Music And The Transhuman Ear Ultrasonics Material Bodies And The Limits Of Sensation The Musical Quarterly 1st Edition David Trippett by David Trippett instant download after payment.

When Voyager probes 1 and 2 left Earth’s orbit in 1977, the committee tasked with assembling cultural artifacts followed scientist Lewis Thomas’s advice to include recordings of J. S. Bach among the many musical samples. This, it seems, was the best way to open a conversation with an unknown non-human interlocutor, wherein exchanges may be spaced hundreds of years apart. Many styles and genres were committed to the golden discs, but Thomas worried that by broadcasting Bach, the human race might be guilty of bragging to aliens: “We would be bragging, of course,” he admitted in 1972, “but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance.”
His statement makes telling assumptions. To take one example, the three-voice C-major fugue Glenn Gould recorded (WTC, Book II) matches humans’ ability at auditory streaming, which, as David Huron has shown, tends to max out at around three streams, after which “confusions [over contrapuntal lines] become commonplace.”
It would seem that part of the effect of Bach’s polyphony depends on precisely that limitation, but there is no reason to suppose that a hypothetical alien would have the same limitation (if it were sensitive to this frequency range); the alien might just as easily find Bach’s fugue elementary, even trivial.
Extrapolating from this distancing exercise, this article is about transhumanism and hearing. It takes a lateral approach to writings in the history of materialism to plot a course for the human ear between two reciprocal paradigms: a receptacle of vibrational force and an augmentable prosthesis creating new sensory feedback. These two paradigms structure the article’s two parts: Part I sets out the materialist context, including—briefly—a study of empirical sense augmentations (and their illusions) in the nineteenth century; Part II extrapolates from this a critique of hearing–enhancing technologies that exist today under the tenets of transhumanism. ...