SonicIntervention

by Graeme Murrel

“[Music must] represent the spirit of crowds, of great industrial complexes, of trains, of ocean liners, of battle fleets, of automobiles and airplanes. It must add to the great central themes of the musical poem the domain of the machine and the victorious realm of electricity.”

Balilla Pratella, “Manifesto of the Technics Of Futurist Music” 1911

With the beginning of the 20th Century came an increasing realisation of the sound of industry. Society began to listen to itself. Since the Industrial Revolution life had become noisier, at least within the vast urban conglomerations that grew to support the new work processes. With the dawning of the new century this noise spread out and began its persistent rise to the present, where it seems there are few places left without the audible imprint of humanity. The motor car, the airplane, modern weaponry, telephony and many other technologies broke the relative silence of centuries.

Thus to Futurism: the first of the many anti-art movements of the 20th Century, followed (loosely) by Dadaism, Surrealism, Lettrism, Situationism, Fluxus, (arguably) punk, and Neoism. Futurism laid down a defining characteristic of such movements: a concern for real life. As Saussure began to define the basis for modern linguistics, with its removal from reality via signs and denotation, so the work of the Futurists bombastically attempted to rescue real life from such abstraction.

Thus to noise: Russolo’s Intonarumori symbolise the aural intent of the Futurists. Intonarumori (Noise Intoners) were essentially speaker boxes that created sounds reminiscent of machinery, people, water and other environmental noises. Russolo called for recognition of such sounds in favour of the ‘acceptable’ musical noises made by conventional instruments. He called for music that reflected its environment, in order to remain attuned to the environment, accept it and revel in it.

Noise communicates… Cut to present time. Sampling culture has accepted the premise. It was accepted within contemporary composition via Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage and musique concrete. The Beatles and other psychedelic bands introduced environmental noise to rock in the late ’60s. Punk’s debt to Futurism - also manifested via outlandish dress - was shouted out by Adam & The Ants (”Animals & Men”, “The Family of Noise”) and introduced The Jam’s “Going Underground”. Now DJs Speedranch and Jansky Noise terrorise audiences with high volume cut and splice found sounds laced with punishing industrial beats, while visionary Argentine band Reynols unleashes its 10,000 Chickens Symphony.

noise as referent/sign

The Futurist noise aesthetic has arguably found its way into the mainstream, or a more critical reading would claim it has been co-opted. It has done this because, like written or recorded language and preserved images, recorded noise symbolises reality. No sooner had society begun to hear itself before it became able to record what it could hear. Sound became another sign. Anthropologists and musicologists began recording instances of time, and the hyperreality of cinema, reinforced by sound, began to tell the world who it was. Reality became further divorced from its meta-narrative.

It is the ability of sound to symbolise that made the Futurists, particularly Marinetti and Pratella, conscious of its importance. It is also that ability that has fuelled acceptance, not just of machine noise but of the whole range of environmental noise. Rail buffs listen to sounds of trains on CD, tourists record the ambient noise of places they visit, rappers record gunfire and police sirens and sonic art installation both utilises, and creates, environmental noise.

noise as storyteller

Futurist manifestos on noise tend to focus on musical considerations. Within a musical context, it often fulfils narrative functions - the smashing of glass at the start of Sham 69’s “Borstal Breakout” - and it is this ability to aid the telling of a story that has taken it beyond revolutionary theorising and into the living room, beyond the abstractions of Kurt Schwitters and the ZANG TUMB TUUMB of Marinetti’s war. Noise as narrative element is utilised most effectively on radio. Noise is used as a signifier, aiding the visualisation required by listeners, particularly in radio drama. There is an important point to be noted here, that pulls noise into the same significant territory as words, for what is signified is often not representative of the signifier at all. Witness the classic case of coconut shells signifying the steps of a horse. The shells are as unrelated to the steps as are the words that describe them. That they do describe them at all is due to the medium, observing Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message.

noise is immediate

The Futurist joy of machine noise is the same joy expressed by the Situationists at the wonder of their surroundings. But where the derive tended to focus on physicality (architecture) and its implications, the Futurists were keen also to listen. Appreciation of machine noise translates as recognition of immediacy - unmediated experience - the raw beauty of reality. The call for its usage in music relates to the desire for environmental recognition - conventional musical sounds being unable to say anything about the now - and the need to break down the mediation of highbrow culture that perpetuates such meaningless music. The heirs to this attitude now occupy all points on the cultural map. Musique concrete and electroacoustic composition form a tradition that tends towards highbrow mediation. Contemporary Futurist agent provocateurs Test Department and Einsturzende Neubaten have softened their attack with dull techno effects. Extant pioneers Speedranch, VVM, Pan Sonic and others gnaw at the fringes of electronic culture. Chris Watson records vultures gnawing at a carcass from inside the carcass. Stomp bang dustbins on television. Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” is still misunderstood.

Anarchy, Open Source/Content and Value Systems

By Gerald Gleason

In trying to think about the success factors for Open Source (OS) projects, and evaluate their character and structure, as well as thinking about extending this idea to other areas, I had the insight that the essential character of OS project organization is anarchy. As a political/intellectual movement, Anarchy is probably the most pure form of Libertarianism. Forget any associations you may have with the idea of creating anarchy in communities or societies by throwing bombs and other disruptive acts, since these are both factually incorrect, and have nothing to do with what Anarchy advocates. The correct association is of anarchy with “a state of nature”, the Garden of Eden, if you will.

Humans, being highly social animals with highly advanced systems for communication of symbolic knowledge, have the ability to impose rules of all sorts on this original state. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this, but history shows many examples where “the rules” become highly oppressive. In tribal societies, the social unit is a small group where social “norms” can operate effectively, and it can be argued that the “norms” are essential for the survival of the tribe, but human development did not stop there. With the development of agriculture, the stage was set for creating hierarchical structures, monetary systems and large scale warfare (i.e. beyond inter-tribal conflicts for territory).

It is well know that Libertarian thought is pervasive in the highly technical software development community, and it is easy to see the attraction of these ideas to a class of highly intelligent, somewhat individualistic people. Add youth to that, and you get a lot of contempt for conventional systems of power and authority. In the beginnings of the software industry, there wasn’t much of a market for additional copies of specific programs, and a lot of development happened in academic and other research labs, so there wasn’t much thought or attention from the capitalists. Programmers freely shared their code with anyone who asked, and nobody thought about cashing in by selling millions of copies of a program. Richard Stallman created the GPL in reaction to the way code sharing was being closed down by the potential to cash in by selling code over and over.

Now that the OS concept is getting mature and people are starting to do academic studies of the organizational structures developing around OS, and others are attempting to extend this model to other forms of intellectual property (IP), they are finding a conspicuous lack of planning or formal thought in these areas. Someone starts with an idea and writes some code, then shares it and begins to develop a small tribe of followers, and delegates some of the core responsibilities within that tribe. Within these groups, social norms control the interaction, and sometimes things go badly, but because the code itself is in the “commons”, anyone can “fork” their own project at any time. Of course, this doesn’t happen often because for the fork to be viable, it must represent a real split in the community, not just one or a few upset people. Typically, the original developer (or small team) retains control of the project for as long as they care to, but this is just another social norm that acknowledges the contribution, skill and insight that it took to get things started. It is often stated that OS project leaders are “dictators”, but they must be benevolent because good will is the only thing that holds the tribe together (ok, so there is also the large amount of code to maintain if you do start a fork, but there are many OS projects to work on these days).

All of this is the essence of an anarchistic organizational system. Yes, formal structures are developed and put in place, but only with the tacit support of the community. It only works because everyone is free to participate or not, according to their desires and interests. There would be no debate about any of this if we weren’t embedded in a system of market capitalism where value is equated with money, and money is necessary for each of us to be able to live and make choices. Some of the most vocal critics of the GPL actually try to claim that OS projects take away their livelihoods by making it hard to make money writing software. I won’t go into all the ways this is wrong here, but it does open up the question of how OS developers can support themselves and their families.

Clearly, the large and growing community of OS users, both individual and corporate, demonstrate that they value the contributions made by core developers, and they often find ways to support them. I take the position that both in the interest of fairness, and to better promote the wide and open sharing of IP of all types, that we need to have more and better ways to compensate significant contributions, without having this dominate. Yes, there are many other motivations for people working on IP projects, and many can work on OS projects with the approval of employers who need features and functions that might not otherwise be developed, but many skilled people cannot afford to forgo employment to work on OS full time, or find sufficient time to do this as a second job. Academics often need publication credits to satisfy their institutions and get grants, but this also tends to distort the work to satisfy the sponsors.

The bottom line is that while monetary systems and markets work well to efficiently distribute scarce commodities, they also tend to simplify complex systems of values into a single dimension, and they are particularly bad at promoting the efficient development of IP resources that gain their greatest value the more widely they are shared. It should be clear to most of us by now that this one-dimensional value system becomes non-functional in an information economy, as well as undervaluing the diversity and quality of the natural environment necessary for our long-term survival. The way forward will involve the emergence of new value systems based on sharing of information. To get there from here, we need to operate in the context of market capitalism, and actually exploit it to fund the transformation. This will involve convincing those who control the money to fund the rapid development of the IP Commons for the benefit of everyone.

I was prompted to write this after reading a paper I found at an on-line journal, First Monday:

The Institutional Design of Open Source Programming: Implications for Addressing Complex Public Policy and Management Problems by Charles M. Schweik and Andrei Semenov

In their conclusions, they talk about attempting to extend the OS development model to other areas, which I fully support. On the other hand, I also think there is something about software that distinguishes it from other types of intellectual property. Specifically, it is the only type of digital information that is both descriptive and functional. Papers, music, videos, and even databases are not fundamentally “engineered” designs where the proof is largely in the way it functions. This places certain constraints on the process and facilitates “objective” feedback from the community. You don’t need to look at the source to know if it works or not, just to run it. This is true in a less direct way with the design and engineering of hardware and other physical devices. My instinct tells me that most types of IP will be harder to establish in OS models, but no less valuable when widely shared. This will make it even more critical that these projects are carefully evaluated for their quality and effectiveness, or most of them will never reach the critical mass necessary to be widely useful.