An Unheard-of Organology

An Unheard-ofOrganology When we look to the past to better understand the present, sometimes things go missing: they go unreported or under-reported; they never existed or never rose into a position to be noticed. Usually, acombination of a number of factors is at work. When it comes to music, missing sounds are literallyunheard of, and the classificationof their techniques and technologies is an unheard-of organology.Of course, when something is unheard of, it can also entail a form of abuse. Luckily, one of the natural habitats of abuse is the editorial, so I would like to take this opportunity to argue for two new organologicalcategories:aural instruments and significantinstruments. AURAL INSTRUMENTS Conventionalmusical instruments are modeled upon the utterance, whether the voice is the instrument or the utterance takes the form of an act of performing upon any other instrument. Simply stated, we have instrument organologies that privilege sending over receiving. But before discussing aural instruments, shouldn’t we rethink instruments of utterance? And where better to start than with the voice?The voice in Western culture was long dependentupon a soul situated singularlyand centrally along the axis of a symmetricalbody. The same position within the body is also occupied by the pineal gland, which Descartes thought housed the soul, and the mouth itself. Two technical practices dislocated the voice forever: (1)phrenology and early neurology and (2) phonography. On FranzJoseph Gall’s map of the scalp, speech was located off center near the left frontal lobe, where, in 1839,the French physicianJean Baptiste Bouillaud found it upon the cortical surface of a patient who had, in a botched suicide,shot offpart of his skull. Bouillaudwrote, “Curious to know what effect it would have on speech if the brain were compressed, we applied to the exposed part a large spatula pressing from above downwardsand a little from front to back. With moderate pressure, speech seemed to die on his lips;pressing harder and more sharply,speech not only failed but a few words were cut off suddenly” [l]. In a new organology, Bouillaud’s spatula would stand proudly next to violins, French horns and the Moog Synthesizer;is it not to the voice what the piano key is to the string?Or is it the first modern sampler, albeit in reverse, because the sound is muted? Likewise, when the British neurologist Wilder Penfield placed, as though it were a phonographic needle settling upon an LP record, a wire electrode down upon the cortical grooves of a patient, the patient swore he heard a gramophone playing in the room. ‘You did have one did you not?”he asked Penfield afterwards [2]. Instead of bringing flesh upon wire while playing an electric guitar, electric wire is brought down upon flesh to create an instrument that plays hearing from the biorecording technologycalled memory. Please don’t try this at home. Conventionaluttered instruments can be in the spirit of Romanticism,where the voice and human expression has presumptuous, transfigurativepowes or in that “0”at the head of each line of Expressionistpoetry intent upon rhymingwith “cosmos.”The same can be found underlying the performed intervals structuring the music of the spheres and in almost all the synaestheticsystems arisingwithin spiritism,French Symbolismand the Russian avant-garde,in which the two sonic elements attendant upon humans thatjust so happen to be tied up in the heavens are the periodic waveforms of musical tones and those of spoken vowels. There would be no problem with this if it were simply humans making designs upon the heavens or talking to each other, but there are a number of other species who, as history has proven, suffer terriblywhen humans are too involved in what it is to be human. The human ear,however, hears the human voice among all the sounds in the world. Although the phonograph was known early on as the Speaking Machine, it was also a listening machine. It not only set the voice askew from the body’s symmetrical soul, it exiled the voice from the body entirely,sending it out to where all things are heard. Preceded scriptuallyby the alphabetical recording of speech and the notational recording of music,it was the first...