Ontoestetyka dźwięku i kultura słuchania. Dyskurs metateoretyczny sound studies

Abstract

The article presents a critical approach to the sound studies debate, concerning its metatheoretical aspects. The point of departure is a paper by Brian Kane that opens the first issue of “Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal”. Kane criticizes the ontoaesthetic perspective within the discipline. My aim is to introduce sound studies both as an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary field of humanities, dominated by two — instead of one referred by Kane — research strategies: audio-antropological and onto-aesthetical. By focusing on the latter, where the works by Christoph Cox and Salomé Voegelin are situated, I want to propose a different, affective-materialistic approach to sound studies, based not on the opposition between signification and sound/vibration, but on the relationship between the Deleuzoguattarian machinic concepts and the musical avant-garde. Referring to excerpts from articles and manifestos by Luigi Russolo, Edgar Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer and Pauline Oliveros, I show that the machinic sound imagination once accompanied the historical avantgarde and neo-avant-garde movements. It is the key to break with the anti-post-structural approach in sound studies in favor of a more relational perspective. This perspective, within the onesthetic paradigm, would allow for the interpretation of sound machinery as elements of the machine system (aesthetic, social, cultural) in which sound operates.

Keywords

• sound studies, onto-aesthetics, auditory culture, sound culture studies, sound machineries