The Maryanne House, or the extra_musical (Fragments of a Lobe Story)

1

Lamina Dyre, who called herself my sherpa, said as we stood by the back entrance of the Maryanne House: “We’re in the oldest part. Servant’s quarters.” A few moments earlier, I had taken a cocktail of targeted drugs temporarily exciting parts of the frontal and temporal lobes (including the auditory cortex, the hippocampus, and the amygdala), those areas which evidently collude to produce a mental model, a psychedelic Victorian mansion called a Maryanne House. This occult mental construct is named after Maryanne Amacher, esteemed phonomagus, in honour of her psychoacoustic experiments. However, peregrinating through its rooms, something I did once in a while, is nothing like experiencing one of her Music for Sound-Joined Rooms installations, in which sound was modulated through the structures of a house rather than heard via speakers. This instead was tantamount to walking through your neuro-musical system, the brain vectors which collude to produce your perceptual reality of music. The model is a prosthetic, giving you returns on your operating system, even if unpredictably skewed. Lamina once explained it to me as a quantum game of questions, in which the decoding of the room’s message produces the percept. The manifestation of this house-incorporation was first noticed in so-called hypermusiac patients with particularly enlarged auditory cortices and cerebella, some of whom had also been diagnosed with Williams Syndrome, finding themselves helplessly attracted to music, and to musicalizing the non-musical. Something about movement when it could be entrained to music was different in people with Williams than other kinds of movement.

Lamina mused. “This room, which is falling apart as you can see, has a mind of its own. One that acts before the one you call mind. It has something to do with primal emotion—startle, fear, rage, calm, gregariousness. Especially gregariousness. Its affects are already nudging you in a particular direction, though you don’t know it yet. But it also keeps you playing in time by coordinating the chaos of signals, keeps you entrained, habituated.”

The music, though severely mangled, was intimately familiar. Glitched-out perversions of the dense hyper-associative music I had been recently enmeshed in making, now beginning to saturate my thought-body in navigation. Unstable, precarious.

2

Lamina paused at the bottom of the basement stairs. “These are some of the more physically wrought of your numbers, your body contorted, hyperspasmic, spastically splayed across the keyboard.”

I instantly flashed back to an early performance that had initiated this form of deviant address. The intensity of the visuals, the spectacle, the theatre was too much for some listeners, who had to shelter their eyes from the deconstructing going on, despite the fact that the event took place at a celebrated experimental music festival. Though the physical engagement might have been deemed excessive to some, to me, it was the other way around: the sounds were the by-products of a strictly performance art intrigue with music as the subject.

Lamina continued. “But these exertions have all been… reduced, stripped into MIDI sequences. All that’s left to contemplate is pitch, timing and dynamic, the three remaining parametric affordances. Huge swaths of the extramusical, disappeared, gone forever. It’s a huge loss, perceptually speaking. But don’t despair, the reduction, as draconian as it is, opens the floodgates to all sorts of embodied hypotheses, depending on who’s in the Maryanne House. Think of this translation as an adversarial input, a signal superimposed onto the original, like in machine learning, that induces misrecognition, weird perceptual completion.”

Lamina had dropped the term extramusical. A quaint concept from the advent of so-called absolute music, mid 19th century, a shorthand for the expulsion of the intolerable frictions and slippages the musical signal suffers from its literary, programmatic, political associations, and conditions of production. A shorthand for cleansing, if you will.

Lamina mused by the boiler, continuing the thought. “The outside of music that can’t be fully repressed by the conventions of musical expression. Like deletions that make their way into consciousness by the effect of their absence, the catastrophe they leave in their wake. This House tells you how the excluded make their way back in. There are clues, remainders. You’ve seen Interstellar, the dust patterns, another, higher dimension punching through, trying to communicate. It’s a pareidolia machine, where we are now, which latches onto salient information, familiar fragments, and then sends them upstairs through motivational, expectation-reward channels, which frames your feeling of the future of this music. This machine radiates throughout the whole house. In the Maryanne House, the work of bringing this body into existence is done by you, like an autonomically activated medium. And reductions have a tendency to irresistibly compel your frontal machinations to complete the circuit. In each room, you try to resolve this anomalous signal into a coherently embodied set of actions. All of these rooms are linked and operating concurrently. What you’re getting in each room is amplification, intensification. Once you understand a signal you thought was transparent houses untold opacities, other kinds of relations evolve, structures of desire, slower forms of life.

3

Entering the parlour, a large room set up as a bar with tables and couches, Lamina declared: “It’s like how colour makes an appearance on black and white TV sets, through moiré patterns. Something technically impossible, outside of the capacities of that particular system still gets smuggled in. And it’s good old mètis. Ancient cunning intelligence, banned by Plato for its use of deception as a mode of navigating life and gaining advantage. It’s a highly pragmatic mode of proceeding, leveraging a situation’s affordances with as minimal effort as possible to alter the balance of power. All these highly idiosyncratic gestures get differently resolved once they pass through the MIDI ablation process. Look at what happens when an uncontrolled seizuring oscillation is recuperated as an act of virtuosity by a body performing the instrument normatively. The erasure of the visually offending, disturbing non-normative body cashes out as a virtuosity effect. The non-intentional is instantly made intentional, rationalized, but now within a superhuman kind of body. The ear is radically refigured in that moment.”

It was true. The nonstandard techniques employed, however achieved, their visual, haptic traces obliterated, left a skeletal aural residue resolved into a nimbly fingered matter, which reminded me that fundamentally piano playing comes down to speeds of attack, their visually perceptible motivations almost functioning as surplus to this quantitatively tractable core. Dynamic is called velocity in MIDI lingo, after all. Yet here, this ostensible virtuosity is caught in a fragmented, distracted temporal succession, a skittish insect-time undercutting its effectiveness, unsettling it while also forestalling the stabilization of a coherent body-image. Expectations were a malleable, tactile material in this room, the overall strategy of the music, inscrutable. Could syntactical strangeness be a form of mètis, inducing the urge to jump listening scales and attend more cautiously to the potential motivations behind the micro-moments?

Lamina jumped in emphatically. “This room conjures stories about the phenomena occurring, a very powerful tendency that takes work to override, or at least temporarily trick. And these rooms respond to that effort, in the meantime focalizing the myriad of modes by which you restore normative images, even if obliquely, through the back door. A qualitative shift to a whole other kind of music can take place anytime by latching onto hidden substrates that can’t actually be heard in the moment. You have to learn to force some of those occult(ed) virtualities into broad daylight. Or brain lesions force them on you, allocating damaged functions to other areas of the brain, leading to a qualitatively different neural organization.”

My hands twinged, bent, out of joint as Lamina paused to listen. “Paralysis sounds so… copacetic now. All that physical tension tamed into pealing tones. The auditory evidence can’t account for the massive energy expenditure that undoubtedly went into this. But this apparent excess is nonetheless constitutive, and already leading you towards bodily hypotheses. Your mirror neurons are actively investigating what this body, the body behind this fugitive music can do.”

4

I started getting the feeling Lamina had been talking it up a bit too much, trying to induce the feared pareidolia herself, the perceptual completion which this music appeared especially permeable to. Top-down resetting the bottom-up, if you know what I mean. But she was my sherpa. And she had, after all, been to an actual brick-and-mortar Maryanne House, one of Amacher’s original house invasions in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1980, which sonically irradiated the Victorian mansion of conductor Dennis Russell Davies. She even attended her Mini-Sound-Series at the Capp Street house in San Francisco, structured like a TV series evolving over six weekly iterations, exploring as Maryanne put it, “scenarios existing between acoustic space and mind interpreting pattern, subjective threshold, physiological resonance.” These sonic soap operas mobilized spatial and acoustic memory in ways that few other artists had explored. “Heard as though many miles away, or felt inside the listener,” her mantra, perfectly described the effect of this sunroom.

The music had become grey, more abstract and clustural, as it gained in visceral, invasive palpability. A lack of discernable melodic or harmonic points of orientation returned you to its statistical impact. Memory couldn’t be operationalized amidst such elusively gestural patterning, the collateral damage of visually oriented, extramusical maneuvers chopped from the signal. But it was nice to be let off the narrative hook temporarily. That structure of expectation sure is exhausting once your attention is drawn to it. Here the extra_musical broke through differently. By being somewhat oblivious to the sonic resultant of these transgressive approaches, gauche and inept, or deskilled, the impression persisted of an unretainable sameness, ungraspable in its infra_differentiation, and at the same time violently returning you to spatial and gestural multitudes.

“Data breakouts,” Lamina said matter-of-factly. “The physically unorthodox origin of this music and the fact of its suppression sometimes yields a net result that sounds like some kind of data sonification. Goes off on a nonhuman tear, if you know what I mean. It reminds me of that Leif Elggren CD, Virulent Bodies, which contained alleged sonifications of eight highly potent viruses, with ample warning on the cover. The ways bodies, viruses come into and out of materialization is just a product of combinatorial operations.”

5

A door at the back of the sunroom opened onto a small hallway leading deeper into the house, an unassuming sitting room at the end of it. On entering, the music underwent a shocking spatial transformation such that it now seemed to radiate from yet another room, perhaps a bathroom, behind a door at the back. It was an odd crossover into the warped spatialities of Maryanne’s world.

Lamina whispered. “This room powers that YouTube genre, the one that stages pop songs in various acoustical, emotionally saturated environments. You remember listening to this one at the going away party, when you were hurling your cookies?”

I didn’t. But Lamina’s suggestion had the effect of resolving the music’s anxiogenic politics of interference into a quasi-melodic linear message. Cleaned up. One of many possible adversarial overlays on a haphazard musical situation that skews its content.

Lamina drifted. “People long for spatial emotional connections. The muzakified Toto in the deserted mall is full of melancholic possibility. Maryanne led the way towards thinking of music, space and affect as being closely imbricated in the brain, merging into a coherent narrative… corpus collusion. These YouTube things are simulations, reverbed and EQ’d in the computer, without ever having encountered any acoustic space whatsoever, without having become spatial. Maryanne on the other hand used the architectural features of a building to magnify the expressive dimensions of music, to expose hidden affordances. Any message that rides this circuit has a better chance of getting encoded into memory. The sunroom we’ve just come from emotionally parses short-term memories, valences the more ambiguous ones and sends the sufficiently saturated ones packing into cold storage, therein constructing the basis for future comparisons. Emotional tagging. A nightmare to which we’re more or less hopelessly subjected to, as anosognosic humans.”

The emotional pangs that had been tentatively stalking now located their object, a threshold of recognition crossed, a hidden lamentation connecting the pitches foregrounded by the music’s spatial projection, a melody that would have remained hidden but for this fortuitous spatialization. Even if unknown, it elicited the feeling of something once heard.

“Normally, the amygdala doesn’t get involved in this kind of jagged-edged noise music, but given your hypermusial tendencies, it’s just the kind of thing to go down a rabbit hole with. Williams people, like hypermusiacs, use a vastly larger set of neural structures than everyone else does, and the emotional centres are especially activated. The world of sound is coded musically and affectively at the same time. It’s definitely an umwelt. But you can see how easy it is to change a music’s tenor, amplifying and attenuating differentially, surfacing patterns, inventing continuities, secreting feelings. Imagine computing transitions between these affectively valenced states. Whole industries are dedicated to the minutiae of pareidolic triggering.”

6

Lamina slowed as we approached another exit. “This door crosses over to another kind of house… where things work differently.” She pulled out a folded paper which, unwadded, revealed the early 17th century diagram Egregorus Occulturalis by Mercurius ‘Scurra. “It’s always on me. We’re flipping into the realm of imago, where illusions are marshaled. You can flip to the other side of the möbius in many places. This is one of them.”

The door opened onto a staircase leading to the third, topmost floor, constituted by two rooms facing each other. Lamina entered the left one first. “It’s the spatial counterpart to the room we started in, where your playing is concerned. This is where your body and its body, the body of the extramusical, start to intersect. In the polar bedroom where we are, interval sizes, distances between notes, adumbrate the physical contours of the hands executing these passages. Completely free of pitch. Just contours. Via mirror neurons, your upper body is slowly molding to these erratic fluxes.”

As we entered the opposing bedroom, which Lamina called “temporal,” the music’s physical coordinates began unrelentingly asserting themselves. Repeated notes or chords established the perimeter within which the hand and the forearm could navigate. The incautious sideswipes and collateral clusters that inevitably accompanied these stubborn iterations thereby materialized hints of the unstable, febrile, clumsy body that rendered them. The accidents through which the body could surface. And what’s more, these manifestations were now indexed to their precise location on the keyboard, further activating mirror neurons no doubt, and cementing the hand-keyboard topology.

Lamina interjected. “This room’s extra large this time. All that perfect pitch recognition, helpless in your case. And your friends love testing you on it, don’t they? Here it’s clarifying the kinetic prerequisites, the bodies necessary to make this music happen.”

The music sporadically broke out into machinically stuttering formations, highly charged drones with tensile activity teeming inside, colored by a weirdly dub echo effect.

“It’s not echo. I’ve heard this before. It’s uncontrollable shaking. Tremors with a will of their own which the reductive ecology you’re enmeshed in has resolved as echo and absolved you in the process. The visuals of an oscillating body are shall we say somewhat repugnant to most people, who prefer to evacuate that particular extramusical from their musical experience. You don’t have to account for the brute labor that directly informed this performance unless the music somehow tells you to.”

7

Lamina whispered conspiratorially as we descended another, darker staircase at the end of the hall. “There are two musics in one. One for this world, another for a world to come. One, exoteric, offering a plausible set of narrative structures compatible with known musical logics. The other, esoteric, a complex concatenation of affective and gestural infelicities, only accessible through skillful, speculative reconstruction. There’s a shadow piece dormant only partially, and paradoxically accessible once its perversion, occultation, transduction, has been accomplished. Steganophonic subterfuge. The suppressed finding its way back in.”

As we approached the two grand pianos in the middle of the room, the music erupted into a wild peroration, contorting my entire upper body as if from the inside, like an active probing for vectors of application was underway. Thresholds were being located, above which virtuosic yet humanly performable music uneasily ceded to de-anthropomorphized configurations requiring another kind of body or bodies. I thought about Lamina’s “data breakout.” Maybe in order to pierce through to this dimension, the playing had to become alien to itself, and begin to observe less “musical,” abstract approaches imported from other domains which might paradoxically be reclaimed as aberrant bodily gesturing, in a kind of speculative reverse acoustical transduction. Who knew?

Lamina pointed to a small trap door in the corner of the room. “There’s a backchannel to the parlour through there. This area insulates the temporal from the frontal. It’s charged with regulation of the body’s homeostasis, which connects motor control, self-awareness, cognitive functioning, interpersonal experience, subjective emotional experience… body representation… empathy. All this makes it something of an affective nexus for emergent embodiments of the alien variety. A transitional portal linking the recognition of emotional expressions by the mirror neuron system with the limbic system involved in generating and amplifying them dopaminergically through reward and reinforcement. This is the room that makes an addict out of you.”

Lamina smirked, as the music mercurially pivoted to quiet, nervous stasis. “I haven’t been totally straight with you. These aren’t reduced performances of yours, exactly. They’re the products of an unsupervised machine learning autoencoding process tasked with generating accurate likenesses of your playing extrapolated from the stripped-down remains that began at a critical point developing self-assembling logics. Developing elsewise. The process iteratively speculates on the bodily technics required to render this music, the same way you’re doing now. Biometric technology is just a set of instructions employed to abstract the body, living or otherwise, into machine-readable information. Which is why we’re getting all the body mapping data from you now, from your head down to the tips of your fingers. The way your body copes with organisms the machine has degenerated is most interesting! When context is flushed and the records have been reconfigured, what stories rush in, and how quickly do they become normalized into obscurity, melting into the background where they can stealthily ground future perceptions? The shiver, the chills you’re feeling, have nothing to do with pleasure. It’s your insula ratifying the machine simulation’s hold on your body, which emotionally locates, grounds it in a spatial reality it never yet has had to contend with. Your body, at the source of all of this, alienated back to you, reconstituting itself in you!”