An Unheard-of Organology

w hen we look to the past to better understand the present, sometimes things go
missing: they go unreported or under-reported; they never existed or never rose into a position to
be noticed. Usually, a combination of a number of factors is at work. When it comes to music, miss-
ing sounds are literally unheard of, and the classification of their techniques and technologies is an
unheard-of organology. Of course, when something is unheard of, it can also entail a form of abuse.
Luckily, one of the natural habitats of abuse is the editorial, so I would like to take this opportunity
to argue for two new organological categories: aural instruments and significant instruments.

AURAL INSTRUMENTS
Conventional musical instruments are modeled upon the utterance, whether the voice is the instru-
ment or the utterance takes the form of an act of performing upon any other instrument. Simply
stated, we have instrument organologies that privilege sending over receiving. But before discussing
aural instruments, shouldn't we rethink instruments of utterance? And where better to start than
with the voice? The voice in Western culture was long dependent upon a soul situated singularly and
centrally along the axis of a symmetrical body. The same position within the body is also occupied
by the pineal gland, which Descartes thought housed the soul, and the mouth itself.
Two technical practices dislocated the voice forever: ( 1 ) phrenology and early neurology and ( 2 )
phonography. On Franz Joseph Gall's map of the scalp, speech was located off center near the left
frontal lobe, where, in 1839, the French physician Jean Baptiste Bouillaud found it upon the corti-
cal surface of a patient who had, in a botched suicide, shot off part of his skull. Bouillaud wrote, "Cu-
rious to know what effect it would have on speech if the brain were compressed, we applied to the
exposed part a large spatula pressing from above downwards and a little from front to back. With
moderate pressure, speech seemed to die on his lips; pressing harder and more sharply, speech not
only failed but a few words were cut off suddenly" [ I ] .
In a new organology, Bouillaud's spatula would stand proudly next to violins, French horns and
the Moog Synthesizer; is it not to the voice what the piano key is to the string? O r is it the first mod-
ern sampler, albeit in reverse, because the sound is muted? Likewise, when the British neurologist
Wilder Penfield placed, as though it were a phonographic needle settling upon an LP record, a wire
electrode down upon the cortical grooves of a patient, the patient swore he heard a gramophone
playing in the room. "You did have one did you not?" he asked Penfield afterwards [2]. Instead of
bringing flesh upon wire while playing an electric guitar, electric wire is brought down upon flesh
to create an instrument that plays hearing from the biorecording technology called memory. Please
don't try this at home.
Conventional uttered instruments can be in the spirit of Romanticism, where the voice and human
expression has presumptuous, transfigurative power, or in that " 0 " at the head of each line of Expres-
sionist poetry intent upon rhyming with "cosmos." The same can be found underlying the performed
intervals structuring the music of the spheres and in almost all the synaesthetic systems arising within
spiritism, French Symbolism and the Russian avant-garde, in which the two sonic elements attendant
upon humans thatjust so happen to be tied up in the heavens are the periodic waveforms of musical
tones and those of spoken vowels. There would be no problem with this if it were simply humans
making designs upon the heavens or talking to each other, but there are a number of other species
who, as history has proven, suffer terribly when humans are too involved in what it is to be human.
The human ear, however, hears the human voice among all the sounds in the world.
Although the phonograph was known early on as the Speaking Machine, it was also a listening
machine. It not only set the voice askew from the body's symmetrical soul, it exiled the voice from
the body entirely, sending it out to where all things are heard. Preceded scriptually by the alphabeti-
cal recording of speech and the notational recording of music, it was the first general mode of sound
recording to record all sound. Coupled with this ability was a new paradigmatic notion of sound
wherein ideas about one sound and all sound proliferated.
Over three decades later, Luigi Russolo became the first person to systematically incorporate this
phonographic aesthetic within music. Later on, we could clearly hear the phonograph speaking
when John Cage called for sounds to be heard in themselves and proclaimed that all sounds can be

LEONARD0 MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 5, pp. 1-3, 1995 1

music; one need only listen. Both Russolo and Cage partook of an important musical strateg?. of the
avant-garde, \\.hereby music, previously consisting of sounds proscribed by the utterances of conven-
tional musical performance, went outside this sphere to incorporate all audible or potentially au-
dible sounds.
Ho~vever,it is important to keep in mind that, contrary to holv the widespread uncritical reception
of Cage's ideas would ha\-e it, the outcome of a desire (where\-er one might find it) to hear all the
sounds of the ~vorldas music not only reiterates the totalizing strains within regimes of utterance, but
also runs counter to his professed anti-anthropomorphism. In the name of the dissolution of the
ego, Cage heard the ~vorldthrough a patently human category achieving through centripetal means
~vllatthe Romantic voice achieved centrifugally. Cage pushed listening quite aggressi\-ely to the ex-
tent that he said that there lvas no such thing as silence; its impossibility ~vascertified by the anechoic
chamber in n.hic11 h e heard his blood circulating and nervous system in operation. Moreo\-er.
microphony might make the entire inaudible world, including ~nolecularvibrations, subject to listen-
ing and thus to music: "That Tve ha\-e no ears to hear the music the spores shot off from basidia make
obliges us to busy ourselves microphonically" [3]. This denial of the finitude of human audition be-
longs to the realm of denials that has historically fueled American enthusiasms and assuaged culpa-
bility, and it demonstrates a desire for an aphenomenal pervasi\-eness of sound that exceeds that of
light: there is no night for the Cagean ear.
Nevertheless, Cage was an important builder and user of t~voof the more notable aural instru-
ments: the piano and the anechoic chamber itself. The piano that "played" Cage's 4'33"is simply the
inverse of the piece performed in the anechoic chamber: muting the surrounding sounds, the
anechoic chamber made the sounds of the body audible, whereas muting the piano displaced atten-
tion to the surrounding sounds. There are rare precursors to Cage's muting: Mayakovsky said after a
\-isit to New York that one should not "extoll noise but . . . put up sound absorbers, we poets must
talk in the carsn[3] and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara suggested that "everything which might make a
sharp sound will be covered with a thin layer of rubber" [j].
The de-amplification of the anechoic chamber, the 4'33" piano, Bouillaud's spatula and Tzara's
rubber are simply the inverse in music, speech and sound of the Cagean microphone that amplifies
absolutely everything. The Cagean microphone has many more precursors, including a conjecture
~vithinthe 1933 Italian Futurist radio manifesto L a Rndia, by F.T. hlarinetti and Pino hlasnata: "The
reception, amplification and transfiguration of vibrations emitted by matter. Just as today we listen
to the song of the forest and the sea so tomorrow shall we he seduced by the vibrations of a diamond
or a flower" [GI. And in the late nineteenth century there was Thomas Edison's "molecular music,"
accidentally disco\-ered as a result of the inadvertent production of sound by means of the carbon
button amplifying the stressed molfements of the telephone handle. An assistant amplified his
memory of this carbon button: "The passage of a delicate camel's hair brush was magnified to the
roar of a mightywind. The footfalls of a tiny gnat sound like the tramp of Rome's cohorts. The tick-
ing of a watch could be heard o\-er a hundred miles" [7].
In Takehisa Kosugi's ,blicro I, from the mid-1960s, a large sheet of paper is cr~impledaround a live
microphone and then left alone to let loose its sounds as it expands: this pun on sheet music implies
that scores, having sufficient materiality and potential for movement, need no instrumental perform-
ers to make music. The insects and other phenomena in David Dunn's recent Chaos @ The Emergrnt
Jlind of the Pond (recorded by means of hydrophones in North American fresh-~vaterponds) ~vould
make us agree with David Cronenberg's Brundle-Fly that the emergent mind has contributing to it a
full-scale insect philosophy. Dunn's critique of Cage argues that Cage decontextualized a n d
musicalized sounds, whereas, "My direct experience of nature convinces me that the \\.orlds I hear
are saturated with an intelligence emergent from the \-ery f~illnessof interconnection which sustains
them. Every living being is a sacred event reaching out from its unique coherence to construct a re-
ality. lye need not anthropomorphize the life around us. Instead we may celebrate those mysterious
occasions which have given rise to each form of mind" [8].
Speaking of mind, Yoko Ono's mind music often bridges the categories of both conceptual and
aural instruments. Her wordscore EIPE PIECE 111, St~ozuPircr (autumn 1963) reads, in part: "Take a
tape of the sound of the snow falling. This should be done in the e\-ening. Do not listen to the tape.
Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with." It echoes Hakuin: "How I would ha\-e them hear/In the
\\.oods of Shinoda/At an old temple/\l\'hen the night is deepening/The sound of the snolr-fall!" [9]
Similarly, a 1962 word score by Milan Knizak calls for a radio broadcast of a snowstorm.
Christian hlarclay's more recent The Bratles (1989) is a pillow crocheted from audiotape on ~vllich
all the Beatles' music has been recorded: a true objet r'nore. The potential state of silence in hlarclay's
object is not simply an occasion for contemplative tranquility, because at any instant it can become
audible and boisterous. In this case, the means of amplification belie the existence of psychotechnics
of the type discovered by Penfield's patient. Thus, an object could ostensibly be silent and deafen-
ing at the same time, a koan-like state ironically excluded from Cagean aesthetics.
Historically, the line dividing sound from musical sound was drawn at the threshold of signification
[I()]. The arts somehow overlooked the fact that the worlds of sound are much larger than musical
sound-and this includes twentieth-centu~composition's incorporation. from Russolo on\vards, of
"extra-musical sound" as a means of rein~igoratingmusic. To truly incorporate sound, of course,
would dissolve these bounds of music as they have been historically argued-along with their atten-
dant genre principles-and substantiate areas unambiguously outside existing conceptions of music.
This already occurs within all daily experience of environments and media and across the li~ninal
thresholds of apperception itself. Yet, to understand these phenomena, to bring them effectively
into fields of artistic practice, would require material notions based in poetics and semiosis-not
"musical semiotics." but something emanating from a more comprehensive technique of aurality
that has yet to be developed. How might this affect instruments? M'e can consider how it might im-
pinge upon something already familiar: the sampler. il'here and what exactly is the instrument in
this case? The sound of a normal musical instrument is located and limited by the physical materi-
als, mechanics and acoustics of the instrument itself. However, the sound of a sampler lies in a me-
diated elsewhere or an)where. M'hether the sampled sound is of extinct amphibians o r a quiz s h ~ \ ~
host, the location of the sound-and thus, of the instrument-exists in at least two places at once,
o r modulates between o r arnong two o r more locations. The instrrlment could easily be conceived
as the class of sounds the sampler organizes and the way it organizes them; in this respect, the sam-
pler is not a new instrument, but is the possibi1it:- for an infinity of new instruments. But the design
of samplers is too imbued with music: ho\v could the crude segmentation of a piano keyboard give
way to a significant design? And there is training: the discipline required to master a significant in-
strument may be of the same order as that of a virtuoso sitar or a three-chord guitar in a punk band.
Please try this at home.

DOrGLls IiIHX

Lronardo bIusic Journdl I~zte7nntional( ;o-hdllo~

References
W I ! ~ , '.\, >it. 4 vrrsjoii of this edlto~-ialwas
puhlishetl in Japanese in I n t ~ r ( ; o t s t ? r u n ~ r9i ~(Summer
t ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 1IIII4)

1. F r ~ n c i ,Schiller. Pnul Bror.a (Brrlele\. (:.\: (.nil. of (:alifi)rnia Press. 1979) p. 173

3. f o h n (:age, .A ImrFrots .Ilondn, ( I l i d d l e t o r ~ n(

. :T
Clrslelnn Yni\. Press. 1967) p, 31.

Tire 1 4 oj .\lay~ikoi~\kr.Bolesla~vTnhorski. tranq. (NelvYorli: Orion Press, 19iO) p. 380.

4. IZiLtor Cll~rosr~lski,
5 . Tristdn "/dl-a, "Seeds ' ~ n t lBlan" (19:3.5). .i{~p,p,osimate.Alan ariil Oiher \liilingr, Mar\ Ann C a ~ s trans.
, (Detroit: \ l ' d ~ n eState
Cnll. PI-rs,, 1979) p. 215.

6. F.T. 31'11-inett1m r i Pino Mdznatd. "1.a Rarii,~"(109Y) 111 F.T. 'rlariilrtti, Tvorrn r I i ~ u e x r i o n eI'iit~i~-zsta
ii'erona: -41-noldo
\Iondador1 Editore, 1968) pp. 176-180; trarlslatrd b\ Stephen Sartarrlli in I)ougla> lia1111and Gregor-\ IZl~itelread,rds . Iliru-

Irnaynaiion: Sozlrzd. Rriiiiii nrzd iize Ailnnt-Gnide (Cambridge. I t : \[IT Press. 1992) p p 26.3-268.

7. Frdncis,Jehl..Ilunlii Park Reninis(rntur, \ h l 1 (Ilearhorn. I l l : Edlson Institute, 19:17) p. 140

8. Program notes for the Tokyo Sound(:ultnre performance, S o ~ e n r i ) e1093
~

9. (:ired in 1)alirts T. Suruhi. l.iu!rig b~ Zuti (Toh\o. Sanseido, 1949) p. 183.

10. For an introduirion to this general line of tholcght. see 1)ouglas b h n . "'Track Orgdnolop-," Ortobr755 [ 1090).Reprinted in

Simon Pennv, rii.. C'ntirnl Inuur In Lluiiionir .lled!n ( 4 I h a n ~SI3-k'

: Press. 1!1!11,)

Editorial 3