Instrumental music: already posthuman?
"[There is an] increasing assimilation of music delivery systems with the “posthuman” condition of machine-human interfaces. Bodies are no longer fully separable from machines, if indeed they ever were. The migration of music to digital media collapses the effect of auditory distance that formed the unspoken basis of music’s relationship to the human. This reorientation necessitates far-reaching changes in our conceptions of classical music, the musical work, the listening body, and the act of performance" (Kramer, 2013, 40)
Interviews
This piece consists of three audio tracks: one for the flute, one for the electric guitar, and one for the percussive beat. The flute and percussion were recorded using a microphone of average quality (Shure SM57), which was connected to my computer via an external sound card (Steinberg UR44). Note that this is where analog-to-digital conversion occurs, as the sound card analyzes the continuous electrical signal transmitted by the microphone and converts it to a discrete analog signal. The guitar track was recorded by plugging the guitar directly into the audio interface via its line level input. Logic Pro X then provided me with an emulator of a guitar amplifier, to give the guitar a nicer sound. The percussion and flute tracks were both equipped with basic compressors and equalizers, to improve sound quality and mixing, and light reverb was added to both the flute and guitar via a bus (“Bus 3” in the video). All of these VST plug-ins are stock plug-ins included in the regular purchase of Logic Pro X. The piece as a whole is in C major, at 105 BPM, and in 4/4 time.
Having explaining the different technological aspects of this piece, I believe that this composition is a great example of Braidotti’s idea of nature-culture continuum. Braidotti indeed argues that scientific and technological advances have displaced and blurred the boundaries between the categories of the natural and the cultural. Lagrandeur similarly argues that “humans are a system, a distributed network, composed not just of the living elements that make up the human brain and body but also of the living and nonliving elements that surround them and with which they interact” (Lagrandeur, 2018, 4) In a similar way Omry argues that “digitality has presupposed a move away from the limitations of the body on the one hand (as with virtual space, cybertexts, and transhumanist singularity), and yet, on the other, seems to increasingly return to a notion of the human that is very much based on our materiality, dispelling the supposed gap between natural and technological” (Omry, 2016, 106) None of the interviewees thought for even a second that this song, in its recording and production, had been processed by a software.
An instrument is already an extension of our bodies and in this sense, it can be considered already post-human. Johnson furthermore argues that “the musical instrument is a prosthetic augmentation of the human body, enabling the body to exceed itself (to sound faster, higher, louder than any voice, and to enable the individual to do so often in multiple parts simultaneously). (Johnson 2015, 142). I therefore believe that the question of whether a work of art is less creative, original or artistic because it had been created or filtered by a machine is obsolete. Each and every work of art has always used a medium and different techne to be created. As Coeckelbergh (2017, 298) argues, “Works of art […] are material or immaterial artefacts, and therefore, correspond to at least one conception of technology: technology as artefact. Moreover, the artistic process is always technological in the sense that it always involves the use of technologies/media. […] Art and creativity can be interpreted as technologically mediated, both as processes (the making of art, the creative process) and as (experienced) products”. As he argues, machines can then be seen as one particular form that art (understood as a human-technological process) takes.
Many post-humanist scholars have argued that the body can be seen as the ‘original prosthesis’ that we all need to manage and manipulate, so that we can extend it with other prostheses (here, the different instruments) that hence become a continuation of our body (see Hayles, 1999, 3). As Johnson (2015, 142) puts it, “instrumental music, by definition, embodies modernity’s contradictory relation to technology and blurs the boundary between organic human agent and its own mechanical invention”. Where the human, the instruments, and the machines begin and end is unclear. Wilson wants to argue that it is by exploring this blurring effect that emerged through different bodily extensions in musical performance that we can rediscover what bodies are. As Hayles argues that “we have always been posthuman” (Hayles, 1999, 275), Wilson extends this thought arguing that “through losing the body into a larger field of instruments, sounds and nonhumans, it rematerialises anew.” (Wilson, 2017, 147)