Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

[Luther Blissett]

I take such umbrage with the idea that there is no new style. I come across so many interesting new aesthetics and ideas that get me excited and inspire me on a daily basis.

[wintler2]

I take such umbrage with the idea that there is no new style. I come across so many interesting new aesthetics and ideas that get me excited and inspire me on a daily basis.

I don't see why you should take umbrage, the theme of the thread is a huge generalisation and as such there will always be plenty of exceptions, praise be.

I realise that i've assumed hauntology is a phenomenon of mass consumerist/profit-motivated production, just my bias or true?

[Luther Blissett]

I take such umbrage with the idea that there is no new style. I come across so many interesting new aesthetics and ideas that get me excited and inspire me on a daily basis.

I don't see why you should take umbrage, the theme of the thread is a huge generalisation and as such there will always be plenty of exceptions, praise be.

I realise that i've assumed hauntology is a phenomenon of mass consumerist/profit-motivated production, just my bias or true?

That's an interesting theory and I'd enjoy reading your thoughts on it (in this thread or the "hauntology" one?). I'd guess it's a little of column A and a little of column B. I feel as though I may be able to provide some of my own insight on the transformation of counter-culture from the 90's into the 2000's. There was something, a thing very hard to define, that was happening in the early-to-mid 90's, involving the preexisting counterculture mixing with the sickly sweet mainstream of the time and a long period of relative peace and stability that "softened" a great deal many subcultures. While I was a big follower of 90's indie rock bands that had a very specific and identifiable fingerprint most closely historically referenced 80's "college rock," Manchester, and The Pixies, like Imperial Teen, Solex, Pulp, Gus Gus, Magnetic Fields, Mercury Rev, The Sundays, Go Sailor and Yo La Tengo, I was also a huge sucker for nostalgia. I think that everyone was, no matter how one self-identified or aligned oneself. Before the internet, it was all such a mystery, like one that was hidden from us by the older generations, as if the 80's represented some huge gulf during which every yip had gone yup to never return.

At least in my age group, ability to reference the past as related to your own chosen interests was highly valuable, in a very sincere way. The artefacts were considerably hard to come by. It was as if Thatcher had come through your town and removed every reference to Robbie Basho from every magazine that ever wrote about his music. Every genre between 1950 and 1980 was romanticized, with the outlier being late 60's hippie culture, which was almost countenanced as "mainstream" in some way. Punk was honored above all else. In the poor city where I was from, a nihilistic outlook was almost a prerequisite to being alive. In 1992, small skate operations loved to pull pop-like consumer culture appropriations, most specifically aping the 50's and 70's. This was done utterly without double-irony for a few years until it spread and became quite ubiquitous (t-shirts referencing Bazooka Bubble Gum or whatever) by the late 90's.

So in contrast to the contemporary indie rock that I loved, I also adored nostalgia. Probably more than most, and in a deep way. I daydreamed over old copies of Surfer magazine of conservation, earthly exploration of hazy places like Playa Negra or Nacala, or by extension, space exploration. I listened to the Creatures, the Shadows, the Dragsters, and Dick Dale. I loved Alton Ellis, Clancy Eccles, Junior Byles, and the Upsetters. I loved 70's punk. I loved "northern soul." I loved modern bands that were themselves nostalgic, like the (pre-Lovefool) Cardigans, because a reviewer said that their music invoked Tuesday Weld. I loved all the regular old stuff that everyone else did. And I don't think I was alone. At some point when I was off chasing a real avant garde during a brief foray into ridiculous math rock and then ridiculous, Wire-like free jazz, nostalgia was commodified. This coincided heavily with the rise of the internet and is still continuing to this day. My tumblr is a testament to that.

All that being said, I think there is still some very creative innovation going on out there. Animal Collective springs to mind as something that calls to mind the future in a way that is pretty obnoxious to most people, yet are insanely popular. As much as I enjoy beauty, I also love totally inaccessible, inventive music like Sleigh Bells, Crystal Castles, the aforementioned Swans, Sunn O)))), Ghost, or even Dirty Projectors. All of those are quite popular groups, and I know I'm missing many others. Even still, the vast majority of my music collection is highly hauntological — especially with the new stylistic resurgence of 90's-style lo-fi DIY twee which keeps me pretty satisfied, personally. There's a bit of crossover there: groups like Peach Kelli Pop or Silkies both hearken back to this obvious callsign, and are accessible, but also kind of brash / grating.

Groups like LCD Soundsystem wear their influences on their sleeve but can still be innovative from time to time. I think there's a lot of innovation in electronic music, but I'm no expert outside of the "adult contemporary" strain of it — Poliça, Ulrich Schnauss, Royksopp, Miike Snow, Phantogram, the Drive soundtrack, etc etc. That stuff isn't really in the same class as more progressive forms of electronic music or bit music.

Much of what I listen to would be incredibly difficult to pin on an earlier decade.

[kelley]

great post, luther.

[kelley]

this is a very long piece, but totally pertinent in regards to the comments above between wintler2 and luther, especially per the consumerist bias mentioned:


http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/loving-the-alien/


Loving the Alien

Socialist economist Jacques Attali’s 1977 book Noise: A Political Economy of Music (translated in 1984 by Brian Massumi) offered a structuralist “political economy of music.” In the U.S., this explicitly political analysis of music made a splash in “new” or critical musicology, which was then in its infancy. (Attali published a revised version of Bruits in 2001, which has not been translated into English.)

In Noise, Attali tried to account for the hypercommodification of music and our resulting alienation from musical creativity and pleasure. His theory of “composition”—defined as “an activity that is an end in itself, that creates its own code at the same time as the work”—offers a quasi-Marxist notion of a musical utopia that would allow music makers to escape the alienation of their labor and pleasure in commodities and enjoy the creative process unrestricted by predetermined rules or outcomes.subscribe to TNI for $2 and get Vol. 9 today

In an interview with Fredric Jameson, Attali describes composition as what happens when “the common people themselves in their creativity and narcissism, who seek their own pleasure and satisfaction—yes, narcissism is the right word here—…want, in short, to liberate themselves.”

Attalian composition seems like a mishmash of different philosophical concepts: there’s a little bit of Herbert Marcuse’s idea of “narcissistic” eros liberated from the performance principle (the imperative to repress and sublimate desire in productive labor), Deleuze’s concept of the plane of composition (macro-organizational rules emerge from the bottom-up, instead of being applied from the top down), and a little bit of Kant’s categorical imperative (work and workers as ends in themselves). It basically involves doing whatever you want for its own sake, with no predetermined purpose or program restricting your creativity. And this is, in Attali’s mind, what liberation sounds like.

Liberation from what, though? Attali explicitly frames composition as the liberation from late industrial capitalism—that is, from mass reproduction. But now, in the 21st century, the so-called developed world has already exited the age of mechanical mass reproduction and moved on to a neoliberal service and information economy. So Attali’s notion of composition sounds overly idealistic and dated at best, if not also philosophically and politically problematic. Writing in Mute, Flint Michigan argues that “Attali has difficulty developing ‘composition’ … beyond individualist dimensions.” If everyone is composing for him or herself, Attali’s project doesn’t leave much room for collective resistance.

As unsatisfying as Noise’s political claims may be, its musical analysis is much more interesting—even and especially for thinking about politics. According to Attali, radical upheavals in 20th century Western art music foreshadow a more fundamental social transformation in which “representation”—his term for the general epistemic paradigm that grounds both classical political economy and tonal harmony—“gives way to statistics, macroeconomics, and probability,” or in other words, to “repetition.”

Though Attali offers repetition as a neo-Marxist account of the regime of mechanical reproduction, it may work better as a theory of the Foucauldian order of neoliberal biopolitics—that is, the statistical maximization of life and minimization of risk or randomness. Foucault and Attali are talking about the same thing—biopolitical neoliberalism. Foucault just does it in terms of power, and Attali in terms of economic models.

As Foucault puts it in his 1976 lectures (collected as Society Must Be Defended), biopolitical neoliberalism—“the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die”—uses statistics to optimize the life of some (privileged) groups, intensifying their access to “life” by deintensifying the access of others. For example, in North Carolina, state employees with a low body mass index can opt for better health-care coverage than “obese” employees, who are eligible for only the most basic plan. Quantitative instruments, Foucault argues, manage the intensity of life to minimize unpredictable, nonstandardizable phenomena, because these drain efficiency and impede optimization. If all a population’s deviances can be standardized, then they can be co-opted as contributions to privileged groups’ quality of life.

Take, for instance, yoga and Zumba—examples of what philosopher Sandra Bartky calls beauty-industrial complexes. Abstracted from the South Asian and Afro-Caribbean contexts on which these practices more or less draw, they can be presented as fitness regimes, easily incorporable upgrades to (Westernized, generally feminine) bourgeois lifestyles. They’re about burning calories, raising heart rates, increasing strength, inches of muscle gained or fat lost, and so on. Instead of talking about cultural differences like Hindu vs. Western philosophical approaches to the body, we talk about exercise and weight loss. Yoga and Zumba become middle-class women’s regimens for self-improvement, segments of the service economy that cater to them.

For Foucault, biopolitical neoliberalism reduces everything to statistical data and then uses this data to distribute “life” to the average and above average, and away from the below-average and the nonstandardizable deviants. As he puts it in Society Must Be Defended, biopolitical neoliberalism is “the power of regularization” that monitors “aleatory events.” In the case of yoga and Zumba, the practices aren’t so much commodified as data-fied, to measure the degree to which they intensify life. The point is to cultivate an above-average level of fitness and attractiveness—to exceed the average without breaking the curve (e.g., by exercising to the point one’s body no longer conforms to recognizable gender ideals).

Like Foucault, Attali treats the biopolitical management of risk as neoliberalism’s defining feature, only he uses the term repetition. Though Attali sometimes frames repetition as copying or looping, he puts more emphasis the “statistical organization of repetition.” A repetitive society uses statistics to manage outliers—whatever can’t be controlled for, whatever breaks the curve. “The administrator in a repetitive society” is tasked with “managing chance,” Attali argues. In a 1983 interview, Attali goes further, arguing that “the aleatory can perfectly well be conceptualized in a profoundly systematic way: indeed, in modern times it becomes the fundamental component of all theoretical systems.”

Attali connects this statistical management of chance to the administration of life. In the political economy of repetition, he argues, “the study of the conditions of the replication of life has led to a new scientific paradigm … Biology replaces mechanics.” By 1977, the “developed” economies of the West were transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service one. Instead of “making things,” as Jack Donaghy would say, we work on ourselves, on our quality of life … or rather, less privileged people get paid to work on more privileged people’s fingernails, hair, muscles, houses, diets, children, psychological health, online dating profile picture, standardized test scores, and so on. In Foucault’s terms, Western economies shifted from the mechanical reproduction of commodities to the biopolitical intensification (stockpiling) of life. In such societies, success is not measured by having more stuff, but by having, as Rutger Hauer’s character in Blade Runner says, “more life.”

So while Attali says in Noise that the problem with repetition is “proliferation” and “an excess of life,” he frames composition as a solution to a different problem: namely, “alienation” or “exteriority,” the result of commodification and a feature of the society of mass/mechanical reproduction. His concept of composition thus misses what is most innovative about his theory of repetition, the move from mechanics to biology, from commodities to life-intensities.

Composition, then, is not a very compelling response to biopolitical neoliberalism. What’s a better one? To figure this out, it helps to examine some Actual musical practices to theorize political responses to neoliberalism as it plays out in current approaches to making and listening pop music.

To explain how administered repetition appears in music, Attali refers to the “management of chance” in mid-20th century avant-garde art music. In John Cage’s work, Attali argues, “even if in appearance everything is a possibility for him, on average his behavior obeys specifiable, abstract, ineluctable functional laws.” These avant-garde compositions define a system within which chance operations occur, but they do not allow for entirely asystematic events. It’s sort of like a Magic 8-Ball toy: In any given shake, any one of the collected “answers” could appear, but you’ll never get a response not already programmed into the toy.

A similar process of containment is at work with xenomania, Simon Reynolds’s term for hipsters’ taste for ever more exotic non-Western pop musics—their “appetite for the alien,” as he puts it. Reynolds argues that the Internet, with its “infinite choice plus infinitesimal cost” has created a context in which “nomadic eclecticism” is the “default mode for today’s music fan.” Here, the Internet—both in the way its architecture manifests global power dynamics, and in the mp3 format shuttled around on file-hosting sites—controls for “randomness.”

Though Reynolds claims that “all those Analogue Era deterrents and blockages have now been swept aside by the torrential every-which-way data flows of Web 2.0,” the Internet is not a level playing field. It, like everything else, is affected by Western hegemony. Xenomania is the flow of musical data from (post)colony to Western metropolis, and the direction matters. (We don’t call it xenomania when they appropriate us, do we?)

The Internet doesn’t make music into a global free-for-all; there is no actual randomness here. Rather, it standardizes musical, cultural, and geographic deviations so that Westerners can more easily and efficiently plunder the cultural resources of the so-called Third World. The mp3 format makes the colonial expropriation of global pop particularly easy. Western DJs can plug an mp3 file right into Traktor, Ableton, or ProTools—they don’t need the ethnomusicological expertise to deal with sounds that aren’t immediately assimilable to Western musical rubrics, like quarter tones, which don’t exist in Western music and which Westerners can’t generally recognize. As mp3s, songs are predigested for these programs, which can quantize them to Western grids with the click of a mouse. The mp3 is like a one-way musical Babel Fish. “Third World” musicians and audiences still have to learn to navigate globalized Western pop, while xenomaniacal Westerners get a cheat code.

The need for this cheat code, or what Reynolds describes as the “thirst for fresh musical stimuli,” is actually a specifically neoliberal imperative. For the neoliberal subject, the point of life is to “push it to the limit,” closing in ever more narrowly on the point of diminishing returns. Philosopher Shannon Winnubst calls this sort of neoliberal hunger game “the biopolitics of cool.” According to Winnubst, the neoliberal subject has an insatiable appetite for more and more novel differences: “difference…becomes a manifestation of cool rather than a repressed other.”

By transforming alterity this way, the neoliberal individual demonstrates its success: “I, too, can do the hot new thing, and I can do it both better than you, and better than those people with whom it’s originally associated.” Niche non-Western pop genres become supplements Western hipsters use to demonstrate that they are “winning” at life, the avant-avant-garde. Xenomanical hipsters instrumentalize non-Western music in order to show that they are always ahead of the curve.

Jeffery Nealon calls this “the logic of intensity”: Pleasure comes not from assimilating difference (“eating the other,” as bell hooks puts it), but from optimizing one’s individual capacities. This logic of intensity works like a synthesizer, regulating the frequency (the rate at which a sine wave cycles from peak to peak, or valley to valley) and amplitude (the height and shape of a peak or valley) of an audio signal. This is what Attali means when he claims in Noisethat “the synthesizer … can be seen as the statistical instrument par excellence.”subscribe to TNI for $2 and get Vol. 9 today

Biopolitical neoliberalism monitors or “synthesizes” the intensity of life. In biopolitics, life’s intensity, like a sine wave, closes in on a limit without ever reaching it. Politically, neoliberalism maintains social stratifications by making sure privileged groups are on the edge of burnout (the upper limit of intensity), while marginal groups are teetering on the brink of death (the lower limit). Adjust the frequency beyond a certain point, and the sound wave becomes another pitch entirely. Similarly, in order to prevent any upset in the overall, population-wide “balance” of privilege, the intensity of each individual’s life needs to remain, like a sound wave, within the statistically defined minimum and maximum appropriate to one’s social position.

Biopolitical neoliberalism manages populations like an audio equalizer manages different signals, maintaining an optimal balance among all signals by keeping each individual one within a narrowly defined range of intensity (e.g., so the treble and bass levels are consistently proportional). Upsetting the balance of intensity, letting people experience life above and/or below their prescribed levels, means distributing privilege and oppression in ways that undermine hegemony (patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.).

Neoliberal approaches to music aren’t limited to hipsters. With the rise of electronic-dance-pop, they have become mainstream. EDM-pop applies the statistical logic of biopolitical neoliberalism—Attali’s repetition—to pop songwriting. Aesthetically, it takes experiences usually reserved for privileged groups—that is, being so ahead of the curve you’re almost burned out—and uses this as a model for musical pleasure. Songs are structured so that rhythmic and timbral intensity are pushed to the upper limits of either/both our sensory wetware and the musical hard/software.

Riding the crest of burnout is associated with privilege. Hegemony reproduces itself by distributing resources to privileged groups; thus, privileged people get to lead the most intense lives, lives of maximized (individual and social) investment and maximized return. Experientially, privilege means being so busy, overcommitted, and invested in your life that you’re always at risk of hitting the point of diminishing returns. EDM-pop songs make that affective experience of privilege a mass-market consumer product. This is why people like it: It mimics the feeling of winning.

So how, exactly, does EDM-pop create in sound the edge-of-burnout effect? This is where Attali’s idea of repetition pays off. Conventional pop is organized harmonically: increasingly stronger dissonances develop to a point of crisis; attenuated dissonance then assimilates back to consonance. (This conforms to the “eating the other” model mentioned above). EDM-pop, by contrast, intensifies repetition to the limit of aural perception; the climax or musical “money shot” comes when this limit is reached or crossed.

For example, the repetitions of a musical event—a word, a drumbeat—will be exponentially increased (eight notes, to sixteenths, to thirty-seconds). This is an intensification of frequency. Amplitude can also be intensified by using effects and synth patches. For example, in gabber, a genre of hardcore techno, the bass is modified so that it’s a square wave on the attack, instead of a regular, curved sine wave. Most EDM-pop songs will combine both: There will be an increasingly dense rhythmic texture, accompanied by pitches and timbres that, in Dan Barrow’s words, “soar.”

Since the subject of the New Inquiry’s music issue was failed utopias, let’s take two dystopian tracks as our examples. First, LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem,” whose video parodies zombie apocalypse stories. The main “soar” starts where the female vocalist enters with her “get up”s (around 4:25 in the video), and ends when the chorus returns (around 4:55). The female vocalist’s part is a simple, clear distillation of the logic of intensity. She says:


Get up, get down, put your hands up to the sound (x3)
Put your hands up to the sound, put your hands up to the sound
Get up, get up, get up, get up; Get up, get up, get up, get up
Get up, put your hands up to the sound, to the sound,
Put your hands up, put your hands up, put your hands up, put your hands up


Ever smaller chunks of text are repeated at increasingly higher rates. Similarly, in the second half of the line of “get ups,” you’ll hear a synth that rises in pitch, soaring us to the last “put your hands up.” The same thing happens in Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” whose video is about dystopian post-industrial Britain. The main “soar” begins right after the repetitions of the titular line, “We found love in a hopeless place” (1:44 in the video). The percussion lines become increasingly more rapid (from eighth-note triplets to sixteenth notes), and several treble synths soar upward in pitch as their timbres are modified. This all leads up to a big hit (2:00 in the video).

In both songs, rhythmic and timbral intensity are pushed to the limit. Riding the crest of auditory or machinic burnout, these songs mimic, in music, the generalized affective experience of privilege in neoliberalism. Listening to this music, people get to feel something like privilege, even and especially if they’re not privileged. Yet at the same time, by tarrying with burnout or, more important, zero intensity (what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”), EDM lets listeners experience what feels like risk, indulgence, and excess but is actually very tightly and carefully controlled. All excess, all deviance, is always already accounted for in the statistical, asymptotic logic of the sine wave. Take the bass too low, for example, and it just sounds like percussive clicks, not a pitch. As Attali argued, what seem superficially like chance events are the products of careful management, which ensures against the emergence of actual chance occurrences or nonstandardizable deviances.

Neoliberal hegemony manages chance. No longer a matter of the alienation Attali sought to remedy, it co-opts (standardizes) deviation rather than oppressing or repressing otherness. How, then, do you resist it? Is there any room for real deviation, and if so, how do you put it into practice?

What counts as deviation depends on what level of intensity hegemony has assigned you in the first place—what frequency range your life is tuned to sound. Producing—getting behind the glass, in front of ProTools—is thus a more useful metaphor for resistance than Attali’s composing. Production is also tends to be a more collective endeavor than composing, a collaboration of knob-tweakers, engineer, and performers. Resistance involves a collective project of rejecting the presets, digging into the advanced settings and modulating frequencies, tweaking amplitudes, and retuning the mix.


. . .

the highlighted bit viz composition, repetition, and privilege or 'exteriority' seem particularly germane to the discussion here.

[yathrib]

It isn't just geezers listening to classic rock. One of my son's best friends from high school's favorite bands was Led Zeppelin, and they all at least were conversant with Zep and bands like it. Metal in its many incarnations remains popular among a significant subset of teens and young adults, and it's changed very little in the last quarter century or so. Just think how absurd it would have been for my peer group to be listening to Sinatra or even Elvis in 1977.

About three years ago I was looking at a concert video from the late 70s/early 80s. I noted that the freaky club kids then could easily pass for freaky club kids now, perhaps sampling the 70s a little tiny bit. Punks still exist. Goths were around when I was in college, although I don't remember if they called themselves that. When I look at old zines or alternative pubs from circa 1985, they don't look comically hokey or naive by today's standards, although the pre-digital production standards are quite obvious. Shall I go on?

[Allegro]

Thanks, kelly, for posting that longish essay. I listened to excerpts of Ms. Robin James’s video references beginning in paragraph 28. Then, I understood better her whole essay. The videos referenced are posted, below.

Excellent references, too: Non-Time and Hauntology and Superbowl Halftime Show - M.I.A. Flips the Bird

_________________


^ Party Rock Anthem | LMFAO

LYRICS.
Party rock is in the house tonight
Everybody just have a good time
And we gonna make you lose your mind
Everybody just have a good time

Party rock is in the house tonight
Everybody just have a good time
And we gonna make you lose your mind
We just wanna see ya shake that

In the club party rock, lookin' for your girl?
She on my jock Nonstop when we in the spot,
booty movin' weight like she on the block Where the drank?
I gots to know, tight jeans, tattoo 'cause I'm rock 'n' roll
Half black, half white, domino, game the money, op-a-doe

Yo, I'm runnin' through these ho's like Drano
I got that devilish flow, rock 'n' roll, no halo
We party rock, yeah, that's the crew that I'm reppin'
On the rise to the top, no lead in our zeppelin, hey

Party rock is in the house tonight
Everybody just have a good time
And we gonna make you lose your mind
Everybody just have a good time

Party rock is in the house tonight
Everybody just have a good time
And we gonna make you lose your mind
We just wanna see ya shake that

Everyday I'm shufflin'
Shufflin', shufflin'

Step up fast and be the first girl to make me throw this cash
We gettin' money, don't be mad now, stop, hatin' is bad

One more shot for us, another round
Please fill up my cup, don't mess around
We just wanna see you shake it now
Now you wanna be, you're naked now

Get up, get down, put your hands up to the sound
Get up, get down, put your hands up to the sound
Get up, get down, put your hands up to the sound
Put your hands up to the sound, put your hands up to the sound

Get up, get up, get up, get up
Get up, get up, get up, get up
Get up, put your hands up to the sound, to the sound
Put your hands up, put your hands up, put your hands up, put your hands up

Party rock is in the house tonight (Put your hands up)
Everybody just have a good time (Put your hands up)
And we gonna make you lose your mind (Put your hands up)
Everybody just have a good, good, good time

Put your hands up Put your hands up
Put your hands up
Shake that, everyday I'm shufflin'

^ We Found Love | Rihanna

LYRICS.
Yellow diamonds in the light
And we're standing side by side
As your shadow crosses mine
What it takes to come alive

It's the way I’m feeling I just can't deny
But I've gotta let it go

We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place

Shine a light through an open door
Love and life I will divide
Turn away cause I need you more
Feel the heartbeat in my mind

It's the way I'm feeling I just can't deny
But I’ve gotta let it go

We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place

Yellow diamonds in the light
And we're standing side by side
As your shadow crosses mine...

We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place

We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place
We found love in a hopeless place

[wintler2]

...
I realise that i've assumed hauntology is a phenomenon of mass consumerist/profit-motivated production, just my bias or true?

That's an interesting theory and I'd enjoy reading your thoughts on it (in this thread or the "hauntology" one?).

Not sure i have what amounts to a theory, its more just how i can make sense of it from my observations. I'm not 'creative' professionally or privately, just fyi's.
I'm in this thread cos 'end of socially observable time' makes more sense to me than the word hauntology, tho i have used the latter cos its shorter. Soc.obs.time i like because to me it is clear - how to we know time passes but that things change, lack of SOT means lack of socially observable change and evolution, as averse to the current recycling/looping in place, most obviously in entertainment & fashion. Interesting threads too, thanks all.

What i see as evidence of 'end of s.o.t' is the increasing homogenisation of nonessential consumer durables (fashion, cosmetics, computers, sportsgear) driven partly by ruthless pursuit of cheapest-cost-max-profit but also by organisational groupthink among decisionmakers. Risk aversion and profit seeking hobble creativity, by definition surely at mass production scale, and the success of taylorism in moulding individual employees to stay within their job description goes all the way to CEO, i think.

If this was just about brands of cheeto's then who cares, but it is so much worse than that.
To start with, these are our symbolic tools, which have for eons embodied the changing habits and circumstances of our race. Until relatively recently, everything was home made and thus was specific and personally meaningful to its context. But today, because they are manufactured from within or by those aspiring to privelidge and the standard product is sold into countless diverse homes, these mass produced cultural artefacts are mostly blind and largely mute on the real problems of their consumers. I feel bad about my McDonalds job so i go see a Jason Bourne movie: i pays my money, i get symbolic relief by imagining i'm the powerful hero, but i don't have anything that will help me in my situation. Whereas mayhap in times gone by, i woulda gone down the pub and sung sad songs, maybe learnt one about the Diggers or Joe Hill.

Grotesquely, given the inappropriateness of most culture tokens today, many ppl are now directly reliant upon their material consumption of these tokens for their symbolic status and thus (for them) their happiness. They wouldn't know how to d.i.y a mood if their lives depended on it. And it will.

Just like IBM and now Microsoft, the bigger brands mass producing culture often become blind in their privelidge and are replaced .. by hungrier meaner versions of the same outsourced-culture disease. And so it goes, until lack of material stuff with which to make basic material needs and symbolic tokens runs short and ever larger numbers of people are ejected into the decidedly material world. SOT will then restart with a vengance, as it has never stopped for those communities that produced their own goods.

Whoa, didn't mean to write an essay, but its an evocative topic.

[Allegro]

Thanks for the posts immediately above by Luther and wintler2. Very Informative as has been this entire thread, and the hauntology thread, too! Robin James’s essay Loving the Alien, introduced by kelley, was motivation enough to continue referencing today’s music compositions. Other James’s insights as a feminist and musicologist are forthcoming.

Premise: It might appear so, but the halt of socially observable time for sounds of music might not exist, and my mind may change tomorrow. After all, when have sounds of music not been transforming over the most recent, say, 10,000 years of human evolution? Albeit, many North American music lovers have dismissed well performed historic western European classics as well as much of the skillfully composed pop and hip hop for listening to toy algorithmic compositions, instrumentations and productions by today’s engineers who are not so skillfully experimenting with our ears and brains, nay, our physical bodies. (Notice that lyrics and socio-economics have been omitted from criticism.)

The essay’s excerpts have been posted in the next space. I’ve put individuals’ comments within which are highlighted snippets below and ahead of the featured essay: listening to electronic music as well as human-performed music, hence deconstructed through use of mathematics. Ugh.
Here we go again .

~ A.

_________________
Five Comments from
Musical rhythms: The science of being slightly off.

This is very interesting BUT... If I would hear such a bad player of Bach music, I would shut down immediately the radio! What is the standard offset of Glenn Gould? Less than 5 ms I guess, no?

Written by Alexandre (Brussels), 2 September 2012 18:05

This is an interesting article, but I would humbly suggest that the authors may have missed the forest for the trees. There are far more obvious factors at play than the 5-10% errors in timing that the authors cite. Dynamic (volume) and note length immediately spring to mind. Even when playing in strict rhythm, musicians emphasize notes or do not, according to what beat in the measure they fall on, or even where within a particular pattern within the beat they fall, depending on the rhythm. (That is, unless the music calls for them not to do this.) They can vary either volume or note length, without changing the timing one iota (within, of course, the margin of error). There are also instances where, in order to give shape to a musical phrase, the player will, without distorting the rhythm, make slight tempo changes, which, again, even when slight, would probably swamp the errors that the authors note.

Written by Louis Grace, 7 August 2012 20:20

You have spoken like a true computer zealot, Earl. I would much rather listen to Bach’s Chaconne played by Itzhak Perlman than listen to randomized computer file. An I am a recording artist and professional musician who uses computers in my studio all the time. It is not JB who sounds like a quasi-religious zealot but you. Nobody is denying that progress has been made in the digital world and I love every innovation and new gadget in my recording studio but machine will remain machine.

Written by George, 17 July 2012 16:33

JB, how will you see anyone in the next century when you’re determined to live in the past? Understanding how the human brain works both in performing and perceiving music has a tremendously wide swath of applications beyond simply approximating human music performance with computers. Shunning such research because you hold some antiquated semi-religious ideas about what music is supposed to be is weak, bordering on shameful.

Written by Earl Scioneaux, III, 15 July 2012 20:35

Love it! But with all due respect to the work here, how long will it take for us to see that Science is not All? The beauty that we feel listening to music is not in its periodic accuracy (or any statistical humanizing factor); the beauty that we feel as Listeners is in our innate communication with the human on the Playing side. This can certainly be approximated by a computer, but for what? Go analyze Sonny Rollins -- and see you back here in the next century.

Written by JB, 4 July 2012 06:16

_________________
The essay’s excerpts have been posted in the next space.

[Allegro]

Follows are excerpts from the essay noted in the space, above. Considering the vocabulary in this essay, a studied musician might claim the co-authors are not musicians. Still, reflecting on today’s music composition, one may assume socially observable time has not stopped; we’re just observing SOT differently, as in, not what is heard as melody, harmony and sound design effects but listening to and feeling the results of ongoing developments of algorithmic persuasions.

_________________
Musical rhythms: The science of being slightly off
by Holger Hennig, Ragnar Fleischmann, and Theo Geisel

July 2012, page 64 | With a statistical understanding of our natural rhythmic imperfections, one can make computer-generated music sound more human.

Have you ever wondered why music generated by computers and drum machines sometimes sounds unnatural? One reason is the absence of small imperfections that are part of every human activity. Whatever your favorite music recording may be, rhythmic deviations accompany every single beat. The offsets are typically small, perhaps 10–20 ms. That’s less than the time it takes for a dragonfly to flap its wings, but you can tell the difference in the music.

Audio engineers have known about the phenomenon for a long time. They will even add slight random deviations to a computer-generated musical piece to give it a more human feel, a procedure sometimes called humanizing. But the precise nature of the deviations made by humans playing complex rhythms has only recently been explored. Are the variations completely random from one beat to another, or are they correlated in a way that can be expressed by a mathematical law? To seek an answer, we turned to time series analysis, a technique widely used in chaos theory.

The beat generation

With a tip of the hat to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and the rest of the US writers who constituted the Beat Generation of the 1950s, let us consider an example of beat generation in a simple musical setting. A professional drummer from Ghana was recorded for more than five minutes during which he synchronized his drumming with metronome beats that he heard through headphones. Panel a of the figure shows the audio signal for five recorded beats, each separated from the following beat by 1⁄3 second, and indicates the musician’s deviations from the metronome’s rhythm. Panel b presents the deviations from the beat for the entire time series of 1030 beats. The mean deviation is −16 ms; the minus sign indicates that, on average, the drummer anticipated the metronome click.


[Image omitted.] Feel the beat.The two plots shown here were obtained as the professional musician on the right played a hand drum while listening to regular metronome beats. (a)In this two-second time slice, green lines indicate metronome beats and red lines, determined from the absolute extremum of the audio signal of each beat, indicate the striking of the drum. (b)Over a period of 1030 beats, deviations from regular metronome beats (dn) exhibit long-range correlations. The five deviations from panel a are marked with red squares. They illustrate how the drummer switches from playing ahead of the metronome at beat number 284 to playing almost simultaneously with the metronome at beat number 288.

< snip >

Long-range correlations are present when a drummer synchronizes with the beat of a metronome. But a ticking metronome is the simplest rhythm imaginable, so one can be forgiven for asking whether LRCs persist when musicians play more complex rhythms such as those in contemporary pop and rock music. It turns out that LRCs are inherent in all sorts of complex rhythms, generated with hands, feet, or voice, as long as the musician does not lose the rhythm completely.

What makes us tick

In the 1970s Richard Voss and John Clarke analyzed pitch fluctuations in classical and other types of music and also found LRCs [Long-range correlations] there. Those LRCs, in Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions and in others’, are statistical evidence that the melody at the end of the piece is related to those in other parts of the composition. That evidence for melodic memory makes sense: Bach, while he was composing, must have remembered the themes informing his piece and how they evolved. Earlier this year, Daniel Levitin and colleagues reported LRCs for the fluctuations of written note lengths in compositions of 40 different composers. Those and many other studies reflect the human preference for music with a balance of predictability and surprise. (White noise can be considered pure surprise.) Apparently, the memory inherent in LRCs is just right to sustain that balance.

What could be the source of our memory for deviations of only a few milliseconds in musical rhythms? Or, to put the question differently, what makes us tick on a millisecond time scale? Scientists have explored the question for decades, and the answer is still wide open. Strikingly, LRCs are entirely absent in individuals who frequently lose rhythm and try to regain it by following a metronome. That loss of LRCs may originate in a resetting of memory in the neurophysiological mechanisms that control rhythmic timing. Further research may help to unravel the neuronal mechanisms that make possible the amazing accuracy of human coordination on a millisecond time scale.

Perfecting imperfection

People often perceive perfectly timed computer-generated beats as artificial and lacking a human touch. Professional audio editing software therefore offers a humanizing feature that artificially generates rhythmic fluctuations. However, those built-in functions are essentially random number generators producing only uncorrelated fluctuations—white noise. The result is a rough ride: a rather bumpy, jerking rhythm. As an alternative approach to humanizing music, one could more closely imitate the human type of imperfection by introducing rhythmic deviations that exhibit LRCs.

< snip >

The observation of LRCs in imperfect human musical rhythms demonstrates an approach frequently found in physics these days. The starting point is a complex system with abundant noise and elusive structure. In the case of human rhythm, the system is not just complex—it’s a living musician. Nonetheless, one can seek mathematical laws that shed light on the underlying mechanisms governing the system. In the case of the musician, a power law reveals an aspect of human coordination.

To err is human. But isn’t that part of the complexity and beauty of human activity? Yes—even more if the human happens to be a really good drummer.

_________________
Holger Hennig is a postdoc in the department of physics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ragnar Fleischmann is a staff scientist in the department of nonlinear dynamics at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany. Theo Geisel is director of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Göttingen, and head of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Göttingen.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank Benjamin A. Allen for useful comments. This work was supported by German Ministry of Education and Research grant number 01GQ1005B. Holger Hennig acknowledges funding through German Research Foundation grant HE 6312/1-1.

References
1. H. Hennig et al., “The nature and perception of fluctuations in human musical rhythms,” PLoS ONE 6, e26457 (2011); see also.

2. D. L. Gilden, T. Thornton, M. W. Mallon, “1/ f noise in human cognition,” Science 267, 1837 (1995). [ISI] [MEDLINE]

3. R. Voss, J. Clarke, “`1/fnoise’ in music and speech,” Nature 258, 317 (1975) doi:10.1038/258317a0.

4. D. Levitin, P. Chordia, V. Menon, “Musical rhythm spectra from Bach to Joplin obey a 1/fpower law,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 109, 3716 (2012).

5. C. V. Buhusi, W. H. Meck, “What makes us tick? Functional and neural mechanisms of interval timing,” Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 6, 755 (2005). [MEDLINE]

[Allegro]

The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music
(Out Sources: Philosophy-Culture-Politics)
A Book by Ms. Robin James | from Amazon dot com

Book Description

Grounded in continental philosophy, The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music uses feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories to examine music, race, and gender as discourses that emerge and evolve with one another.

In the first section, author Robin James asks why philosophers commonly use music to explain embodied social identity and inequality. She looks at late twentieth-century postcolonial theory, Rousseau’s early musical writings, and Kristeva’s reading of Mozart and Schoenberg to develop a theory of the “conjectural body,” arguing that this is the notion of embodiment that informs Western conceptions of raced, gendered, and resonating bodies. The second section addresses the ways in which norms about human bodily difference—such as gender and race—continue to ground serious and popular hierarchies well after twentieth and twenty-first century art and philosophy have deconstructed this binary.

Reading Adorno’s work on popular music through Irigaray’s critique of commodification, James establishes and explains the feminization of popular music. She then locates this notion of the feminized popular in Nietzsche, and argues that he critiques Wagner by making an argument for the positive aesthetic (and epistemological) value of feminized popular music, such as Bizet and Italian opera. Following from Nietzsche, she argues that feminists ought and need to take “the popular” seriously, both as a domain of artistic and scholarly inquiry as well as a site of legitimate activism.

The book concludes with an analysis of philosophy’s continued hostility toward feminism, real-life women, and popular culture. While the study of gender, race, and popular culture has become a fixture in many areas of the academy, philosophy and musicology continue to resist attempts to take these objects as objects of serious academic study.

Review

The Conjectural Body is a fantastic and ground-breaking book! While recent cultural theorists have exploited and appealed to music, they have failed to think through its complex implication in race and gender. Music is not a given; it is not merely exemplary of, or expressive of, a raced or gendered identity, any more than race or gender are unproblematically or essentially given. Rather, race, gender, and music are coincident with one another. They all negotiate in complex ways the material/social divide that theorists like to impose upon the world. Such is the sophisticated, nuanced and compelling argument of this book. This is a clearly written, timely book, as original as it is profound. Essential reading for cultural theorists of all stripes.

(Tina Chanter, DePaul University )

In this book, Robin James holds philosophy accountable to the pleasures and critical resources of Western popular musics, which many philosophers have disavowed. With verve and determination, she calls on aesthetics to answer these challenges with a vision of the raced and gendered body that allows us to think rigorously about political and social questions we engage as everyday cultural agents. Her discussions give the philosophy of music a salutary update.

(Monique Roelofs, Hampshire College )

This interesting...book investigates the interrelationships among music (especially popular forms like rock, jazz, and blues), gender, and race. James (philosophy, Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte) uses ‘conjecture’ to refer to the way categories like ‘gender’ and ‘race’ are at once myths but yet are important to use in order to advance feminist aims. The categories are not independent entities, separable even in principle from bodies; rather the categories are themselves created through the socialization and music-making process. For instance, race does not intersect with music and then become expressed by music. Instead, race and music are baked together as in a cookie, but whereas the cookie was always in the baked state, the different elements are so intertwined that they never actually existed apart from their combination. This is fascinating stuff.

Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers/faculty.

[82_28]

HOLY SHIT. I scored me an acronym! SOT.

Anyways there is this that is kind of apropos.

Pop Music Became More Moody in Past 50 Years

We blast the upbeat tunes for parties and workouts at the gym, and we save the low-key ballads for romantic or pensive moments. It’s hardly a new idea that music is intertwined with our emotions. But how have our favorites changed over the decades, and what do these changes say about America’s shifting emotional landscape?

Music is a form of naturalistic data that, much like popular television, literature, and sales of consumer goods, scientists can sample for insight into our minds and values. Researchers E. Glenn Schellenberg and Christian von Scheve set out to examine songs popular in America during the last five decades, using a selection culled from Billboard Magazine’s Hot 100 charts. Schellenberg and von Scheve wanted to learn how emotional cues in music, such as tempo (slow to fast) and mode (major or minor key), have changed since 1960.

The most striking finding is the change in key. Songs composed in a major key tend to sound warm and effervescent (think “We Can Work it Out” by the Beatles, released in 1965), whereas songs in a minor key can sound darker and more melancholic (think “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” by Green Day, released in 2005). Over the last few decades, popular songs have switched from major to minor keys: In the 1960s, 85 percent of the songs were written in a major key, compared with only about 40 percent of them now. Broadly speaking, the sound has shifted from bright and happy to something more complicated. It’s important to note, though, that although older songs were frequently in a major key, this didn’t necessarily mean the lyrics were cheerful (e.g., The Fifth Dimension’s 1969 “Wedding Bell Blues” tells the tale of a woman longing for her wedding day, despite being in major key). Similarly, Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” hit from 2006 is in minor key, but it relates the tension and fiery lust between two potential lovers.

America’s popular songs have also become slower and longer. When the researchers analyzed the beats per minutes (BPM) of each song, they found a decrease from an average 116 BPM in the 1960s to approximately 100 BPM in the 2000s. Songs in the 1960s tended to run under three minutes, whereas more recent hits are longer, around four minutes on average.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is that our current favorites are more likely to be emotionally ambiguous (such as sad-sounding songs being fast or happy-sounding songs being slow – compare “Disturbia,” Rihanna’s fast-paced dance song, which is in a minor key, to Alicia Keys’ emotional ballad “No One,” which is in a major key but clocks in at a relatively slow 90 BPM). Perhaps, the researchers suggest, today’s listeners are more musically sophisticated. Other studies in the past have linked music preferences to personality traits, such as a preference for sadder music being tied to more empathy, openness to experience, and less extroversion.

Other research by C. Nathan DeWall and his colleagues used linguistic analysis to show that popular song lyrics became more self-focused and antisocial (i.e., violent, more profanity) between 1980 and 2007, a psychological shift that may have translated into changes for musical elements of songs. Brooding, introspective songs are unlikely to be party anthems, for example, so they may be more down-tempo. Schellenberg and von Scheve also suggest that artists may employ minor keys and compose slower songs to give them an air of maturity. After all, it’s children’s music that is usually happy, and many musicians known for bubbly, feel-good tunes (e.g., Jonas Brothers) are relegated to the pre-teen shelves at the store.

Another possible explanation for the changes in popular music is that the more contemporary music reflects the hardships and tragedies that our society has endured. For example, Terry F. Pettijohn II and his colleagues have shown that popular songs tend to be longer and slower during times of economic or social difficulties. However, Schellenberg and von Scheve believe that the steady increase in duration and decrease in tempo that they found in their study doesn’t support the idea of growing difficulties fully because it would mean our problems have increased steadily over the last fifty years.

Perhaps popular songs have become more complex over time because Americans are becoming more diverse and individualized in their musical tastes. For example, as globalization increases exposure to foreign artists who might not have entered American awareness years ago, we absorb and are inspired by their new sounds.

Though we can only speculate on the specific causes of this evolution in music, we can still view society’s preferences as a metric of the public consciousness. Maybe the reason South Korean rapper PSY’s infectious “Gangnam Style” went viral in 2012 is because we needed a little light-heartedness and a dose of fun in the face of disturbing world events beyond our immediate control (economic crisis, that means you). Schellenberg and von Scheve stress that their initial observations have only opened the door to inquiries on the link between emotion and music consumption. Perhaps someday we’ll learn more of the secrets behind the music we love and the times we live in.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... -pop-music

[justdrew]

It may be that socially observable time has stopped to the extent that we've stopped observing society. More than ever we're tunnel visioned into our own personal choice stream. We see only what we choose.

[justdrew]

How Corruption Is Strangling US Innovation
"The Harvard Business Review is running a very interesting piece on how money in politics is having a deleterious effect on U.S. innovation. From the article: 'Somehow, it seems that every time that [Mickey Mouse] is about to enter the public domain, Congress has passed a bill to extend the length of copyright. Congress has paid no heed to research or calls for reform; the only thing that matters to determining the appropriate length of copyright is how old Mickey is. Rather than create an incentive to innovate and develop new characters, the present system has created the perverse situation where it makes more sense for Big Content to make campaign contributions to extend protection for their old work.if you were in any doubt how deep inside the political system the system of contributions have allowed incumbents to insert their hands, take a look at what happened when the Republican Study Committee released a paper pointing out some of the problems with current copyright regime. The debate was stifled within 24 hours. And just for good measure, Rep Marsha Blackburn, whose district abuts Nashville and who received more money from the music industry than any other Republican congressional candidate, apparently had the author of the study, Derek Khanna, fired. Sure, debate around policy is important, but it's clearly not as important as raising campaign funds.'"

via slashdot

[JackRiddler]

Aha! Does it feel like a thread like this one keeps appearing and going away and coming back again? It may illustrate the point.

I take such umbrage with the idea that there is no new style. I come across so many interesting new aesthetics and ideas that get me excited and inspire me on a daily basis.

Ah, but that's not the thread topic. It's not that change has stopped, or that there is no new style, or that the new styles all suck and Things Were Better Before. No. It's that the sense of socially observable time has slowed down to adult participants and observers of Western cultures, for various reasons that we have debated. I just reviewed this thread and it's had some fascinating postings, including by slomo & simulist, who have sadly gone away and disappeared, respectively, and marycarnival, who is rare. Also kelley.

As I've maintained here, I believe some of the factors contributing to this feeling are:

- the sheer accumulation of styles and items and gadgets so that even great or momentous innovations add less and less to the total of things to wear, use and eat;

- omnipresent always-on media tending both to singularity (it's all one computer on different screens and it's swallowed the stereo, the TV and the phone) and info-overload that blunts sensation;

- simultaneous presence of all past styles and looks and technologies in an age of limitless reproducibility, so that there is no handful of identifiable Looks of the Decade;

- labor intensification and a breakdown in distinctions between labor and leisure, adding to each of the above effects;

- in short, a homogenization of time and experience within the Western populations and increasingly for all of the consumer cultures implanted in almost all other nations (& a bird tells me North Korea is about to join).

Again, there have been momentous changes. For example, just in the last decade people on the streets in population groupings large and small have switched at least 50% of their attention from looking at other people (which is what they've been doing for the last 10 thousand years since the first settlements) to looking at goddamn little units in their hands. But that's an example of a change that increases homogenization, detachment, atomization and thus this sense of a slowed or featureless, storyless history. Even if that's contrary to the real pace of history at this time, which is off the charts and definitely not heading to the End in any Fukuyama sense.

Also what wombat said above:

Consumer economics. What we've witnessed since the tumultuous year I was born has been a steady tightening of the noose with a hard margin on the top of end of conspicuous consumption as a function of individual and household income. The process of strip-mining value, the bastard twin of Bucky Fuller's "ephemeralization," has been the driving engine behind economic growth. It's a very cynical game built on simple scale -- population ramps up, so a higher percentage of overall value can be directly extracted. There's no innovation aside from social control technology. (The changes in technology as "products" is a matter of iteration, not innovation.)

The Chinese method of manufacturing is the blueprint. Find the cheapest, fastest possible means of production and then start removing/replacing core ingredients as much as possible, for as long as possible, until you are caught or out-competed by someone else who wants it more and is willing to take more risks to get there. End result is food without nutritional content, status symbols without value, and hollowed out currency from dollars to dinars. The house always wins until we burn it down.

If you want a prototype to study, observe the nostalgia marketing and manufacturing chain behind Urban Outfitters and their family of stores/catalogs.