1877: Capitalism and Schizophonia 25

Noise, noise, noise—the greatest single disease vector of civilization.
—J. G. Ballard, “The Sound Sweep”(1997)

Contemporary capitalism is accompanied by the colonization of the audio sphere by an epidemic of “earworms,” or audio viruses. The concept of the virus as applied to cybernetic culture, from computer infections to the dynamics of “hype,” has become generally prevalent, yet particularly under thought in relation to sound.1 There is now a burgeoning, if problematic, range of discourses that extend from theoretical biology and medical epidemiology, to software programming, cultural theory, marketing strategy, and science fiction, which finds in the virus, biological and digital, so much explanatory potential regarding the nonlinear dynamics of cybernetic culture. Infesting the fissures of the nature-culture continuum, the virus is also at the center of discussions on the aesthetics of artificial life research generally, and specifically in relation to generative music. To understand this ubiquity of the concept of the virus and its relevance to the contagiousness of vibrational events, some initial components of an “audio virology” will be sketched, paying special attention to the microscopic engineering, incubation, transmission, contagion, and mutation of sonic culture.

An initial task in constructing an audio virology is to break with a transcendent view of viruses. Film director David Cronenberg, cinematic fabricator of the new flesh soft machines of contagious media in films such as Videodrome and Naked Lunch, assumes a somewhat Spinozist approach to the virus:

To understand physical process on earth requires a revision of the theory that we’re all God’s creatures—all that Victorian sentiment. It should certainly be extended to encompass disease, viruses and bacteria. Why not? A virus is only doing its job. It’s trying to live its life. The fact that it is destroying you doing so is not its fault. It’s about trying to understand interrelationships among organisms, even those we perceive as disease. I think most diseases would be very shocked to be considered diseases at all. It’s a very negative connotation. For them, it’s a triumph. It’s all part of trying to reverse the normal understanding of what goes on physically, psychologically and biologically to us.²

This reorientation onto an immanent plane of specific encounters (which can be both constructive and destructive) between bodies, what Spinoza calls an Ethics, is opposed to an overarching, transcendent, anthropocentric morality of health. Of course, this all raises the question of why it is more productive to develop the concept of cultural infection when there is already a more neutral concept of affection. While these terms can often be developed interchangeably, the connotations of “infection” usefully dramatize this conception of the power relations of affective contagion,³ an aspect that tends to be missing from the dominant cognitive theory of cultural virology, that is, memetics.

Methodologically, an audio virology implies the transcription of the terminology of music markets and antimarkets; individual artists or producers, for example, become carriers, events become incidents of outbreak, scenes become fields of contagion, trade becomes an exchange of contagious sonic fluids or particles, radio becomes a literal transmission network, and acoustic cyberspace, in both its analog and digital domains, becomes an epidemiological field of affective contagion. In constructing this audio virology, it is helpful to track down traces of this notion of sonic infection that reside latent within the discourses of the last century while noting how the digitalization of culture has brought viral microcultures into ever sharper focus. Over the past decade, the emergence of digital encoding formats and decentralized distribution networks has forced a radical rearrangement of global music markets, leading many to proclaim,⁴ for example, mp3 as a code weapon in a market warfare against global multinational protectorates: an audio virus, replicating itself across the hard drives of networked computers, unraveling the cell walls of a global anti market.⁵ Elsewhere, recent digital sound design, equipped with its algorithmic instruments and generative methodologies, continues what is essentially an avant-gardist electroacoustic legacy, obsessed with music as process (not product) and therefore concerned with the integration of chance into compositional practice.⁶ More interestingly, its research has provided a vehicle for the arrival of self-differentiating autonomous acoustic agencies and artificial sonic life-forms, unraveling musical form into networked sonic anarchitectures, rendered susceptible to random mutation. In many cases, these sonic algorithms, usually genetic and sometimes viral, are transpositions of bioevolutionary rules into software.⁷ But while such digital sound design technologies have facilitated much of this topologization of microsonic form and its exposure to potential mutation, it would be a conceit to attribute too much significance or innovation to these recent formalist technoaesthetic developments.

As predatory brand environments converge with generative music and consumer profiling, artificial sonic life-forms are released from the sterile viro-sonic labs of digital sound design into the ecology of fear. But what conceptual tools does an audio virology use to track the transmission of these contagious sonic algorithms (earworms) and their psychoaffective symptoms (“stuck tune syndrome” and so-called cognitive itches)? Cultural virologies have to date remained essentially dualist (in the Cartesian sense) and neo-Darwinian in their reduction of culture to a cognitive field composed of static, unchanging idea units, otherwise known as memes. A standard objection to cultural virologies such as memetics is that by attributing so much autonomy to networks of memes, they sideline the human labor and consciousness involved in the construction of culture. Like memetics, the conception of an audio virology is also intended precisely to counter some of the habits of anthropocentrism within auditory thought. Yet it will be clear that the audio virology consistent with the ontology of vibrational force developed earlier diverges from memetics is significant ways. Moreover, if anything, one problem of memetics is that it does not go far enough in this direction. There is a residual transcendence that haunts the cultural cybernetics of memetics. Memetics tends to conceive of culture strictly cognitively, as composed of ideas, beliefs, and values, posing the question: If humans can think ideas, can ideas think humans? Yet it will be suggested that memetics, with its cognitivist obsessions and constant academic inferiority complex, can only inadequately deal with processes of affective contagion and the rhythmic differentiation and mutation of vibrational transmission vectors. Instead, the components of an audio virology will be sought that are capable of mapping the full spectrum of affective dynamics.

It will be suggested that perhaps a more fruitful line of investigation can be found in the broader intersection of sonic culture with the virological pragmatism, the viro-tactics found in the sonic fictions and processes of the Black Atlantic. Such an upgraded audio virology should be able to assist in approaching the following diagnoses: What is it to be infected by sound?⁸ How are bodies affected by rhythms, frequencies, and intensities before their intensity is transduced by regimes of signification and captured in the interiority of human emotions and cognition? What can be learned from the microscale of sound about its global technocultural tendencies, drifts, innovations, and black holes? What viral algorithms are at work within vibrational culture beside so-called generative music? What artificial life-forms inhabit the ecologies of global music markets? How are audio viruses deployed within a politics of frequency?