Intensive relations and sound (a paper)
Felt like a good time to post a copy of a paper on sound I wrote some years ago, having found it coming up a few times in exchanges recently. It was written for a symposium as part of the Cybersonica Festival in 2005, although when I re-read it I was pleased with how well its held up, relatively speaking. Around that time I was working with a group called Waveswarms comprised mostly of MA students at Middlesex University’s Sonic Arts and we put on some exciting events before drifting apart.
The symposium itself which was curated by a friend Dave Lawrence and featured some excellent papers and contributions from far and wide, including as I recall, a piece on sound poetry by Fiorenzo Palermo, a piece on improvisation and cognition by Tim Sayer and a great piece on Installation by Aaron Siegel.
A couple of years earlier, I had spoken at an event organised within the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosphy at Middlesex (an entire department / faculty that was subsequently ejected by the university in a cost cutting exercise). That particular event (NoisetheoryNoise #1) and the paper I prepared for it, while a rewarding experience had required that noise be the conceptual locus, an area of only relative interest to myself.
As such it felt like, when this opportunity arose, the chance was there to clarify lines of thought in their own terms and that I had now had the time and space in which to formulate what it was that I was thinking. As such this paper looks at how our idea of sound is embedded in notions of a confined sense and reality, and can be altered or willed toward realising in intensity and scope sound as a transforming and transformed entity.
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reflectivewavelengths 