There is always a gap between affect and representation. But representations have their own affects.
Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience
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Quotes
In presenting forms of feeling music is not articulating any particular affective state so much that it is an event by which one may get a sense of how the world could be felt in its qualitative-relational order.
Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience
Music is…revelatory of of the sense of feelings. It neither causes nor evokes any specific affect or emotion, but presents dynamic forms whose ‘resulting gestalt “is and is not” its avowed object.’
Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience
Music’s abstractions, its semblances, show forms of vitality rather than say them, and in this regard music is able to articulate and set forth relations that language cannot – namely, relations that are revelatory rather than explanatory.
– Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience
What is significant about music…is its symbolism; the way its semblence of a lived or living time gives logical expression to forms of feeling.
– Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience
What the arts speculate on…is not the status of a truth or fact, but what it feels like to feel oneself affecting and being affected by and as an occasion of experience.
– Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience
Harmonies are affects…
Harmonies are affects. Consonance and dissonance, harmonies of tone or colour, are affects of music and painting […] the artist creates blocs of percepts and affects but the compound must stand up on its own. The artist’s great difficulty is to make it stand up on its own.
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?
it’s not about content, it’s about the energy and the aura
Fight Back! A Reader on the Winter of Protest
The word was a voice
In the beginning, there was the word. The word was a voice. The voice had a speaker. And the speaker knew the magic words. Fast-forward thousands of years to a time when humans behave like robots and robots behave like humans. Nobody knows the magic words anymore. Computers don’t distinguish between messages of love or hatred. Microchips make music and war with indifferent equivalence. All word, every voice, is now code. It has been for years.
A voice sonically signifies an individual. When that individual’s voice is translated into code, digitized, the voice becomes malleable. Its fixed and ephemeral properties are made durable, permanent, and loosed from time at once. It then becomes possible to perceive the digital recording in microscopic ways. Digitization makes it easy to study, and so to impersonate the voice – to replicate its signifying power.
Echo’s secret voice – scattered today to every corner of the winds – drives Pan mad. The trickster Raven steals Crow’s voice for a song. Shamans recite incantations from within cavernous passages, separating the voice from a body. The Acousmatics blindly follow Pythagoras’s enshrouded voice. The schizophrenic patient convincingly hears imaginary voices – special words for safe ears. The ventriloquist conceals her own voice, diverting attention to an avatar instead. The voice thrower untethers his voice from spatial coordinates’ confines. Renowned voices supplant an impersonator’s own. The speechwriter churns practiced words through a politician’s voice. Phonographs reproduce the voices of the long-ago dead. A Bell Labs computer sings “Daisy Bell”. Ferris Bueller’s fake coughs and sneezes echo into a high school telephone booth receiver from a digital sampler called the “Emulator”.
Would the walls of Jericho have fallen to the sound of a synthesized trumpet?
From Mad Skills: MIDI And Music Technology In The 20th Century
Literature and Revolution
It is silly, absurd, stupid to the highest degree, to pretend that art will remain indifferent to the convulsions of our epoch. The events are prepared by people, they are made by people, they fall upon people and change these people. Art, directly or indirectly, affects the lives of the people who make or experience the events. This refers to all art, to the grandest, as well as to the most intimate.
