The Technophonic Everyday

Abstract

The Technophonic Everyday explores interrelationships between music, sound, and ostensibly “non-musical” technologies in an effort to better understand human-technology relationships. It asks two core questions: How might music and sound reflect and shape the way we think and feel about the technology in our daily lives? And how might the technology in our daily lives reflect and shape understandings of music and sound? The exploration of answers to these questions is bound up in a multi-modal approach of listening to and through technology, of a reflexive practice which seeks to be wary of assumptions and comfortable in heterogeneity. Focusing on technology as used (and sometimes produced) in the USA, this project traces the sonic and socio-political histories of slot machines, cash registers, personal computers, and domestic appliances. Through a variety of case studies which consider both “analog” and “digital” instantiations of these technologies, this project highlights how music and sound are deeply embedded in the invention, development, and reception histories of the machines from which they emanate, just as the invention, development, and reception histories of these machines are caught up in vernacular understandings of music and sound. Engaging literature from contemporary music discourses alongside non-music disciplines – particularly frameworks from the “non-human” turn – this project seeks to think expansively, if at times with an air of experimentation, about how music and sound are put to work in our machines. This experimentation is rooted in a multi-modal approach to music and sound analysis, moving between computer-aided analysis, more traditional formal music analysis, close listening descriptions and hermeneutic reflections, considered alongside the analysis of non-sonic archival materials such as catalogues, print advertisements, and patents. This expansive approach seeks to recognise how these short sounds are not so easily dismissed as simple “noises” but are brought into the contentious zone of “musical sound,” deserving of our analytical attention. Through this attention, The Technophonic Everyday explores the formation of a musical grammar of machines borne out through a double abstraction process which underscores our relationship to technology: the overwhelmingly synthesized timbres of the various “bleeps” and “bloops” preserve the other-than-human “machine-iness” of our mundane technologies, while the (perhaps surprisingly) traditional employment of tonal music rhetoric offers familiar and intelligible gestures for its users that can ease interactions with these machines. This musical grammar of machines, therefore, is characterized by both invention and convention in a way that is fundamental to forming and sustaining human-technology relationships.