“Twenty-First-Century Feed-Forward Music” – Antony Nestel

How does the universe sound like? A question mathematician and electronic musician Valery Vermeulen is occupied with. Vermeulen’s interest doesn’t stop there, he manages with the captured abstract scientific data stemming from space to realise innovative ways to compose and perform music compositions. Vermeulen uses two distinct creative processes that facilitate ‘his’ cosmic music possible: data sonification and interactive sound synthesis. Data sonification is the expanding field of converting any presented numerical abstract data into sound. Interactive sound synthesis differently contains all synthesis techniques where the created sound is being influenced by one or more external data sources (Kikk 2019).

What interests me in Vermeulen’s practice, besides his capturing and deep alluring compositions, is the complex imbrication between what Hansen calls  21st- Century Media and the human. What makes it possible for the human to play and compose with the sounds of material processes that are totally out of our sensorial unenhanced bodily technologies? The answer is the assemblage that consists of cosmic events, capturing technologies and Vermeulen’s body. In order to elaborate on these complex non-hierarchical interactions, I will explain in short Hansen’s take on 21st- Century Media and the potentialities these technologies afford to organic, material and technological assemblages.

According to Hansen, 21st- Century Media shifts away from the centrality of human consciousness and instead affords humans with experience we cannot obtain without them. These technologies open our awareness of the sensibility of the world, of which humans are a part. 21st- Century Media expand and “directly shape the sensory continuum” (Hansen 2015, 38) that engenders perception and memory. Hansen goes even further by arguing that whereas older media mediated human experience, as in the age of cinema, 21st- Century Media requires an addition between their technological activity and human experience, an addition as mediation that forms “relations between technical circuits and human experience” (Hansen 2015, 43). The concatenation or Hansen’s preferred term imbrication of new media and human is then a mediation of the “technical conditions of mediation itself.” (Hansen 2015, 43) Feed-Forward, the title of Hansen’s book names just this sort of mediation which are necessary for us humans to consciously become aware of the “plurality of multi-scalar” (Hansen 2015, 44) occurrences that have already happened, since they are too fast, too small, too far for us humans to consciously perceive.

Vermeulen’s body is deeply imbricated with these technologies and only thanks to the aforementioned assemblage can he in a new assemblage create music with the feed-forward sounds of cosmic material occurrences, materialising outside human conscious perception. His compositions bring about a worldly sensibility that affects us as listeners bodily, sensorially and which enable us, in consequence, to become aware of our participation in these cosmological processes in which “everything that has been created up to that moment in the development of the universe is involved” (Hansen 2015, 13).

References

• Hansen, Mark. 2015. Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Kikk Festival. 2019. “Valery Vermeulen. Workshop – create your own music from (deep)space.” Accessed January 2, 2019. https://www.kikk.be/2019/en/program/workshops-masterclasses/valery-vermeulen