12/7/2023 0 Comments Alfred north whitehead adventureAs throughout Process and Reality, Whitehead also thinks through the way in which an event can be both extensively relational and self motivated in its becoming. Both are important elements of the becoming or concrescence of an entity (Whitehead, 1978: 233). Each have their own sets of held contrasts but they are never really separable. In his example of audition, Whitehead emphasises the necessary intertwining of material and conceptual data. There is not a resolution of difference but a sustained resonant and productive difference across many registers whose intensity is held in the beauty, if not always the harmony, of the definite note. The event of audition is not that of a passive listening to the already resolved sound, but is entirely active. In the patterning and valuation of contrasting feelings to compose the note, the auditor grasps, though largely not in a conscious way, a whole world or ecology of relations in-composition. This complexity arises from their mediated relationship to all the spatial and sonic qualities of the environment in which the note sounds, and from personal ‘qualities of joy and distaste, of adversion and aversion’ (1978: 234). The listener composes one complex feeling from a series of feelings that in themselves are divisible into infinitely complex data (of which only those differentials between tone and overtones are defined by Whitehead). This ‘subjective’ complexity is, he argues, synthesised from three patterns of contrasts: those of the data the ‘emotional quality’ and ‘the pattern of emotional intensity’ (1978: 234). 5 -Īs Whitehead briefly examines this audition of ‘one definite note’, it becomes clear that any such audition is entirely singular (‘a particular fact not to be torn away from any of its elements’) (1978: 234). One will become less sure about the existence of any stable entity or event that might be safely called a ‘note’. That is, the closer one begins to look at the audition of a particular note the more complex, vague and entangled it will become (the deeper the rabbit hole, to mix metaphors). It is to confront the ‘social effort’ of the whole universe that has gone into the event’s makeup (1978: 233). The example hints at the fact that to attempt to follow all the threads of the events that go to make up a particular event of audition is to embark on an unending task. Whitehead is, I think, well aware that he is opening this can of worms. In fact he opens a can of (vibratory) worms. Whitehead slyly defines this as a ‘simple’ example that avoids any ‘unnecessary complexity’. (Lucier & Simon, 2012: 31) Introduction: A Sonic Can of Worms - 4 -Īlfred North Whitehead’s opus Process and Reality devotes slightly more than one page to the question of the audition of sound (1978: 233-5). (Leibniz, 1994: 212) - 3 -Įvery room has its own melody, hiding there until it is made audible. Music charms us, even though its beauty consists only in the harmonics of numbers and in a calculation that we are not aware of, but which the soul nevertheless carries out, a calculation concerned with the beats or vibrations of sounding bodies, which are encountered at certain intervals. What you listen to or what you’re reading is still moving and still living.
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