Re: [microsound] being 'political' in non-verbal music

[Kassen <kassen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

aleks vasic

> Well, the use of INSTRUMENTS, to communicate on the battlefield is not
> music in its traditional sense.  More along the lines of humans being
> problem solvers and using whatever is at hand to solve said problem, in
> this case keeping formations in sync, signaling attack and retreats,
> and other military gobbledy gook.  Its definatley not a language when
> compared to literal communication(i assume this to be written word).
> Its very limited for todays world, but it did serve its purpose.  Non
> exhistent in todays military world aside from nostalgia and tradition.

I think the line is a little more blurry then that. I once read that music
originated from young males trying to impress the girls (from time to time I
get the idea nothing changed when looking at DJ or car audio culture...) and
there you could argue it´s very much a comunicative signal. Love songs, the
more political side of punk and so on could all be argued to comunicate.
Just like a big drum is a good medium to get messages across large fields
putting you political or romantic aspirations to melody may make them cary
futher, albeit in a different way.

In many cases I´m not sure I realy see so much difference particularly not
because music has many other functions besides just being beautufull. I
think there is for example some element of marking teritory with portable
instalations meant for high volume such as ghetto blasters. When picking a
drum from amongst multiple suitable canidates i´m sure the warlords of old
would want the one that sounded the lowest for reasons very similar to D&B
producers. In the case of the producer we´d probably call that a musical
choice, why not in the warlord?

Perhaps it´s pushing it to call it a language but I think those uses of
sound are often very similar in how they map to meaning, even if much of
this process may be unconcious.

Microsound would at first seem to be too abstract to be linked to
comunication in such a blatant way but I think it´s no accident that
Microsound often uses sounds asociated with breaking or broken products and
that the Microsound comunity is very crtical of comercial companies. The
impressiveness of the drum sound does not nesicarily have anything to do
with the functioning of the batalions as such but it´s still there because
the general needs to urgently express how much more impressive his army is
and I think this is akin to a Microsound composer that still uses the sounds
of broken things even when the subject of the piece is -say- summertime.

Multiple levels of symbolism and comunication may be intertwined, perhaps
even conflicting (one MTV leader sounded quite microsoundy to me) but even
if it´s not possible to "translate" everything coherently all of the time,
there´s still a lot of cumunication through symbolim going on and exactly
what part of that is "music" to you may depend more on how you relate to the
sound and who makes it then to anyhting else.

My cents,
Kas.



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