The Sound Monad: A Philosophical Perspective on Sound Design

Vincenzo Zingaro

doi:10.1515/opphil-2020-0169

Abstract

Abstract This article aims at sketching a philosophical theory of sound based on the perspective of sound designers: unique agents blurring the boundaries between engineering, music, acoustics and sound-based art. After having introduced the general framing in Section 1, focusing on a short history of the theory and practice of sound design, in Section 2 we propose a reading of sound as monad. We derive such intuition from the technology of digital sampling of audio signals, based on the decomposition of complex sound waves in a number of elementary sinusoidal waves. Thus, in Section 3, we attempt at grounding the resulting “sound-atom” on Leibniz’s notion of monad, intended both as a “simple substance without parts” and as a “nucleus of forces in statu possibilitatis.” The insight is resumed and further discussed in Section 4, where we draw our conclusions by demonstrating the fitness of such framing with regards to the standpoint of sound design, while accounting for the work of sound artists Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda.

Highlights

In 1997, the iconic, American experimental-electronic act “Matmos” released their first, eponymous record
We assume the reader will already spot the similarities between these Leibnizian sentences and the nature of sound we have attempted at sketching so far. Albeit this all seems not to differ under any aspect from what we suggested about complex sound-waveforms, we shall refrain from the temptation to resolve our quest in a proper “monadology of sound,” for this would imply sustaining the same exact theoretical framework with regards to the creation and annihilation of substances
Paraphrasing Leibniz himself, perhaps music is the best among the possible worlds for sound, yet to say that many other sound-worlds are constantly given to our experience, that sound itself makes for an elective entrance to unique worlds and that music itself is ever-changing mostly by virtue of the “non-linear” components of sound [...] are all true statements in need of deep investigations

Summary

Introduction

In 1997, the iconic, American experimental-electronic act “Matmos” released their first, eponymous record. Sounds we may hear nowadays might as well be nothing of this world, meaning precisely that if it’s true that we could still start from a physical source and process it to the point of getting something completely different (i.e. Matmos’ track cited in the opening), it is true that we could combine numbers, locating the origin of sound directly in the virtual domain It follows, that by reaching at the same time the visual and the tactile fields, as a representation (i.e. sound waves on a screen manipulated via a cursor) sound has been somewhat freed from its mediums (air and water). Sound as idea and sound as manifestation (as event) share a common root which, in the following pages, we will attempt to locate in the notion of monad

Towards the inneres auge of sound

The sound-atom

The sound monad

The sound-event in light of the monadic perspective

Conclusions