I’ll be presenting my current research at the Rethinking Sound conference in Seoul later this week. My current project explores the materiality of song and the relationship between songs and objects. As this is a sound studies conference, I’m using this paper to think about how my project intersects wtih the theories of Pierre Schaeffer and those influenced by his work on acousmatic listening, sound objects and the ‘thingness of sound‘.
The second half of the paper is taken up by a discussion of Björk and the ways her music gets connected to objects of various kinds: natural, technologcal, human, nonhuman, viral, meteorological. I’d already been planning to include references to the work of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Jlin, so I was delighted to learn last week about the new remix that Jlin has made of Björk’s ‘Arisen My Senses’. I love the way she makes it almost unrecognisable (as a Björk song, that is: it’s very recognisable as a Jlin song) while still retaining important aspects of the original vocal timbre. Jlin’s remix is the second on the Spotify playlist below; the original can be heard on last year’s Utopia.
My absract for the conference:
Recent years have witnessed an intense interest in the roles played by objects in the world, with many approaches recognising the vital interdependence of human and non-human actors. My current research aims to establish the importance of music (and sound more broadly) in this new terrain of scholarship by analysing how songs represent objects, how songs themselves become meaningful objects and how songs rely on a wide range of ever-changing objects to assure their survival. Using the connecting thread of materiality, I propose an approach to musical analysis that both connects with recent object-centred scholarship and overcomes existing musicological distinctions between music as thing and music as process.
This paper presents an analysis of the ‘song object’, a concept crucial to my research and which has connections to earlier theories of lyric substance as well as to Pierre Schaeffer’s objet sonore (sound object). What constitutes the song object? What kind of object is it? How do songs themselves comment on their construction, their parts, their physicality? I argue that songs are a particular kind of technology for ordering information and that they deploy particular technologies of object orientation in ways distinct from, but comparable to, those of paintings, sculptures, poems and books. Part of my analysis therefore consists of exploring material descriptors and metaphors connected to song, incorporating the artificial (hooks, bridges, etc.) and the natural (cells, viruses, weather systems). I’m interested in what these terms – and their application to song objects – can tell us about the materiality of sound.
