The Arculutron is my open-ended encounter with the intersections between acoustic, electronic & digital sound and how they relate to visual and kinetic art forms.
It is an emergent play-space I began in lockdown and which consolidates my extensive work in the realms of installation making, immersive theatre and improvisation. I have experimented and improvised by making a number of contraptions and installations. Materials rather than other humans. I have indulged in a messy, open-ended play that is constantly full of new questions and lines of inquiry. I have to say it is joyful.
The Arculutron is both a refuge from the pressures of my thesis writing and also a generative and experiential way of thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical themes of Synthesis and Refrain, Tsing and Sheldrake’s methodologic and epistemological ideas of polyphony and the deep listening practices of Pauline Oliveros which understand sound as an improvisation with time and matter (Oliveros in Rodgers 2010)
Deleuze and Guattari, noted how the electronic sound machine generated rather than reproduced sound. How sound becomes mobile and rhizomic, escaping the fetters of reproduction. They argued that philosophy could function as a ‘thought synthesizer’ able to escape priori judgement, ground and territory.
By assembling modules, source elements, and elements for treating sound (oscillators, generators, and transformers), by arranging microintervals, the synthesizer makes audible the sound process itself, the production of that process, and puts us in contact with still other elements beyond sound matter.
(Deleuze and Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus 1987)
Electronic music has a history of resisting tired reproductions and traditional ways of understanding music. Speaking to Tara Rodgers, noise musician, Jessica Ryan comments on the ridiculousness of constructing and developing electronic instruments though the limitations of volume pitch and timbre. She argues that electronic instruments need not be determined by such reductive ways of understanding music. (Ryan in Rodgers 2015)
Tsing and Sheldrake both draw on ideas of polyphony and polyrhythm in music in order to advocate for a polyphonic way of understanding the world. They note that western music (classical and modern) has become a single, unified, harmony and rhythm moving from one place to another. We westerners have come to think of sound (and the world, and our existence) as a line in time; the logic of a Newtonian clockwork chronology. In Polyphonic and polyrhythmic music, unification is displaced by a synthesis of multiple texture and tone and a looping of times. Multiple rhythms and melodies produce new rhythms and refrains that exist only in between things.
By noticing of the world as polyphonic and entangled rather than explained by a single unified narrative we begin to make tangible the things that exist between. Sheldrake calls this noticing a ‘soft listening’
It’s like trying to listen to many conversations at once without flickering from one to another. Several streams of consciousness have to commingle in the mind. My attention has to become less focussed and more distributed. I fail every time but, when I soften my hearing [my italics], something else happens. The many songs coalesce to make one song that doesn’t exist in any one of the voices alone. It is an emergent song that I can’t find by unravelling the music into its separate strands.’
(Sheldrake 2020)
This Soft listening (Sheldrake), Deep listening (Oliveros), Listening with all our senses (Davis), Special kinds of noticing(Tsing) It is a practice of ethics and aesthetics of moving beyond the tyranny of a single, unified narrative. And it is also central to the practices of improvisation, curiosity and experimentation. Opening to the world (with ears, though, senses) is how the improvisor makes conversation and complicité with the world. This practice reaches beyond the human into material and temporal and affective realms. My Arculutron adventures have been a making conversation with a sonic world that has something to say back. All music improvisers attempt to keep asking their instruments interesting questions in order to break out of tired routines. I have found that with electronic instruments the conversation can never be the same. Every moment is made from a set of unique parameters, utterly unrepeatable. It is an unfolding of time, this deep listening.
Davies, B. (2014). Listening to children: being and becoming. London; New York: Routledge
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury
Rodgers. T (2015) Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Rodgers. T. (2010) Pink Noises. London: Duke University Press
Sheldrake,M. (2020) Entangled lives: How Funghi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures. London: Bodley Head
Tsing, A.L. (2015) The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins, Princeton University Press, Princeton.