Oliver Sacks, neuroscience and amusianalysis

It all sounded like screaming.
-- D.L., on going to the opera.

Far be it for me to belittle Brahms or Mahler or Sibelius or any of the great Romantic composers. It’s simply great music that means nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. In fact, if it was on the radio, I’d turn it off. If I was in someone’s room where it was playing, I’d ask them to ‘please turn it off’. If I’m at the dentist and he’s got it on, I say ‘please turn it off’. If that’s just what classical music was, I’d do something else in life.
-- Steve Reich, South Bank Show

Well, you get in that kitchen make some noise with the pots ‘n‘ pans
-- Big Joe Turner, ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’


Judging by the cases of neurological amusia collected in Oliver Sacks’s book Musicophilia (2007), the condition never concerns simply a case of deafness or indifference to music. Amusia does not describe a world of silence so much as the presence of noise where there ought to be music. Music, or an aspect of it, is perceived as noise. Sometimes the condition affects melody, sometimes harmony producing a dysharmonia. Elsewhere it affects rhythm but not metre, or the reverse. Even in the more extreme instances, it remains the case that music is not absent but experienced as a dissonant negativity that is sometimes overwhelming. In a classic example from the neurological literature, Henri Hécaen and Martin L. Albert described one man, apparently a former singer, who ‘complained of hearing a “screeching car” whenever he heard music’. For Vladimir Nabokov music was agony and he complained of feeling ‘flayed’ when he heard orchestral music. The condition of amusia therefore describes the occasion of music as the experience of a tormenting noise that causes subjective fragmentation even heralding death.

Sacks’s examples are all presumably supposed to have biological causes, but they are expressed in highly subjective forms sensitive to music as a mode of subjectification, even of power and violence. They provide a clear illustration of why, as Paul Hegarty says, ‘noise is not an objective fact. It occurs in relation to perception’. The perception of noise is both intensely subjective and also specific to ‘historical, geographical and cultural location’. In Musicophilia, Sacks describes his own temporary experience of the condition. He reports on listening to a Chopin ballade on the radio and hearing just ‘an unpleasant metallic reverberation, as if the ballade were being played with a hammer on sheet metal’. Although it distressed Sacks, a piece of music that included a sampled phrase of a Chopin ballade de-tuned to sound like metallic reverberations might be something that fans of Aphex Twin or Autechre would be keen to hear; or indeed Kraftwerk which, to the delight of Derrick May, the founder of Detroit techno, ‘sounded like somebody making music with hammers and nails’.

In western culture at least it seems that noise is a source of more annoyance and distress than vision. The phrase ‘noise pollution’ does not have an optical equivalent in spite of western society being bombarded by visual stimuli. This pollution does not just concern aircraft or traffic noise, car alarms, ring tones, advertising jingles, inane pop music endlessly repeated on the radio, the percussive hum of personal stereos, ipods and so on. There is perhaps nothing more annoying than the sound of other people as in the case, for example, of the Parisian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller’s Islamic neighbours whose music perfectly evokes for him the jouissance of the Other that lies at the ‘extimate’ core of a racism that no rational understanding or liberalism can erase. Music can be perceived as an unbearable noise when it is experienced as the expression of the Other’s jouissance. Perhaps this also applies where the Other is the locus of the law in an institutional as well as symbolic sense, not just when its alterity is figured in signifiers of ethnicity. Since ‘music can organize our bodies and keep our minds in order’ (Hegarty), this musical expression of order might well, like Sartre’s gaze, be experienced as nauseating, unbearable. Could something like this be behind Nabokov’s problem with orchestral music? No doubt, a certain form of amusia arises as an effect of sensibilities that are as much political as musical. For Brian Eno, ‘classical music ... represents old-fashioned hierarchical structures, ranking, all the levels of control. ... I have to say that I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if I never heard another piece of such music’.

Sacks’s main example of amusia in his book is a seventy-six year old woman to whom he was introduced in 2006. ‘D.L’ is the daughter of a very musical family who did everything they could to teach and acculturate her into a world of melody and song but to no avail. Sacks does not consider whether or not the woman’s amusia could in some way be related to the music of family romance and a father who made her listen and play music ‘again and again’. Nor does he comment on a school and social circle that not only failed to recognise or take seriously her condition but also forced her to sing publicly and attend regular concerts in musicals such that when her amusia was recognised she lamented that an earlier diagnosis ‘might have saved her from a lifetime of being bored or excruciated by concerts’. When asked what music sounds like to her, Sacks writes that Mrs. L. always answers ‘If you were in my kitchen and threw all the pots and pans on the floor, that’s what I hear’. Later, Sacks adds, she noted that she was ‘very sensitive to high notes’ and that the opera ‘sounded like screaming’. Opera, of course, is quite an acquired taste and I suspect Mrs. L’s sentiments in this regard might well be shared by others who have failed to acquire it, but it does not necessarily imply a lack of taste or appreciation of music.

Indeed, her view is shared by some people with a highly developed sense of musical taste. In a heated debate in the letters page of The Times concerning the introduction of jazz and world music on Radio 3, the BBC’s classical music channel, a correspondent wrote: ‘I have always enjoyed the jazz and world music content. The problem for me ... is opera and operatic singing ... I get great pleasure from most forms of music, but not from maniacal screaming. Give us music, Radio 3, and we will return’ (May 7, 2008: 20).

D.L.’s description of thrown pots and pans is as interesting an example as operatic screaming. Sacks does not give enough information to ask questions concerning any personal or idiosyncratic reasons for such a description, but it inevitably throws up cultural connotations. A kitchen’s pots and pans are not normally thrown on the floor without also signifying some kind of crisis, producing a cacophony shattering domestic order. For many women like D.L. born in 1930, the order of domesticity to which they were confined, willingly or not, was shattered, at least symbolically, by the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s. This revolution was heralded in the 1950s when young women D.L.’s age were invited by Bill Haley and his Comets to ‘get out of that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans’ in a version of the rock ‘n‘ roll classic ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ that failed to diminish the suggestive tenor of Big Joe Turner’s original. For many of D.L.’s father’s generation attuned to the classics, such a vulgar form was of course not perceived as music at all but a racket, a hideous noise that, in the generational antagonism it represented, similarly shattered domestic order.

For D.L.’s generation ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ provided the noise-music that precipitated the relation of non-relation of sexual, social and generational antagonism. Rattling pots and pans in the context of sexual suggestion and the disruption of social order has long cultural roots. Charivari, for example, as a form of popular power, was sometimes the source or catalyst for popular revolt; and in France it remains a term for the noise of public ridicule. Charivari therefore is an important example of how noise is not exterior to music but the same thing. It might be ‘rough’ but the banging of pots and pans in charivari is music, an amusical music that exposes its violence and power. In the unfortunate instance of Mrs. D.L. all music seems to have become a charivari, forever summoning up through the sound of the shattering of domestic order discordance with her own social reality that is nevertheless linked to cultural and historical forms.

To sum up:

In neuroscience amusia is a version of agnosia, which is the disappearance, pathology or deviation of a highly selective aspect of one’s phenomenal model of reality (Metzinger).

The amusia of amusianalysis in contrast is primarily concerned with music (not the brain), but only in the sense that the amusical is musical.

The neuroscientific notion of amusia also presupposes that music can disclose a fissure in the brain’s model of external reality that frames phenomenal experience, hinting at a reality outside that model: the unknown impulse that generates painful amusic. The ‘malfunction’ of the system of perception, the disjunction between the brain and its reality, is betrayed by the musical repetition of noise.

While science finds its consistency in repetition, amusia concerns the irreducible specificity of this ‘malfunction’, of how music is experienced as a profound dissonance for some one that nevertheless discloses the limited nature of the (imaginary/symbolic) system that gives the phenomenal experience of music a semblance of meaning in so far as it is pleasurable. With amusia, music exceeds meaning or ‘means nothing to me’, but is nevertheless experienced as intense or oppressive, ‘please turn it off’ (Reich).

Agnosias like amusia are useful for neuroscience in ascertaining the contingent (evolutionary) nature of perceptual apparatuses. At the limit, the loss of certain phenomenal ‘qualities’ may imply the emergence of new forms, and indeed new forms of knowledge (Metzinger).

Amusianalysis seeks to trace the auto-emergence of a ‘sinthomic’ amusic that takes as its condition the incurable real of the amusical symptom that the negativity of musical form renders both singular and common.

Three examples are hinted at here that might be developed:
1) DL’s amusia turns classical music into noise, screaming and the banging of pots and pans, the very sound, for her father’s generation, of the rock ’n’ roll of Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Big Joe Turner and so on. In classic Freudian terms (and a certain Freudianism was at its height in America of the 1950s), DL’s amusia is the symptom of a repressed desire, the message of her father’s generation being returned in reverse form.
2) From a similar position to DL, Steve Reich’s resistance to the oppressive meaninglessness of the classical music of romanticism resulted in the development of new ‘machinic’ musical processes that ‘opens my ears to it, but it always extends farther than I can hear’ (Reich), thus taking music beyond the imaginary (‘romantic’) mastery of human perception. While machinic in the sense that ‘its’ music emerges as an effect of automated processes involving both performers and machines, Reich could see no point in pursuing the tendency of his early tape-loop pieces that would have resulted in the complete subtraction of all human participation from the musical process thus rendering it merely ‘a mechanical gimmick’ (Reich, SBS).
3) It is precisely this tendency that enthused Brian Eno and inspired him to develop the concepts of ambient and ultimately generative music in which music is ‘evolved’ from the sort of software used in digital biology. Dispensing with all pretensions to meaning, generative-ambient attains the nullibiquitous real of the drive beyond desire and fantasy that nevertheless opens on to an extraordinary new imaginary that finds consistency in the infinity promised by 77 Million Paintings (2008), the generative audio-visual installation that it would apparently take 9,000 years to experience in total.

Abstract. Satanforladt: towards an impolitical atheology

The burning corpse of god shall keep us warm in the doom of howling winds. For we are a race from beyond the wanderers of night. -- Xasthur

Dødens nat
Alt er forladt
Kun en sang fra de sørgende ... -- Nortt, ‘Gravfred’

[Death’s night
All is forsaken
Only a song of mourning ...]

The aim of this commentary will be to excavate the traces of an event immanent to black metal. This event is the death of Satan. While it is conventional for black metal acts to be allied to Satan or indeed even assert that Satanism is ‘the true essence of black metal’ (Nortt), the essential is conveyed in sonic conflagrations of divine joy. This is eloquently expressed in Xasthur’s epigraph to the volume in which ‘the burning corpse of God shall keep us warm in the doom of howling winds’. Clearly there are two moments in this statement before it gives way to speculation concerning a people beyond the night. The death of God is not the same as the ‘doom’ which it shelters in the face of howling winds. God’s burning corpse both illuminates and heralds the doom of a much greater catastrophe: the death of Satan.

Satan’s role, as it has been handed down from Romanticism, is to sustain the trace of the divine in the wake of the death of God. The Prince of Darkness, in the playful gravity of his perpetual insurgency, is the last support of modernity’s Enlightenment project. Satan, as the untenable metaphor for nonknowledge, marks the boundaries of being and nothingness, joy and the abyss, centre and margin, life and death, man and beast; as the demonic figure of paradox, possession and the impossible, Satan threatens the undoing of these distinctions, holding them both together and apart. Should Satan forsake us and die, what happens? Can there be the worldwide governance of ‘globalatinization’, biopolitics, without the transpolitical mirror of evil?

While it remains unavowed in black metal, Satan’s withdrawal and demise is effectively and extensively mourned in its ritual howls of rage and sorrow, particularly the ambient/funeral doom of Xasthur, Nortt among others. But this commentary will pursue the hypothesis of Satanforladt, the double notion of the forsaking and withdrawal of Satan, throughout the general articulation of mourning and melancholy in black metal. This is the ‘doom’ that is immanent to black metal and which, at least at the level of its statements, precipitates three of its main tendencies. 1) the forsaking of Satan precipitates the retroactive precession of pagan simulacra without origin that both precedes and repeats Satanforladt (Ragnarök); 2) Satan’s forsaking is a punishment for the failure to live up to his demands – see for example Darkthrone’s ‘Unholy Black Metal’ that consists entirely in a series of impossible Satanic demands. The failure is evident in the toxic superegoic logic that propels the black metal death-drive for (self-) annihilation. 3) ‘To fall as Satan's heir’ (Nortt) or to celebrate the ‘funeral of being’ (Xasthur) is to inhabit the event of the death of Satan in an interminable wake that opens up a different temporality and speed (faster but slower) from which voice, in its in-audible commentary on its absence of meaning, comments, impossibly, on black metal’s amusical destruction of form.
Black metal is not a form of music nor simply an unholy racket, but an amusic that precipitates a trajectory of joyful, singular dissonance in (non)relation to the conformity of the age. It is in this way that black metal, in the wake of Satanforladt, broaches the exigencies an atheological, acephalic community without metaphor or limit ‘beyond the wanderers of the night’.

For Glossator special issue on black metal edited by Nicola Masciandaro and Reza Negarestani

Abstract. The heterogeneity of the sound image in David Lynch's neuracinema.

A recent irony in the on-going amorous non-rapport between art and science concerns cinema and neurology. Even as Gilles Deleuze announces that rather than linguistics or psychoanalysis the cinema should look to the micro-biology of the brain to develop cinematic concepts, so neuroscience is using the cinema as a means of understanding the images generated and edited by neural patterns. As the new neuroscience acknowledges (Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux, V.S. Ramachandran and Francisco Varela), the internal world of the brain is not a sealed-off hard-wired automatism; the external world is inseparable from the structure of neuro processes of self-modification. Circuits in language, art and music create and modify circuits in the brain. Furthermore, these dimensions, while interconnected are also functionally heterogeneous, occupying and connecting-up different parts of the brain in a variety of networks. However, it is for Damasio through assembling a ‘movie-in-the-brain’ with 'as many sensory tracks as the nervous system has sensory portals', that neurones generate subjectivity.

This essay takes up these suggestions in relation to the cinema of David Lynch not in order to make a contribution to neuroscience but in order to attempt to understand unconscious processes through the heterogeneity of sound images rather than through the paradigm of language. It is well-known that the power of Lynch's films resides not so much in narrative, not even the narrative of dreams, but in the arresting and disturbing force of sound images. These sound images are heterogeneous in a variety of ways, not least in the composition of sound and image itself where the affective force resides in their disjunctive (non)relation. Nevertheless they provide points of connection, like the many 'phones (telephones, microphones, gramophones) that provide portals between different domains and parallel worlds throughout Lynch's oeuvre. Discrete sound images articulate disjunctive series of sounds and images whose heterogeneity provides the locus of unconscious desire that proceeds along networks that are cultural and technical as well as neural. Lynch directs a 'neuracinema' where the 'a' denotes the undefinable, mobile points of cultural anxiety, discordance and desire that articulates inner and outer worlds.

For David Lynch edited by Francois-Xavier Gleyzon, Literaria Pragensia

Abstract. From Forests Unknown: ‘Eurometal’ and the political / audio unconscious

The idea of an audio political unconscious is suggested by Jacques Attali when he argues that music, as a particular organization of noise, heralds the coming of a future social order. The extremes of metal, however, push at the intensely pleasurable threshold of dis/organization in which music becomes noise as well as vice versa. Any notion of a future social order promised by metal therefore can only be seen as highly equivocal and as precluded as much as pre-empted. But that does not mean that immanent to metal there isn't the possibility of some future thinking of the political. Certainly the extremes of metal exist in the absence of any political thought adequate to the current state of affairs. Across Europe, old and new, national and regional varieties of DM, BM, Viking, battle, folk, doom and ambient have tracked the expansion of the EU and its borderlands. At the same time, the expansion of the homogenizing force of the techno-bureaucratic EU, that is itself a symptom of the failure of the nation-state in the face of global capital, has left a trail of discontents, some of which have found a voice in metal. This chapter looks at metal as the bearer of both a political and audio unconscious in which can be located, along different tracks, the positive reverse of the absence of any European popular culture in which could be located a political alternative to the ‘globalatinization’ represented by institutions like the EU.

For an ebook Title tba edited by Imke von Helden and Niall Scott, Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Music, violence and Phil Collins

Phil Collins is of course notorious as the by-word for the offensively banal. I’m not sure where this originated, but no doubt it has something to do with Brett Easton Ellis. American Psycho (1989), Ellis’s satire on the rise of neoliberalism in 1980s America, draws a direct causal link between the vacuity of corporate rock and violence – or at least the fantasy of violence. It is not just that, as part of the satire on the vapidity of his class and generation, long passages and three whole chapters are given over to Patrick Bateman’s critical appraisal of Phil Collins, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis and the News as the highest achievements of liberal culture. Rather it is that each of Bateman’s bursts of rage or violent fantasies are preceded and apparently prompted by the ambient noise of rock and pop. Belinda Carlisle has him reaching for his serrated knife ready to gut and slice open a colleague (50), MARRS’ ‘Pump Up the Volume’ prompts him to fantasize about stabbing a waitress (57), The Lovin’ Spoonful suggests slitting the throat of another woman (74), George Michael accompanies and drowns out his announcement that he’s going to cut the arms off another (75), and so on. When eventually, in the narrative, he commits his first murder, this is immediately juxtaposed to his four-page peroration on Genesis (128-31). If he isn’t wired into his Sony Walkman listening to Bon Jovi, at a club being blasted repeatedly by INXS, U2 or Madonna, he is at home playing repeatedly the Broadway cast recording of Les Misérables on his latest state-of-the-art hi-fi (165), music that, when whistled by a colleague, causes him to try and strangle him in the men’s room (152-3). The novel seems to suggest that Bateman’s violence, whether actual or fantasy, is the inevitable outcome of the ubiquity of a certain type of standardized popular music, the garish expression of its evil banality.

Maybe. But there seems to me something abyssal or contagious about this banality, and the banality of naming it, that sees it reproduce itself over the void of contemporary culture. The psychological structure of American Psycho isn’t psychosis; the book is hysterical in its appeal to literary authority that has lost all purchase and meaning. Yet, the satire is crassly simulated in the same smug irony and faux shock that characterized the marketing strategies of 1980s advertising and MTV. It is not just that American Psycho was the literary equivalent of Phil Collins; it is that Phil Collins was the general equivalent of all culture, including literature. Hollowed out as the pure form of cultural exchange, this meant that poor Phil Collins lost all specificity except as a shitty remainder, a stain on the cultural memory of the 1980s.

However, there was a happy ending. In 2007 Phil Collins triumphantly returned as the apotheosis of modernity in his overcoming of the history of western metaphysics in the form of an animatronic gorilla in a 2007 TV commercial for chocolate. In this Ad, a favourite on Utube, he is playing karaoke drums to his own track, ‘Coming in the Air Tonight’. The song, once scurrilously assumed to be about masturbation, is here the occasion for the full, dignified presentation of humanimality, as the camera pans in close-up over the gorilla’s intense concentration and contemplation, poised to erupt into an explosive rhythm. In the gorilla’s embodiment of the continuity between music and violence, Collins is disclosed as the extimate heart of consumer culture’s amusical ecstasy. ‘Joy in a glass and a half’.

amusia: the parlour game

This game derives from a few years ago when while enjoying the hospitality of a certain friend, some of us decided that we could no longer bear her music. While she agreed she was also tired of her collection, she was nevertheless justifiably affronted. Flicking back raven hair, she issued a challenge that met with counter-challenges that thus gave rise to a game of devilish inter-subjectivity. The aim of this game would be to inflict the maximum pain on all the other players with the choice of a song. Each member would choose a song in a competition to discover, by democratic means, which was the most offensive and unbearable. The constraint, however, would be that one had to confess, on one’s honour, to loving the song in question. Entries would be anonymized by a Master of Ceremonies who would make a tape of the collected songs prior to the event and then inflict them, one by one, on those assembled on the particular night. There would be two rounds, and voting would take place after each round, awfulness being ranked on a scale of 1 to 10. At the same time contestants would attempt to identify the owner of each track of shame.

I cannot remember all the entries, but on this particular night a Hawkwind track complete with a ten minute drum solo contested Neil Diamond’s ‘I Am, I Said’ alongside a Boredoms track that consisted of two and a half minutes of belching. None of these could match the winner, however, Nick Cave’s ‘A Box for Black Paul’, which narrowly defeated ‘Guitar Man’ by David Gates and Bread. Nine minutes of tuneless doom-laden, howling pretention was stoutly defended by its advocate as ‘post-parodic genius’.

The second round raised the stakes by introducing an example of 70s German pop, Merle Haggard, Courtney Love and some more Japanese noise that met with howls of derision. Way too entertaining. Profound, intense groans of agony, however, were produced by Judy Tzuke’s ‘Stay With Me Till Dawn’. Indeed this looked the likely winner until the final track was played: ‘The Carpet Crawlers’ by Genesis. It took some time for people to recover their own carpet crawling, biting and gnashing of teeth. But when they did, there was no question which song would win, by a unanimous vote.

Ahhh, Phil Collins ...

amusia: cultural theory

‘Rock ‘n’ roll isn’t music ... it’s a mistreating of instruments to get a feeling across’.
Mark E. Smith

Music, as amorous promise, other enjoyment or inordinate joy is also a singular locus of discontent. Unlike language, music does not even provide a semblance of meaning, yet nevertheless produces powerful affects. That music and speech are heterogeneous is evident in the profound desire that music speak, that it say what words can’t say. Conventionally, music is attributed with a special power of speech, that it can address the question of existence in a way that escapes language. That this is a delusion does not dispel the desire for musical speech, the desire for music to provide, impossibly, a commentary on the absence of meaning.

In order to explore what is both singular and common with regard to the affective power of music, this blog appropriates and develops, for cultural theory, a notion of amusia. Amusia usually designates a neurological condition in which music is perceived as a painful noise. Here in the term amusia, the ‘a’ marks the point of the intimate exteriority of music. The ‘a’ denotes the noise not just left over from the cut in sound produced by music, but the point of exquisite dissonance in which one finds oneself afflicted with a passionate love for music, hatred of music or a desire to know nothing about it. Without reflection in language or vision, amusia relates the question of the subject devoid of all subjective qualities, devoid of being, substance, form, content, essence, to the affectivity of music, to what affects itself and affects with music. The ‘a’ of amusia therefore both denotes and places in question, in horror and joy, the critical and clinical locus of modes of life affected by music.