Composed Silence - Microsound and The Quiet Shock of Listening PDF

Composed Silence: Microsound and the Quiet Shock of Listening
Author(s): Thomas Phillips

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 232-248
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
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Composed Silence:
MlCROSOUND AND THE
Quiet Shock of Listening
L__7fa 1
Thom
I would
tinction like to begin
to the traditional thisof scholarly
decorum paperdiscourse,
on composed
with the first"silence," in contradis
person singular pronoun. It is widely acknowledged in contemporary aca
demia that the authorial "I" is implicated in its discursive practices, not to
mention its inevitable brush with what Julia Kristeva calls intertextuality.
The same can be said of the composer in terms of the particular subject
position and historical context through which his or her music is inevit
ably filtered. Extending this argument a bit further, it is not the "I" of the
artist alone whose subjectivity, whose dimensions of perception and capac
ities for creativity and personal development are at stake. The reader,
viewer and listener are likewise implicated in an experience, or, one might
say (as I will argue in relation to the genre of microsound), a practice of
textual consumption. The underlying idea behind such practice is, of
Composed Silence 233
course, that it may be active rather than passive, an activity that is doubt
less prompted by some "texts" to a greater extent than it is by others.
In terms of music, those compositions that are organized according to
an aesthetic of relative silence are particularly operative in such a manner
as to leave (aural) space in which the "I" of the listener may confront
himself or herself as a listener. In other words, microsound, by virtue of
its sparsity of sound, amongst other qualities, elicits a unique subjectivity
(in the context of general music appreciation) and is thus as much about
the perceiving self as it is about sound and sound design. Among the
authors whose works can help us to understand various angles of what it
might mean to compose and to listen to microsound are Walter
Benjamin, composer and theorist Kim Cascone, and a number of other
writers who focus on both the politics and the aesthetic(s) of the genre.
Additionally, I shall discuss an example of microsound that is representa
tive of the specific qualities of the music that interest me, namely, Richard
Chartier's homage to Morton Feldman, "How Things Change."
As is commonly recognized by scholars of art and new technologies,
Benjamin is a useful starting point for such exploration in so far as many
of his ideas paved the way, at least theoretically, for the centrality (and
acceptance) of technologically infused art. Concerning sound, he offers
the following advice:
In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semirelax

ation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other
hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can
become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of night. If
the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for
a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds
(Benjamin 1986b, 80).
This passage, taken from a sub-section of Benjamin's "One-Way Street"

entitled "The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses," is at once charac
teristically ambiguous and pragmatic. Its terminology remains unex
plained, thus allowing for contradiction to arise between seemingly
kindred phenomena, "a cacophony of voices" and "wayward sounds."
And yet, Benjamin is clearly pursuing a didactic line in an attempt to
establish the ideal working environment for the serious writer. A crucial
element of this environment, Benjamin suggests, is music, or rather,
sound. Gershom Scholem has testified to Benjamin's ongoing battle with
unwanted noise that disturbed his work in numerous residences, lending
weight to Thesis Three's argument for the importance of auditory com
patibility with intellectual labor (25). Unfortunately, however, we are
234 Perspectives of New Music
given no further explanation of what constitutes "insipid sounds" or how

these might differ from "an etude [ironically, perhaps, a mere exercise in
technique] or a cacophony of voices," all of which could be considered
"wayward" sound in contradistinction to "the perceptible silence of
night by a writer in the midst of his or her work."
On the other hand, if viewed within the context of the early twentieth
century avant-garde, specifically the musical avant-garde, the passage
reveals Benjamin's inclination, in contrast to earlier, pre-industrial gener
ations, to accept the validity of a larger palette of sound as music, or, at
the very minimum, as suitable auditory accompaniment to the task of
writing. The well-known Futurist manifesto of 1913 by Luigi Russolo,
The Art of Noise, for example, which heralds the introduction of industry
inspired "noise-sound" into the traditional concert hall, would most
likely have been familiar to Benjamin through his contact with experi
mental art movements of his own time. From this passage alone, then, we
are able to catch a glimpse of how Benjamin's notions of art and the
technologies that serve to generate and inspire art might affect the cre
ation and perception of music as an increasingly amorphous component
of daily life.
Russolo's Futurist project was essentially reactionary. With instruments
of an original design, it was his intention to "excite our sensibility" (5) in
opposition to the "boredom stemming from [the] familiarity" (7) of tra
ditional symphonies. He wished to "enrich men with a voluptuousness
they did not suspect" (10) from the incidental noise of modern industrial
life. The obvious irony of finding "voluptuousness" in mechanical or oth
erwise neglected sound could not have been lost on him. At the begin
ning of the twenty-first century, however, such irony is relatively, though
not completely passe. In the age of computers and sampling devices, we
have grown accustomed to the importation of previously foreign sounds
into the repertoire of standard musical vocabulary1
This development reached a new level in the late nineties with the
advent of glitch music, a genre that is almost entirely dependent upon
computer technology in so far as it employs the conventionally unwanted
sounds of the computer, its hums and pops, the crackles that erupt when
the machine is pushed beyond its limit, as primary source material. A
sub-genre to arise out of glitch, microsound actually redirects Russolo's
noise imperative to precipitate a return to silence in the postmodern
world. In so doing, it initiates a complication of traditional concepts of
both music and performance and thus calls into question the auratic con
tent of what Benjamin may very well have referred to as "insipid" music.
The Birth of a Genre
One could argue that the entrance of John Cage's 4'33" (1952), a piece
consisting of a musician sitting still at a piano without touching the keys
for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, into the canon of twentieth
century experimental music set the boundary for minimalist explorations
as far as the audio medium is concerned. More importantly, however, it
constituted both the end and the beginning of music, by which I mean
that conventional (I use this word in the broadest sense possible) struc
tures and timbres had become just that, the hackneyed tropes of a popu
lar or even "experimental" aesthetic; silence being the inevitable (and
perhaps primal) conclusion. On the other hand, recent technology has
made it possible to compose out of that silence (as did Cage, to some
extent, in later compositions), to retain the immediacy of quietude whilst
allowing sound to emerge as a compositional frame. Of course, one may
ask the question as to how a minimalist aesthetic is to evolve after com
plete silence has been legitimated as a composition. The answer lies in the
fact that Cage's piece serves a primarily performative function. Even as a
recording that is packaged and released (there are several recorded ver
sions), 4'33" is delineated by indeterminacy, the indeterminate sounds
that emanate from the audience, whatever form this takes, or the general
(in fact, all-encompassing) ambience of the performing space. The com
position is therefore not entirely bereft of noise; so the boundary of
silence that it implies is an illusion, a conscious illusion on the part of
Cage, one would suspect, signifying the pervasiveness, and musicality, of
ambient "field" sound, an obvious reservoir of material for microsound
composers in addition to purely digital sources.
Microsound has clearly developed out of a Cagean aesthetic and, in
some cases, philosophy. Its roots in Russolo's Futurism are apparent as
well, dependent as it is upon the appropriation of both technological
advances and the auditory manifestations of new technology. As com
poser and theorist Kim Cascone states,
[t]he "post-digital" aesthetic was developed in part as a result of the

immersive experience of working in environments suffused with
digital technology: computer fans whirring, laser printers churning
out documents, the sonification of user-interfaces, and the muffled
noise of hard drives. But more specifically, it is from the "failure" of
digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs,
application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion,
quantization noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound
cards are the raw material composers seek to incorporate into their
music (2000, 12-3).
I will return to Cascone's notion of "digital failure" later. For now, how
ever, it is important to emphasize this historical development both in
terms of microsound's reliance upon technology and the minimalist ten
dency towards a nearly inaudible abstraction. It is this return to silence,
to the relatively "naturalistic" ambience of pre-industrialization that dis
tinguishes microsound from kindred genres, from the comparatively
louder "noise" associated with the over-arching category of glitch, from
the rhythmic, techno-inspired minimalism of "clicks and cuts," and that
ultimately links it to the philosophical and social implications of 4'33".
While it is impossible to determine the intentions of a given composer
(though some, such as Cascone, are known for their theorization), a
work that evolves out of sharp sine-wave tones, digital bleeps and blips,
spare field recordings that have been processed beyond recognition, or
nearly inaudible sub-bass rumblings, all at very low volume levels, auto
matically generates inquiry into its status as music and the validity of its
performance in a public sphere.
Such performances are generally presented in a format that is akin to
the minimalist musical aesthetic?spare stage set-ups with few or no
visual accoutrements (with the exception of some performers who
employ visuals, usually quite abstract, to accentuate the sound). A typical
stage will include a table behind which the performer sits or stands while
staring into the neon blue of a laptop screen, perhaps making the occa
sional gesture of a knob turn or the raising of a fader on some external
device (not too far removed from the interpreter of Cage's 4'33'*). Light
ing tends to be dim, if not entirely absent, aside from that which illumi
nates the face behind the screen. The choice of venue for microsound
performance is of increasing concern. Performers soon realized that the
average rock club, with its lack of chairs, its bar sounds and its conven
tional function as a site of sociality, was detrimental to the audience's
ability to focus on the music. Alternative venues have been found in art
galleries or in private lofts whose relative formality precludes the kinds of
intrusions characteristic of a standard club. The performance of
microsound, then, is conceptually and aesthetically as far as one can get
from more traditional musical performance (which necessarily produces
an aura of spectacle) without simply doing away with the performer
subject altogether.
Noise as Failure, Noise as Art
In reference to Stan Link's "The Work of Art in the Mechanical Aging of

Art: Listening to Noise," Brady Cranfield claims that "the history of
recorded sound is also the history of the reduction of noise" (2002, 44).
By this he means that the modus operandi of recording has always involved
an effort to capture only the intended sound, be it a piano sonata or a
president's speech. The hiss or fuzz that is inevitably produced in a
recording is simply unwanted sonic material that obscures the full realiza
tion of the initial target. The same may be said of microsound, though the
genre marks a transition in recording history in that it uses such unwanted
sound as primary material.2 To the extent that the sound is unwanted and
exists in even the most proficient recording at some level, it signifies fail
ure not unlike the auditory failure that results from computer malfunc
tion. When Kim Cascone speaks of "concepts such as 'detritus,' 'by
product,' and 'background'" (2000,13) that make up the sonic palette of
microsound, then, one is reminded of Benjamin's validation of Dadaist art
in his "The Author as Producer" essay: "the tiniest authentic fragment of
daily life says more than a painting" (1986a, 229). Indeed, the traditional
conception of noise consigns it to the category of refuse, to failure, and
yet it is "authentic" in its inevitability and thus, for the Dadaist and
microsound composer alike, worthy of artistic foregrounding.
The subject of Cranfield's article, German composer Markus Popp,
otherwise known as Oval, is particularly relevant to a consideration of the
nexus of noise, failure and artistic production. As an innovator of glitch
music, Oval began working with the actual material of the CD itself in the
early 1990s, transforming its recorded surface by defacing it to affect a
skipping aesthetic that mimicked the skipping that occurs on a malfunc
tioning CD player (Cascone 2000,13). His project is ongoing and is rem
iniscent of earlier innovations in turntablism whereby the composer
manipulates the phonograph as an instrument in and of itself; the differ
ence being that the latter is conceived as originary sound creation, while
Oval is appropriating the sound of failure as his starting point. Cranfield
explains that "by using the sound of skipping CDs, something prosaically
and familiarly unwanted, Oval's work self-consciously explores the socially
mediated nature of noise and the outward indifference of technology"
(45). There is in Oval's work, then, as in the glitch genre as a whole,
including microsound, a determination to confront and manipulate that
which escapes auditory perception through socially-contrived negation.
The same may be said of fellow German sound and installation artist,
Carsten Nicolai, who works under the name of Noto and Alva Noto.
While not engaging in the manipulation of tactile material that results in
the "unwanted" noise characteristic of an Oval CD, Nicolai has nonethe

less carved his own niche with the orchestration of sharp, minimal clicks
and tones into the sparse rhythms that would otherwise be comprised of
softer, and therefore more socially acceptable, timbres. Martin Pesch
affirms the affiliation between the two pioneers: "[j]ust as the music by
Oval is based on the production errors on CDs . . . Nicolai's music relies
on frequencies and modulates them. ... By advancing this process, he
makes the listener aware of the non-perceptibility of the remaining spec
trum of frequencies" (91). In both cases, music is constructed out of pre
viously neglected auditory sources and thus makes such noise apparent to
the listener in a different way; the noise is defamiliarized, to use Viktor
Shklovsky's term, so as to grant it meaning within a new context.
The listener to whom Pesch refers here, as I intend to demonstrate, is
of central concern?certainly to Benjamin, who was interested in the film
and photography audience that would be (ideally) informed by the polit
icized, non-auratic art forms?but also to the theorists of microsound.
Benjamin intended to cultivate listeners who, rather than concentrating
and being absorbed by art, would confront the work in a state of "distrac
tion" and absorb it into their modus vivendi (1969, 239). To provoke
such listening, Benjamin argues, is the task, and perhaps the fate, of tech
nology. Microsound fulfills the demands of this task by virtue of its theo
retical and aesthetic eschewing of itself as the medium that is necessarily
replaced by an inherent identification with its primary tool, the laptop
and various software programs, for communication.3 As Cranfield puts it
in relation to Oval, "by making the consequences of digital technology
obvious, Oval's work . . . draws attention to its own constructed form,
ideally returning listeners to a human level of engagement, albeit amidst
the ruins of digitized sound?a social truth hidden in the most compli
cated and beleaguered technology" (46). In other words, in lieu of a
purely self-reflexive "aura," microsound enlists the listener's attention
with the clarity of its ruination and appropriation of conventional sound
to the point that social truth (what he earlier refers to as the "socially
mediated nature of noise") is revealed in the process of listening.
Cranfield's statement may be further clarified in light of Benjamin's
own claim about the fate of concert music in the wake of current tech
nology. He asserts that "the task . . . [consists] of an Umfunktionierung
[functional transition] of the form of the concert that [has] to fulfill two
conditions: to eliminate the antithesis firstly between the performers and
listeners and secondly between technique and content" (1986a, 231).
Clearly, both of these conditions are met in the case of microsound,
probably beyond what even Benjamin could have imagined. For each of
the dichotomies becomes one?the technology of microsound is its con
tent, and vice versa. Likewise, the listener who, to paraphrase Cascone, is
positioned within the space of the music so as to participate in the pro
duction of meaning (2001, 2) becomes a performer, a surrogate for the
relatively docile body that opens this space with the gentle clicking of a
mouse in the dark.
Before going any further, I will take a moment to clarify the immediate
links between Benjamin's theories of art and technology and current
practices of microsound. To begin with, microsound lacks "aura" in so
far as it is obviously reproducible in the form of CDs and thus, like a pho
tograph or a film, involves no original product. It also provokes "distrac
tion" on the part of the listener in its use of background sound or sonic
detritus that compels the listener to renegotiate his or her relationship
with traditionally unwanted noise. And finally, by diminishing the ele
ment of spectacle that is common to conventional music performance,
microsound emphasizes a reciprocal relation between performer and lis
tener wherein the latter's experience of listening may be generative of
meaning.4 For Benjamin, such reciprocity, which is inextricably tied to
the conflation of art and technology (as in microsound), is necessarily
politicized. The extent to which microsound succeeds or fails in realizing
a political ideal of Benjamin's project, in the form of what I have termed
a unique subjectivity (a subjectivity that is necessarily based in the social
by virtue of its investment in a shared art form) will occupy the remain
der of this analysis.
The Politics of Microsound
There is, of course, a dilemma that arises from speaking of generalized

notions of an artistic medium when it (as both art object and practice) is
more or less accessible to a mass audience. As numerous examples dem
onstrate, such art can be utilized with various intentions. One need only
compare the incriminating video footage of Rodney King being beaten in
1991, an example par excellence of auteur documentary filmmaking, to
any number of vacuous Hollywood productions of the same year; or the
illuminating photographs by Eugene Atget to advertising images that
poster the expansive landscape of Western culture; or finally, microsound,
to the increasingly thoughtless, homogenized expressions of "glitch" and
E.A. in much contemporary computer-based music. So the arts are sub
ject to commodification and crudity as much as they are the province of
more noble instincts and inspiration. Such is the paradox, it would seem,
of "art for the people." Benjamin addresses this concern, albeit under
comparatively dire historical circumstances, when he warns of the fascistic
appropriation of art. He states that "[t]he logical result of Fascism is the

introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses,
whom Fascism, with its Fuhrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counter
part in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production
of ritual values" (1969, 241). This concept of ritual refers to "the loca
tion of its [the art object's] original use value" (224). Though there is no
original film or photograph or compact disk due to the capacity of repro
duction, the specific technologies that make them possible are vulnerable
to the "violation" of propagandizing forces.
To combat fascistic appropriation, Benjamin calls for a politicized art
that is political in so far as it is the product of technology. "Technical
progress," he asserts, "is for the author as producer the foundation for his
political progress" (1986a, 230). Political art, then, must reach the public
with its technologically-inspired revelation of the "unwanted" and do so
in a way that does not simply cater to the desire for the auratic contempla
tion (of the remote, unique object) or superficial entertainment. It must
seek to transform the public. Ironically, the tendency in some microsound
theory is to do just that, though I would contend that its motivation is
less political and more aesthetic?and ultimately, more individualized.
In his "Laptop Music - Counterfeiting Aura in the Age of Infinite
Reproduction," Cascone explains the problem of "recycling signifiers"
(2002, 58) in relation to the laptop as a music tool. As microsound has
developed out of the spectacle-laden subculture of dance music, as well as
other genres that I have already mentioned, it has been to some degree
dependent upon the visually-oriented signifiers or codes of that sub
culture?flashing light, the dancing body/self in the club environment.
Hence the more recent relocation of microsound to less flamboyant ven
ues. And yet, the signification of the laptop is confused by its increasingly
apparent use in mainstream pop, in the work of Bjork, for example.
Cascone concludes: "In order for the signifier of the laptop to stabilize
there needs to be a recuperation of codes that move away from the use of
spectacle, that establish aura, and show the audience how to differentiate
'representation by the machine' from 'repetition of the machine'" (my
italics, ibid.). Essentially, he is calling for a "recuperation" of the laptop's
original signification (after glitch music appropriated it from the
machine's initial bourgeois office use), its original aura. So here, too, we
find a defense against "fascistic" appropriation (or pop-culture ideology,
not all of which is fascistic, obviously) and yet it is a defense based upon a
reinvestment in aura. The same may be said of Graham Miller's "The
Real Deal: Toward an Aesthetic of Authentic Live Electronic Dance
Music." As he charts the historical cycle of performed vs. recorded music
and the seemingly unending search in each for a privileged signification,
Miller is ultimately intent upon establishing authenticity, aura, in the

domain of performed electronic DJ music. This, in opposition to any
variety of appropriation that circumvents the primary tool of the turn
table. Though he is concerned with a different genre, the aesthetic
imperative is the same as Cascone's: return the aura to its original site.
Other writers, however, take a more rigidly Benjaminian stance. In ref
erence to the work of Carsten Nicolai, Pesch notes "the intention to ren
der formless matter malleable and to consider the resistance this material
has to becoming a defined form" (90), in contrast to the definitive, one
might even say ritualistic ideals of Cascone and Miller. He goes on to
consider the CD packaging of Nicolai's record label, Raster-Noton, and
its characteristically minimal aesthetic that abandons, in certain of its
series, extensive text and imagery, making the disks virtually indistin
guishable from one another. "The presentation . . . negates the notion of
high-profile representation of the individuality of the artists involved"
(93) and, it is clear, of the CD itself. And yet Pesch is interpreting the
role of Nicolai's products rather than his performance. It is the latter, I
believe, that generates the peculiar paradox found with the other theo
rists. For in performance, regardless of genre, it is not only the legitimacy
of the genre itself that is at stake, but the performing subject whose iden
tity is more or less invested in the genre as well. Hence my contention
that some theory seeks not the political transformation of the audience
for the audience's sake but, rather, the re-negotiation of the listener's
investment in the aura of the performer himself or herself. This re
negotiation finally results in the education of the audience in the con
sumption of auratic art.
There are a number of aspects of microsound performance that compli
cate its status as non-auratic art and thus substantiate the performer's
claim to authenticity and ritualistic "tradition." For example, the fact that
the performer is alit by the glow of the computer screen puts him or her in
the spotlight, so to speak. Furthermore, because the performance often
takes place in a gallery setting, it may be related to other art objects on
pedestals, hanging on walls, psychologically "distanced" from the viewer.
Ultimately, however, it is the music that takes center stage, of which, in
the case of microsound, there really is no center. The still body aglow in
light offers no sustained spectacle and compels the listener to look else
where or, more likely, to look nowhere, to close his or her eyes. In such a
performance, the object is the music in and of itself and it pervades the
space of the venue so as to be at once nowhere and everywhere. As I state
above, microsound brings the performer and the listener into the same
sphere of performativity in so far as the music is (or can be) about listen
ing alone, stripped of spectacle and the compulsion to animate bodies in
ritualistic movement. And it is in the centrality of Ustening, in the gallery

or in the home, that we may locate what I perceive to be the variety of
"politics" specific to an attentive experience of microsound.
The Aura of Silence
John Cage states in an interview that "it used to be thought that the
function of the artist was to express himself and therefore he had to set
up particular relationships [between sounds]. I think that this whole
question of art is a question of changing our minds and that the function
of the artist is not self-expression but rather self-alteration, and that the
thing being altered is not his hands or his eyes but rather his mind"
(quoted, Nyman 1993, 210). Cage is discussing the transitions that are
indicative of twentieth-century experimental music. First, he notes the
traditional mode of composition entailing specific forms of orchestration
that dictate the boundaries of notational relationships. This mode gave
way to a more indeterminate method of composition in Cage's work in
which the composer is more of a participant in a process than the abso
lute "hero-artist" of modernism. By extension, the self-expression of the
latter segued into the new composer's self-exploration that evolved from
the interplay of conscious choice and chance methodologies in Cagean
composition.5 What is most crucial in this passage in relation to the pos
sible political dimension of microsound is the focus on transformation or
"alteration." While it may be argued that this notion of self-alteration
merely reinforces the autonomy of the composer, signaling a return to
Romanticism, I would like to suggest that in the case of microsound (and
certainly in Cage's 4'33"), the listener as well as the composer is subject
to change. Furthermore, it is the silence of microsound that is the agent
of this change, a transformation that is illuminated in light of Benjamin's
notion of "presence of mind" in the utilization of art.
In "The Work of Art" essay, Benjamin maintains that film is akin to
Dadaist art in that it confronts the viewer with shocks (the constant
movement from frame to frame) that parallel those encountered in mod
ern, particularly urban life. In Dadaism, these shocks take the form of
"waste products" being presented as art, thereby precluding the "con
templative immersion" that may occur in the viewing of traditional art
(1969, 236-7). Both phenomena, Benjamin claims, are effective in so far
as "an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space con
sciously explored by man" (ibid.) on the part of the viewer, the uncon
scious being privileged as a kind of storehouse for what is genuine in the
individual relative to bourgeois ideology. The two art forms "penetrate"
the unconscious and expose its contents to the individual. The aggressive
nature of the verb here is not an accident, for we must read "shock" to
include its conventional signification as a form of emotional or physical
violence. In order that the shock effect of the film or art does not become
excessively detrimental, Benjamin concludes, it "should be cushioned by
heightened presence of mind" (238). What he means by this is somewhat
confusing when read in relation to his final comments on the value of
film in "The Work of Art" essay. He states that "the film makes the cult
value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the
position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position
requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded
one" (240-1). The choice of "absent-minded" here is most unfortunate
since it appears to contradict the "presence of mind" that enables the
illuminating experience offered by the work of art. I will attempt to clar
ify this dilemma by turning to Benjamin scholar Susan Buck-Morss and
further thoughts on microsound's capacity to meet the criteria of
Benjamin's politicized aesthetics.
Buck-Morss makes the elucidating claim that Benjamin "[demands] of
art [the] task ... to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to
restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of
humanity's self-preservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new
technologies, but by passing through them" (5). The restoration to which
she refers comes in the wake of the numbing of what she calls the "syn
aesthetic system" (13), the human consciousness that extends beyond the
boundaries of mind and skin into the external world, by modern life.6 In
other words, the bodily senses are restored through art that provokes
them by way of "distraction," which I would argue is a more appropriate
term than "absent-minded." The viewer/listener is "distracted" to the
point of heightened attention and critical thought (a difficult task indeed
in contemporary life). She goes on to add that "[i]n this situation of'cri
sis in perception,' it is no longer a question of educating the crude ear to
hear music, but of giving it back hearing. It is no longer a question of
training the eye to see beauty, but of restoring 'perceptibility'" (18).
There is perhaps no better affirmation of the aesthetic and political
practice/experience of microsound than this.
At this point, my own contention should be obvious; namely, that
"self-alteration" is inherently political to the extent that transformation
of the embodied individual is the most valid groundwork from which to
launch political and social transformation. Where art is concerned, as
Buck-Morss makes clear, the (political) function of the artist as producer
is not simply to educate the individual listener/viewer in terms of (mass)
taste. Rather, a "crisis in perception" requires a restoration of the ability
to be present in the experience of art?to hear it, to see it from a "height

ened presence of mind." Of course, this view departs from Benjamin's
ambition to conceive an art that transforms the masses rather than just a
few scattered individuals. Considering the uses to which film and photog
raphy have been put since Benjamin's death, however (despite their
reproducibility), his ambition seems untenable. One could, in fact, go so
far as to say that mass access to each medium has led to its debasement in
the form of over-saturation.
Microsound, on the other hand, nurtures perception in the listener by
way of its investment in relative silence and minimalism. For it is in silence
that one is confronted with oneself, one's history, thoughts, emotions,
sensations, the unconscious detritus of a life span. Thus the aura of
microsound lies neither in its presentation, its packaging, its tools, nor in
itself as a medium. On the contrary, its aura emanates from the space in
which the listener is mirrored. This may sound dangerously close to the
"contemplative immersion" so repugnant to the Dadaist and to Benjamin
himself, though such immersion must be qualified by the music's overt
appropriation of noise and the distraction that it produces. So, again, the
immersion is not in the art per se, but in the act of listening. The aura of
silence is deafening to the extent that this immersion reveals the "noise"
that is always already on the periphery of consciousness. To put it another
way, the listener "passes through" the music and the technology that
informs it in a process of restoration of the periphery, of his or her senses
and humanity?the self-preservation of which may not necessarily require
art, though it most certainly requires embodied self-awareness.
In so far as it provokes such awareness or "perceptibility," microsound
functions as a praxis of embodied listening. Nowhere is this more appar
ent than in the music of Richard Chartier. I have chosen his "How
Things Change," a tribute to Morton Feldman, to exemplify his work
and microsound in general because it both reflects an exemplary aesthetic
of silence and locates itself within a historical context, in relation to a pre
decessor, which has been one of the tasks of this analysis.
"How Things Change" (an apt title in light of the vicissitudes of sub
jectivity) opens with a flutter of sound, the faintest resonance of a distant
event from which all lower frequencies have been removed. It is followed
by the slow fade-up of a mid-range drone, barely perceptible. A more
audible bass swell lands in the sparse territory of the drone and is
repeated approximately every 25-30 seconds. At 3'25, there begins a
segment of the composition that is most "musical" in so far as it intro
duces notes in the form of two sustained drones that move from one to
the other (E to D). At 5'25, the mid-range drone is left to fade out to the
point of complete silence, a silence that is quickly occasioned by a high
frequency sine tone lasting for 15 seconds. The repeating bass swells that
had dropped out prior to the silence return, as does the initial "flutter."
At 8'15, the mid-range drone fades back up to it original volume and is
soon accompanied by an even lower bass that slowly pans from right to
left. At 10'30, the E to D drones are repeated once. As the D note fades
out, the pulse of the lower oscillation is left to conclude, until, quite sur
prisingly, a final bass swell closes the piece. The listener is thus left with
what may be characterized as one of Benjamin's productive "shocks."
Conclusion
Microsound may not be precisely the culmination of the politicized art

that Benjamin would have desired, but it is a marriage of aestheticism and
technology that "liquidates" the standard obstacles to perceptibility. If it
is to endure in this capacity, its composers must strive towards greater
levels of attention to compositional structure, to the rich dynamics of
silence. The alternative is, at best, the kind of homogeneity that has
already evolved from the increasing numbers of laptop owners who, like
millions of ordinary people with still and video cameras in hand, seek to
employ technology, often with the consequence that it employs them. At
worst, the glitch aesthetic will be, indeed, is already, appropriated for cap
italistic ends. Microsound composers such as Chartier, however, push the
genre further away from mass consumption through the continued
exploration of silence and noise amidst a culture besieged by Music with
a capital M. The revolutionary potential of their efforts awaits listening.
Notes
1. This is even true in popular music (the sound of "the street" sample
into rap; nature recorded or re-presented in New Age music that
wall-papers bookstores and bourgeois boutiques), not to mentio
more obscure manifestations such as musique concrete, electr
acoustics, and the industrial music of the 1980s.
2. This is equally true of Futurist music or musique concrete, though

microsound differs in that it deconstructs the social material direct
connected to the very technology that makes the music possible.
3. Hence, one of Cascone's central arguments that "the medium is no

longer the message; rather, specific tools themselves have become th
message"(2000, 12).
4. As opposed to more traditional music that, I would argue, "colonize
the listener by fulfilling (indeed, overfilling) his or her expectations of
standard melodies and timbres of sound, thus providing no space in
which one can participate beyond a conventional foot tap, dance or
blank stare into a void of popular fantasy or solipsistic memory. O
the other hand, I do not wish to imply that all music in relation
microsound is without value. Some forms, modern classical or impr
visational jazz, for example, are relatively engaging and challenging.
5. Cage based some of his composition on the I Ching, for exampl

thus allowing chance to guide the relationships between sounds. S
Cope 2001, 88-102.
6. Another way to view the effect of modern life on consciousness is v
"its anaesthetizing [of] the organism, not through numbing, but
through flooding the senses" (Buck-Morss 1992, 22). Such is th
faculty, for Buck-Morss, of phantasmagoria that "tricks the sens
through technical manipulation" (ibid.).
References
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction." In Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Trans
lated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 217-52.
-. 1986a. "The Author as Producer." In Reflections: Essays, Apho

risms, Autobiographical Writing. Translated by Edmund Jephcott.
Edited by Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken, 220-38.
-. 1986b. "One-Way Street." In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writing. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by
Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken, 61-96.
-. 1999. "Little History of Photography." In Selected Writings, Vol.

2, 1927-1934. Translated by Rodney Livingstone et al. Edited by
Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 507-30.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1992. "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter
Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered." October 62 (Autumn): 3-41.
Cascone, Kim. 2000. "The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tenden
cies in Contemporary Computer Music." Computer Music Journal 24,
no. 4 (December): 12-8.
-. 2001. "The Microsound Scene: An Interview with Kim Cascone."
Ctheory.net. <http ://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick= 322 >.
-. 2002. "Laptop Music - Counterfeiting Aura in the Age of Infi

nite Reproduction." Parachute 107: 52-8.
Chartier, Richard. 2002. "How Things Change." On CD For Morton
Feldman. Trente Oiseaux TOC 024.
Cope, David. 2001. New Directions in Music. Prospect Heights, 111.:

Waveland.
Cranfield, Brady. 2002. "Producing Noise: Oval and the Politics of Digi
tal Audio." Parachute 107: 42-51.
Miller, Graham. 2001. "The Real Deal: Toward an Aesthetic of Authen

tic Live Electronic Dance Music." Unpublished Thesis.
Nyman, Michael. 1993. "Against Intellectual Complexity in Music." In

Postmodernism: A Reader. Edited by Thomas Docherty. New York:
Columbia, 206-14.
Pesch, Martin. 2002. "Transfer and Transformation: Strategies in the

Oeuvre of Carsten Nicolai." Parachute 107: 81-93.
Russolo, Luigi. 1967. The Art of Noise: Futurist Manifesto, 1913. Trans
lated by Robert Fillion. New York: Something Else.
Scholem, Gershom. 1981. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship.

Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken.

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Composed Silence: Microsound and the Quiet Shock of Listening

Author(s): Thomas Phillips

In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semirelax

This passage, taken from a sub-section of Benjamin's "One-Way Street"

given no further explanation of what constitutes "insipid sounds" or how

The Birth of a Genre

[t]he "post-digital" aesthetic was developed in part as a result of the

Noise as Failure, Noise as Art

In reference to Stan Link's "The Work of Art in the Mechanical Aging of

the "unwanted" noise characteristic of an Oval CD, Nicolai has nonethe

The Politics of Microsound

There is, of course, a dilemma that arises from speaking of generalized

appropriation of art. He states that "[t]he logical result of Fascism is the

Miller is ultimately intent upon establishing authenticity, aura, in the

ritualistic movement. And it is in the centrality of Ustening, in the gallery

The Aura of Silence

to be present in the experience of art?to hear it, to see it from a "height

Microsound may not be precisely the culmination of the politicized art

2. This is equally true of Futurist music or musique concrete, though

3. Hence, one of Cascone's central arguments that "the medium is no

5. Cage based some of his composition on the I Ching, for exampl

Benjamin, Walter. 1969. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

-. 1986a. "The Author as Producer." In Reflections: Essays, Apho

-. 1999. "Little History of Photography." In Selected Writings, Vol.

-. 2002. "Laptop Music - Counterfeiting Aura in the Age of Infi

Cope, David. 2001. New Directions in Music. Prospect Heights, 111.:

Miller, Graham. 2001. "The Real Deal: Toward an Aesthetic of Authen

Nyman, Michael. 1993. "Against Intellectual Complexity in Music." In

Pesch, Martin. 2002. "Transfer and Transformation: Strategies in the

Scholem, Gershom. 1981. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship.

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