no feelings

[Joshua Maremont <thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The recent thread on emotion in music has stirred a few lingering 
reflections for me.

First of all, can one speak of music devoid of emotion, or might one 
say instead that music without affect, as psychologists like to put 
it, is actually making a quite strong emotional statement.  For all 
humans, however repressed, have emotional responses, and part of the 
power of music - especially in the extreme nonrepresentationality of 
the digital music discussed here - is to trigger these responses. 
Similarly, the process of composition involves - one hopes - a human 
(even conceptual or process-based music requires a human to develop 
the concept or set up the process), and this human experiences 
various emotional states during the compositional process, states 
whose influence upon or erasure from the resulting musical work must 
infuse some sort of emotional content into the music itself.  By this 
I do not mean to fall into the so-named "intentional fallacy" (the 
idea that a work must be interpreted primarily according to the 
creator's intention), but I do expect that a musician's emotional 
state has some effect on the music created and that this effect is in 
some way blended with the emotional state of the listener during the 
listening experience.  As I recall from a college course on the 
topic, Alain Robbe-Grillet similarly sought to banish all associative 
descriptors and related (to him) fluff from his new novels, yet the 
very emptiness of the prose in his "Voyeur" struck me as simply 
giving rise to a different set of associations and aesthetic 
responses than would have been stimulated by a fuller word set.

Secondly, the current state of popularized computer music - music 
often packaged beneath photographs of computers, circuit schematics, 
or fragments of programming code - has been reminding me, oddly 
enough, of what I call the "cold wave" of the late 1970s and early 
1980s.  In the cold wave there seemed to be a pop cultural awareness 
of the advent of a world of robots and computers as well as a fearful 
obsession with what life in such a world might be.  Gary Numan's "I 
Dream of Wires" and John Foxx's "030" to me exemplified a stonefaced 
exploration of a dystopian possible future, in which humans 
themselves became robotic, their emotions erased with grey networked 
reprogramming.  Technological development at the time was guided 
largely by defense procurements and the concerns of the Cold War (the 
internet too sprung from such loins, as, perhaps, did some of our 
basic tools here), and maybe it seemed that the products of this 
development would be used by political and economic blocs only to 
control or destroy those who puttered and poked about under their 
sway.  Somewhere in the background of this cold wave, then, as it 
evolved out of punk and prog and krautrock, was a reaction to a 
perceived technological state of things in the world, and now two 
decades or so later this music is to me fascinating as a collection 
of artifacts from a pop cultural gloss on that state.  Meanwhile now, 
as the ubiquity of the computer and its growing need for care and 
feeding through labor both threaten profound global economic 
dislocation and reorient much of human activity (communication, 
creativity, work, etc) around its flickering screen and cramping 
keyboard (can we not, finally, banish QWERTY?), it seems no accident 
that the issue of the Emotionless and the Digital is up for 
discussion, as if in a return to our position in the 
cultural-technical cycle of two decades earlier.  For is the Fear 
not, in a slightly different form, back?  Yes the Cold War is over, 
for the moment, but even a cursory reading of global news suggests 
that technomilitarism is alive and well, and although the computer of 
2000 is one that smiles at and talks to its user and the robot of 
2000 is the automated poop-free dog, the feeling that far larger 
forces of technology will not ultimately be making this a 
you've-got-mail world after all is certainly in the air (at least it 
is here in silicon-friendly SF).  I laughed in the recent "Charlie's 
Angels" movie at the idea that villains with dry-ice mainframes were 
about to be able to locate people from their cellphone calls, for 
this has already been done; the really frightening advances - for 
example, constantly connected PC/GPS/cellphone devices from which 
one's exact location, one's conversations, and all of the details of 
one's existence can be extracted without one's knowledge - are far 
more potentially villianous and soon, I expect, to be ubiquitous.  Is 
the current popularized computer music, then, also an outgrowth from 
and a critical artifact of the current popular consciousness of 
technology?

Just a few ruminations at twilight...

np - Minit "Music"
--
joshua maremont / thermal - mailto:thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
boxman studies label - http://www.boxmanstudies.com/