Representing Lively Bodies in Sound: Legacies of Analog Signification in Digital Audio

How did it become commonplace for creative practitioners and engineers in contemporary audio cultures to think of sounds as individual entities, with distinct aesthetic properties that can be technologically controlled? This talk will address this metaphor of electronic sounds as individuals, which is such a familiar concept in epistemologies of digital audio that it has escaped critical attention. This metaphor took shape over the nineteenth century in tandem with the development of graphical methods that represented diverse phenomena in a common language of waveforms. Notions of sonic individuation and variability also emerged in the contexts of Darwinian thought, and a cultural fascination with electricity as a kind of animating force. Tara Rodgers argues that practices of classifying individual sounds by aesthetic variations are deeply entwined with epistemologies of gender and racial difference in Western philosophy and modern science, and that these legacies persist in contemporary representations of digital audio. This talk will also introduce some of her recent sound and music projects that complement this research by engaging metaphor as a creative tool.