Person:

Accornero, Giulia

Over the past decade, the viral circulation of the acronym ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) has brought a new sensation and audiovisual genre to the attention of the internet-connected world. This phenomenon has attracted the interest of contemporary music composers, who have begun using the term ASMR as a shorthand for a broader theoretical category that involves the assemblage of a specific sound quality, its aisthesis, and a range of compositional, performance, and recording techniques through which they are manipulated. Based on interviews with eight living composers (Carola Bauckholt, Chaya Czernowin, Andrew Harlan, Ole Hübner, Neo Hülcker, Allan Gravgaard Madsen, Morten Riis, and Charlie Sdraulig), I argue that the term ASMR is used as a shorhand to invoke the ‘intimate zone’. As one of the four zones of human interaction formalised by anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his theory of proxemics, the intimate zone emerges from the ways in which space, the sensorium, and one’s sense of self mould each other. After deconstructing the nature of ASMR as an autonomous galvanic response, and combining the framework of proxemics with that of ‘cultural techniques’, I articulate the ways in which the composers use the term ASMR to speak about features of past contemporary art music as well as their current work. I then describe the strategies employed in their compositions to engage the intimate zone and divide them into two main categories. The first involves calibrating the perceived proximity of the audience to the sound object, while the second involves manipulating the space in which this interaction occurs.

In this chapter, I examine the underlying principles and historiographical consequences of the Index of New Musical Notation (1970) and its associated event, the International Conference on New Musical Notation (1974 Ghent, Belgium). The goal of this enterprise was to rationalize the various and diverse forms of notations European and North American composers had invented since the 1950s. I relate this objective to Hegel’s and Francis Fukuyama’s teleological versions of history, as well as the neoliberal values of the post-war United States, in order to show how cybernetics and information theory offered a means for overcoming differences in compositional aesthetics and giving coherency and strength to the teleology of Western art music. I argue that, by reinforcing an understanding of notation as code, this enterprise reinterpreted music as information, ready to circulate without the obstacle of culturally bound hermeneutics in a manner consistent with American neoliberal democratic values. I conclude by showing how, in hindsight, the basic posthuman tenet of cybernetics, i.e. the equivalence of humans and machine, however, has challenged the ‘transcendental value’ attributed to the human by neoliberal humanitarianism. The consequence of recognizing the agency of notation is that we can no longer think of it as a transparent ‘mark’ of an ideal music. I suggest that, by disrupting the naturalization of teleological history, along with its hierarchies and history of exclusions, the posthuman tenets of cybernetics has opened a space for rethinking the politics of historiography and the ethical role that a medium like notation might play in it.