New media artist and theorist Frances Dyson provides an engaging demonstration of productive interactions between critical theory and artistic creation. Her book would provide a useful launching point for electroacoustic artists who wish to consider how their work – as well as the traditions and technologies underlying electroacoustic studies – may relate to virtual reality. Although Dyson's standpoint is largely critical and philosophical, as opposed to technical or musicological, this perspective enables her to take a broad look at points of contact between several disciplines (in particular, new media studies and electroacoustic studies) and varieties of technology (including tape recorders, cinematic technologies, telephones and digital-audio tools).
She also highlights an interesting theoretical problem that may be provocative especially to creators of sound installation, cinematic sound and electroacoustic performance: namely, the disappearance of machines from conversations about machine-produced works. She approaches this problem, first, by pointing out that theorists and artists who talk about ‘virtual reality’ do so in terms originally reserved for audio, or technologically processed sound. She then argues that conversations both about audio and virtual reality rely on the notion that these are wholly immersive, therefore immediate, experiences. Here the word ‘immediate’ implies that the ‘mediating’ machines used to generate audio and virtual reality – tape recorders, computers and so on – are somehow overlooked, or made transparent, by conversation.
Dyson develops her argument by investigating how theories and designs of various audio technologies – from telephony to musique concrète and digital audio – rely on certain recurring, theoretical themes, subsequently pointing out that new media discourses rely on similar themes. The themes include: proximity, embodiment/disembodiment, objects, silence and noise – all of which are names for sensations, experiences, impressions that may create (or hinder) the feeling of being immersed in sound itself.
For example, Dyson opens Chapter 1 with an astute investigation of how communications technologies, such as telephony and shortwave radio, use noise-reduction techniques to create the illusion that communicating parties are physically near to one other – that is, in ‘immediate’ proximity. The downside here is that bodily noises, such as breathing and the smacking of lips, are eliminated from our interactions. The upside, of course, is that we hear each other's words distinctly. Thus, whilst we may immerse in the spoken language common to both parties, the individuality of our bodies and voices is silenced. Dyson suggests that a similar kind of disembodiment happens in cyberspace.
Moreover, through tracing how the themes described above permeated the foundations of new media studies, Dyson provides a useful historical analysis of important but understudied works and issues within electroacoustic music – such as L'astronome, Edgard Varèse's unrealised opera collaboration with Antonin Artaud (begun in 1928), and Schaeffer and Cage's relationships with electronics (Chapter 2). Dyson's discussion of L'astronome reminds us about early efforts of treating sound ‘as a compositional material’ and voice ‘as bodily emission’ (p. 33) – notions much re-visited in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century electroacoustic music. The idiosyncrasies of tape-recording technology implied similar materialistic evaluations of sound. For Schaeffer and Cage, the tape recorder is an instrument that creates the acousmatic situation by enabling the composer to extract sound from its source and the context from within which it arises. Dyson's analysis is interesting because of the larger context in which she situates it. In Chapter 4, by juxtaposing Schaeffer's and Cage's use of tape recorders with Derrida's thoughts on tape-recording (as a ‘trace’ of the voice, just as written text is a ‘trace’ of speech), she further develops the theory that machines which mediate sound are overlooked by these composers' conceptions of the acousmatic situation, despite the fact that the machines themselves help to generate this situation.
In other chapters, she interrogates technologies that distort relationships between sound and listeners to create illusions of proximity and presence. She reveals that such distortions imply grotesque mutations of listeners’ bodies and sounds’ characteristics. In L'astronome she notes Artaud's dissatisfaction with radio microphones that filter out background noise, thereby ‘sanitizing and paralyzing life’ (p. 45). A memorable passage describes similar phenomena in other technologies: ‘[t]he aural close-up in cinema, for instance, assumes a listener with enormous ears, while the audio recording, by automatically announcing that the voice heard is both absent and past, re-presents a phantom’ (p. 46). In Chapter 4, considering headphones and microphones, Dyson describes how these aural illusions take on metaphysical significance, as such technologies ‘offered the opportunity to envisage a new, technically augmented embodiment, one that could occupy transcendent space’ (pp. 83–4). But, as she suggests in a discussion of digital audio (Chapter 6), the price of ‘transcendent’ hearing is that, at least in theory and conversation, machines and human bodies become indistinguishable. Too often our conversations overlook the fact that it is both the headphones and our ears, as well as our subjectivities, that work together to achieve enhanced hearing. In other words, in describing our experiences with headphones, microphones and digital sound, we talk as though the amplified, reverberating, or otherwise processed sounds come immediately to our ears. For example, when we describe the piece Wind Whistling by Toshiya Tsunoda, we may say, ‘I hear the wind whistling through a pipe’, instead of ‘Tsunoda offers a recorded, amplified and electronically mediated rendition of an air current moving through a pipe’.
Dyson proposes (Chapter 3) that the notion of ‘ “unmediated” media’ (p. 55) may have historical precedents in the traditions underlying electroacoustic music. She describes how, in a manner similar to the telephone, Schaeffer's concept of reduced listening theoretically implies that listeners may make immediate contact with ‘sound in itself’, if we have the help of machines and the subjective will-power to eliminate various kinds of ‘noise’ from what we hear. For Schaeffer, Dyson implies, ‘noise’ included the individual perspectives that listeners bring to sound and the meaningful implications we hear in sound. Like the telephone, reduced listening theoretically brings us into ‘immediate’ proximity with ‘sound in itself’, at the price of eliminating what individual listeners bring to their sonic experiences. Dyson identifies a similar problem in Cage's theories which, she believes, extolled chance at the expense of the ‘noise’ of personal choice. For those interested in the roots of electroacoustic music, this chapter provides a unique and thoughtful perspective.
For Dyson, ‘noise’ becomes a theoretical representation of individuality, meaning, history, technology (including headphones, microphones and digital processing) and anything else that mediates our sonic experience. Our experience of sound is never ‘immediate’, no matter how we'd prefer to think of it. ‘Noise’ for Dyson is therefore a metaphor for anything – whether it is technology or her own body – that somehow comes between a listener and what he or she hears. Instead of overlooking these mediating aspects of our interactions with audio, we should emphasise them in our creative and theoretical discussions. In other words, Dyson proposes that noise should become the dominant trope of audio discourse, wherein it may function ‘as a metaphor for alterity or difference’ (pp. 156–7).
Perhaps the most important contribution of Dyson's perceptive critique is her reminder to electroacoustic artists that they should not take their equipment, the individuality of their listeners, or other kinds of ‘noise’ for granted. When working with electronic and mechanical equipment, it is so easy to get caught up in creating the sonic illusions that give electroacoustic music its identity, that set electroacoustic music apart from any other genre: illusions such as those in Yann Novak's installations, that the very room is made of sound; in music by Steven Takasugi or Maryanne Amacher, which gives listeners the impression that the sounds come directly from inside their own heads. So evocative are these effects and the experience of listening to them, that it is easier to immerse ourselves in them than to think about the machines and individual perspectives that create them. Not that we can or should invariably listen from a critical point of view – but when we do discuss and create electroacoustic work, we should not overlook the fact that machines and subjectivities mediate the experience of sound. It is tempting to argue that scholars and theorists will be more prone than artists to such overlooking, or that the problem at the heart of Dyson's discussion is merely a matter of language. However, as Dyson's own career as both an artist and a theorist evidences: thought, discussion and creation of sound are not mutually exclusive; and the use of creative methods is not necessarily independent from the thoughtful critique of those methods. Moreover, as for language, the way we treat sound of any kind depends to a significant extent on what we call it. To call sound an ‘object’ (as in Schaeffer's theories) or an ‘immediate’, ‘immersive’ environment (as in Dyson's examples) is to treat sound as an object or environment. Discursive or conversational issues thus relate directly to creative methods and perspectives.
Sounding New Media will be a stimulating read for scholars, aestheticians and enthusiasts of sound studies, communication studies, musicology and art history, as well as creators of electroacoustic music. Those interested in critical theory and interdisciplinary work will find that Dyson engages with an impressive range of perspectives. She contributes valuably to contemporary music scholarship by demonstrating its intersections with philosophy. Drawing on Derrida and Heidegger, for instance, she relates silence, noise and voice to writing, presence and difference. She also juxtaposes her discussion of audio with investigations of the foundational issues of new media studies: the posthuman condition, virtual reality and Artificial Life (A-life). She draws on new media theories by Mark Hansen, Brenda Laurel and N. Katherine Hayles, as well as new media artworks by Char Davies and Catherine Richards. From many scholars’ points of view, we suspect, Dyson's in-depth discussion of Hayles’ influential theory of the posthuman, outlined in her 1999 monograph How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, will be particularly exciting. We read Dyson's theoretical examination of headphones and cinematic sound to suggest that the notion of a posthuman or cybernetic body conflates the human and the technological, instead of clarifying the (‘noisy’) differences between them that lend variety to experience. As earlier writings from artist–thinkers (e.g. Cage, George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, Garth Paine, Schaeffer, Agnostino Di Scipio, Dennis Smalley and many others) have shown it to be fruitful for composers to think about their works from theoretical points of view, it is also constructive for theoretical perspectives to be grounded in artistic practice. Sounding New Media is a book in which depth and virtuosity of thought is accumulated through not only thinking but also artistic practice.
We should point out that the organisation of Dyson's book may be counterintuitive to some. While we find her thesis convincingly articulated, we regret that in her otherwise compelling analyses of Davies’ and Richards’ new media works she does not clarify precisely how the linguistic issues she points out affect the artworks. While it is something the perceptive reader is invited to decipher by reading between the lines, Dyson does not explicitly elucidate the connection between Davies’ and Richards’ works and discussions of electroacoustic sound.
Moreover, the meandering, far-reaching paths that Dyson forges between theories, musical ideas and new media artworks are far from streamlined; instead, they are varied and nonlinear. But this potential incoherence could be read as a deliberate enactment of the noise metaphor that Dyson offers as a model for thinking about sound and new media. She writes: ‘The a-periodicity of noise – its randomness – is not simply a metaphysical irritant waiting for clarification; nor does it have an essential relationship with order and singularity’ (p. 188). As a result, when seemingly disparate material is treated by Dyson's pen, productive patterns, tendencies and alterities emerge and open up spaces for creative, original thinking about sound, new media and the posthuman condition. Sounding New Media allows the noise, the productive frictions in the histories of music, sound and new media studies to emerge, giving rise to innovative insights.
