Experimental Electronic Music in Sound Art, Cinema
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Sonic Affects: Experimental Electronic Music in Sound Art, Cinema, and Performance A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theater and Performance Studies by William Moran Hutson 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Sonic Affects: Experimental Electronic Music in Sound Art, Cinema, and Performance by William Moran Hutson Doctor of Philosophy in Theater and Performance Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2015 Professor Sue-Ellen Case, Co-Chair Professor Timothy D. Taylor, Co-Chair The last decade has witnessed an increase in scholarly attention paid to experimental electronic music, especially the subgenres of sound art and noise music. Numerous books, articles, and conferences have taken up these topics as objects of study. However, only a small amount of that work has focused on the music’s relationship to affect, identification, and cultural history. There remains in some disciplines an assumption that examples of experimental electronic music are either dryly formal demonstrations of art-for-art’s-sake, or essentially resistant to legibility and meaning. The more “abstract” and “difficult” a piece appears on first ii glance, the more likely it will be seen to retreat from social and political concerns. This dissertation considers specific works of experimental electronic music through the lenses of affect theory, performance studies, sound studies, cultural studies, and other related approaches to argue for a perspective that more thoroughly accounts for the human in the electronic. The dissertation’s case studies are selected from a variety of different media. Chapter 1 addresses four historically significant works of sound art that each take a technological or physical property of sound as a guiding compositional principle. The chapter considers the ways these pieces can be heard to signify beyond their “modernist” strategies with attention both to the affective experiences of hearing the works, and the sociopolitical contexts of their creation. Chapter 2 outlines a selective history of noise music through the vacillation between opposing poles of “noise” and “music.” The chapter contains a sustained analysis of Macronympha’s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1995) that investigates the titular city’s deindustrialization and the affects of anger and disappointment that animate the album’s representations of “white trash” masculinity. Chapter 3 examines diegetic appearances of experimental electronic music in two films—Lipstick (1976), and Bewildered Youth (1957)—in which the music is made to signify sexual perversion and criminality. Using Susan McClary’s notion of gendered structures in western tonal music, I argue that, in these cases, music that rejects tonality becomes characterized by a failure to adequately perform “normal” gender. Finally, Chapter 4 engages examples of extreme performance art with a particular focus on the significance of recorded audio in the documentation of John Duncan’s Blind Date (1980). All four chapters prioritize close readings of audio compositions to interrogate the dense bundles of affect and meaning they generate. ii The dissertation of William Moran Hutson is approved. Susan Leigh Foster Sean Metzger Sue-Ellen Case, Co-Chair Timothy D. Taylor, Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2015 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Vita vi Introduction: Sonic Affects 1 Chapter 1: Affect and Space in Sound Art 33 Chapter 2: Noise and Music in an Underground Art Subculture 83 Chapter 3: Sexuality, Fear and Diegetic Music in Film 139 Chapter 4: Sound and Documentation in Extreme Performance 187 Works Cited 217 v VITA Education BA, Theater University of California, Los Angeles December 2004 Publications “Max Neuhaus’s Times Square and the Production of Sound and Space” Digital Art Criticism No. 2, November 2012. Print. Teaching Experience As Instructor: “Sound Studies for Theater Sound Designers” Spring 2014 Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles “Monsters and the Uncanny in American Popular Culture” Summer 2012, 2013 Department of American Studies, University of California, Berkeley As Teaching Assistant: “History of American Theater and Drama” Spring 2015 Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles “Reconstructing Theatrical Past” Winter 2015 Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles “Acting and Performance in Film” Fall, Winter, Spring 2009-2013 Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles “Race in American Popular Music” Summer 2010, 2011 Department of American Studies, University of California, Berkeley “Shopping in America” Summer 2011 Department of American Studies, University of California, Berkeley vi “The Age of Monopoly: America from Reconstruction to The Great Depression” Summer 2010 Department of American Studies, University of California, Berkeley “Race in American Cinema” Summer 2010 Department of American Studies, University of California, Berkeley As Guest Lecturer: “Reconstructing Theatrical Past” Winter 2015 Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles “Advanced Sound Design for Theater” Winter 2013 Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles “Background of Theatrical Art” Winter 2013 Department of Theater, University of California, Los Angeles Conference Participation “Abrasive Nostalgia: A Noisescape of Deindustrialization” EMP Pop Conference, New York University, March 2012. Journal Manuscript Review Computers in Entertainment, 2012. vii Introduction: Sonic Affects For twenty-eight days in 2012, performance artists Bryan Lewis Saunders plugged his ears, held a funnel in his mouth, and attempted to hear the world exclusively through the vibrations in his skull and body. Titled The Third Ear Experiment, Saunders’s performance enacted the following instructional score: 1. Insert wax earplugs into both ears. 2. Smear petroleum jelly around the inside of the ear. 3. Gently press a cotton ball into the ear. 4. Wrap ears with tape, sealing the contents within. 5. Put sound isolation headphones on. 6. Attach a copper funnel to your mouth. As you deny the ability to hear with your external ears, sound is redirected and heard through the inside of your mouth. Immediately, the noises of your own body moving around in the world grow overwhelmingly loud. Shortly thereafter, you begin to hear with your third ear (2012)1 Saunders documented this performance with written descriptions of the sounds he felt, as well as through drawings and paintings of himself that visualize the sonic experiences he was enduring. For Saunders, the piece is as much an example of sound art as it is performance art, even though he was the only person in a position to hear the piece. The Third Ear Experiment foregrounds hearing as a physical experience and proposes an understanding of sound as an ever-present vibratory field, insisting that the sonic consists of a constant flux of resonances and oscillations that are felt in the body as well as heard by the ear. 1 Saunders’s documentation of this piece can be accessed at http://bryanlewissaunders.org/weblog/2012/sep/19/third- ear-experiment/. !1 When the artist sealed off his ears—the organs most often associated with audition—he was drawing attention to the physical nature of sound, reminding his audience and himself that “sound” is a word that describes a range of vibrations in matter that are transferred from one material to another through physical proximity. With words and images, Saunders chronicled what he perceived during The Third Ear Experiment, focusing his documentation on materiality —he felt sounds through the resonance in his jaw, his mouth, his throat, his nasal cavity, his ribcage. Saunders noted and notated both the sounds that originated outside of his body as well as those he perceived to be produced by his body: the inescapable thudding of his heartbeat, the ringing of his tinnitus, the creaking of his bones, and the stretching of tense muscles. While Saunders’s documentation was not meant to be distinguished from the performance itself, his words resemble the language of affect theory—a body of ideas that I will argue, offers a productive way to understand sound propagation and sonic movement within bodies, from source to listener and within material spaces and contexts. Affect theory arose in the 1990s in response to what some critics thought to be an over-long preoccupation with semiotics- dominated poststructuralism. Calling for a turn toward phenomenological perspectives, affect theorists attempted to account for the experience and meaning of embodiment (human and non- human) and focus scholarly attention onto the emotions as well as onto as physical encounters that link affection, cognition and action. I begin this introduction with The Third Ear Experiment because it illustrates how the sonic can be understood as a dimension of affect. Relying on the work of Brian Massumi, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, among others, I take affect to mean something that exists in-between bodies, and in the transitions between states of the body. Affect describes the relationships between adjacent materials that cause changes in those !2 materials. Sound is one such relationship—a bell is struck; the brass vibrates with a collection of frequencies that are transferred into the air surrounding that bell; those atmospheric vibrations are transferred to the bones in a person’s ear and communicated as signals to their brain. However, this