Extended Music.en - Jerome Joy website

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!!!!4. -- Metaphors Various metaphors present in literature are used for the transportation of distant sounds, recording devices, networked musicians and music: sounds picked up and transported from one place to the next by sponges (Charles Sorel, 1632) or through frozen words (Mandeville, 1356; Balthasar de Castillon, 1528; Rabelais, 1552) —taking care of choosing the season wisely—, or still in a bamboo cane (legend from China), or finally through shafts, trunks and pipes (New Atlantis, Francis Bacon, 1627); some interfaces may be invented, such as this globe entwined with imperceptible shafts connected to remote locations of which one can hear the live sound ambiance (Giphantie by Tiphaigne de la Roche, 1760), or this keyboard or organ with multiplex microphones, each key switching on microphones spread across the globe, all the keys together playing the world symphony (Le Roi-Lune (The Moon-King), Apollinaire, 1916). Interfaces can be replaced by a stream of invented machines and devices, including the “telechromophotophonotetroscope” imagined by Didier de Chousy in Ignis (1883) and remote microphone-operated sensors, such as these set up by Télek (Le Château des Carpathes (The Castle of the Carpathians), Jules Verne, 1892) and the “telephonoscope” suggested in 1878 by George Daphné du Maurier and imagined by Camille Flammarion in 1894 to connect the Earth to Mars (La Fin du Monde (The End of the World)) or allowing to follow live and from a distance the musical or theatre shows (Le Vingtième Siècle - La Vie Électrique (The Twentieth Century - The Electric Life), Albert Robida, 1883). In 1875, Jules Verne described a networked concert by the pianist Pianowski playing remotely on pianos situated in various concert houses across the globe (Une Ville Idéale (An Ideal City - Amiens in the Year 2000), Jules Verne, 1875). Furthermore, Philip K. Dick imagined “psychokinetic” concerts played and remotely transmitted, without touching the instruments and without any acoustic or electroacoustic diffusion, by the pianist Richard Kongrosian (Simulacra, 1963). Dislocations — Echolocations. Nowadays, our world is organized in networks; our surroundings have become interconnected and interconnectable, redesigning our outskirts and imminences, as well as our distances and remoteness, through all kinds of communication devices. Our perceptions of space and time are more and more dependent on devices. The development of telephony and radio at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, communication techniques which were invented for the transmission of sounds, parallel to phonography, allowed to raise the almost anthropological challenges linked to sound transmission and distance listening. Supports of listening, vision and writing spread out on the basis of this saturation, nowadays of a digital nature, making our activities inter-operable and connected and increasing our scales of perception and action. We are at the same time “hearers (of absent things)” (‘acousmates‘ in French) and microphones, at every place and every moment, hypothetically a receptor and transmitter. Let us quote this extract from Paul Valéry, from a text titled La Conquête de l’Ubiquité (The Conquest of Ubiquity) dated 1928, and based on the future of an all-connected world: “I do not know whether a philosopher has ever dreamed of a society engaged in the home delivery of Sensitive Reality. ^[...^] Such circumstance, added to the recent progress in the field of transmission means, suggested two technical issues: #- Make heard in every location across the globe, instantaneously, a musical piece played anywhere. #- In every location across the globe and instantaneously, replay at will a musical piece. Such issues are now solved. The solutions become every day more perfect.” What Paul Valéry also wants to point out is the issue underlined by our devices, which “dismember” us and ”distribute” us simultaneously in several locations and moments. Against the speediness and performance of our techniques, is it possible to adopt, with and without these, another pace, slowed down, even stopped or fluctuating unevenly? Is it possible to travel and come back, with circumlocutions and interruptions? In short, is there a time to experiment vastness together ? ---- {small}February 2010{br}English translation from French by Celine Cruickshanks and revisions by Yang Yeung and Cédric Maridet.{/small}
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