Becoming-Communication: Some Collisions in Conceptualising Communication in Humanities, the Arts and Cultural Studies

Communication studies are specially challenged when confronted with classical literary approaches, or when faced with non-verbal expression, such as music and sound. Cultural studies take a yet-different set of approaches, often recognising that they may need to be in more rapid adaptive flux.

I will use the case of sound to illustrate and discuss some of these collisions and challenges. Musicology has mainly focused on the notated score, and how to interpret it. There is a chasm between this approach and those of cognitive studies, which more commonly ask what is heard, perceived and internalised, than what is notated in a score, seen and analysed. Many assumptions of conventional musicology depend on verbal meta-description, and concepts of structural narrative which may have little relevance to most listeners. Ethnomusicology faces music in more socially-bound frameworks, and can transcend some of these difficulties, but it often does so from the dangerous position of observer-within. While any position of observation has its dangers, those of ethnomusicology have probably been celebrated more than most, and they have been moulded into cultural studies and post-structural positions.

Deleuze and Guattari (in their massive 'A Thousand Plateaus') offer many perspectives on the process of becoming which is music. I will juxtapose some of their thoughts, and extrapolations from them, with empirical and computational approaches to music. I argue that collisions between such diverse strategies for understanding sound, and the arts more broadly, are important and potentially productive for humanities studies at large.

I will also illustrate the application of the collisions from the perspective of a creative artist. As a soundsmith, one of the key issues which emerges from empirical and cultural studies of music for me, is what influence should this understanding have on the tools to hand in making sound, and on the preferences expressed in that process? I will discuss several processes we have used in my creative computer-interactive ensemble austraLYSIS to make new work, and how they may interrelate in an ongoing way with cognitive and cultural studies of sound. Again there is the scope for such ongoing exchange across the arts and humanities more broadly.

Since creative arts and humanities underpin the economically important 'creative class' these exchanges underscore the importance of supporting the arts and humanities within the academy of the university, and in the larger community.