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

[Bill Ashline <ashline@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/23/05, tobias c. van Veen <tobias@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> If one were to broadcast at extremely high volume piercing sinewaves in a
> centre of a citycore, the polis would evacuate if nothing could be done
> about it.

How would we know that, tobias?  Are we assuming in this speculation
that there's a distinction between noise and music such that if noise
was played very loudly within a community for a certain duration and
was inescapable that it would have the political dimension of
dispersing a community?  But doesn't this already assume a culture
that can distinguish the difference between noise and music such that
the intervening noise would become intolerable?  As you may recall, I
did play sine waves very loudly one day in a home in the US and it
didn't cause the rest of the residents to vacate.  It caused them to
check out which room had tripped a fire alarm, and so the sine wave is
always already going to be metonymically connected to the fire alert
(probably), and so I'd speculate a civic act to prevent an inferno
from taking place is a more likely outcome.

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