Unfiltered notes
Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions
Thor Magnusson
Preface
p. ix - AI is a bitmuch to take in
"The same year Russolo wrote his manifesto, Stravinsky premiered his Rite of Spring in Paris. That story has been told many times, but it involves Stravinsky escaping the auditorium because of the loud uproar in the audience; the music of the new century was perhaps too much to take in."
Chapter: Introduction: On Objects, Humans, and Machines
p. 1 - music is becoming human
"Quite the opposite: music is the making of humanity, the very thing that makes us human. This is a point musicologist Gary Tomlinson makes in his book A Million Years of Music (Tomlinson 2015), where the origins of music are traced back to 800,000 years before the emergence of our species c. 200,000 years ago. The argument is convincing: music is an archaic activity written into our psyche, existing beyond the scope of conceptual language or symbolic systems, and connecting with the totality of our intellectual, emotional, and physical being. Originating with early human brain development and tool use, music had a role in the attempt to understand and organise the world via the mimetic function of repeating what is heard, forging the synchrony of rhythmic repetition, understanding time, establishing order, and social cohesion."
p. 1 - music might have come before language - at least it assisted it
"Some authors, for example Rousseau and Darwin, are of the view that music appeared before language, while others claim that both have a common precursor (Mithen 2005). What we do know is that music played a role in training the voice to the degree that human language became possible."
p. 4 - epistemic artefact or epistemic tool
"The bone flute is an object that materialises music theory by dint of a discrete organisation of pitch – an organisation that is by nature musico-theoretical, owing to the discreteness of its tuning and scale. We can define this new object as an epistemic artefact (Kirsh and Maglio 1994) or an epistemic tool (see Magnusson 2009), as it affects, shapes, controls, and directs the way music would be made when the instrument is played. It is an externalisation of musical memory, or what Stiegler would call a mnemotechnic device, that maintains the human in the “stereotypic” form it has evolved into, suggesting that our brain and our external tools are one interdependent system: The question then becomes: where is the memory of the stereotype kept, if not in the material trace of the stereotype in which the preexisting tool itself consists, repeated, duplicated by its “maker” and guiding the latter much more than being guided by him or her? In this sense, the archaic cortex and equipment are codetermined in a structural coupling of a particular sort. (Stiegler 1998: 158)"
p. 4 - Magnusson. Derrida. Stiegler. writing and grammatisation
"This book frames the act of writing in a wider sense than musical notation or sound recording. Sonic writing equally includes material, symbolic, and phonographic inscriptions. It explores how we think with and through technology; sometimes in a dialogue with technology, other times where it serves as an extension of bodies. Although it is a coinage that derives directly from the Greek concept of phonography (and my native Icelandic hljóðritun), “sonic writing” refers to a wider area of human expression traceable to certain strands in the philosophy of technology, where the notion of grammatology (Derrida 1997) is used to explain how humans extend their memory and body technics by means of external “supplements.”2 Stiegler developed this notion of grammatology further, and introduced grammatization as the technical history of memory, arguing that we cannot separate incorporated memory (mneme) and exterior memory (hypomnesis) (Stiegler 2010a: 29): By grammatization, I mean the process whereby the currents and continuities shaping our lives become discrete elements. The history of human memory is the history of this process. Writing, as the breaking into discrete elements of the flux of speech (let us invent the word discretization for this possibility), is an example of a stage in the process of grammatization. (Stiegler 2010b) If grammatisation is the task of externalising, of abstracting processes, of categorising, of representing, it is a process that begins at an early stage of human evolution."
p. 5 - tools and toolmakers co-develop
"Art historian Whitney Davis gives laconic expression to this view when he says: “the tool writes the toolmaker as much as the toolmaker writes the tool” (Davis 1996: 116)."
p. 5 - logos and techne are connected through our tertiary retention
"Technics are an externalisation of the mind, but for Stiegler the technical is not merely a tool or a machine – it constitutes the invention of the human. “Is it tekhnē that arises from logos, or the reverse? Or rather, is it not that logos and tekhnē are modalities of the same being-outside-oneself?” (Stiegler 1998: 193). What characterises the rational human is the transmission of memory via technical artefacts. We have a transgenerational accumulation of memory that is preserved in the technological totality: the people of the cave die and new generations are born, but they are born into a cave equipped with tools, one of which is a bone flute. The experience of the human culture gets written into the tool – and it becomes cumulative and transmissible."
p. 5 - knowledge becomes cyclical, and generations wont see things the exact same way
"This means, however, that the human being is an animal whose knowledge acquisition is not transferred by one individual to its offspring via genes, but via mimesis. This is knowledge that needs to be learned repeatedly by every new generation, and these cycles of iteration will result in difference, in misunderstandings, and in re-appropriation in new technocultural contexts."
p. 5 - tools are memory
"It becomes what Stiegler calls a “techno-logic,” which then, in turn, becomes our external memory: “A tool is, before anything else, memory: if this were not the case, it could never function as a reference of significance” (Stiegler 1998: 254)."
p. 5 - being humanbis to inhabit the already there
"Before the writing technologies of clay, papyrus, scroll, and codex, we wrote our cultural memory into our material artefacts, such as the caveman’s flute which would pass through generations of players, all of whom would automatically align to the musical potential and theory written into the surface of that instrument. To be human is to inherit the already-there of history, in an environment of designed objects into which we are “thrown,” to use Heidegger’s vocabulary. We, therefore, get access to a past “that is mine but that I have nevertheless not lived” (Stiegler 1998: 159)."
p. 6 - 19th century episteme of acoustic instruments
"In the nineteenth-century episteme of acoustic instruments, we find sophisticated technological objects, such as pianos, violins, and saxophones. The technological context was one of standardisation in instrument production, in conjunction with mass production where instruments, such as the piano, began to be made in factories with production methods that derived from the Fordist ideology of the conveyor belt (see Petersen 2013)."
p. 7 - 20th century episteme
"In the electronic episteme of the twentieth century, the instruments are physical and clearly visible, but we cannot inspect their internal workings. There are no visible vibrating objects, no hammers, bows, strings, or membranes that move. However, we touch them, connect them into a sound-producing assemblage, and manipulate their workings through knobs, sliders, and buttons. The twentieth century is the age of the electronic synthesizer, the pickup, the microphone, the amplifier, and the loudspeaker. The"
p. 7 - symbol to signal
"These are instruments that draw into the spectral domain, and musicologists such as Robert Erickson (1975) and Tellef Kvifte (2011) have argued that in twentieth-century music, the focus shifted from musical notes written as black blobs on staff paper to timbral composition of sonic spectra – a shift, in other words, from the symbol to the signal. With"
p. 7 - third episteme - digital tools
"The third episteme is that of digital instruments. These obviously existed in the twentieth century, but they were largely mimetic screen-based versions of acoustic and electric instruments and technologies, remediated in the mouse-keyboard-screen interface combo of the personal computer. It is really at the cusp of this century that we begin to explore the unique qualities of digital technologies for what they are: namely algorithmic, computational, archival, and subject to artificial intelligence. In the digital episteme of the twenty-first century, the innards of the instruments are hidden – including in live coding, which presents a high-level language representation of the control of switching electric gates. In the digital computer, physical energy is transduced via digital mappings. Any bodily gesture can be mapped to any sound and there is no natural paradigm at play that we can relate to."
p. 7 - epistemological rupture
"In this context, Jussi Parikka points out how Elsaesser talks about “ruptures” in our epistemological frameworks, in which the digital is portrayed to be beyond the threshold of the perceptible (Parikka 2012: 23). With digital media we operate in a production network that is of computational representation – that is, the work is digitally notated and interpreted by computer processors, either as linear data or code."
p. 8 - material turn heidegger
"In past decades researchers in the humanities, as well as the sciences, have increasingly focused on the role of material objects in human and animal culture. The part played by technology is finally acknowledged as an essential extension of the human body and mind, used to achieve various tasks, from lighting fire, carrying water, or calculating, to playing music, conducting business, or studying the nature of atoms. This shift has often been called the “material turn” and is strongly inspired by Heidegger’s philosophy of technology."
p. 8 - material turn in music
"Musicologist Emely Dolan suggests that we are witnessing a material turn in musicology as well: “One recent trend seeks to achieve this by collapsing ‘music’ back into the bodies, instruments, and machines that produce it. From the disciplinary point of view, this can be liberating: material objects, unlike musical works, do not drag two centuries of musicological literature behind them” (Dolan 2015: 88)."
p. 9 - epistemic tools mark a need to understand grammatisation
"If our objects serve as instruments of thinking, as epistemic tools, the millennia-old distinction so clearly articulated by Plato between episteme (knowledge) and techne (skill) breaks down, and we need to investigate how our tools of grammatisation, of externalising our thoughts into systems of discrete elements, play a crucial role in our musical practice."
p. 9 - process over object - musical instrumentsbfor instance are objects of processes
"While objects are instrumental in the analysis of how music technologies manifest in the twenty-first century, we must not forget that they are the results of movement, changes, development, evolution. Objects are “things in the making, mediated, unstable, not quite given, constantly deferred” (O’Riordan 2017: 2). Musical instruments are themselves objects of process; unlike paintings on the wall, they are used in the process of creating other art.3 Since Aristotle, Western thought has emphasised form over process (Oyama 1985), and the analysis of objects in archaeology, anthropology, science studies, etc., tends to focus on the character of objects as they appear at a specific point in time: this has been a synchronic, as opposed to a diachronic, study. This book sets the conditions for an attentive focus on processes and how musical objects evolve over time: how they carry ideas, and the evolution of ideas, through time. We are faced with an ontological dichotomy when studying the evolution of musical instruments: either we focus on the objects themselves, their qualities and use, or train our gaze on the evolution of the instruments, the effect of material change on musical practice, and the development of musical ideas."
p. 12 - ergogenesis
"Analysing instruments from this perspective, the object is merely a materialised snapshot of what we could call an evolutionary ergogenesis (the origin of practical work patterns, an embodied movement and process-focused evolution)."
Chapter 1: Instrumentality
p. 17 - object get definition through use
"Such a definition supports Wittgenstein’s description of how words gain their meaning through their use (Wittgenstein 1968),"
p. 17 - anything that makes sound is an instrument
"In 1933, musicologist Eric von Hornbostel proposed a broad definition of musical instruments: “For the purposes of research everything must count as a musical instrument with which sound can be produced intentionally” (Hornbostel 1933: 129)."
p. 17 - disagree. thats about evident of intentionality as we might come
"This is a good definition, wide and inclusive, the only problem being that musical ideas have changed since the 1930s, and now intentionality is not a necessary prerequisite when making music. The music of John Cage from the latter half of the twentieth century corroborates that."
p. 18 - musicsl instruments are ends on their own right
"Unlike tools that serve as a medium for making a particular task easier, such as hammering a nail (which can be done with a rock or any solid object), musical instruments are more than mere media for the transmission of a message or achieving an end goal: they are an end in themselves. The harp, the bagpipe, or the synthesizer are not there to make certain tasks simpler for us, nor are they substitutes for anything else; they constitute the meaning of their play through their expressive nature."
p. 18 - etymology of instrument
"Deriving from ergon (from which the English word “work” can be traced, and which we explored in the introduction) as “to do” or affect something, the organon is a part of the body, and in the form of technical instruments, extensions of the body: thus prosthetic. For Aristotle, in the Physics, the organon is that which mediates the motion between the mover (the doer) and the moved (the deed). For the Greeks, musical instruments were organa, amongst other tools and implements. The word organon was also used in Latin, and Galileo, for example, used the word “organum” for his newly invented telescope."
p. 19 - simondon concretisation of classic instruments... is this quite right?
"Related to this formal definition of roles, the evolution of musical instruments stagnated in the nineteenth century, a process Simondon calls “concretisation,” or when a technology stabilises and becomes a standard (Simondon 2017)."
p. 22 - monochord embodies the rules
"Music and its instruments were a physical manifestation of the mathematical harmony of the world. It is no coincidence, then, that Pythagoras’s monochord is called canon (κανών) in ancient Greek – appearing later as the Arabic instrument qanun – a word that also means “rule.” The instrument embodies its rule."
p. 23 - instrument teaches better than man
"(D) How can it be true that a string teaches better than a man? (M) A man sings as he will or can, but the string is divided with such art by very learned men, using the aforesaid letters, that if it is diligently observed and considered, it cannot mislead. (Strunk 1998b: 91)"
p. 23 - instruments also limit by their very nature
"(D) Indeed, I must say that you have given me a wonderful master, who, made by me, teaches me, and teaching me, knows nothing by himself. Indeed, I fervently embrace him for his patience and obedience; he will sing to me whenever I wish, and he will never torment me with blows or abuse when provoked by the slowness of my sense. (M) He is a good master, but he demands a diligent listener. (Strunk 1998b: 94)"
p. 23 - artificial music
"Boethius’s view of the cosmos resonated down throughout the centuries, for example, in Regino of Prüm’s early tenth-century Epistola de armonica institutione there is a division of music into musica naturalis and musica artificialis, the latter using “artificial instruments of sound.” Regino writes: “Thus, natural music is that which produces sound with no musical instrument, no touch of the fingers, no human striking or touch, but breathed upon by God” (Jeserich 2013: 178). As a result, instruments produce artificial music: “That music is called artificial [artificialis musica] that was conceived and invented by human art and ingenuity, and is based in certain instruments [in quibusdam consistit instrumentis]” (Jeserich 2013: 179). Note how the music of the voice can be inspired by God, in consequence of the logic of language, while instrumental music derives from the instrument itself. Centuries after Boethius we still harbour the same scepticism towards instruments, a scepticism we find throughout Western history in relation to technology in general, and that derives from the Platonic dichotomy between episteme and techne. This is a common theme throughout Western musical history:"
p. 27 - postphenomenological view
"Instruments were understood to equally contain and reveal theory, demonstrating a particular perspective or understanding of the world."
p. 30 - symbols to timbre
"Indeed, in a recent NIME keynote, Kvifte (2011) pointed out how the production of music changed from the nineteenth-century focus on discrete instrumental notes, played from a standard form of musical notation and manipulated as symbols on a page, to the twentieth-century emphasis on timbre. This could be exemplified by pointing to spectralist music (such as Grisey, Murail, Saariaho, and Harvey), drone music (Radigue, Young, Oliveros, Niblock, Conrad), noise (Russolo, Reed, Einstürzende Neubauten, Merzbow), and so on."
Chapter 2: New Instruments
p. 33 - digital represents the analogue, but is different
"As any ethnographer, ethnomethdologist (or better “technomethodologist” – see Button and Dourish 1996), or participatory design researcher would point out, a direct translation of technologies from the analogue to the digital domain is never possible. By moving practices from the real world to the computer, objects, relationships, and work processes are abstracted, quantified, classified, and arranged into an ontology that supports the operational principles of the software. The"
p. 34 - what is interesting about new tdchnologies is their ability to facilitate something novel. this is where we call into question generative AI as a medium... it is tinpot everything
"disappear. What interests me is when the DAW goes beyond its simulative functionality and begins to operate in ways that are uniquely digital, for example by new signal processing techniques, innovations in interface and interaction design, and new AI that enables the software to learn, adopt, suggest, and generally form a dialogue with the musician, where the software becomes more of a partner than a tool. Technical transitions such as those that move from the acoustic, to the electronic, to the digital are transformative transductive processes that do not simply change the underlying media functioning: they transform our musical ideas and practices too (Mackenzie 2002). Instruments"
p. 35 - black box - interfaces
"Electronic instruments have designed interfaces that connect to the black box of their functionality. The instrument designer has decided to “expose” certain sound parameters through user control; others lie fixed in the darkness of the box. In general, we can state that the electronic or digital instrument has an interface, whereas the acoustic instrument is the interface."
p. 43 - it does not...
"The Ocarina is amongst the top 20 downloaded apps of all time, which indicates how powerfully it connects with people’s general love of music and experimentation. The app is also a good example of how digital instruments can democratise music-making by enabling simpler entry levels. A good source of information for exploring this and related work is Ge Wang’s Artful Design book (Wang 2018)."
p. 44 - borgmanns device keeps popping up
"The difference between an instrument and a controller also reflects this: we expect controllers to be easy, like a button on a coffee machine, a car radio, or a train ticket kiosk. Instruments, on the other hand, have depth, character, resistance, and individuality. We don’t want them to be controller-interfaces: we want mystery and magic, discoverability and surprise. The notion of ergodynamics unveils how the first encounter of a digital musical instrument typically involves exploring its affordances and then a further study in the instrument’s constraints. For this reason, digital luthiers often make use of complexity and non-linearity to make the instrument perceptually interesting to play."
p. 44 - it seems to me that the music in question is equally indebted to the tech that made it possible as well - whetherbits an instrument, controller or software
"A question arises: how does controllerism differ from the development of new DMIs as we see in the NIME research community? The most prominent difference is the status of a user versus designer of technology. Controllerists are creative users of hardware and software, but their primary focus is working within established musical genres, often with clear criteria for the music’s functionality, such as getting people onto the dance floor. In contrast, NIME researchers tend to think more critically about the technology, often designing the instrument from scratch, and questioning what it does, how it works, and what kind of music it encapsulates, to the degree that the distinction between the instrument and the musical piece disappears. Here, building a musical instrument becomes indistinguishable from designing a music-theoretical framework; the musical instrument is a theory of music, and it equally contributes to genres, styles, and musical scenes. Another profound difference is the conception people have of their performance: the controllerist performs their music via an interface, whereas in the NIME performance the instrument itself constitutes the music: without the particular instrument the music would be different."
p. 46 - NIME stuff is not adopted
"Considering the speed of development and the competition in the respective areas of high tech, whose products we integrate in our new instruments, we can question whether it is realistic to expect our instruments to stabilise, or concretisise in the Simondonian terms (Simondon 2017). The technology moves faster than musical practices and what we are getting are snapshots of technics applied in musical composition and performance, technics whose materialities will be quickly replaced with new ones, but whose ergomimetic structures continue and become re-implemented in later technical objects."
p. 46 - the ergomimetic is what is broight along, not the technical object itself
"For us, researching in the domain of musical performance, it is therefore the ergomimetic gesture that becomes concretisised, not the technological object."
Chapter 3: Epistemic Tools
p. 47 - the flute distorts the face of the player
"The message is clear: music should be inspired by divine voices, in language, not abstract sounds. The flute, aulos, distorts the performer’s face, transforming their organ of rationality, the mouth, into one of breath rather than words – psyche versus logos. Stringed"
p. 47 - instruments help us think about and understand the world. but they also shape it
"Bacon, often called the father of empiricism and modern science, wrote in his Organum Novum: Neither the naked hand nor the understanding left to itself can effect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is done, which are as much wanted for the understanding as for the hand. And as the instruments of the hand either give motion or guide it, so the instruments of the mind supply either suggestions for the understanding or cautions. (Bacon [1905] 2011: 259)"
p. 48 - instruments determine what can be thought. so does money and power
"In their work on Instruments and the Imagination Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman enunciate how scientific instruments can serve as the foundation of scientific thought, as “[i]nstruments have a life of their own. They do not merely follow theory; often they determine theory, because instruments determine what is possible, and what is possible determines to a large extent what can be thought” (Hankins and Silverman 1995: 5). Instruments thus serve as extensions of our bodies and amplifiers of our senses."
p. 48 - minds as machines for bacon
"Indeed, for Bacon, the implication of the new logic (as opposed to the mere perception of the senses) is that the “mind itself be from the very outset not left to take its own course, but guided at every step; and the business be done as if by machinery” (Bacon [1905] 2011: 256)."
p. 49 - gauvin - instruments for journey into the unknown
"With the proliferation of philosophical instruments, the scientist’s laboratory became a habitus in which knowledge was embodied in epistemic artefacts, ranging from books to microscopes: “Virtue was not only found in the scientia of geometry, but also in the instrument and its operator” (Gauvin 2011: 317). However, the biggest change was in the new conception of the instrument, the organon, moving from Aristotle’s conception of an instrument as a means to an end (terminus ad quem) to a more speculative conception of the instrument itself as a starting point for a journey into the unknown (terminus a quo) (Gauvin 2011: 333)."
p. 51 - ihdes amplification reduction. something gained,.something lost
"Technology equally conceals and reveals. We have already seen how technology can never be neutral. Technologies organise, select, focus the task, and shape the environment (or the material of the work) through various transformations. This is what Ihde calls amplification-reduction transformations (Ihde 1979: 56), and he takes the example of a dentist’s probe that becomes a prosthesis of the hand, amplifying any unevenness in the tooth, whilst reducing information such as wetness or warmth. By selecting a technology, one is choosing a lens, a background theory, a specific world-view, and thus the interpretative scope of potential outcomes. This selection involves what kind of perceptual resolution we want to engage with the world and what type of embodiment and theoretical inscriptions. It is a necessary property of all technological artefacts to amplify certain possibilities of experience while at the same time reducing that very experience."
p. 51 - blackboxing, latour
"As sociologist Bruno Latour (1987) so elegantly demonstrates, objects establish themselves as black boxes through repeated use and in the process their origins disappear. The object is naturalised through heavy use, a fact prompting Bowker and Star to observe that the “more naturalized the object becomes, the more unquestioning the relationship of the community to it; the more invisible the contingent and historical circumstances of its birth, the more it sinks into the community’s routinely forgotten memory” (Bowker and Star 2000: 299). Musical patterns and musical styles become “blackboxed” in software."
p. 52 - bowker and star on the connectedness of sofgware systems
"The software instrument maker is embedded in a knotty infrastructure of operating systems, programming languages, protocols, standards, and interface limitations. This is a factor that involves social and technical elements well described by Bowker and Star: “Systems of classification (and of standardization) form a juncture of social organization, moral order, and layers of technical integration. Each subsystem inherits, increasingly as it scales up, the inertia of the installed base of systems that have come before” (Bowker and Star 2000: 33). This intricate, reticulated, technological structure is wide-reaching and applies techniques of heterogeneous origins."
p. 53 - tool use and aesthetics
"The awareness of the relationship between tool use and aesthetics has long been acknowledged in the crafts (Pye 1968; McCullough 1996). The practised hand using highly designed tools results in a unique aesthetic that is historically rooted within a tradition of workmanship (Wilson 1999)."
p. 53 - technical artefacts and epistemological work
"Baird provides an analysis of three different ways in which technological artefacts can perform epistemological work, but he states that this list is not exhaustive. Instruments can embody knowledge as a material mode of representation (model knowledge); as a mode of effective action (working knowledge); and as a material mode of effective action that synthesises representation and action (encapsulated knowledge) (Baird 2004: 17)."
p. 54 - materials are not ideas
"In a Heideggerian manner, Baird shows that instruments are not simply “instantiation of ideas.” Materials and ideas are both necessary in science and materials do not behave like ideas. This is the point of Baird’s instrumental epistemology: “[A]n artifact bears knowledge when it successfully accomplishes a function” (Baird 2004: 122). Theoretical scientists are “concept smiths,” whereas people who build instruments are “function smiths” (Baird 2004: 123). Function smiths develop, replace, expand, and connect new instrumental functions from existing affordances. The functions of a measuring instrument are semiotic; they are built according to our theoretical understanding of the domain to be measured. As such, measuring instruments do not extract information from the world: they generate new data signals that have to be hermeneutically translated and prepared into a suitable form, and only then can the data be understood as information about the world."
p. 55 - onto-eistemology depends on pov. i believe it simply imposes its view on our unsuspectingly
"These threads in the philosophy of technology can be defined as an epistemological material turn, or what Karen Barad calls onto-epistemology (Barad 2003, 2007)."
p. 55 - tacit knowledge
"Many of the finer parts of these learned skills, including the intuition of material properties and sound physics, are in the form of tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966), that is, embodied and non-theoretical knowledge derived from discovery, exploration, and refinement."
p. 56 - Latour
"From the perspective of Latour’s actor-network theory, the networks enrolled in the production of digital instruments are practically infinite. There is an impenetrable increase in complexity, which means that the inventors have to constantly rely on black boxes."
p. 57 - epistemic tools... acoustic and electronic
"The argument here is that acoustic instruments are clearly impregnated with knowledge, but that their electronic and digital counterparts are imbued with an increased level of epistemic dependencies. Clearly acoustic instruments demonstrate acoustic theory, often music theory (e.g., with discrete pitch, as in the flute or the harp)."
p. 57 - using these electronic tools demands a deep knowledge of what lies beneath
"The challenge of designing and performing with digital instruments is to understand their material properties and symbolic writing, their internal guts in the form of code, yet functioning as tools whose end arena is at the level of the signal. The digital system is material in its body, electric in function, and symbolic in control. Live coding is a good example here: tactile keyboards are used to write symbolic code that generates an electric signal. How do we analyse such instruments? I propose we need an organological approach for understanding them, a critical analytics of musical instruments, and I call this study musical organics (Magnusson 2017)."
Chapter 4: Digital Organology
p. 59 - LLMs as instruments?
"While the design of a digital instrument is a process requiring knowledge of sound, signal processing, music theory, and interface design, the use of the instrument happens through habitation, through working with it, discovering its functions, and progressively building an understanding of its affordances and constraints (Magnusson 2010) – its ergodynamics. This is what philosopher of science Andrew Pickering calls the “performative idiom” (Pickering 1995: 144), and it applies equally to scientific discoveries and explorations in laboratories."
p. 60 - LLM as instrument?
"Performers of acoustic instruments develop an intuitive understanding of their instruments, the music theory, and the tradition in which they operate. They internalise styles, techniques, and finger patterns. The interaction with the instrument is embodied and learning the instrument means negotiating a space for a dialogue with it. The instrument is not a mere channel for ideas, but a designed thing in the world that contains a strong agency, primarily in its musical affordances, but also in terms of character, quirkiness, or individuation (the object’s history and change through time as an effect of manoeuvre and use). The"
p. 62 - stiegler on internal logic
"For example, Stiegler writes that “the logic of invention is not that of the inventor. One must speak of techno-logic, of a logic literally driving technics itself” (Stiegler 1998: 35). He borrows this idea from Bertrand Gille’s “loose determinism,” or the notion that although one cannot anticipate technological evolution a priori, innovation is never random, even if it appears so. Technological progress is driven by a specific logic innate to technology itself: “The system’s dynamic offers the possibility of invention, and this is what is essential to the concept of technical system: the choice of possibilities in which invention consists is made in a particular space and particular time according to the play of these constraints, which are submitted in turn to external ones” (Stiegler 1998: 35). In other words, the technical infrastructure that evolves offers or suggests inventions (in the classical understanding of the term), instances of objects, or solutions that derive from the engulfing techno-social structure. For"
p. 65 - stiegler organology 2010
"It is also important to keep in mind that the organology we are performing here is not so distinct from Stiegler’s “general organology” which he divides into three tiers: “the thinking of grammatization calls for a general organology, that is, a theory of the articulation of bodily organs (brain, hand, eyes, touch, tongue, genital organs, viscera, neuro-vegetative system, etc.), artificial organs (tools, instruments and technical supports of grammatization) and social organs (human groupings … and social systems in general)” (Stiegler 2010b: 34)."
Chapter 5: Writing Music
p. 71 - arguablybnot true. the external is all the music we listen to the written in music is also the recorded
"However, the voice does not have an external referent for tunings or scales. With instruments we get prosthetic technologies that extend beyond the body, forming a tertiary memory (Stiegler 1998) where music is inscribed into material objects. The early sound-generating objects were our instruments, but they were also the ergodynamic vehicles that framed the social potential and further continuity of musical practices."
