I don’t see “sound” as either an idea within myself, or as an attribute of equipment. Rather, it’s a third structure that emerges between the two and retrospectively determines both. That is, one creates within a sound. Equipment is as it is, only within a sound. Sound is not something of which one conceives or even enacts, but a prior (transcendental) condition for conceiving or enactment as such.
Third structures like “sound” aren’t mere artifacts, such as rhythms or recordings. They are ontological. They determine how everything shows up: even causality and time can be only as they are within a sound, and then only to the extent one has opened oneself to it.
Take, for instance, a guitarist improvising with a delay pedal. The “function” of the delay pedal is delay: one plays a note, and hears the same note a little bit later. As a system to be apprehended rationally from an objective distance, that’s all there is: the function. Delay. Indeed, not so interesting.
However, suppose one abandons such thinking and instead allows oneself to be open to the sound. In other words, to what is actually happening when one plays with the pedal. Such allowance is none other than an initiation, and such an openness is none other than listening. Listening as such initiating oneself to be placed within the sound: not thinking it in an objective sense where one wishes to master or control it, but thinking within it, which is to say freeing it, letting it come into its own.
Indeed, through this primordial and initiatory openness called listening, the fingers start doing their thing and repetitive patterns begin to emerge. With such patterns, let’s say a loop of five eighth-notes, a delay of three notes becomes also an advance of two; that is, time and causality readily flow backwards within the sound in which one has allowed oneself to enter.
But this reversal of time is simply the beginning, in a process where one has let a simple “function” give way to a rather complex and profound “functioning”. As intensity develops, and even shorter patterns emerge, time stops altogether: there are simply these notes, sounding with or against these other notes in a relationship that is fundamentally acausal and atemporal. [And from whence came these notes? Is it the “I”, the guitar, the pedal (which in this case is excessively stupid)? ]
Perhaps, this stopping of time achieves no less than what Castaneda termed “stopping the world” – that is, an initiatory abandonment of self and worldly preconception, an ecstatic release that frees one “to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality.” It is in this ultimate sense of a “world outside” – that is also what is most near, that the emergent “third structure” known as sound reveals its fundamentally ontological character; as much through what it conceals as through what it reveals, it determines the “I” and “delay pedal” as such – the “functioning”, not the “function”.
And yet, in the clear light of reason, in our attempts to realize “the sound inside our head” based on an absolute mastery over any musical situation, where instruments like the delay pedal are “just tools”, just means to preconceived ends – sound collapses once again, the ontological space of the “functioning” collapses back into “function.” [See, time hasn’t reversed or stopped at all, I can defeat the “functioning” by playing this single note, and then, it will come out again some time after.]
Indeed, the rational person will object, doesn’t this focus on repetitive patterns actually restrict one’s freedom, after all one should be able to play anything! But freedom is not “freedom of choice”. It is not being able to choose between a hundred varieties of cereal or fifty kinds of toothpaste. In the modal categories of the possible, the necessary and so on, one has only described a situation where everything can be produced and yet nothing ever is. Nothing is ever brought forth; nothing ever freed to come into its own. Indeed, it is only within the horizon of sound, where function has given way to functioning – a functioning that conceals as much as illuminates – that the “I” and the gear both experience freedom as such.
Skill, in the hard light of rationality, is taken as an end in itself because it can be quantified in terms of virtuosic “possibilities”, again as according to the rational and modal schema, as the sum total of the power res cogitans has over res extensa. Yet within sound, skill is only insofar as it conceals, in that it enables one to not think anymore about various aspects of one’s playing such that one can be open to what is unfolding, such that one can initiate oneself into the sound. When properly habituated, skills simply vanish from mind; they present a completely opposite image to that of a disembodied controlling power.
Placing oneself within sound is in fact dwelling within that sound, and dwelling – the “within”, is only in and through depth. In depth one never “sees” anything in its totality but only in and through movement within it, a movement which itself has the essential characteristic of openness and receptivity, but in ways that conceal as much as they reveal. Neither map nor televised image can truly capture what it is to experience a landscape in its depth, to experience the rapid shifts of terrain underneath one’s feet, the veiling and unveiling of clouds and their mists, the vast and immovable mountain ranges far off into the distance, the sudden illumination of a lightning flash across the vast expanse of the sky, the echoing of thunder through the canyons. That which is near is only made near by holding that which is far at a distance. The familiar mountain ranges being that which one has habituated through skill. That which is brought forth, that to which we listen – is only so by that which is veiled. That which is freed only is so by that which we have held out as no longer possible for us.
Sound as such, as third structure, operates fundamentally and ontologically in how it determines the “I” and the “equipment” – yet there is a fragility and an ephemerality hidden in the fact its determinations are retrospective. There are two, seemingly contradictory senses of time: on the one hand sound emerges from the “I” and the “equipment”; on the other, sound retrospectively determines what is even meant by “I” and “equipment”.
This contradiction can be resolved by recognizing that as an emergent whole, sound never fully transcends its parts. In this, parts don’t refer merely to the “I” and “equipment”; rather everything, every little gesture, every timbre, every note – nothing is ever in itself conditioned fully by sound. There’s always the possibility that at any moment something else will emerge: often as the result of a simple curiosity (“what does this do?”), or that sound will simply vanish, as apparition with its own retrospective determination that annihilates that which has come before, in the mode of the “it never was.” While ontological, sound in no sense can be interpreted as being; it is always caught up more primordially in the perpetual unfolding of becoming.
Openness to sound that we call “listening” is also openness to its disappearance or its changing into something else. Its radical contingency - that it is always at the same time not-itself. That sound is as it is only because it can become something else. If one may speak of sound’s beauty or poignancy, one does so only with intimations of sadness (that things will soon pass), but hopefully also the humble joy of having been given a rare gift, and having responded accordingly.
Thankfully this is not otherwise, because it is only in and through its radical contingency that sound wants to be recorded. That we want to share that which has come not from calculation or design, not from some idea or “expression” we want to impose upon the world – but something we have merely helped cultivate, helped bring along, something for which its time is passing, something already becoming something else. We share both with humble joy and sadness but with no illusions that we have preserved sound for eternity – even its recordings and circulations are caught up in other sounds, other retrospective determinations that reach no finality in their perpetual unfolding.
