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Contributing Authors

Not Just Sound is dedicated to articulating, sharing, and promoting a speculative approach to sonic art practice, aesthetic theory, and the role of technology in the arts at large.

Today, there is no clear or consistent way to assert the positive existence of Music. To approach the question, “What is music?,” we must pass through John Cage’s observation that music is just sounds, sounds heard. We must thank Cage for the identity he established between music and sound, but we shouldn’t be satisfied with it. When we recognize both the obviousness and the incompleteness of sound being all there is we stumble upon something missing: the negative remainder of what just is, of appearance appearing. To identify sounds as music is to force, to make positive, a fundamental lack in relation to hearing; we call this lack listening. If we consider Cage’s intervention to be a negation of the classical notion of Music as a pre-given and privileged class of sounds, then our recognition of what’s not ‘just sounds’ should force us to negate the negation. We must listen differently, as Jean-Luc Nancy describes, as an:

Approach to the self: neither to a proper self (I), nor to the self of an other, but to the form or structure of self as such, that is to say, to the form, structure, and movement of an infinite referral [renvoi], since it refers to something (itself) that is nothing outside of the referral. When one is listening, one is on the lookout for a subject, something (itself) that identifies itself by resonating from self to self, in itself and for itself, hence outside of itself…

Not Just Sound is not about Music grounded in dogmatic metaphysics or twentieth-century phenomenology, but rather about the hard problem of considering how the privilege of music appears at all, given the material reality of sound, sound’s reproduction, and the biology of aural perception.

CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS

Sean Peuquet: A composer, writer, and programmer working in digital music and new media installation art. Sean shares his work online at www.ludicsound.com.

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