~Proceedings ICMCISMCI2014 14-20 September 2014, Athens, Greece
EROTICISM AND TIME IN COMPUTER MUSIC: JULIANA
HODKINSON AND NIELS RONSHOLDT'S FISH & FOWL
Danielle Sofer
Kunstuniversitat Graz (KUG)
Palais Meran
LeonhardstraBe 15
A-8010 Graz
Austria
tel. +43/(0)316/389-3294
danielle. sofer@kug. ac. at
ABSTRACT
Music analysts often default to alternate forms of
visualization when dealing with electroacoustic music
for which no score exists, thus sound becomes situated
within the limitations of a visual system. In this paper I
show that visual models do not always convey the
varied possible hearings of multiple listeners,
particularly in music with an erotic tinge. Coupled with
clicking heels and a cracking whip, Fish & Fowl (2011)
by Juliana Hodkinson and Niels R nsholdt is an
electroacoustic work rife for suggestive inferences. The
sexualized breathing of the female "protagonist" in Fish
& Fowl is an allusion to a territory typically, if tacitly,
forbidden as an expression of sonic "art," but it is
precisely in this transgression to normative hearing that
Fish & Fowl is potentially interesting for analysis.
Unfolding with temporal and spatial changes in the
music are variable structures of listening that mediate
our perceptions of, for example, the instrumentation,
performance space, and semantic meaning of what we
hear. In employing Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of time,
this paper offers an alternative to visualized analytical
models by elaborating on the experience of erotic sound
through multiple and synchronic temporalities.
1. INTRODUCTION
Though certain musical qualities have always been
heard with erotic connotations, it is only in the last 10 -15 years, that scholarly attention has turned toward
studies of eroticism and sexuality. In this recent turn,
not only were we granted greater freedom to explore
topics that were once inconceivable in the context of
scientific or historical musicology, for example gender,
sexuality, and eroticism, but such explorations have
even become common practice. One can hardly imagine
a musicological text today that does not contextualize
its subject within the surrounding historical, but also
social and cultural circumstances. And yet, although
eroticism and sexuality studies abound in the literature,
the terms "sexuality" and "eroticism" remain somewhat
vague, invoked in musical contexts via a presumed
universal definition, one which resides within the realm
of transgression.
While attempts to conjure eroticism in music, and
furthermore, hearings of sexually explicit sounds in
Copyright: O 2014 Danielle Sofer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative ommos q. n igens,_ Un?ed, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
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credited.
music, are not new and continue to require attention,
what is new in the twentieth century are attempts to
record the body in order to capture the aural qualities of
erotic pleasure and to include these sounds through
technological means in a musical setting. Technologies
of the recorded body innovatively present the audience
with a sexual encounter through sounds of the (human)
body as experienced in "real time." But our hearing of
recorded or synthesized sound depends in part on our
suspension of disbelief as listeners, since, after all, we
are provided with no visual "evidence" of the body
from which these sounds emanate. Whereas allusions in
instrumental works might arise through metaphor
though completely real in the sense that we hear such
expressions as erogenous-in computer music
composers can make overt use of the timbres of sex and
the envelope of the erotic by way of a deliberate
incorporation of accepted norms of how human
sexuality is encountered in sound.
Modern philosophy's earliest investigations of music
perception proceeded from the assumption that we hear
music by first engaging physically with sound and only
then are our sensations imbued with meaning. In
counter-distinction from this separation between mind
and body, Merleau-Ponty posits, "The union of soul and
body is not an amalgamation between two mutually
external terms, subject and object, brought about by
arbitrary decree. It is enacted at every instant in the
movement of existence" [1:102]. Merleau-Ponty's
radical suggestion, that music is experienced not as a
composite of discrete events but as a mode of existence
whereby listener and listened are in synchronic
synthesis with one another, changed not only the way
philosophers conceived of music, but the unity of mind
and body allowed also for a new conception of how
meaning is derived from music. When we hear
sexualized breathing and moaning we recognize these
sounds as such without further mediation or meditation.
If music and meaning are experienced simultaneously
by the perceiver, then it stands to reason that timedomain representations or spectrogram visualizations of
music are somehow remiss of a large portion of our
musical experience. As observed by Judy Lochhead [2],
music theorists often rely on a musical score to serve as
visually "correlative evidence," but when exploring
electroacoustic music, which, absent physical
performers, does not employ a traditional musical score,
