Hobnobbing with the most bitter of postmodern cynics, musical aesthetics have plateaued and dulled; bodies gigue mechanically only to the orchestras of CBDs, and so where might we look today for musical inspiration? Better and beyond here and now, let us heed Luigi Russolo and turn inwards to the human capacity for culturally attuned listening, where the potential musicality of noise resides. Digital technology enables accurate repetitions of single sounds to instigate what Pierre Schaeffer calls ‘reduced listening’ on an audience, which in turn offers an opportunity to realise the aesthetics of perception above simply the perception of aesthetics. Flanear is a public art soundscape project that aims to rightfully return appreciation and enjoyment of Melbourne’s CBD environment to the auditory beholder.
Observing the linear evolution of Western music, a notion unattainable in human sciences, Flanear attempts to prophesise the direction in which music will develop. Jacques Attali acknowledges the socially reflective nature of music throughout history, from 10th century liturgical to classical to modern popular. Music as an immaterial product of a dynamic society necessarily embeds itself within the theoretical contexts of its time. Unlike the sciences with their malleable axioms and contradictory paradigm shifts, the forerunners of any type of music are the people who create, perform and consume it, rather than the music that precedes it. With this in mind, Flanear is certainly not merely a soundscape; it is a revelation of the musicality of noise and the celebration of ‘prosumers’ transcending their supposedly initial Internet context and fixing their place within all perception of art. Where, indeed, will music go from here? Folk, secular, sacred, Baroque, minimalist, electronic, ska, death metal; postmodernists may be satisfied with settling on the pastiche, quotation and appropriation answer. What I am suggesting through my project is that the development of musical aesthetics does not lie within the structural elements of tonality, rhythm or timbre, but rather in a reversion back to almost ‘primitive’ listening practices. As bodies with increasingly translatable boundaries, returning to our inherent bodily capacities – inclusive within and observant of, but always autonomous in the robotics of contemporary life – the act of listening itself will find newfound importance as we embrace the aesthetics of perception above the perception of aesthetics.
