Groove - proposition for a Sound Cuff

In agreement with Ingold (2015), lines of sound and music would have no different dimension. Therefore, music would be nothing but sound. Following this line of thought, it aims to a new conceptualization of music or of what could be called music. A punctum, according to Barthes (1980), shows the affect of experience. It’s a detail that overhelms the reading, an intense mutation of interest. Something has emerged from experience and now this is not anything whatever anymore. “This something has triggered me, has provoked a tiny shock, a satori, the passage of a void” (BARTHES, 1980, p. 49). Therefore, music would be no longer just sound as anything whatever. It is still sound in its constitution, but there’s an affective quality that emerges from and through sound compounds – this is what I would call music. Music is a question of intensity, of feeling, once feeling is what activates the differential, the more than of experience. Although it is assumed that Ingold makes a lot of sense, that music in its constitution is sound and this is what urges, what is being played and this is what is heard and felt, this is also music. Ingold feels music through him when he plays.

Yet at the moment when I start to play, the instrument seems to explode. What had been a recognisable, coherent entity becomes something more like a bundle of affects, a meeting of bowhair, rosin, metallic strings, wood and fingers, coupled with resonant air. Bundle them together and sound erupts as through a fissure. If I continue to play, then the eruption carries on and the sound keeps flowing. In this exploded view the instrument takes on cosmic dimensions. It blasts into the infinitude of the auditory atmosphere (INGOLD, 2015, p. 192-193).

Music is the continuity of explosion. Its affective affirmation. To actually perform the cosmos in its making – activating a kind of geological event-time. A quality of openness operating on the threshold - becoming increasingly intensive - showing glimpses of difference itself. According to Manning (2016a, p. 9), artfulness is “actively engaged in the differential of experience in the making”. Music, therefore, would be the artful of sound. It Activates the infrathin of a potencializing force making felt the untimely, as an art of time. Therefore, for a becoming-music, something must shift the experience of sound in its ordinary quality. What operates this shift is what Manning (2016b) calls a cuff. A cuff is a change in direction that opens the relational field of experience, activating its differential, revealing its more than. It is something that appears in the relation as a disjunctive conjunction, turning to the outside. A cuff, thus, gives an opportunity for difference - it makes the difference. So, what kind of cuff would take sound to its more than, to its artfulness?

This is my starting point to work on how a groove can perform this cuff-like act. I think music has an infinity of possible cuffs and a groove is just one of them. A groove is a compound of repeating deviations moved by expressive timing – which is also called feel. It operates drags and rushes in-between rhythm structure. According to Ingold (2015, p. 197), “where sounds vary, it is in how and how far they are pitched by the force of the explosion in which they are generated”. A groove would perform a transversality that reaches the edges of sound explosion.

A few examples of music associated with groove:

References

BARTHES, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill & Wang, 1980. 

INGOLD, Tim. The Life of Lines. United Kingdom: Routledge, 2015.

MANNING, Erin. For a Pragmatics of the Useless, or the Value of the Infrathin. SAGE Publications, New York, p. 1-19, 2016a. DOI: 10.1177/0090591715625877

_____. Class - What is a Cuff? Montreal: Concordia University, 2016b.