Sensory Social

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I am working on a piece of para-academic critical writing on the topic of the relationship between music, technology and society through the lens of neurodiversity. It exists in the form of an introductory text and an outline.

I’m looking for a readers to provide me, a non-academic, with some feedback and guidance in order to refine my rough sketches into its destined end form.

These thoughts were stimulated by my engagement with the FluCoMa community which is why I thought to share them here.

Here is an excerpt:

I understand the activity of music making as being primarily a personal and intuitive one which serves the purpose of making our sensory environment intelligible and habitable. The main way we do this is through making sounds and inventing patterns. The social and ritual functions of music must derive from some sort of first principle or instinctive individual behaviour closer to self-soothing and sensory exploration. Even so, music is social right from the beginning in the sense that we need others to survive and learn this behaviour from them.

Music making also relates to technology. These are technologies of memory, tool making, and dissemination which are historically situated. Music making necessarily employs whatever tools are available and at hand.

Following from these premises, I’m led to believe that our ways of relating to one another through our senses are also being continually shaped by the surrounding environment in the course of our interactions with it. In turn, different sensory adaptations create distinct social formations.

I refer to this complex of relationships by a single concept: “the techno-sensory-social”. In this framework, socio-economic considerations (the constraints of economies of scale; forms of literacy; politically determined modes of agency, freedom and participation) are framed within an ecological understanding which relate to sensory experience.

My ambition is to publish it in some form, although right now it’s unclear what. My intended readership, I think, are mainly pedagogues and workshop facilitators but also artists and curators.

Does what I’ve written resonate with anybody here enough to have a conversation exploring the topic?

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Hello @heretogo

This is quite close to some of what I’m writing about at the moment (a critical review of FluCoMa, as it happens), and not a million miles away from the way that I think about the techno-social in music.

Some comments inline:

This is where we differ most. I tend to cleave more to the view that musicking is at least as social as individual, not least on the basis that I also view our sense of individuality as itself social (following, e.g., Varela, Thompson and Rosch in The Embodied Mind).

So, consequently, I place a greater emphasis on the socio-cultural horzions that inform and sometimes bound this inventiveness, i.e. one doesn’t draw equally upon patterns from the entire possibility space: our selectivity and appetite is always historically situated and culturally conditioned (but not determined).

This chimes with how cultural evolution scholars and evolutionary psychologists tend to think about it. For instance, see the (open access) articles in an issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences: two target articles (Savage et al; Mehr et al) argue on the premise that there must be some unitary first principle, whereas some of the responses dissent, such as the one from Wald-Fuhrmann et al, which points out that there’s no strong basis for arguing that all the things that ‘we’ (Western subjects) identify as music need to have the same historical basis or evolutionary ‘function’ (this is me doing some violence to their argument). I’m more sceptical still, about both the necessity of unified origins and about the idea of Darwinian analogues of cultural practices!

Music making also relates to technology. These are technologies of memory, tool making, and dissemination which are historically situated. Music making necessarily employs whatever tools are available and at hand.

Following from these premises, I’m led to believe that our ways of relating to one another through our senses are also being continually shaped by the surrounding environment in the course of our interactions with it. In turn, different sensory adaptations create distinct social formations.

Yes, with some caveats. People can and frequently do transform / mutate / extend / recombine the tools at hand, i.e. there is a radical open-endedness – and politics – to technology as this open-endedness is conditioned (like musical invention) by socio-cultural horizons and power relations. Meanwhile, yes different ‘sensory adaptations’ (I would go for ‘ways of making sense’, I guess) do affect social formations, but this is a reciprocal affair: social formations affect sense-making practices.

My thinking around this is heavily informed by Andrew Feenberg’s philosophy of technology and Georgina Born’s writing about music. I’m also currently getting to grips with Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman’s Investigative Aesthetics, and Simon Penny’s Making Sense, both of which seem like they’d be up your street.

Feenberg: Technosystem (2017): Technosystem — Harvard University Press

Born, Music and the materialisation of identities (2011): https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1ac532ba-239f-4e8f-87bf-f474ad5e86a9/files/mafdc1b3b739f8a53b2f01f70991d7931

Fuller and Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth | Verso Books

Simon Penny, Making Sense (2019): Making Sense

‘Techno-sensory-social’ is neat. I don’t think you need to limit the social to socio-economic though!

I’ll be very interested to see how your piece takes shape: if you’re addressing teachers and facilitators outwith academia, then I guess the point will be to develop something pragmatic (i.e. practice-focused) that cuts through the theoretical thicket we’ve covered here?

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This chimes with how cultural evolution scholars and evolutionary psychologists tend to think about it. For instance, see the (open access) articles in an issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences: two target articles (Savage et al; Mehr et al) argue on the premise that there must be some unitary first principle, whereas some of the responses dissent, such as the one from Wald-Fuhrmann et al, which points out that there’s no strong basis for arguing that all the things that ‘we’ (Western subjects) identify as music need to have the same historical basis or evolutionary ‘function’ (this is me doing some violence to their argument). I’m more sceptical still, about both the necessity of unified origins and about the idea of Darwinian analogues of cultural practices!

I had to really think about this and I need to be careful about language I use. There is something that interests me about how we as individuals negotiate our environment. This is primary in the sense that one has to take care of one’s own needs before the needs of others. I’m also thinking of things like early brain development where certain changes happen in stages. There are ways that music can relate more to basic needs like safety and shelter than to social signalling and group bonding. Whether one can posit a unitary first principle and build an account of the origins of music is too big a leap outside the scope of what I want to accomplish. I like the idea of a divergence of social functions of music.

Thanks for all these references. I’m going to take my time to check them out. I recognize Matthew Fuller’s name from a talk I saw him give at CodeFest:

I’ll be very interested to see how your piece takes shape: if you’re addressing teachers and facilitators outwith academia, then I guess the point will be to develop something pragmatic (i.e. practice-focused) that cuts through the theoretical thicket we’ve covered here?

I can’t find it now, but a long time ago I came across this amazing YouTube channel by these two guys with autism who did movie reviews. They had a set of criteria they would use to assign ratings. These included expected things like entertainment value and filmcraft but also criteria like like “coherence” and “sensory”. I’d like to find ways to normalize talking from this perspective, as musicians.

Right now I’m reading Heble and Stewart’s Jamming the Classroom which is fantastic. I suppose this is the level of tone and language that I’m going for as far as writing.

Besides that I’m considering all kinds of ideas: an academic journal article, a comic book or zine, a kit made up of flashcards prompts and activities, a series of podcast interviews, a reading group…

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Dear @heretogo

Sorry to be late to the party - but this sort of thread is really as important to me to the more ‘technical’ ones we have here, so I hope we as a community can discuss this indeed. It is very relevant to the messy state of my modest thinking on the subject, post FluCoMa funding and towards new adventures in and out of academia. Now, I am not half as well read as @weefuzzy and I really loved your dialogue. I’d just like to point a few things that might stimulate more thinking and on which I’d be happy to hear your thoughts.

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When you were trying to talk about a unified (essentialising) musicking anchor, Owen replied

I would add that I am not even sure that my own practices even share a common anchor between them! I really enjoy very different ways of musicking - playing bass in groove bands is a very different experience (embodied, affective, cultural, technical, etc) than playing the exact same bass in free improvisation settings. Another example: listening to 00s West Coast rap to enjoy it (loud), to do its masterign, to teach how to produce it, to mix it for someone else, and to compose it, are very different ways of musicking. Yes, my electroacoustic training helped me engage with it in, let’s say, atypical ways? But then I missed some parts of the code that those within the in-group had…

Even if we embrace the breadth and anchors enabled by Stockfelt’s adequate modes of listening, I am not too certain about the bundling of musicking in my life as a single activity, with all the social and biological, nature and nurture, ramifications that brought that in me at that moment. I hope this makes sense? In other word, I’m not sure there is one musicking experience for me… let alone between you and I at any time in any clear way. It doesn’t mean we cannot share, but it is always essentially different, mediated and negotiated.

Maybe this is what Owen meant with

The thing that I feel is unclear for me is in your unification of autism experience with some sort of universal view on it. For instance, when you say:

I cannot but want to go see what is common between autistic encounters with the world across classes and cultures… I reckon there is quite a lot of literature in the field of sociology of psychology (and epidemiology) - I had the chance to study with one ethno-epidemiologist in the 90s, and I am still shaken by a few of the examples he gave. Neuro-diversity implies so much in term of cultural expectation and norms that I reckon there is a lot to unpack?

I would be amazed to read, for instance, a specific musicking task (let’s say, to narrow it down as much as possible, making sounds for a community to dance to in a positive situation) across parameters you propose (music making, tools used, neurodivergence perspective on it, but also the readiness of diagnosis, and the social relations between it all and all the agents - and we could add how people musick otherwise in their life as well, which other communities they engage with through sound). So much to unpack, but so many interesting questions!

So maybe now, what I would like to hear from you, is the specific of what musicking practice(s) you are refering to in your own life and your own communities. That way, I think I can see more which other communities you are including.

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When you talked about format, Owen replied

I would add to not be afraid of bouncing off the 2 sets: top down synthetic ideas, and bottom up practice ideas can be good to present here for instance, so critical (enthusiastic) readers can propose more, and/or highlights points of convergences and maybe even dissonances.

On a related idea of drafting:

not here as long as you’re polite and if you don’t mind the discussions and clarifications. Each academic field will have its vocabulary, but there are ways in. Honing in on ideas is what matters.

For instance, I find this first chapter on postphenomenology well articulated and well explained for an entry point. I am learning to unpack the biases of my musical trainings :slight_smile: I’m not certain I agree with everything in there, but hey, they offer a model to think about an individual’s relation to the work mediated through technology. That is right up your alley, and you might have challenges to it, which would be great to read.

As for your question on where to publish, as soon as you spoke about pedagogy, I thought of the Journal of Music, Technology & Education - but you seemed interested in hybrid format, which I command, and would encourage open sourcing of the material. It is a hard balance to strike to find ways of putting things out in the world and reaching the right people, so I understand your question’s ramifications dearly.

I hope some of this make sense.

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So maybe now, what I would like to hear from you, is the specific of what musicking practice(s) you are refering to in your own life and your own communities. That way, I think I can see more which other communities you are including.

Ok, to situate myself a bit: my early musical training started as a classical string player before experimenting with music made on a 4-track and computer, playing in rock and jazz bands, then studying music formally at a University as an undergraduate.

One thing that I’ll share as a formative experience for me was during my first year of University when I developed significant health problems. This caused me to delay my studies and at one point partially drop out. I had developed a chronic pain condition, tinnitus, hyperacusis and wrist problems. So I developed a need to define personal limits with respect to energy, endurance, loudness and physical activity. I immersed myself in contemporary music and free improv (even though I had to go alone to these concerts and it ostricized me socially) and a significant reason was that they were generally not as loud as the rock, noise, club, jam sessions and bars my friends and fellow students were going to. I didn’t go to those kinds of events at all in that period. I liked the texture, density and speed of information of the more experimental music and ultimately the people too. I started coding in part because it was more comfortable for me to type than to use a mouse and so I could automate transcriptions and written score assignments. So, I guess, that’s the origin of techno-sensory-social for me. I tend to frame listening and aesthetic enjoyment through the experience of pain and find that it constrains my choices and activities.

I abandoned playing music completely for a period of time during which time I started hanging around in queer and alternative circles, eventually discovering dance. My health improved and I was able to find my way back into music mainly playing avant-garde jazz and free improvisation.

In my so-called professional music career, I have played straight-ahead-ish, avant-garde and big band jazz, classical and contemporary chamber and orchestra music, as a singer in various kinds of choirs (professional, community, Meredith Monk-type of stuff), in Broadway musical pit bands, world fusion, ambient, new age and psychedelic music, music for dance and theatre, session work for indie rock bands, gamelan and flamenco (?!), free form radio, accompanying spoken word poets, all kinds of stuff.

I am not even sure that my own practices even share a common anchor between them

Well, okay. So the thread between those performance activities is more of a personal connection or a set of circumstances. There is at least the common element of making the choice to do them and whatever reward results from those choices.

Having spent time in the dance world, there’s an emphasis on holism and arriving at a personal physical practice which serves as a stabilizing anchor and internal compass (“making one’s sensory environment intelligible and habitable”). I base my practice as an improvisor and my teaching on this idea. I have found it relevant to working with computers and being able to achieve productive focus in other areas of my life. I’m sensitive to the amount of energy is wasted trying to do too many different kinds of things and have had to quit most of my freelance music gigs, making my living in other ways. I’ve organized my life around having a certain amount of control over my sound environment. Nowadays, I mainly self-organize concerts, usually employing alternative venues, partly as a way to control the physical environment but also to locate and expand my community. I suppose I am sympathetic to a hypothesis that there are strong anchors which affect both aesthetic judgement and social decisions however I don’t assume they are the same for everybody.

I do find there are strong preferences in the qualities I listen for which are consistent over time and across musical genres. I started to attempt to describe this earlier (in terms of detail, intensity and pace of information). One of my early starting points for writing was to try and articulate those sensory qualities with the hope that it would help me communicate them better and lead to more fulfilling collaborations. I’m now in this weird position where I’m asked a lot for advice, to teach people, and to lecture at schools which has further pushed me towards writing.

The thing that I feel is unclear for me is in your unification of autism experience with some sort of universal view on it.

Well, I don’t have a universal view of autism at all. What was interesting to me about the channel was the was that it exemplified dialogue in a way that I was not seeing elsewhere and which related to the inner experience of the sense world. Again, it pains me that I can’t find the link to it anymore. I see examples of dialogue like this as being pedagogically and socially useful. In this context, the hosts self-identified as autistic.

My connection with autism has to do with the fact that I have a close family member with that diagnosis. I take an interest in the discourse of neurodiversity, how it has evolved and been embraced or rejected by various subcultures. I think the cross-cultural and class dimensions are important because we don’t all share the same vocabulary, references or have the same level of identification with or access to like-minded social groups, and may have differing stances towards the institutionalized origins of some of the terms associated with it. I think there is also an important dimension of whether those shared communities are proximal or online (or both). I have a positive bias towards the term neurodiversity itself and it seems to be more of a conversation starter when I use it in everyday life. I try to be more careful about words that are medicalized or carry the authority of a specific diagnosis. Some people shun labels and others embrace them as an identity marker where they take on different meanings.

I don’t personally identify as neurodivergent (I see myself as queer and in pain all the time) but when I encountered the term, it resonated as an idea which seemed to acknowledge my family, chosen communities and also to validate the experience of chronic pain.

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thanks for this thorough answer, I really appreciate the time it takes to put a (frame)work-in-progress into words. I have read, and agree with most of it. I am trying to formulate a nuanced perspective on the role of canons (ephemeral-ish intersubjectivities inherited from the various significant experiences (and trainings/schools/radios/gangs and other institutions) you had in the times-spaces you live in) and of words (as opposed to other types of knowledge transfer) but as these are hard to articulate, it will take time (and I am likely to disagree with myself anyway not long after I wrote them :slight_smile: )

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