Sanne Krogh Groth
Fragility of voltage
Needless to say, electronic music has something to do with electricity. As a genre, “electronic music” was coined in Germany in the late 1940s to capture music entirely made from sine waves (Ungeheuer 1992). Electronic music at the time became the sound of the future, and even today the smooth and iconic abstract electronic sound remains significant in soundtracks of contemporary science fiction movies (Richardson, Pääkkölä and Qvick 2021). This style of music gave the composer a direct voice that was no longer necessarily mediated by the musician or dependent on a concrete performance space or recording studio. Instead, electronic music was made directly for the media that would perform it.
With electronic music, a new dimension of abstraction became possible. In the decades after the 1940s, electronic seemed to promise that it would finally fulfill the Romantic ideal of music’s total abstraction, an abstraction that was intimately tied to the idea of the sublime. Electronic music seemed to have a potential for a sublime experience that was two-sided. On the one hand, it entailed a promise of the Kantian notion of the aesthetic sublime. On the other hand, it also relied heavily on what I, inspired by David Nye’s (1995) notion of a “technological sublime”, would call an “electrical sublime”. Nye (1995: 152) has described the dual promise of the aesthetic and technological sublime in this way: “Kant’s sublime made the individual humble in the face of nature, the technological sublime exalted the conquest of nature […] it created a synthetic environment infused with mystery”. The double-sided aesthetics seemed to make electronic music the apparent heir of Western Art Music as well as the prophet of a more radical aesthetics that was suitable for the promising future.
The grand promises of the electronic sublime notwithstanding, the concrete experience of electronic music was much more messy, and listening to electronic music is in practice much more than the pursuit of sublime experience (Groth 2014). This messy dimension of electronic musical experience is, however, often ignored, and only rarely do contemporary composers pay attention to the dependence of electronic music on the actual matter of electricity, its voltage and ampere – even though this is the core of making this artistic practice possible. Instead, in most contexts, electricity is taken for granted as an invisible yet omnipresent affordance of modern life. Until it suddenly isn’t. A person trips over a wire, a fuse blows, the voltage fluctuates, or a generator stops working: all of these events can turn a lively electronic musical performance into a space of deadly silence. Electricity is fragile and can easily fail. Electricity is also highly context-dependent: its availability depends on the skill of the technicians, the stability of the equipment, and the infra-structure of the power supply. Even weather conditions can disrupt its availability. Electronic music is much more than a sublime abstraction. It is a highly sensory matter that is entangled in social, political, and infrastructural worlds.
Some genres bring these exact characteristics into aesthetic practice. A genre such as noise music is a play with electricity as such (Hegarty 2007; Novak 2013; Graham 2023). Sounds and noises of voltage, electrical mishaps, distortion, feedback, and low-tech equipment are all key ingredients in the aesthetics of noise music. Some noises are ugly, some can even be painful, while others invite into contemplation, transcendence, and deep listening (Groth 2022).
The breakdown of the electrical sublime that happens when the music suddenly and unexpectedly stops provides a music aesthetics that might remind us of our own humbleness and fragility.
The balance in noise music is to push, play with, and challenge the boundaries of electricity, without exceeding them. Electricity is powerful, but at the same time it is fragile. If Kant claimed that the sublime artwork invites us to stand humble in the face of the awesomeness of nature, one could certainly apply this to noise music as well: we are invited to experience artistic phenomena that are immersive and breathtaking and that test our own limits of being in control. But Kant forgot something in this focus on total abstraction: if the artistic performance exceeds the limits of their own condition of possibility – in the case of electronic music that condition of possibility is electricity itself – then aesthetic sublime comes to an abrupt halt. An absence of electricity in electronic music means an aesthetic breakdown of the sublime. The space, the situation, and the contemplation are disrupted, the content disappears, and a hollow emptiness becomes the focus of experience. Sometimes the absence of electricity can be felt stronger than its presence.
But is this silence not also an aesthetic experience? We need an understanding of the aesthetic experience that is able to capture both when art works as it is intended and when it does not work. The breakdown of the electrical sublime that happens when the music suddenly and unexpectedly stops provides a music aesthetics that might remind us of our own humbleness and fragility. However, such aesthetics do not build on the encounter with nature (like Kant’s), but on encountering our own failing abilities as creators. It is the contrast between the conquering of nature with technology – manifested in an inferno of noise – and the total breakdown – manifested as silence maybe only disturbed by a howling tinnitus – that creates this new aesthetics. It is an aesthetics where the mystery has vanished, and the synthetic environment is replaced with a reality of failure (the breakdown) and self-destruction (the tinnitus). An aesthetics that reaches far beyond music and the notion of the sublime.
References:
Graham, Stephen. 2023. Becoming Noise Music. New York: Bloomsbury.
Groth, Sanne Krogh. 2014. Politics and Aesthetics of Electronic Music. A Study of Ems -Elektronmusikstudion Stockholm, 1964-1979. Berlin: Kehrer Verlag.
Groth, Sanne Krogh. 2022. “Deep Situated Listening among Hearing Heads and Affective Bodies”, in The Body in Sound, Music and Performance: Studies in Audio and Sonic Arts, edited by Linda O. Keeffe and Isabel Nogueira, pp. 51-64. London: Focal Press.
Hegarty, Paul. 2007. Noise/Music: A History. New York & London: Bloomsbury.
Novak, David. 2013. Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Nye, David E. 1999. American Technological Sublime. Paperback ed., 3. print. ed. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Richardson, John, Anna-Elena Pääkkölä, and Sanna Qvick. 2021. “Sensing Time and Space through the Soundtracks of Interstellar and Arrival”, in The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening, edited by Carlo Cenciarelli, pp. 385-406, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ungeheuer, Elena (1992). Wie Die Elektronische Musik „Erfunden” Wurde… Quellenstudie Zu Werner Meyer-Epplers Musikalischem Entwurf Zwischen 1949 Und 1953. Mainz: Scott.
Niina Oisalo
Electricity, attraction
Meri Kytö
Live electricity
Kids know that electricity comes from the socket in the wall. Like water from the tap or Wi-Fi / 5G hovering around you, it is part of the invisible infrastructure that just somehow should be available, always. Kids also know that when you rub a balloon to create static electricity your hair lifts up, and you might get a small shock when you touch a friend next to you.
Electricity streaming from the walls also seems like tap water. You know it’s available, until it isn’t. Infrastructural failures and temporary overloads teach you to bottle up spare water and fill up buckets. Similarly, with electricity. Battery, an odd device of packed electricity that you can take care of, can feel, like a Tamagotchi[1]. If I were to ask you how much battery life you have in your phone at the moment, would you know? Approximately?
The batteries take space, even though they have become smaller and smaller. They also have a life expectancy. A life.
When visiting an audiologist who would turn on and calibrate my informant’s cochlear implant, I learned about an advanced state of living with batteries. Without a daily system for maintaining the carry-around batteries, she hears nothing. The rechargeable batteries are preferred and the old-fashioned cell ones are flimsy and expensive. At night, the rechargeable ones are placed in a dehumidifying box, because the wetness one’s body produces during the day need to be dried out. The implant produces tiny pulses of electricity to the cochlea to elicit a sensation of sound. These are tiny pulses that her cochlea can’t produce by itself. The batteries take space, even though they have become smaller and smaller. They also have a life expectancy. A life.
This life a woman sitting next to me on the train last year sensed as alien. She said she has an allergy to electricity; sometimes she feels nauseous. For this reason, she wore three vests, a silver netting on her head, and used her phone only when necessary and on loudspeaker. She does not bring the phone close to her head. During our trip, she gave advice on how to avoid electricity (calling it radiation). Radiation is harmful, she said, and can cause cancer and dementia, even Alzheimer’s. Nevertheless, she also had to take care of the battery life of her phone.
There are also other kinds of energy than the 220 V current and the electricity of our infrastructure: the energy that is in our bodies, called ATP (adenosine triphosphate). Mitochondria, the part of our cells that produce energy, were originally bacteria, evolving into cell parts of all animal, plant, and fungi through millions of years (Martin and Mentel 2010). With the energy this chemical produces, we are in connection, command, and in touch with our touch screen gadgets. The tip of your finger has a small amount of energy, just enough for the screen to respond. You can control your screen with your nose, even with a frankfurter sausage (as a meaty product it conducts your energy), but not with a carrot or a nail or a finger that is clad in a glove. Standing in a bus stop at minus 25 degrees Celsius, trying to get your mobile ticket to show the bus driver, while fretting over your phone battery that is losing life quickly because it is freezing, you expose your hand to the prickling cold and hope your phone doesn’t die before the ticket reader machine can register your ticket, “beep”. The energy in your body is not constant, though. When you get older, it decreases (Chaudhari and Kipreos 2018). That is why the elderly sometimes have problems with screen gadgets. The sensitivity levels have been designed, tested, and calibrated with younger and able people, a recurring problem with digital gadget design.
Electricity, radiation, energy, life, in machines and in us.
References:
Martin, William, and Merek Mentel. 2010. “The Origin of Mitochondria”. Nature Education 3(9): 58.
Chaudhari Snehal N. and Edward T. Kipreos. 2018. “The Energy Maintenance Theory of Aging: Maintaining Energy Metabolism to Allow Longevity”. Bioessays 40(8): e1800005 Doi: 10.1002/bies.201800005.
Robert Willim
Touching the extended realities of electricity
I take a TS-cable, often called a guitar cable. I connect it to a combined analog filter and a spring reverb – a device called Vermona Retroverb Lancet. When a signal is run through the circuits of the device, it can evoke sounds that are modulated and changed by the filter which produces rhythmic and harmonic effects. The spring reverb utilizes metal springs inside a box that vibrates to give a spatial atmosphere to the sound. It has a bright splashy and metallic sound, all while the filter modulates and transforms the sound’s timbre and harmonic content and introduces rhythmic variation. Sound effects such as these, using filters and reverbs, have been used widely in a variety of musical genres and sound design. They can evoke sounds of everything from subtle tenderness to violent fury or physical intimacy to otherworldly expanses.
I connect the Vermona device to the electrical grid. I also connect it to a speaker. I turn it on. Small lights shine and flash. I let the device consume energy. I utilize the electrical system and infrastructure. But there is still no sound. If sound would come through this small setup, or through other forms of connected listening equipment such as headphones, it would instill a specific atmosphere in the room. Could this sonically evoked atmosphere be called a sonic world? Could this be an extended reality? What is an extended reality? During the last number of years, the phrase has become an advertising hook to promote specific emerging technologies. Several products and services have been launched, arguing that they afford what is called extended reality experiences. Within the world of electronic consumer products, an extended reality has become an umbrella term for computer-generated environments, such as virtual and augmented reality. Smartphone apps as well as new kinds of wearable devices offer ways to merge the physical surroundings with digitally engendered audiovisual layers. Impressions of new worlds emerge, and the experiences of physical surroundings have become altered through different audiovisual tricks.
In 2023–24, one of the products that offered extended reality experiences, based on what was called spatial computing, was Apple’s Vision Pro. A pricy device, at the time of writingit is still in its early versions. Would this be the seed for new kinds of extended realities? Other similar devices, VR or XR headsets such as the Quest VR or Mixed Reality headsets by the company Meta have been produced. These technologies and products propose new ways to evoke worlds and realities.
New layers of technological appearances continuously emerge in people’s everyday life: new experiences; new extensions of reality. After a while, they will, if successful, feel mundane and ordinary.
However, it is important to consider earlier devices, what today are experienced as more mundane tools, as something that extends or alters realities in ways that are often taken-for-granted. For example, the different audiovisual tools and devices that have become ordinary and familiar in many contexts, that create sound effects such as delay, reverb, modulation, etc. In this sense, an analog device such as the Vermona Retroverb Lancet alters and to some extent evokes worlds. The rhythmic effects of its LFO-modulated filter together with the splashy ambient sound of the spring reverb evokes a kind of altered, perhaps extended, sonic reality.
Furthermore, there are similarities between devices as the Vermona Retroverb Lancet and extended reality headsets. They both alter or extend realities. They also orient people’s attention away from certain circumstances. Advanced electronic products, like VR or XR-headsets, are often promoted as something that offers new abilities and experiences, but what do they encourage users to ignore? Everything that makes them work. All that labor, the infrastructure, and materials that are required to keep the systems up and running. The unnoticed extended realities of consumer electronics and networked digital services. New technologies are built on layer after layer of earlier technologies, labor, and systems that are either beyond perception and knowing or have turned ordinary, mundane. The experiences, along with the transparency and insights new complex products can afford, are all built on that which is already taken-for-granted, that which has become increasingly ungraspable and highly convoluted.
New layers of technological appearances continuously emerge in people’s everyday life: new experiences; new extensions of reality. After a while, they will, if successful, feel mundane and ordinary. They will become another layer of what I have called Mundania (Willim 2023; 2024). There are earlier strata that already cover us. Mundania is built on a multitude of often ignored circumstances, invisible labor and infrastructures. Mundania can afford comfort, convenience, and ignorance. We are immersed in systems, in networks; in fields of radio waves and electromagnetic radiation. Antennas might capture these fields and transduce them into experiences for humans. Most of the time, the base layers of Mundania are ignored, overlooked.
It is impossible to find a concrete basic fundament to all of this. We could, however, play with the idea of how we could tweak all these extended realities of tech-induced everyday life. We could play with the idea that we could touch some lower layers of Mundania. What lies beneath. Would these layers relate to electricity? How could we engage more directly with the lower layers of infrastructures? How could we, by some simple means, experience them?
This is why I sit by a table, holding the TS-cable in my hand, with the Vermona filter device in front of me. This equipment is meant to produce and process sounds. Now, however, it is silent. There is no noticeable sound coming from the speakers. Nothing that could evoke audible sound is connected to the input of this small system. Or? Could I in some way get in touch with the electricity, to evoke sound? Extend myself and connect with the electrical grid? With the beneath and with the beyond?
I grab the cable with my hand, and I reach for the connector. I touch the tip with my thumb. A buzzing sound is heard from the speaker. Current has started to flow through the system, and it is transduced into an audible signal – 50 Hz. That is the frequency of the electric grid and the frequency of the buzzing sound. A note somewhere between G and G#. In other parts of the world with a different infrastructure, such as the US, the frequency would be 60 Hz, and the musical pitch somewhat higher. By touching the tip with my thumb, a closed circuit has been created. I have merged with the small machinery and with the vast electrical infrastructure. Here, I am shielded from the lethal currents of the grid through converters that make the system more compatible to my human capacities. Through this setup, in this situation, electrical currents have merged. Through this quite mundane situation, I experience and realize that I am also electricity. Current runs through my body and is part of the surroundings. I am immersed in electricity, while my skin and my thumb act as conductors. I can repeatedly lift and lower my digit from the tip of the cable and create a rhythm. Digit means finger. This is digitally created sound, but not as the word digital is commonly understood nowadays (Plotnick 2018; Willim 2024: 24ff; cf. Boellstorff 2021).
I can also engage with the knobs and switches on the Vermona Device. I can open and close filters, use the circuitry of the device to perform a simple electronic musical piece, where I am myself integrated as a tone-generator, as part of the system. A simple extended reality of electricity is evoked. I engage with the affordances of the specific device at hand. But I also engage what lies beneath, what reaches beyond, and what is all around. Power stations, converters, connectors, and devices – the all-encompassing currents and flows of electromagnetic fields and radiation. The thumb pressing the connector of a cable, and the sound it evokes, offer a perspective to all those recently launched devices that afford extended reality experiences – a perspective on the growing topography of Mundania.
References:
Boellstorff, Tom. 2021. “Rethinking Digital Anthropology”, in Digital Anthropology, edited by Haidy Geismar and Hannah Knox, pp. 44-62. London: Routledge.
Plotnick, Rachel. 2018. Power Button. A History of Pleasure, Panic and the Politics of Pushing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Willim, Robert. 2023. “Probing Mundania: Using Art and Cultural Analysis to Explore Emerging Technologies”. Cultural Analysis 21(1): 22–37.
Willim, Robert. 2024. Mundania. How and Where Technologies are Made Ordinary. Bristol: Bristol University Press.
[1] Tamagotchis are handheld digitals “pets” that were popular in with children in the 1990s.
