levity is a levitation leech.

I’m reading Doug Kahn’s Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts right now to get a better idea of how to approach my application paper. As I go along, it occurs to me how radically different new approaches to the body and cognition can actually change the way we think about sound in the arts. Kahn’s assumption is that the world is “out there” and we just happen to fall into it, thus sound is all pervasive. Autopoiesis (or perhaps I should call it the Santiago theory) teaches us that the world isn’t exactly out there, at least not in any ordinary sense, rather that we “bring it forth.” I understand this to mean that we create the world in response to what is actually there (the world is there) and as an organism with a nervous system and sense generally we are constantly ‘bringing forth’ – never brought forth. Sound then is always interpreted – perhaps the word “interpret” is incorrect, but anyway… So where does that get us? In theory it brings us back to selectivity, though selectivity not based on taste so much as biological structure.. In practice, we would have to consider that mimetic attempts at sound are never mimetic, so Marinetti’s “Rattatat Tat” machine guns could be a pervasively glottal “u=u=u=u=u=u,” point one. The interesting point is that, having similar structural similarities, we may all understand the different versions of machine gun fire as machine gun fire. I would say the other point is that because we can broadly assimilate onomatapoeic sounds, that there is a possibility for metaphor in sound. Suppose my, imagined, piece called “beer belly” started with a succession of flatulent sounds and continued to ASCII: “plezur plezur : ?? Well, ahem. Anyhow, sound artists actually already know this on one level. Kenny Goldsmith is doing it all the time, but as far as I know, people don’t get it.. Well, that’s all I’m doing for now. Hmm. I’m more than a little dissatisfied by this actually. If theory does nothing but explain what has already been done, then it is utterly useless. It has to always point to what has been done and what can be done. This is just explanatory. If you think otherwise, let me know