Contemporary Music Review

ISSN: 0749-4467 (Print) 1477-2256 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmr20

Agostino Di Scipio: Audible Ecosystems

Makis Solomos

To cite this article: Makis Solomos (2014) Agostino Di Scipio: Audible Ecosystems, Contemporary
Music Review, 33:1, 2-3, DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2014.906673

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2014.906673

Published online: 06 May 2014.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 504

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gcmr20
Contemporary Music Review, 2014
Vol. 33, No. 1, 2–3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2014.906673

EDITORIAL
Agostino Di Scipio: Audible Ecosystems

We are living today in a world, where sound is everywhere, and at every moment. One
could think that this situation realizes the musician’s most beautiful dream. But this is
not the case; on the contrary, this sounds more and more like a nightmare. Why is it
so? As the phenomenon we are referring to when we say that sound is everywhere is
only rarely an aesthetic phenomenon and, even more, it is very often a kind of
reified, frozen entity, with no human (subjective, bodily, spiritual, meaningful, etc.)
content. If, for twentieth-century music, the main question was, as Varèse said, to ‘lib-
erate sound’,1 for the music of today, the urgency is to ‘take care’ of sound, and to
deconstruct its reified manifestations. The Italian composer Agostino Di Scipio
makes an important step towards this direction, by criticizing the idea of sound as
an object, i.e. as an entity with no interactions with what surrounds it (space, the
environment, the listener, etc.):

As a phenomenon of human experience, sound is never really object and is always

event. We can always attend to it as the audible manifestation of relations and inter-
actions in the space-time unity of experience, in the here-and-now. A non-objecti-
fying attitude is at work here, sensitive to the ecology of the living, embodied process
that auditory perception is. This is in fact something the body knows well, but that
we have unlearned: sound is difficult to objectify (electronically generated sound is
no exception). Sensed in its unfolding in time across the tridimensional space, sound
spreads around and within the listening body, as well as across and within the body
of the sound source. As it takes place (and that takes time), it also takes on the
semantic connotations of the place, as an event in and of the environment. (Di
Scipio, in press)

Agostino Di Scipio is today a well-known composer and theoretician, especially in the

circles of computer music and live electronics.2 His music is regularly performed, his
ideas circulate more and more, and many articles are devoted to him. Thus, it was time
to edit a whole issue of a review focused on his work. I wish to thank Peter Nelson who
accepted that Contemporary Music Review would play this role. Most of the articles
were first presented as papers in May 2013, in the international symposium Music
and ecologies of sound. Theoretical and practical projects for a listening of the world orga-
nized at University Paris 8, France (http://www-artweb.univ-paris8.fr/spip.php?
article1677). This symposium had special sessions focused on Di Scipio’s notion of

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

 Editorial 3
‘audible ecosystems’, which reconstructs sound as an event existing in interaction with
what surrounds it.

Makis Solomos

Notes
[1] Cf. my recent book (Solomos, 2013), which analyses the history of this liberation.
[2] He was keynote speaker in the ICMC (International Computer Music Conference) 2013 in
Australia.

References
Di Scipio, A. (in press). Sound object? Sound event! Ideologies of sound and the biopolitics of music.
Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology.
Solomos, M. (2013). De la musique au son. L’émergence du son dans la musique des XXe-XXIe siècles.
Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.