FCJ-225 One Definite Note and the Anarchic Share of Listening

Andrew Goodman La Trobe University, Australia What you listen to or what you’re reading is still moving and still living. It’s still forming. (Harney and Moten, 2013: 107) Music charms us, even though its beauty consists only in the harmonics of numbers and in a calculation that we are not aware of, but which the soul nevertheless carries out, a calculation concerned with the beats or vibrations of sounding bodies, which are encountered at certain intervals. (Leibniz, 1994: 212) Every room has its own melody, hiding there until it is made audible. (Lucier & Simon, 2012: 31) Introduction: A Sonic Can of Worms Alfred North Whitehead’s opus Process and Reality devotes slightly more than one page to the question of the audition of sound (1978: 233-5). [1] Whitehead slyly defines this as a ‘simple’ example that avoids any ‘unnecessary complexity’. In fact he opens a can of (vibratory) worms. Whitehead […]