While cymatics vividly illustrates the rhythmic field of vibrational, analog wave phenomena, postquantum experimentation with sound and computation has drawn attention to an atomistic digital ontology, whose analysis cannot be subsumed to a topology based on analog waves. This methodological problem, central to the ontology of vibrational force, also lies at the heart of contemporary debates regarding digital sound aesthetics and the textural innovations of granular synthesis. Texture marks the membrane between vibration and skin, and therefore the front line in any deployment of sonic force.
In a provocative essay, “The Superiority of the Analog,” Brian Massumi attempts to strip away some of the hype of the digital, arguing that the analog is always one fold ahead.1 Massumi reminds us that there is actually no such thing as digital sound, whether generated on or off a computer; if it is audible, it must be analog. Digital code is audible only after it is transduced into sound waves. With theorists such as Pierre Levy,2 Massumi wants to cleave apart the erroneous equation of the digital with the virtual. Instead the virtual is defined as potential, while the digital can only tend toward an already coded, and therefore predetermined, range of possibility. As an antidote to the many digital philosophies of computer age hype, the “superiority of the analog” position questions temporal ontologies that emphasize the discreetness of matter through a spatialization of time (in the composition of the digital) in favor of a refocus on the continuity of duration. Typical objections to the ontology of digital temporality share much with the philosophy of Henri Bergson. In Bergson’s philosophy of duration, he argues that the spatialization of time belies the “fundamental illusion” underpinning Western scientific thought. Bergson accordingly criticized this cinematographic error,3 which he described as cutting continuous time into a series of discreet frames, separated from the temporal elaboration of movement that is added afterward (through the action, in film, of the projector) in terms of the perceptual effect of the persistence of vision. Yet sonic time plays an understated role in Bergson’s (imagistic) philosophy of time, often being taken as emblematic of his concept of duration as opposed to the cinematographic illusion of consciousness. In stark contrast to Bachelard, in Time and Free Will, Bergson uses the liquidity of the sonic, “the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another,” as exemplifying that aspect of duration he terms interpenetration.4
The argument for the “superiority of the analog,” in its Bergsonian allegiance to continuity, could easily be taken as an ill-conceived, antidigital phenomenology. But such an interpretation would be misleading. The drive of Massumi’s argument is in fact to push for a rigorous theorization of the enfolded nexus, or plexus, of the analog and digital. The question here is what kind of sonic plexus they can compose and where the potential for invention lies in both its analog and digital dimensions.
In his recent book, Sound Ideas: Music, Machines and Experience, Aden Evans, without specifically deploying a concept of the virtual, attempts to locate zones of mutational potential within the codes of digital music. Evans describes how digital code stratifies the analog in a double articulation. He raises the question of whether a digital singularity can be conceived, or whether such a singularity would in fact be merely a residue of the process of the digitalization of the analog. The digital stratification of the analog cuts it into parts and then assigns values to these parts. As Evans points out, this articulation is crucially double:
On the one hand, the bits are spread out linearly, each divided from each, while on the other hand, each bit is either a 0 or 1. Binary numbers have a first articulation (the nth place) and a second articulation (0 or 1 in each place).... The binary is nothing but articulation, a simple difference between 0 and 1... [but to] be effective the digital requires another articulation.... In the case of sound digitalization, a sound is divided into small chunks of time (samples), and each sample is evaluated by measuring the air pressure at that point in time.... A first articulation of parts and a second of values.5
However, in this process, Evans argues, using the term actual where Massumi would use the analog, digitalization “captures the general, the representable, the repeatable, but leaves out the singular, the unique, the immediate: whatever is not formal. Actuality always exceeds its form, for it moves along lines that connect singularities; the actual is not a neat sequence of frozen or static moments but an irreducible complex process that cannot be cleanly articulated in time or space.”6
The rules of operation of the digital are immanent to its formal, binary code from which it is composed. Yet the emptiness of this code is what produces its infinite replicability: the clone is always formal, and therefore there is no haeccity as the format is essentially generic, every analog place becoming a numerical space, and every type of analog object tagged by numerical values. So the limits of the digital—“Refinement, precision, storage, isolation”7—are exactly its power, that is, its ordering quality, for measuring and counting. The digital is simultaneously exact and reductive. But Evans distinguishes between this exactness and precision. He terms the exactness of digital calculability imprecise in that “it measures its object to a given level of accuracy and no further ... it presents its own completeness.”8 For Evans, something is lost in this transition from the fullness of the analog to the exact partiality of the digital. There is a residue of the process of stratification, whereby the digital cuts into the analog, and through which continuity is transposed into generic parts, or bytes. This residue is the excluded middle of this process of double articulation. “The digital has a resolution, and detail finer than this resolution is ignored by the digital’s ordered thresholds.”9 The analog, on the other hand, for Evans, as a variable continuum, is fuzzy, and responsive—any operation performed on it transforms it. The digital zooms in on the thresholds of the analog, marking variable ranges in this qualitative continuum, quantizing them into a discreteness and exactitude. Paralleling Massumi’s thesis that the “analog is always a fold ahead”10 of the digital, Evans notes that the “superiority” of the analog stems not from a limitation of the digital substitution, its difference from an actual object, but crucially—and this is the crux of their differential ontology—it is “rather a productive difference, a not-yet-determined, an ontological fuzziness inherent to actuality itself. Difference as productive cannot be digitalized.”11 The processual nature of the actual, and its generation of singularity, must exceed its capture. In other words, the actual for Evans exceeds the sum of its digitized parts. This is not merely a phenomenological point. Elsewhere, Evans develops a parallel argument using intuitionist mathematics in relation to the concept of the differential (specifically the surd)12 from calculus and what Deleuze termed the process of differentiation. The differential “was an extra term, left over after the rest of the equation had been reduced, and the methods for dealing with it could not be decided in advance.”13 Evans finds the surd at work in the uncertainty principle of acoustics, concluding that the “digital encounters events or objects that it cannot accommodate, and it must reshape itself in order to make room for these new ideas, but eventually settles back into a placid or rigid formula, neutralizing the novelty that challenged it to develop.”14
Where Evans’s position deviates from Massumi’s is in the terminology of the virtual, with Evans locating the productive force in the actual itself, whereas for Massumi, the potential for change lies in fact in the virtual. What Evans calls the actual as opposed to the digital, Massumi terms the analog, composed of the actual and the virtual. Massumi questions the potential of the digital generation of results that are not already precoded. If the digital is to provide access to the virtual, then it would have to “produce unforeseen results using feedback mechanisms to create resonance and interference between routines.” A virtual digitality would have to integrate the analog “into itself (bio-muscular robots and the like), by translating itself into the analog (neural nets and other evolutionary systems), or again by multiplying and intensifying its relays into and out of the analog (ubiquitous computing).”15
While a healthy skepticism regarding the claims of digital hype is recommended, a rhythmanalysis of the digitalization of sonic matter reveals much about computational mutations in the operative logics of vibrational force. The narrowband of humanoid audio perception is a fold on the discontinuum of vibration. On this field, the musical distinction between rhythm (infrasonic frequencies) and pitch (audible frequencies) dissolves, each merely constituting bands on the frequency spectrum.16 This vibrational discontinuum can be mapped as molecular texturhythm. Referred to as the “great base” by Ezra Pound17 and explored continuously throughout the twentieth century in the vibrational science of electronic music, the rhythmic ontology of matter flattens the elaborate elevations and stratifications of modern tonality (pitch as a system of frequencies unfolds into a matter of rhythm) into a simultaneously abstract yet felt plane. This plane is populated by molecular entities composed of variations of speed and slowness and marked by fluctuating degrees of affective potential. In the language of Varese or, later, granular synthesis, these bodies can be clouds, vortices, or densifications of sonic matter. This is the plane of microsonic turbulence explored by contemporary digital sound design.
In some suggestive ways, the sonic atomism of granular synthesis converges with the atomism of Whitehead’s vibrational anarchitecture. No longer should sonic matter be conceived purely in terms of waveforms, but now also in terms of grains of sound. The parallel faces of wave and particle open up a rhythmanalysis of microsound. As Sherburne has noted, “Rhythm is texture writ large, peaks and valleys turned to pulse. Texture is rhythm rendered microscopic, (ir) regularity encoded and impressed upon the surface of sound. Where these two break and cleave apart, the click, smooth-faced, one dimensional, textureless and out-of-time.”18
Perhaps, contra the “superiority of the analog” thesis, the digital encoding of sound at the micro-timescale has opened untold sonic potentials in terms of textural invention, a surplus value over analog processing. A fundamental temporal potential of sonic virtuality is locatable in the very un-Bergsonian realm of digital sampling, known as discrete time sampling.19 As the Nyquist-Shannon theorem explained, “A continuous band-limited signal can be replaced by a discrete sequence of samples without loss of any information and describes how the original continuous signal can be reconstructed from the samples.”20 At a fundamental level, in its slicing of sonic matter into a multiplicity of freeze frames, digital samples treat analog continuity as bytes of numerically coded sonic time and intensity, grains that may or may not assume the consistency of tone fusion, the sonic equivalent of the persistence of vision.
In contrast to the Bergsonian emphasis on continuity in duration, in the 1940s, the elementary granularity of sonic matter was noted by physicist Dennis Gabor, dividing time and frequency according to a grid known as the Gabor matrix. Prising open this quantum dimension of sonic time opened the field of potential that much more recently became the time-stretching tool within digital sound editing applications.21 The technique “elongates sounds without altering their pitch, [and] demonstrates how the speed at which levels of acoustic intensity are digitally recorded (44,000 samples/second at standard CD quality) means that a certain level of destratification is automatically accomplished. Since magnitudes (of acoustic intensity) are all that each sample bit contains, they can be manipulated so as to operate underneath the stratification of pitch and duration, which depends on the differentiation of the relatively slow comprehensive temporality of cycles per second.”22
The technique referred to as time stretching cuts the continuity between the duration of a sonic event and its frequency. In granular synthesis, discreet digital particles of time are modulated and sonic matter synthesized at the quantum level. In analog processing, to lower the pitch of a sound event adds to the length of the event. Slow down a record on a turntable, for example, and a given word not only descends in pitch but takes a longer time to unfold. Or allocate a discreet sampled sound object to a zone of a MIDI keyboard; the difference between triggering the sample using one key and moving to a key one octave down doubles the time of the sound and halves its pitch. Time stretching, however, facilitates the manipulation of the length of a sonic event while maintaining its pitch, and vice versa. Time stretching as a digital manipulation process has become increasingly common to electronic music software, particularly in the transposing of project elements between one tempo and another, fine-tuning instruments, but also as a textural effect producing temporal perturbations in anomalous durations and cerated consistencies.
These texturhythmic innovations add new complexions to the ontology of vibrational force, new ways in which sound impresses on the skin, touches, affects, and infects. While the digital, it is argued, in its discrete binary constitution of bytes frames a predetermined, precoded field of demarcated possibility, can there not be a potential for mutation immanent to the numerical code itself? Digital philosophers such as Gregory Chaitin hint at this when they map the contagion of the uncalculable, irreducible real, which always exceeds axiomatization.23 A too quick dismissal of the digital, articulated without an exploration of the numerical dimensions of the virtual at work in mathematical problematics and in popular numeracy, risks falling back into a phenomenological fetish-ization of the emergent plenitude of the analog. What is required is an affective calculus of quantum rhythm. Such a calculus would map the rhythmic oscillations that vibrate the microsonic, and the molecular turbulence these generate, a spiral that scales up through the nexus of the analog and digital (a sonic plexus)—its codes and networks of affective contagion. Sonic warfare becomes a sensual mathematics.