Toward an aural aesthetics of 24/7 environments: Beethoven, audio stretching, and techno-indeterminacy

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a critical analysis of Leif Inge’s sound installation 9 Beet Stretch, exploring the piece’s complex relations both to its musical “source” (a recording of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony) and to the technical process (audio stretching) that sustains it. The Stretch effectively allows us to listen to Beethoven’s 9th for a duration of 24 hours without distorting the pitch or other sonic qualities of the original recording. The result is an acoustically impossible experience that brings us uncannily close to Beethoven’s masterpiece in its structure and sonic materiality, while simultaneously pushing Beethoven into the background of a diffuse sonic environment in which our own embodiment and experience of listening come to the fore. I propose the term “techno-indeterminacy” (based on John Cage’s notion of indeterminacy in composition) to describe the imbrication of musicological, aesthetic, and material registers that Inge’s piece both celebrates and suspends by means of a technical process. Moving critically from Cage’s indeterminacy to Mark B. N. Hansen’s theory of affective embodiment, I argue that the sonic environment of Inge’s 24-hour installation ultimately merges with the totalizing 24/7 environment of digital capitalism as recently sketched out by Jonathan Crary—and prefigured philosophically in Adorno’s writings on modern music. Techno-indeterminacy characterizes not only the aural aesthetics of Inge’s piece, but also our lived experience in the total technological environment of digital capitalism.