Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience
Independent Scholar (Canada)
Decades ago, a volunteer at the Edmonton Jazz Festival was assigned driving duties for pianist Herman Poole Blount, to transport he and members of his group between Calgary and Edmonton for their respective festivals. A three-hour journey, Blount spent much of the time scribbling in a small black notebook, often pausing to think and look out the window. The volunteer was extremely curious about the contents of the book, and made it his mission to peak inside of it at any given opportunity. During a brief pause at a gas station to refuel, the band exited to buy snacks, presenting the driver with his opportunity. It turned out to be a small collection of crossword puzzles. But why was the driver obsessed with Blount’s book? The answer to this true story (told to me personally by the driver himself) can be found in Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience by Paul C. Jasen.
Low End Theory is a fascinating study of low frequency pitches, their physical effects, and how humans understand and define such tones, the goal being the creation of new language and terminology that helps the humanities better appreciate material agencies as sound-related scholarship moves into unexplored areas. What is there to be discovered in low tones? Is it possible to create a new, previously non-existent language to access and create cross-cultural comparisons?
The book starts with the idea that there is not a suitable language to access and describe the cross-cultural investigations of bass tone, how things feel and sound in settings where there is a significant amount of low tone. Using the general term “bass”, this word also includes or represents vibration, and extra cochlear perception including acoustics, infrasound and liminal events that could be called sound-like, pointing to “whole intermodal worlds of sonic experience beyond audition, where perception is unsettled and synesthetic overlaps make bodies re-imagine themselves and their surroundings” (3). Sound (as a mechanical vibration) is thus best understood as a relation and not an object. Thinking with vibration then requires conceptual tools that are especially attuned to matter-in-process and what Jasen calls the “circuits of responsivity that emerge between sonorous beings” (14).
A key theoretical concept underlying the book is the idea that the human body in its materiality is a contingent being adaptively recomposing (moving, adjusting, testing, imagining, anticipating) in the immanent relations of its worldly encounters. Adding sound into the mix, we arrive at an incorporeal materialism, a body’s relational potentials (which theorist Brian Massumi describes as their “yet-ness”: 13). This contingent, imaginative “body” that emerges in its sonorous relations is what Jasen calls the “sonic body”: wondering how a “given vibratory milieu augments or diminishes” a body’s capacity to act—alone or collectively (194). By imagining or theorizing this sonic body Jasen asks not what do we make of bass, but rather what does bass make of us? How does bass undulate and unsettle; how does it incite; how does it invade the lives of people, drawing bodily thought into new equations with itself and its surroundings?
Two important concepts that Jasen focuses on is how sound, in this context, is most meaningfully understood as (1) a relation and not an object, and (2) the foundation of what is known as a myth science: the unmaking of consensual reality and inventing livable futures through myth making; the affect of sonic experience being a modulatory influence on the social scenes in which low (or indeed any) tones occur. Also including infrasound, or inaudible frequencies from nature or industry (the “presence-absence” of such sounds), low tones register in the body as a feeling of being acted upon by an unseen agent, which stimulates imagination and influences perceived reality. Here Jasen introduces the term spectral catalysis, topologies of wave energies or conditions of molecularity that open up the body to “strange minglings” aka spectral-level events or the swarming of spectral uncertainties that create (1) new inflections of felt reality, and (2) turn the body into a series of questions and forced adaptations (33). This is essentially how “certain material-sonic conditions can deterritorialize the sonic body in ways that spark new trajectories in individual and collective activities” (17), adding to the myth-sciencing that can occur in such moments.
One such myth-scientist is the aforementioned pianist Herman Blount, and the effect of his mythology on his fans. Blount (1914–1993) was a Philadelphia-based jazz pianist, born and raised in Alabama. Though this is fact, Blount changed his named to “Sun Ra” and vehemently insisted that he was born and raised on the planet Saturn, later coming to Earth to create peace and harmony through poetry, onstage theatrics, unusual electric instruments such as his massive hexagonal light instrument dubbed the “Outerspace Visual Communicator”, and the making of cosmic music. His efforts would later come under the aesthetic category of Afrofuturism: an African-American movement combining science fiction, mythology, philosophy, fantasy and social critique, the “application of imaginative force to the alteration of lived reality” with which African Americans might invent their own “Alter Destiny” (200). As Ra himself states, “myth permits man to situate himself with the past and the future. What I am looking for are the myths of the future, the destiny of man ... if one wants to act on the destiny of the world, it’s necessary to treat it like a myth” (Lock 1999: 61). Ra’s myth-science itself was highly influential and immense, drawing upon ancient hermetic writing, religious texts, theosophy, contemporary science fiction and cryptic numerology, and was instrumental in reviving African-American interest in ancient Egypt. Ra even called his various assembled sidemen “tone scientists”.
Such was the mystique and legend surrounding Ra that the aforementioned jazz festival driver was immensely interested in peaking into Ra’s black notebook to see if there was anything of philosophical or literary importance, any arcana he could glean and share with his friends: wisdom or creative mythology that would give the driver social capital amongst his peers (status via participation in the Ra mythos through personal contact with the master myth-scientist himself). As Jasen reveals, bodies of myth science accumulate around unusual vibratory milieus (28), and Sun Ra’s own “tale of becoming”, how he categorized and philosophized about his experiential knowledge, serves as an excellent parergon to Jasen’s own attempt at rigorous speculation on the sound body.
Thus, not meaning to be definitive, Jasen intends for the book to be an “experiment” (187), its own kind of myth science, a work that “strives instead to engender a mode of thought that draws sound-related scholarship into unfamiliar territory, and help nudge the humanities more broadly towards a greater appreciation of material agencies” (19). The aim is “to fertilize a mode of perception—to find ways of conceptually inhabiting the vibratory encounter, finding means to render it sensible in language, and letting theory be informed by it” (187). Jasen also states that his writing, like a myth-science, “need not be utterly ‘right’ or objectively accurate. It’s doing its job if it manages to convey something of a milieu’s affects, and their escapes, in ways that put theory more closely in touch with the sonic body” (17). Indeed, as Hakim Williams states, the “quest for certainty” in the sciences “ends up narrowing and ‘colonizing’ the realm of the possibilities, in terms of diversity of approaches, and ways of being and thinking”(2015: 28). This is the great strength of the book and ultimately the success of its goal, as it analyzes a wide variety of sonic events and their sites in thoughtful and imaginative ways while attempting to evade scientific monism or intrinsicism.
But this also raises the issue that myth “science” provides no guarantee that any/all mythologies will avoid inculcating actual delusion, cult behaviour, oppression, or other modes of thought and action that are intellectually suspect, or obscure social reality. Jasen openly admits his work is an effort to “deform” thought, rather than clarify it, to “push it into the always complex, and often strange, traffic between nature and culture”(17). If we have to deform thought to advance, then this suggests Jasen’s method neither enriches nor supplements the existing scholarship on sound and materiality. Jasen also states that the scientific literature on sound, and its accounts of peculiar neuro-scientific effects, is “constrained by its unwillingness to pursue anomaly and its social life” (17), though he cites no examples of such. This weakens his argument and, as Alan Singer states, “the disposition towards contextual relativism depends on prejudicially conflating reason with instrumental dogmatic thinking. In this way, reason becomes the scapegoat antagonist for without which any such aesthetic quest cannot proceed to the sanctifying pedestal of pure art. The conflict between reason and the aesthetic becomes the motive for the aesthetic evasion of conflict” (2003: 111–12).
Jasen concludes the book with the statement that “we will never know just what a sonic body can do. All the more reason to keep asking the question” (194). Following such a declarative statement with the inference that we should ignore its premise (the “certainty” of never knowing) works to undermine the salient aspects of the book and feels like a negation of Jasen’s previous efforts, the very monism he seeks to avoid. In that sense, Salomé Voegelin’s book Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound (2014) works better towards categorizing or defining theory around what is heard and felt, versus what we imagine has been heard and felt, through descriptive language she defines as “textual phonography” (2014: 1). Overall, though, Low End Theory is an interesting and thoughtful addition to the greater discussion of sound materiality, and will serve as excellent graduate-level reading for ethnomusicologists, folklorists and anthropologists alike.
Lock, Graham. 1999. Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Durham: Duke University Press.
Singer, Alan. 2003. Aesthetic Reason: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Voegelin, Salomé. 2014. Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Williams, Hakim M.A. 2015. “Fighting a Resurgent Hyper-Positivism in Education is Music to My Ears”. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 14(1): 19–43.