Making Audible Forces That Are Not Audible in Themselves
It is not a question of using works taken as musical examples to reach an abstract concept of time where one could say: “This is musical time.” It is a question of taking limited, determined cycles under certain conditions to extract particular profiles of time, and then potentially superposing these profiles to make a veritable cartography of variables. This method concerns music but could just as well be used for a thousand other things.
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Pulsed time and non~pulsed time are completely musical, but they are something else as well. The question would be to know what makes up this non~pulsed time. This kind of floating time which more or less corresponds to what Proust called “a bit of pure time.” The most obvious, the most immediate feature of such a so~called non~pulsed time is duration, time freed from measure, be it a regular or irregular, simple or complex measure.
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Turning to a completely different domain, I think that when biologists now speak of rhythms, they have found similar questions. They have also renounced the belief that heterogeneous rhythms are articulated under the domination of a unifying form. They do not seek to explain the articulations between vital rhythms, for example the 24~hour rhythms, in terms of a superior form that would unify them, or even in terms of a regular or irregular sequence of elementary processes. They seek an explanation somewhere completely different, at a sub~vital, infra~vital level in what they call a population of molecular oscillators capable of passing through heterogeneous systems, in oscillating molecules coupled together that then pass through groups and disparate durations. The process of articulation does not depend on a unifiable or unifying form or a meter, cadence or any regular or irregular measure, but on the action of certain molecular couples released through different layers and different rhythmic layers. We are not only using a metaphor to speak of a similar discovery in music: sound molecules rather than pure notes or tones. Sound molecules, coupled together, are capable of passing through totally heterogeneous layers of rhythm and layers of duration. Here lies the first determination of non~pulsed time.
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Music is thus no longer limited to musicians to the extent that sound is not its exclusive and fundamental element. Its element is all the non~sound forces that the sound material elaborated by the composer will make perceptible, in such a way that we can even perceive the differences between these forces, the entire differential play of these forces.
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There is no absolute ear; the problem is to have an impossible one ~ making audible forces that are not audible in themselves. In philosophy, it is the question of an impossible thought, making thinkable through a very complex material of thought forces that are unthinkable.
~Gilles Deleuze
“Making Inaudible Forces Audible” ~ Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975~1995 (Tr. Ames Hodges & Mike Taormina) NY : Semiotext(e), 2006 / pgs 156~60
