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[Music and Letters, 89/2 (May 2008), 293-298]

Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience. By Aden Evens. pp. xviii + 204. (University of

Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2005, $23.50. ISBN 0-8166-4537-X.)

“Sound is a problem posing itself while working itself out”, writes Aden Evens (pp. 58, 147).

What kind of problem? Evens’s answer works through the passage from noise to musical

sound, the articulation by musical sound of time, the conceptualisation of musical

technologies, and the faculty of musical work. Sound Ideas is an original study in the

philosophy of music by a thinker at MIT, and its cultural context comes from the types of

contemporary musical experience that rely on digital technologies for their emergence and

maintenance. In one sense Evens continues where the second edition of Evan Eisenberg’s

The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (New Haven, 2005)

leaves off after its wonderful closing sci-fi evocation of musical life in the future. Evens,

writing a different kind of book, is concerned with the nature and possibilities of music-

making as acted out by those out there within today’s embodied, socially conditioned

practices who trade downloaded tracks, build up record collections, and so on. He is

concerned with the listener as performing consumer, but is not afraid to call the listener a

vicarious performer. On the cover of the paperback, for example, the experience of music is

described as a matter of “making it, marketing it, listening to it”, marking a subtle drift

away from the old-fashioned middleman of performing – even though Evens acknowledges

that one should not separate the two activities, as if performing were not, at the end of the

commercial day, just another way of marketing the musical work.

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Evens invests much energy in discussions of the intertwining of music and

technology, going as far as to write in chapters 3 and 4 about the many forms of music-as-

technology: about the vibration-amplifying technology of the violin’s bow plus string, for

example. His overriding concern is the paradigm shift from analogue to digital

technologies, and whether the latter offer creativity more sophisticated than the slot

machine. To his credit, he resists temptations to pre-empt the debate either way. There are

perceptive discussions of the ways in which music becomes an object of and for perception,

and particularly useful nuggets of argumentation crystallise around the relations between

silence, noise, and music, and between repetition and improvisation.

Chapter 1, ‘Sound and Noise’, tackles the literal and virtual sensibilities of sound:

how it is sensed, both by CD players and by ears, and how it makes and is made to make

various types of sense. Through a comparison of vinyl and CD technologies and of analogue

and digital mechanisms, Evens articulates the importance of noise in music and its

perception. His take on the relation between analogue and digital is pragmatic, noting the

occasionally misleading turns of human perception and the impact of economic and

ergonomic concerns on technological developments (the force of R&D). “Digital sound”, he

says, “especially digitally reproduced music, is said to sound sterile, dry, or cold” (pp. 11,

23), and he remarks on the link (which reappears in ch. 3 with respect to the relations

between analogue and digital instruments) between digital sound and “simulated music”

(pp. 11, 51). On the passing of a tradition, he notes that, although we now generally prefer

the convenience of MP3, “Aura is thus an appropriate term for what the audiophile wishes

to coax from the recording” (p. 176 n 9), associated as it is with the “fluidity” (pp. 171, 172)
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and “liquidity” (pp. 13, 84, 158) perceived to be characteristic of analogue recordings and

live performances.

The first section of Chapter 1, ‘Hearing Contractions’, is pregnant with many sound

ideas about the ecology and psychoacoustics of perception. At issue is the passage from

noise to music and back. For Evens, this is the passage (temporal and virtual) over which

the “energies” and “forces” of music – of the performer’s physical energy (p. 87), of

contraction (p. 16), of noise (p. 18), of difference (p. 21), of sound (p. 50), of memory (p.

54), of unheard-of creative problems (p. 59), of productivity (p. 70), of vibration (p. 83), of

sense (p. 140), and more – are contracted in and by perception into events, into what the

listener calls, or recognises as, musical sounds. By noise Evens means, not just vulgar

notions of that which interrupts the purity of music’s and musicians’ attentive expressions,

but that which, unheard, forces the music out in an ecstatic contraction of musical energy;

in this sense, he maintains, noise is the underside of music – not the musical event or itself

an event, but its presentation and presenting, its condition of possibility.

The key figure is contraction. Evens describes it in terms of the ways in which

“Hearing takes a series of [acoustic] compressions and rarefactions and contracts them,

hears them as a single [aesthetic] quality, a sound” (p. 1-2), and, elsewhere, of how

“Perception contracts sound into sense” (p. 15) – a matter as much of separating as

synthesising (p. 177 n 22). Contraction runs alongside the arguments of Richard Wollheim,

Roger Scruton, and others who, after Wittgenstein, have argued for a metaphorical

conception of artistic perception and understanding: noise is heard ‘as’ music, certain types

of pitch sequences are heard ‘as’ ascending lines, and so on. Later Evens writes, only half

metaphorically, that “It is as though sound has to be jump-started, to burst ecstatically out
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of noise” (pp. 30, 40). Although sound is always shadowed by noise (p. 162), we

nevertheless hear contractions, then, as a single “value or quality” (p. 40). The desire for

this quality returns in chapter 4, where Evens theorises the possibility of a ‘faculty of

music’ dedicated to this desire.

The second part of the chapter is subtitled ‘An Ethics of Intensity’ (cf. p. 117). Set in

motion by Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (trans. Paul Patton (New York, 1994)), the

narrative moves logically from noise to what Evens terms ‘implication’, on the basis of the

argument that, if in perception noise is contracted ‘into’ sound, then it is also the case that

noise carries within it sound that must be teased ‘out’ of it: it projects sound into its future

(p. 140). Evens writes of performance, for example, that it “requires a sensitivity to the

whole situation, to the event of performance, to the entire history of sound implicated in

noise in order to coax from this noise just the right contractions” (p. 21), and he unpacks

the issue of “sensitivity” in terms of affordance (p. 152) and a backward notion of

withdrawal. To wit: “To explicate just enough means to leave just enough implicated, to

draw the implicated to the verge of clarity, while letting it also extend back into the noise

from which it is contracted” (p. 21); the improviser’s job involves “refusing insight” (p.

148), since the implicated “withdraws from scrutiny” (p. 16); “To explicate just enough

means to leave just enough implicated, to draw the implicated to the verge of clarity, while

letting it also extend back into the noise from which it is contracted” (p. 21). This, of course,

raises the question that Evens asks later while discussing improvisation post-Cage: “How

do we fail to foresee, or rather, how do we succeed at not foreseeing?” (p. 150). Although

there are a few minor inconsistencies in Evens’s discussion regarding the role (or not) of
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conscious choice and decision-making in the matter, his overall answer seems to me to be

pragmatic and correct: perform and find out (p. 166).

Implication is integral to musical expression, and Evens states what is

simultaneously obvious and obscure: “Expression is a delicate balance between implication

and explication, a mixture of the clear and the obscure” (pp. 23, 16). This becomes clearer

alongside the remark that expression is “a question of touch or feeling, vague and subtle

notions that point to something one cannot quite put one’s finger on but that make all the

difference. […] expression is lived as much as recognised” (p. 14). Here, in contrast to the

Hegelian position on recognition, Evens follows Deleuze in holding open a contrast

between recognition and production (pp. 144, 14), where (to simplify) the former is a

matter of box-ticking and of validating internal representations, and the latter is open and

open to creativity, to “the diagonal, ‘the musical act par excellence’, the zigzag that makes

the notes leap off the page into other dimensions” (pp. 116-17, 89).

Evens distances his phrasing of implication from the expected issue of expectation

and other conscious or epistemological phenomena (p. 20). What he calls ‘the implicated’ is

resistant to the contractions through which noise passes to sound but is nevertheless a

constituent of the “momentum” of musical sense (p. 140). It is a matter of “not so much the

clarity of sound waves as the singularity of events, historical events, musical events,

masking within it affect apart from object and percept without subject. The implicated

contracts noise, an entire history of sound, but the contracted events, percepts, and affects

are still inarticulate, too relaxed to be clear. They are singular but not specific” (p. 20) and,

indirect and acousmatic (p. 42), are lost outside the musical event (p. 23). Indeed,

articulating musical sense by implication burdens it with clarity. This argument has a
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number of angles and offshoots: one is its commonality with the extensive rethinking of

desire post-Nietzsche and post-Freud, to which Evens returns and displaces in a number of

creative ways (see e.g. pp. 64, 129-30, 132, 139, 162-4, 168, 190 n. 35). Another is an

uncanny overlap with specific arguments phrased by writers like Jacques Attali (p. 57) and

Lyotard, in which it is written of “sound both hither and beyond the languages of sound, of

sound without language, of sonorous matter without form” that “The gesture of music

labours to let the inaudible lament come forth to what is audible” (‘Music, Music’, in his

Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis, 1997), pp. 217-33 at 220

and 233 respectively). Reflection on the deficiency of musical experience, its

Nachträglichkeit vis-à-vis noise and innuendo, leads Evens towards his next chapter, where

music’s time moves centre stage: “Something must be lost for the obscure to become clear,

and what is lost is the difference that the implicated holds within it and which gives force to

the implicated. Implicated difference can only serve as the reservoir of sense while it is

obscure; once it is crossed or cancelled in the contraction it loses its potential” (pp. 20-21).

Chapter 2, ‘Sound and Time’, asks how music distributes time and is distributed and

incorporated in and over time: “In reality, we must consider that just as sound compresses

and rarefies the air, so too it compresses and stretches time” (p. 31). The focus is generally

on twentieth-century music, and brief case studies are presented of Boulez, La Monte

Young, Cage, Stockhausen, Reich, Alvin Lucier, Berg, and Adorno (in that order). Evens

opens the concept of ‘innuendo’, which he describes from its etymology as a hint or nod.

Innuendo, he argues, explains the mechanism of attention by means of its ‘inflection’ by the

musician. However, innuendo does not specify what its inflections lead towards, and

“leaves its object ambiguous, unheard, to be determined” (p. 27). The point is that inflection
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– that which leads the music onwards – is itself never completely or conclusively

articulated: there are always other possibilities, other side-shadows waiting in the wings

for inflections. This means, pragmatically, that to inflect innuendo is, like Klee with his

pencil, to create a sound and take it for a walk, and this might surprise the musician or

artist just as much as the consumer. Evens writes: “Going into each performance, the

performer leaves some part of the music not yet fully determined, something must be left

for the performance, a modal or gestural indeterminacy, a feeling that is familiar but must

be actively recalled each time, re-created to suit the occasion. The performer must follow

an innuendo, which inheres in the piece of music, but also in the audience, the other

performers, the atmosphere in the concert hall” (pp. 29, 21). It is no coincidence that the

image inflected here relates to the phenomenology of improvisation, for this returns

metonymically in chapter 4 as a key to the dynamics of musical experience generally (p.

156) – though its limitations regarding non-improvised music are largely avoided.

Innuendo, then, directs attention and opens sound to time, but is not itself articulated as

such. I would add that at the root of innuendo and its multiple inflections is a notion of

‘distraction’ (pp. 8, 9, 27, 130, 135, 137), but this flipside is underused by Evens, even

though Benjamin’s classic essay formulating it is referenced elsewhere (for different

reasons).

Chapter 3, ‘Sound and Digits’, is the most directly engaged with technologies of, for,

and around musical experience, both hard-core and soft-centred. The first part, subtitled

‘The Question Concerning the Digital’, looks through Heidegger at issues raised by the

digital in general and by the emergence of digital (especially computer) technologies,

outlining both the limits of digital technologies and the possible threats they seem at first
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to pose to musical experience as conventionally understood. Outlining Heidegger’s

position, in which the point of technology is to bring something about, truth being

witnessed as an event, perhaps in some way as a performance of some sort, Evens notes

that, far from this position, “Modern technology does not take its cues from presencing or

truth; rather, it sets upon the world, ordering that world to make it available for human

being” (p. 64): its function is to save time. His own question is therefore, “Does the digital

reduce experience to pure form, make every difference effectively equivalent or

homogeneous?” (p. 78). The ensuing discussion notes that in isolation it might indeed seem

that the digital is doomed to abstraction, “sacrificing fertility for perfection, innovation for

predictability” (p. 79), but it turns out that, despite a certain degree of purity (and with it

the potential for accusations of sterility (pp. 11, 23)), the hermetic perfection of the digital

dissolves into productive ambiguity at the fuzzy border between analogue (read: actual)

and digital. This liminal space is where the creative potential of digital technologies

emerges, teased out with the help of prosthetics, interfaces, and active interventions (pp.

79-80).

As the chapter moves on, Evens posits heuristic distinctions between digital and

acoustic instruments – the latter “occupies more dimensions than its number of

parameters” (p. 89), resistance and limitation are more desirable in the latter (pp. 95, 160-

2), and “complexity is formally injected into the [former] sound instead of arising by

accident (the latter case [analogue] being generally more interesting)” (p. 96), for example

– and evolves a positive approach to digital technologies. He discusses how certain modes

of digital sound processing can nevertheless form part of creative musical experience,

writing about Fourier analysis, Wavelet analysis, and Granular synthesis with a keen ear for
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their pros and cons. Exploring the limits of the digital, he teases out creative moments of

engagement, which he says arise, not just from the occasional failure of technologies to do

what they are programmed to do, but from “within the banality of everyday computer use”

(pp. xii-xiii). He is careful to separate the question of technology from the question of

recording, despite their economic and political fusion (the totalitarian state, he notes, is

dependent upon technology (p. 188 n. 2)), and he writes about conventional music making

through the lens of digital technologies. He is not quite so up-to-date with the specifics of

avant-garde creative activity, and some practitioners will probably see this book, not as a

theoretical discussion of what they are doing, but as playing catch-up – as should be

expected with any heavily technology-mediated practice.

Chapter 4, ‘Making Music’, asks questions about the relationship between the

performer (to whom Evens refers, rather nicely, as a musician) and her instrument (about

its contribution to the musical experience). Given the precise use of noise made by music

and the emergence of specifically musical sense out of the implicated, the most original

contribution of chapter 4 is Evens’s discussion of what he terms a “faculty of music” (pp.

142, 116-17). This emerges from his extended meditations on improvisation and the

phenomenology of musical “immersion” (e.g. pp. 38, 132-5, 140, 142, 146-8, 157, 162),

which, related to what the Chicago School of Psychology termed ‘flow’, he summarises as

“not a magical state of being, attainable by the greatest musical geniuses; it is only the

sustained condition of an engaged [i.e. undistracted] musical faculty, not necessarily easily

achieved, but also not simply out of reach for the lesser musician” (p. 148). The faculty of

music is presented as the fourth of four models of immersion, the first three being ‘spirit

possession’, ‘intellectual intuition’, and ‘projection and temporality’. Phrased with

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Nietzschean imagery as “a will to music” (pp. 139, 140) and thus concerned with the

“responsibility for music-making” (p. 143) and the trade-offs between the risks,

investments, and failures of improvisation (pp. 156-157), the basic argument for a faculty

of music develops out of (Deleuze’s) Kant.

Key to the Kantian project was how human experience relates to the world and that

within it which is experienced, the point being to argue against those that believed in a

direct intellectual intuition of objects and unmediated knowledge of things in themselves as

they really are. Evens takes this basic idea and branches out in search of the heart of

musical creativity, arguing that, although our experience of things does not freely bring

them into existence ex nihilo (recall the structure of the Transcendental Aesthetic), a

certain degree of rethinking is needed to phrase that which is truly creative and open about

musical creativity. The goal is to reconcile the idea that noise “gives itself to sensation” on

the way to sound (p. 15) with the idea that during immersed music-making “the will and

the willed are coincident” (p. 139).

Evens argues that, just as “The loquendum, the spark that ignites the faculty of

speech, disappears each time it launches speech into action, cannot itself be spoken though

it is essential to the happening of speech” (pp. 145-146), and just as, in modular terms, the

faculty of understanding has its cogitandum and the imagination its phantasteon, so “we

can recognise that fundamental to immersive music-making is a spark, a moment of pure

musicality, the musicandum” (p. 146). This, he says, allows for “each faculty [sensation,

understanding, imagination, and music] an independence and autonomy that establishes its

sovereign domain while also creating a place for it within human activity” (p. 144), and it

arises and hypostasises in the moment in which there is a collision between sensation-as-
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passive-reception and the exploratory moving-outward of musical events – in the fact that

the immersed musician is, as he describes Jackson Pollock, “simultaneously deliberate and

spontaneous, wilful and reckless” (p. 133). This sparks off the faculty of music to begin its

“bootstrapping” (p. 141) creative work: of responding to the problem of “how to engender

the musical in music” (p. 146).

Evens suggests that, “despite its fuzzy borders and lack of a centre, the notion of the

musical [faculty] makes sense of itself, generating a negotiable territory using landmarks

that appeal as much to the ‘natural’ […] as to the ‘cultural’” (p. 147). Where Evens’s theory

about the faculty of music stands in relation to debates about music’s adaptive evolutionary

value deserves attention, perhaps with regard to its de- and re-territorialising mechanisms.

What Evens does suggest is that the faculty of music “is not located in a particular

dimension of the human being, not in the mind, or in the body, or the history, or the

instrument, but is dispersed throughout these parts and also into the space of sound. It

does not end at the limits of the body or of the instrument but extends as far as the music

itself, diffusing at its limits into the background of noise, becoming a part of everything

there, of history and of the future” (p. 148).

As will have become clear early on in this review, there are really two books in

Sound Ideas. There is a book on the ‘nature’, impact, and use of digital and recording

technologies, and there is a book on music perception today. The former takes a hard

scientific approach to today’s changing musical landscapes, while the latter seems to

reintroduce, alongside developments in psychoacoustics, a certain “persistent” (p. 36) and

“insistent” (p. 138) folk psychology into the phenomenology of music, albeit strongly

theorised rather than reliant on common sense. Interesting in this regard is the bridging of
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the two ‘books’, which Evens does with panache, passing between them with an easy grace.

In the wake of the Recording Turn in Musicology, one could claim that the former book will

become less useful than the latter, but this is only to be expected, since recording

technologies cannot be ‘untimely’ in the Nietzschean sense used by Evens in his closing

paragraph (p. 173), only useful or out of date.

On the Deleuzian model of philosophy, Evens is good at creating concepts and

running with them: contraction and implication in chapter 1, innuendo, inflection, and

compression in chapter 2, transduction in chapter 3 (p. 83), collision (p. 146) and

immersion in chapter 4, and probably others I overlook. Occasionally there is ambiguity as

to how they relate to each other. Thus, how does the inflection of innuendo relate to the

contraction of noise towards sound? Are compression, transduction, and contraction the

same thing? My understanding is that inflection happens ‘after’ contraction insofar as

inflection works over musical innuendo, and innuendo is that which inheres within sound

(as opposed to noise). And when Evens writes, in broadly Meyerian fashion, that “To hear

form is also to compress, since one hears a melodic line even before its collection of notes”

(p. 40), it seems to be the case phenomenologically that inflection is also compressed –

hence, in this context, Attali’s thesis that music acts as social prophecy because it

compresses its contexts (p. 57). One might also ask whether there is a conceptual collision

between contraction and collision, that is, whether the perceptual contraction of noise

towards sound – the passage from the cognitive to the aesthetic – is catalysed by a collision

between the two (or would this be a category error?). And how are immersion and

inflection to be inflected alongside each other, since one seems to have tendencies towards

predominantly unconscious processes, the other conscious processes? The answer, I think,
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is elsewhere: “To move from desire [read: innuendo] to expression [read: inflection]

requires an effort [read: immersion] and is never guaranteed short of this effort” (p. 163).

Evens writes at one point that “One should not ask of a recording that it re-create

the experience of live music but that it create new expressions, that it involve the listener in

a new world” (p. 23). This is, he admits, avowedly Deleuzian, as befits the twenty-first

century, and it rings true with other writers on recordings, from Evan Eisenberg to Simon

Frith to Glenn Gould. What is interesting here is the type of response demanded by the idea

behind this remark: one should be set in motion by a recording to create something new (in

many cases getting up out of the proverbial armchair). As Evens writes a few lines later,

solidly in the ancient tradition of art as moral practice:

If the absolute sound is a matter of repetition, the repetition of the

musical event, then we should look not so much to fidelity, which is only

ever an objective standard, but to the implicated, which repeats entire

events in expression. One climbs a mountain listening to Beethoven in

one’s living room, one is drunk to the point of sickness with Nick Cave.

Though there are no sore legs or nasty mess to clean up afterward, these

events are real, if implicated. We hear them in the music, differently each

time. The idea is to climb a new mountain, to find a new intoxication. The

reproduction of sound is not a matter of physics but of affect and percept.

Expression exceeds fidelity, so hold on to your LPs. (pp. 23-4)

This position, I might add, without adding too much to Aden Evens’s text, is not just

a matter of performativity (using recordings efficiently) but of one’s humanity in this in- or

post-human era.
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