On Live Sound

In the last century, a transformation which was applied during the industrial revolution to physical objects, rendering them manufacturable copies, each merely an instance of some mold, has been applied anew to ephemera, things previously appreciable only as felt experiences, reducing¹, for example, the performance of a live orchestra to an infinitely replicable static binary file.

This transformation, like the one before it, appears as the latest iteration in a series of transformations, when viewed through the moral-genealogical lens of a narrative that models the evolution of a culture via the tension between an imagistic, Apollonian force and its sonic, Dionysian counterpart. Though this may sound fanciful, the dualism between stasis and dynamics, image and sound, which the entanglement of these two, inextricably linked forces represents, presents a powerful tool for modeling the zeitgeist of a society, and diagnosing a disharmony in its composition.

When applied to the last few decades, this interpretive lens magnifies a particular, emblematic dissonance between the contemporary cyber and physical worlds; that while the physical world still seems to evolve synchronously, as a single, symphonic gesture, a confluence of local and global orchestration that everywhere satisfies some deep coherence condition, and preserves a property of ‘liveness’, the cyber world feels fragmented, a junkyard of inanimate objects, embedded in disparate environments which do not easily interface or compose, where processes run asynchronously at different rates, unable to communicate and interoperate except via brittle, bespoke bridges that fall into disrepair, having no common, underlying substrate to connect them.

If the industrial revolution divested physical objects of their material provenance, of the natural link between their constituent materials and the environments from whence those materials came, and in so doing, dissolved the bond between craftsmen and their handiwork, then the information revolution has done the same to ephemera, to transient experiences, divesting them of the very meaning of occurring at particular places and times, annihilating their spatiotemporal provenance, retaining only the thinnest and lowest-cost of ad-hoc, asynchronous connectives between isolated, fragmented encodings of experience. The consequence of this has been the dissolution not only of bonds between creators of ephemera, musicians, and their music, but also between ephemera and its beholders, audiences.

Whereas in the physical world, sound is live, synchronous, and reactive, in the cyber world, even virtual environments endowed everywhere with the highest verisimilitude, what is called sound is not really sound at all, or is dead sound.

Consider that in the implementation of a typical virtual space, such as a game world, sounds are files, often preloaded, embedded in a logic that determines when, under what conditions, and with what spectral transformations they are to be triggered for transmission over a network, and then actuated. The logic that determines this behavior of sound files associates, to each conjunction of a point in virtual space and moment in virtual time when and where a listener is present, a file that is either loaded or produced, in real-time or not, using a closed- form, analytic solution. Such a solution is fixed by geometric invariants and simulated material properties of the scene, and in environments where it is demanded that what a listener hears correspond faithfully to what they see, the set of available solutions also constrains the scene itself, since for the vast majority of possible scenes, closed-form analytic solutions for sound wave propagation within them are not yet known.

While the advantage of such an approach is its economy of computation, whereby the evolution of a sonic landscape is computed only when and where it is needed in order to corroborate a visual scene, there is a deep, philosophical disadvantage; the ad hoc algebraicmanipulations which orchestrate the encoding and emission of sounds cause them to be actuated, if at all, only upon egress from the virtual world proper, via individual end-user- interfaces at the boundary of the system, which might transduce them into air. The sound files never exist in, or affect the virtual world.

The dissonance that exists today between contemporary cyber and physical worlds may not be simply the result of error, which arising due to poor approximation of real-world phenomena by yet incomplete models will, as our science improves, eventually vanish, so we inevitably attain a kind of isomorphism between sound in virtual and physical space. Rather, our current approach to the realization of sound in virtual environments may be unable to preserve the properties of sound, which give it its intrinsic semantics. For as long as the imagistic semantics of the virtual world determines its sonic ones, but not vise-versa, it may attain coherence as a kind of game, composed of ad-hoc relations, but it will never attain the immanence of the physical world, orchestrated, as it perhaps wholly is, by compositions of live sound.

This reduction has neither been full, nor faithful. ↩