In January 2024, I started "From the Machine" as part of my M.A. thesis project. This critical introduction touches on much of my research over the last 3 years in relation to the podcast's content and production process, focusing on the first 14 episodes.
Introduction
As a music producer, multimedia artist, and interdisciplinary scholar, I aspire to generate theory and critical insights that can be meaningfully applied to increase the effectiveness of my own and others’ creative works. My concentration title – “Art and Sound Rhetoric” – refers on one hand to the rhetorical effects of art and media to move audiences physically and emotionally, and on the other hand to the rhetorical effects of arts discourses on the production and experience of art. Bridging the two, the applied component of my capstone project is a chatshow-style podcast where participants and I discuss a range of topics related to music, art, and artistry. In From the Machine, I put the academic ideas I’ve engaged with and developed during my MALS into vernacular conversation. In the following critical analysis, I outline key principles and themes of art and sound rhetoric by putting vernacular ideas from the podcast into academic conversation.
Description
Podcasts are a popular, versatile, and effective means of disseminating information. Kristi Kaeppel & Emma Bjorngard-Basayne (2018) suggest that podcasts are uniquely powerful educational tools because they can present complex topics in a conversational and/or narrative form. The chat show genre brings together two or more speakers, providing different perspectives on a topic and illustrating a discourse (Drew, 2017). The casual tone and perceived authenticity of podcasts affords the audience an intimate connection with the speaker(s), while the flexibility of the form allows podcasters to experiment with different strategies of conveying information. The podcast format therefore allows me to present and synthesize information from diverse disciplines and experiential perspectives in a form that is engaging and educational for a wide audience.
From the Machine has been distributed weekly through major podcasting platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts (in audio format) as well as YouTube (with accompanying visuals) since January, 2024. As of April 26, the show consists of 14 episodes ranging from 7-33 minutes, averaging ~15.5 minutes (see Appendix for complete episode list and descriptions). From the Machine features conversations with an irregularly recurring network of artists who share critical orientation, social chemistry, and investment in central North Carolina’s music and arts culture. Conversations blend informal ruminations and anecdotes about art theory and practice, punctuated with banter and short music breaks. The podcast serves not only as an interdisciplinary space to discuss the effects of music, but as an active experiment demonstrating how arts discourses are shaped within a vernacular community of artists. Common topics include creativity, production, perception, marketing, business, genre, and history.
Framework
I understand rhetoric to be the study and practice of effective communication, i.e. what a message does for/to an audience and through what mechanisms it operates. When I explain my MALS concentration on the podcast, guitarist and visual artist Ethan Bowen frames it as a synthesis of philosophy and psychology (“Ego,” 0:45). His observation speaks to rhetoric’s interdisciplinary position as an art and an applied science. Alongside the rhetorical canon and contemporary rhetorical theory, my scholarship has brought me into contact with psychoacoustics, the metaphysics of sound, art and media economics, and the neuroscience of music perception. The questions that guide me – what I understand to be the essential dimensions of rhetorical criticism in general and art-rhetorical criticism in particular – are about function & consequence, representation & affect, and power & ethics.
Function & consequence
Rhetorical criticism is distinguished from other types of art criticism (e.g. aesthetic criticism, semiotic criticism) by asking questions about function and consequence. Function refers to the actual or potential uses of an artifact rather than the creator’s intended purpose (Foss, 1994). Consequence refers to the material effects of a message, i.e. what it does rather than its content or symbolic meaning (Blair, 1999).
Representation & affect
Every piece of information does two things simultaneously: it moves a body (affect, which I describe as the physiological precursor to emotion [“Tortured artist,” 14:00]) and it implies a state of affairs in the world (representation). Art-rhetorical criticism deals with both the representational elements of an artwork – what it signifies and the sorts of meaning it produces – as well as nonrepresentational elements that have no external referent and are best understood as asignifying affect, as a preconscious physical force that puts bodies in movement.
Power & ethics
In line with the contemporary responsibility of the rhetorical critic to engage with questions of power relations and social consequence (McKerrow, 1989), art-rhetorical criticism seeks to uncover how power and agency are distributed and exercised in the process of production and consumption. Power is defined in Foucauldian terms as capacity/energy – “the power to.” Rather than what one ought to do (i.e. morality), ethics is defined in Spinozist terms as what one has the power/capacity to do.
The discipline of rhetoric is uniquely self-reflexive. Rhetorical criticism is always simultaneously analyzing and performing discourse. It is a strange and circular task to perform, through writing, an analysis of a discourse where I am among several voices also analyzing and performing discourse. If I am to critique the podcast as a media artifact while I respond to the podcast as a vernacular contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship, I must reconcile my written voice – here in an academic context, responding to scholarly conversations in rhetoric and arts entrepreneurship – with my spoken voice – Monday nights in a sound studio, talking about music and art with musicians and artists. To effectively analyze the podcast as (1) a workshop for developing theory and criticism in an informal setting, (2) a dataset of vernacular arts discourse in a particular community, and (3) a produced media artifact, I’ve chosen to write autoethnographically. I maintain objectivity by self-consciously speaking from my threefold subject position as scholar, artist, and producer. My writing will be structured nonhierarchically and organized by theme in order to flesh out key concepts and vocabulary. Parts of the text are expanded from the notes I prepared in advance of recording sessions, elsewhere I cite my own words as examples of how artists talk about art. In my effort to bridge vernacular and academic discourse, I cite conversations from the podcast alongside the words of popular musicians, authors, and scholars in an effort to bridge vernacular and academic discourse. Insofar as it is a descriptive analysis of my capstone project, this critical introduction is also a brief review of the most important insights about art and music I’ve encountered in the last three years and their relevance to my continuing interdisciplinary practice and scholarship.
Analysis
Ontology & Epistemology
Sound is distinct from other media in two respects: (1) sound is temporal, an ephemeral process unfolding over time; (2) sound is tactile, engaging touch as well as cochlear hearing. The paradox of music criticism is that concepts and language are static by function. A concept arises when a mind stratifies reality into a calculable set of data points. Like sampling a continuous sound wave at discrete points to render it in 1s and 0s, we erase difference by equating two distinct things as the same class of things, or by assigning self-identity over time. As Nietszche writes, “every concept arises from the equation of unequal things" (1873/1954, p. 46). All language is metaphorical, insofar as a word makes a comparison between every actual thing it purports to represent (“Lyric & flow,” 0:06).
Representing music through language involves erasing its temporality to make sound into something permanent, a static subject for analysis. Music criticism tends to bias the elements that are easily subjugated to symbol systems, such as note choice, lyrics, tone painting, and paratext (“Psychedelic Music,” 3:00). Barthes suggests that music’s affective dimensions – its temporality and tactility, reflected in timbre and grain – challenge subjectivity (i.e. deindividuation), and that by speaking of sound as a self-identical noun and assigning it adjectives: “the predicate is always the bulwark with which the subject's imaginary protects itself from the loss which threatens it” (1977, p. 179). This is one function of genre, to define and circulate a network of appropriate adjectives (Gunn, 1999).
The problem of music as something indeterminate, defying language and challenging logocentrism, has long been known within rhetoric (Rickert, 2006). It is a problem of particular relevance to music critics and producers who find themselves communicating about music as a profession. Unless we follow through with Barthes’s “little parlor game” and manage to speak of sound without using adjectives (better yet and more challenging – without using nouns), there are three options:
Symbolic criticism
The symbolic critic “plays it safe” by sticking to music's representational capacity. We speak of the meaning of the lyrics; of harmonic structure and voice leading; of genre-appropriate adjectives; of tone painting and the imagery evoked by sound; of background and paratext; never of the sonic object itself. This description is largely based on my experience editing reviews for a nonprofit music magazine, and represents the dominant form of music criticism (“Psychedelic Music,” 3:00). Particularly for describing popular music – which, unlike western art music, has had little time to develop its own vocabulary for symbolic analysis – this approach limits the rhetor in what kinds of experience they can describe (for critics) and what kinds of performance it can elicit (for producers).
Scientific criticism
If music's ephemerality evades conceptual stratification, let our language break concepts and open possibility rather than close it. No more visual metaphors. Speak literally of sound, how it resonates through bodies and facilitates movement according to different logics of vibration. For Kodwo Eshun and for a lineage of hip hop and jazz artists following Sun Ra’s mythScience, “[to] drop science is to mystify, rather than to educate” (Eshun, 1998, p. 29). In this model, “music's mystifying illogicality is not chastised but systematized and intensified” (p. -4). Bassist and performing artist/athlete Zac Strum discusses military march and dance music in scientific terms in episode 4 (“Functions & origins,” 1:44) when he describes the attack of a snare drum and how the fluctuations of EDM bass play against the human body.
Affective criticism
Like music, language has elements that are both representational and affective. Reviving the "sensuous force" of the metaphor means to create a sound-image in the mind of another not by describing the formal qualities of sound, but through vivid and unconventional language that compels an audience to construct the sound enthymematically. This, I suggest, is the nature of poetry: to explore metaphor in order to draw out truths that cannot be expressed as effectively using rational language (“Lyric & flow,” 0:06). In episode 3 (“Talking about music,” 1:37), Strum cites Tom Waits as a producer who communicates with his musicians affectively. E.g., when recording “16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought-Six” from Swordfishtrombone (1983), Waits directs his band by explaining “[this song] is about a guy who’s got a crow. He’s riding on a mule. He’s got a Washburn guitar; it’s got this crow inside the guitar, and it can’t get out, because it’s got strings across it. So it’s called the Washburn jail … he hits the guitar just to rattle his cage” (qtd. in Enos, 2023).
Effectuation
In the past, I have briefly discussed bricolage and effectuation as modes of rhetorical invention in DIY music (Tomlinson, 2021). Now, I intend to develop this connection as it has unfolded through the podcast. Aristotle characterizes the function of rhetoric as determining the available means of persuasion in any given case (c. 325/2007). Rhetoricians engage in what Levi-Strauss refers to as intellectual bricolage: utilizing one’s finite and heterogenous set of means to achieve an ends, exploring new and potential uses for these means when necessary. Sarasvathy popularized the notion of effectuation in entrepreneurship literature: whereas “Causation processes take a particular effect as given and focus on selecting between means to create that effect[,] Effectuation processes take a set of means as given and focus on selecting between possible effects that can be created with that set of means” (Sarasvathy, 2001, p. 245). Reviewing the entrepreneurship literature on bricolage and effectuation, Essig characterizes arts entrepreneurship as the discovery of new means-ends relationships in pursuit of sustained artistic creation (2015). If we understand persuasion affectively, as movement at a distance – e.g. as “resonance” (Hocks & Comstock, 2017; Hawk, 2018) or “turning” (Muckelbauer, 2016) – this pursuit of new means/ends relationships is a type of rhetorical invention that characterizes both entrepreneurship and artmaking.
On the podcast, we relate effectuation to both improvisatory practices and lo-fi music production. Live performance involves an “open, spontaneous response to contingencies of performance or production” (Hamilton, 2020). In improvisatory traditions like jazz, rather than accept an error as a flaw, the musician takes as given what has been played before and selects between possible effects based on their instrument and ability. Testifying to the idiom that “there are no mistakes in jazz,” multiinstrumentalist singer/songwriter Agis Shaw references one of Herbie Hancock’s experiences with the Miles Davis Quintet. During a performance of “So What,” Hancock played the “wrong” chord during a crucial moment, to which Davis responded with a melodic phrase that recontextualized the chord (“Talking about talking,” 14:18). Strum further suggests this “no mistakes'' mindset is relevant to irreversible mediums generally, including live music as well as visual mediums like ink drawing (15:35). When applied to recorded music, this speaks to the artistic affordances of lo-fi and DIY production as creative limitations, i.e. as opportunities to engage in effectual reasoning. We often discuss how artists exploit inexpensive and initially undesirable technology, such as the TR-808 drum machine (“Genre,” 10:11) or solid state amplifiers (“Talking about talking,” 17:24). On one hand, such practices serve an emancipatory function, reconfiguring aesthetic discourse to make production accessible (Tomlinson, 2021). At the same time, by encouraging artists to take their finite, heterogeneous means as given and to explore alternative ends, these practices give rise to new forms of expression (19:38).
From the Machine emerged from effectual reasoning. In my capstone prospectus, I indicate that the form, style, and content of the podcast should be refined through experimentation. Instead of working toward a predetermined end, I began by identifying the means available to me: access to recording technology; experience in sound production; exposure to interdisciplinary ideas about music and art; a community of knowledgeable, opinionated, and inquisitive artists. During the winter of ’23-’24, we recorded two pilot sessions with no expectations of either being aired publicly. Each conversation meandered for around two hours, repeatedly taking wide detours and occasionally circling back to the topic of interest. These sessions (parts of which became episodes 1, 4, 5, & 6) allowed me to test how conversations unfold organically and explore possible formats for the podcast.
Sessions are held irregularly and typically begin with me relaying an idea that interests me, e.g. the importance of music’s temporality (“Music & film”) or the connection between cognition, metaphor, and poetry (“Lyric & flow”). Sometimes other participants or podcast viewers provide discussion prompts, or a conversation that starts before the recording session will carry over into recording (e.g. Shaw’s candid opening monologue to “Bob Dylan”). Post-production takes place in Logic Pro. I begin by identifying the most interesting and insightful sections of the conversation – periods of 2 to 20 minutes following roughly the same line of thought. After editing these sections to isolate participants’ voices and remove noise (e.g. mic handling, excess verbal tics) and mixing the audio to maintain clarity and balance between speakers, I export the edited sections each as a single lossless audio file. By mixing down a multitrack recording into a series of stereo files, I commit to my initial editing and mixing decisions in order to limit my means and open new creative affordances for editing and rearranging fragments of the conversation. In a separate Logic project, I assemble these fragments and arrange them by topic or theme, aiming for ~10-20 minute episodes. I use musical interludes – jam sessions recorded by one or more of the musicians who feature on the podcast – to indicate an ellipsis or a transition. Here, again, I begin with my means (an extensive library of jam recordings; episodes compiled from multiple fragments of a conversation) and let the form of the podcast follow.
Sound Design
Taking inspiration from Glenn Gould’s contrapuntal radio documentaries, where he “works with the voices he had recorded as sound—not just as discursive statements propounding particular views” (Alexander, 2015, p. 86), From the Machine engages the affordances of digital audio production to more effectively communicate participants’ perspectives and personalities. Fragments are often arranged chronologically, representing the highlights of a linear conversation, but I sometimes rearrange excerpts to more clearly reflect the development of a set of ideas. For instance, episodes 1 (“Music & film”) and 4 (“Functions & origins”) were compiled out of order from the second pilot session. When recording, I opened the conversation by remarking on the significance of music as a temporal medium and asking about the functions of music. Because music’s temporality only became relevant in the final minutes of the conversation, and because it became a recurring theme on the podcast, I chose to release our closing remarks about film as the first episode. I therefore removed my comment about time from the opening of “Functions & origins” and instead used it to provide context for our conversation in “Music & film” in order to present information more clearly.
In The Electronic Revolution, author William Burroughs describes several ways in which cut-up technique can be applied to tape recorders as a political weapon, such as editing a politician’s speech with stammering and slurring to make them sound foolish, or playing the sound of gunshots at a protest to incite a riot. His observations resonate as prophetic at a time when artificial neural networks are able to cut-up the spoken word and produce convincing deepfake audio of politicians saying anything at all. The power to cut-up and otherwise manipulate the words of participants raises ethical questions alongside considerations of style and structure. As I remove stutters, long pauses, and comments that someone retracts or that do not advance the conversation or characterization, I make judgments about what ought to be revealed and concealed. Reversing Burroughs’s technique, it is my interest and responsibility to portray my participants and their ideas in a favorable light. Digital audio production therefore provides an opportunity to elevate the eloquence of the conversation, making it more accessible, immersive, and resonant.
In addition to the use of cut-up to more effectively convey information, I engage in experimental production techniques to establish mood and style. For instance, episodes 9 and 10 (“Bob Dylan”) both employ a flanger effect on participants’ voices: first briefly over Bowen’s voice in the context of a discussion about psychedelic music production (where it serves to demonstrate the effect [“Psychedelic Music,” 6:19]), and then over Shaw’s introductory monologue as he exposits his beliefs about artistry (where it serves as a call back and to illustrate Shaw’s personality and aesthetic sensibility [“Bob Dylan,” 0:00]). Less overt and more common are instances like the outro of episode 12 (“Lyric & flow,” 17:27), where I stereo pan overlapping banter so that individual voices are pushed to the background (speaker systems as well as human perception tend to bias sound sources that are center-panned) and yet rendered more distinct through separation. Experimental production is sometimes an effectual response to mistakes in recording, such as the abrupt ending of episode 13 (“Distribution,” 20:31). When the recording unexpectedly paused after my computer’s Siri voice assistant activated erroneously, I chose to call attention to the incident by sampling Siri’s infamous “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that.” These creative decisions are both reactions to the contingencies of production and exercises of sound’s power to communicate information beyond the linguistic content of a conversation.
Functions of Sound
My understanding of sound’s rhetorical capacity as an embodied, multimodal experience – which I express frequently on the podcast and am attempting to formalize in this essay – began to take shape during my work as a research assistant on the Virtual MLK Project. In an article co-written by Gallagher, myself, & Rosenfeld (2022), we describe three rhetorical functions of sound: its locative function to situate and orient a listener; its generative function to elicit movement in response; and its comparative function to call attention to the difference between symbolic text and embodied experience. Using the vMLK Project as a case study, we developed these concepts in the context of public address and digital humanities. From the Machine offers a chance to elaborate on the functions of sound in the context of music.
Locative function
The locative function corresponds to the representational capacity of music, and refers to music’s ability to position a listener in space, in a cultural milieu, and in a cognitive state. Spatial location is reflected in how mixing arranges elements in relation to the listener in one (mono) or more (stereophonic and surround sound) spatial dimensions. At the same time, the listener is located in time as they internalize the rhythm of a piece and generate predictions about the future based on the past. Cultural location is indicated by cultural signifiers like instrumentation, tonality, and language, as well as other arbitrary and conventional signs. On the podcast we discuss how music’s tactility allows musicians to emulate affective states, patterns of movement, or the effects of psychoactive drugs (“Genre,” 7:50; “Psychedelic Music,” 5:02). Because it is felt as vibration within the body but attributed to an external sound object, sound challenges the distinction between interior and exterior, making music uniquely suited to influence a subject’s relationship with its (physical, social, or psychological) environment.
Generative function
The generative function corresponds to the affective capacity of sound, its ability to elicit movement. Sympathetic resonance between bodies is the most basic (nonconscious) form of generation. Applied to human physiology, rhythmic music activates motor timing circuits, making motor action more likely to occur (Etani et al. 2023). As the body interpolates metric structure onto organized sound, we often find it necessary to respond with rhythmic movement in order to establish or reinforce a beat against syncopation (Vuust et al., 2022). In rhetorical terms, this is music’s capacity as a preconscious physical vibrational force, “[creating] the suasory conditions for the body to be moved” (Church, 2017, p. 326). We first identify the generative function of music at play in dance music, military marches, and works songs (“Functions & origins,” 0:33). Closely related is music’s deindividuating effect as a shared experience that challenges interior/exterior distinctions. As Rou Reynolds describes it, “at a rave, the idea of the self would be lost. The idea of an individual would be lost. You would be in a mass of people moving as one.” In the case of worship music, it is this experience of deindividuation – of the affective force of sound overwhelming representation – that finds religious expression when it pulls people out of subjectivity and into a direct encounter with undifferentiated substance, with Spinoza’s God (Jasen, 2016). We likewise connect music’s generative function and the principle of deindividuation to mosh pits and the experience of embodied tension characteristic of metal music that Hunt-Hendrix (2009) describes as the “haptic void” (6:39).
Comparative function
The comparative function is, in large part, due to the temporality of sound as a medium, which calls attention to the embodied experience of music and problematizes the identity of the sonic artifact. As an ephemeral process, the essence of the musical artifact is contingent on the available methods for capturing and reproducing this process, i.e. recording technology. Frith (2001) identifies four regimes of recording that shape the production and consumption of music. The earliest musical traditions were strictly oral; folk songs are recorded in minds, copied through interpersonal instruction, and distributed through participatory rituals. The necessity of storing works in memory means the essence of folk songs are highly compressed and variable. The musical artifact is fluid, embodied, and participatory, often inseparable from poetry and dance. Writing introduced an alternative paradigm of the musical artifact as a set of instructions, alongside the composer/performer divide (and the <genius> of the composer) and the calcification of the musical artifact according to what can be expressed within a given notation system (in the European tradition, this includes rhythm, pitch, and instrumentation, with only approximate instructions for dynamics and timbre). The next revolution was the ability to record and reproduce sound, capturing the materiality of a sonic event in a physical medium. Instead of selling instructions which would be realized by trained musicians at a concert venue (or by amateur musicians at home), the record industry could sell specific sounds and distinct moments in spacetime to unprecedented masses of non-elite, non-expert consumers, able to be replayed anywhere at any time. The artifact of popular music is the sound itself, transduced through a microphone and encoded on some physical storage medium, then retrieved through a reversal of the recording process. The digital recording regime was in its infancy when Frith wrote, and involves compressing an analog transduction of sound into symbolic digital language. By bringing together the advantages of writing and sound recording, digital music production has been steadily driving storage and distribution costs toward zero and reproducibility toward infinity. Each tradition and each era carries an array of metaphysical assumptions that shape our perception of music, e.g. what are the essential, immutable parts of a musical work?; who/what is the artist?; how does a work come into being? Throughout episode 13 (“Distribution”), we discuss how the evolution from 45 rpm singles to LPs to digital streaming has conditioned our experience of music. By attending to how music as a text has been defined by a lineage of recording mediums, we suggest that musicians can better take advantage of the affordances of digital distribution.
Genre
Listening to music is an active process that involves making predictions about the future based on past experience (“Lyric & flow,” 7:31). The interaction between repetition and novelty in a piece of music activates prediction circuits, and the experience of musical pleasure is based on these expectations being satisfied, suspended, or subverted, with rewards for being proven correct in one’s expectations or for effectively resolving a prediction error (Vuust et al., 2022). Whereas evolutionarily-hardwired responses (e.g. anxiety produced by loud and low frequency sounds; physiological reactions to different timbres of the human voice) and extramusical associations are characteristic of sonic experience in general, and communicate information about something other than music, Vuust et al. identify anticipation to be self-contained and unique to music. Novelty within a pattern of repetition can be understood in Batesonian terms as “a difference that makes a difference,” and is what allows a listener to generate meaning and emotion based strictly on the hierarchical organization of sound into music.
Sound engineer and guitarist Matt Stretz speaks to the significance of prediction and expectation when he observes that “genres establish the listener's expectations for what sounds they can anticipate to hear” (“Genre,” 0:40). In contemporary rhetorical criticism, genre is a symbolic coding of form that, through repetition, channels affective intensity into meaningful emotion (Gunn, 2012). According to Gunn, genre “emerges at the point at which the symbolic meets the body” (p. 369). Genre labels therefore provide context for listeners, allowing them to interpret a piece of music more quickly and with more nuance, while providing artists a reference point from which they may follow or deviate in order to communicate musical meaning. Within the symbolic scaffolding of a genre, listeners learn where to listen for repetition and novelty, as well as culturally mediated ways to express affect as movement and emotion.
Let me illustrate further using the generic assemblage of extreme metal. The physiological phenomenon of the haptic void is an affect that may be produced by a number of formal qualities of music (actual or implied loudness, complex frequency distribution, an intermediate level of syncopation). The term <extreme metal> indicates that these elements will be present to some degree, cueing the listener to focus their attention and anticipation away from e.g. dynamic range and tonal harmony (which are largely absent) and toward those elements where a balance of repetition and novelty (and therefore meaningful difference) can be found, e.g. rhythmic progression and the grain of the voice. Extreme metal’s dense network of subgenres further categorizes formal routes to the haptic void and more specifically direct listeners’ attention: extreme speed (thrash) or slowness (doom); rhythmic complexity (tech/prog) or transparency (black); etc. In addition to describing where to listen for repetition and novelty, <extreme metal> prescribes culturally mediated responses to the haptic void. One such response is the release of embodied tension through “stankface,” rhythmic headbanging, or – at its most extreme – the mosh pit. In addition, Hunt-Hendrix identifies a feeling of empowerment associated with the haptic void. This is far from an instinctive reaction to the disorienting, desubjectifying experience of extreme metal, but rather exemplifies how genre symbolically codes affective experience into a coherent narrative. In fact, part of the appeal of metal is the in-group identity, reinforced by the existence of an out-group who is unfamiliar with the codes and the narrative, and who might respond to the same sonic experience with anxiety and irritation (Heller, 2015).
A genre emerges (as a scene or a movement) as a contingent response to a particular historical situation. At one end, genre is constructed by artists who – intentionally or not – respond in similar ways to a kairotic moment. At the other end, genre is imposed by critics and listeners who look past the idiosyncrasies of individual expression and associate artists whose shared formal qualities point to such an underlying ethos. By circulating a network of appropriate adjectives as well as a set of canonical artists, genre both organizes markets and structures musical discourse (Gunn, 1999). At the same time, artists are often wary of genre discourse for imposing symbolic structure on music’s affective force, for apparently prescribing function to form and meaning to code. While, as Gunn observes, genre is both necessary and inevitable, we should see this romantic objection as a reflection of the limits of genre discourse – i.e. its symbolicity, being both arbitrary and conventional.
The first problem arises when audiences take symbolic generic discourse as reflecting some essence or truth. The function of genre, as I have defined it, is primarily preconscious, mediating the relationship between affect and expression. A generic assemblage can be said to overcode music when it becomes a conscious act of interpretation, not simply rendering music linguistically intelligible but subjecting value judgment to linguistic metrics. When this happens, listeners may be disappointed when genre conventions are defied or when expectations are subverted. E.g. in metal and other genres, the phenomenon of “gatekeeping” involves criticizing artists for failing to adhere to the generic codes of metal, imposing social restrictions on musical enjoyment. The second problem arises when artists take historically contingent genre labels as reflecting a fixed flow of desire, assuming the function/form and meaning/code articulations of a generic assemblage to be prescriptive rather than descriptive. Like when audiences allow language to overcode music, artists who do the same limit their art to preexisting forms and risk limiting their audience to those encultured into a genre’s particular matrix of expectations.
These two positions – the romantic denial of genre’s categorizing impulse and the nihilistic submission to genre as prescriptive – roughly correspond to the philosophical extremes of “art for art’s sake” and “art as a widget” (Beckman, 2015). Throughout the podcast, we work to better understand the utility of genre as a compositional tool and a medium of communication. In order to avoid disappointing audience expectations, artists need to understand relevant genre codes. Particularly when marketing, knowledge of genre codes allows artists to more effectively reach their relevant audience (“Booking & promotion,” 4:19) or to creatively defy audience expectations (“Merchandise,” 6:38). In music, because genre is arbitrary and conventional; genre codes can be exploited simultaneously for their representational capacity and the particular form/response relationship they speak to (“Genre,” 6:07). I echo Gunn’s observation that “genre criticism in general is only critically useful or interesting when examining an object or ‘text’ that does not faithfully subscribe to generic norms” (2012, p. 370). Regardless of genre affiliation, artists are better equipped to communicate effectively and advance the possibilities of their medium by attending to both the sonic characteristics of genres and their historical development in response to an artistic and social environment.
Art Mythologies
The rhetoric scholar is less interested in what art is than what it does (function & consequence). I take for granted that what constitutes <art> and <artistry> is socially constructed, and am interested in how this construction takes place, what its implications are, and how it can be reconstructed to produce better outcomes for artists. Shaw describes “music as being a form of art and art being pure personal expression, noting the true beauties of life and being the vessel that shows other people that beauty” (“Bob Dylan,” 0:16). Filmmaker and photographer Jason Ronan relates artistry to substance, suggesting that “stuff that has substance is made with blood, a person’s putting their soul into it” as well as that “artwork that cannot be outgrown, that you can keep coming back to and it will give you insight, has substance” (“Art & the body,” 16:30). These discourses point to an element of consequence (communicating insights about beauty), as well as an element of intentionality (expression of the self/soul). Strum’s response to Ronan reflects a more rhetorical perspective on art: “At the end of the day, all that matters is how it affects the person” (17:27).
Our conversations illustrate a spectrum of arts discourse from “art for art’s sake” to “art as a widget” (Beckman, 2015). Romantic ideals like those expressed by Shaw and Ronan found a foothold in popular music discourse in the late 1960s, when progressive/psychedelic rock artists became invested in notions of authenticity and personal expression derived both from 19th-century art music and a nostalgic view of folk music (Warner, 2003; Frith, 2007). On one hand, romanticism functions to maintain aspirational and professional musicians’ artistic practice in spite of highly variable (and typically low) financial reward, as well as constructing an ethical imperative to create more innovative and effective art. When artists understand self-expression to be the function of art, artists who find themselves unable to express themselves through existing cultural codes strive to defy and ultimately reconfigure hegemonic aesthetic discourses (“Tortured artist,” 26:31). On the other hand, the discourse of art as self-expression causes artists to feel exceptionally vulnerable when marketing and selling their art. It is for this reason that I suggest artists often view professional artistry as a form of prostitution (“Ego,” 0:00). One consequence of the intentionalist view is a fascination with the psychology of the “creative genius.” In the record industry, there may be a monetary incentive to neglect or even undermine artists’ mental health in service of the myth of the tortured artist (“Tortured artist,” 30:42).
Artists and arts educators are interested in ways to reconcile art and business in order to provide better resources and outcomes for aspiring artists. Beckman suggests that this desire has motivated arts entrepreneurship as a field of study (Beckman, 2015). Writing for arts entrepreneurship educators, I propose a model that holds artistic and business practice as two complimentary (and often indistinguishable) forms of critical rhetoric (Tomlinson, 2021). Art and commerce always take place within an established but shifting matrix of discursive practices, what Biesecker calls a “grid of intelligibility” (1992). Like Biesecker’s critical rhetoric, entrepreneurship and avant-garde art are each understood to involve exploiting the existing contradictions and fissures in their discursive matrices to open new possibilities for movement and expression. Further, by crafting narratives that effectively reconcile romanticism and nihilism (in my case study, industrial musicians and the politico-aesthetic narrative of the “information war”), artists are able to reimagine marketing & branding as an extension of their creative practice (Tomlinson, 2022). A refrain throughout the podcast (which constitutes my own myth of <artistry>) is that – because the experience of an artwork is shaped by its total context – everything an artist does is <art>. Arts entrepreneurs therefore have both the capacity and the responsibility to approach marketing with the same level of originality and craftsmanship as their art, treating, e.g., posters as visual art (“Booking & promotion,” 7:06), or band merchandise as fashion (“Merchandise,” 0:50).
Conclusion
Our audience has testified to the podcast’s helpfulness, either in comments on episodes or in private messages. One musician that I work with found our conversations on genre to be useful, writing that “the concept of genre is still a little finicky when it comes to classifying [my band] so conversations like this make it a lil easier” (personal communication, February, 2024), speaking to the special utility of genre discourse for genre-bending artists interested in navigating audience expectations. In addition to theory-oriented discussions, our “observations” episodes – where we reflect on business practices we’ve noticed in the scene and beyond – have proven especially helpful for independent artists. Another musician admitted that he began booking shows with fewer bands in response to our discussion about facilitating the audience when organizing shows (personal communication, February, 2024; “Booking & Promotion,” 8:30).
Given the warm reception the podcast has received, I will continue to upload weekly episodes after the completion of my capstone, further experimenting with form and content. Four recording sessions have been scheduled over the next month, including book reviews with guest participants and an on-site conversation at a music festival. In addition to the main series, I am uploading exclusive episodes to the subscription-based content platform Patreon. This is intended to provide additional value to fans and friends of the participating artists who may be interested in supporting the podcast and hearing casual banter and other informal parts of the sessions. If successful, this will provide a revenue stream to maintain the podcast while keeping the informative conversations public and accessible.
As the capstone to my MALS concentration, this project is (1) intellectually rigorous in its engagement with interdisciplinary scholarship and in following the critical imperative to illustrate the operations of power in society; (2) practically applicable to my career goals and to enacting meaningful change outside the academy; (3) creative in its application of sound as a rhetorical force. The theoretical component – this critical introduction – evidences my ability to engage in graduate-level scholarly writing, and serves as a recapitulation of my research throughout the MALS program to guide my future as an engineer, artist, and scholar of sound. The creative/applied component – the From the Machine podcast – has proven to be an effective way to channel my passion for theory and criticism in a non-academic setting, allowing me to explore problems and develop ideas in collaboration with other artists and to share the results with my community.
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