Gilbert Simondon’s ‘Transduction’ as Radical Immanence in Performance

Abstract

Transduction is Gilbert Simondon’s key concept for understanding processes of differentiation and of individuation in a number of fields, including scientific disciplines, social and human sciences, technological devices, and artistic domains. Originating from the sciences and crucially developed in its philosophical implications by Simondon, transduction refers to a dynamic operation by which energy is actualized, moving from one state to the next, in a process that individuates new materialities. This chapter appropriates this concept for musical practice, aiming at establishing a foundational conceptual layer for a broader research effort that crucially includes artistic practice—both composition and performance—as its starting and end points. After an introductory depiction of what transduction might mean for a music performer, this paper focuses on the presentation of different definitions of transduction, mainly stemming from Simondon himself, but including two further extensions: one to Deleuze’s concept of haecceity (and via Deleuze, to my own micro-haecceity), the other to Brian Massumi’s notion of corporeality. Keeping in mind the potential of these definitions for the making of music, this essay explores eight different, yet complementary ways of thinking transduction, which are presented in a growing scale of complexity from the incandescent light bulb (3.1.) to the intricacies of decision-making in living organisms (3.8.), passing by the question of time and temporality (3.2.), thermodynamics (3.3.), information theory (3.4.), a redesigned theory of haecceities (3.5.), Riemannian topology (3.6.), and corporeality (3.7.). All these topics are presented here in short, as opening gates to wider fields of inquiry, suggesting future avenues of research, rather than claiming to offer finished thought.

uso de processos estocásticos como recurso criativo no desenvolvimento de um sistema composicional

“…Quando elementos extramusicais são utilizados na elaboração de um sistema composicional, trazendo-os para o domínio da música, podemos chamar essa transformação de transdução entre domínios, numa concepção mais abrangente do termo, como proposta por Simodon (Assis 2017). No caso da presente pesquisa, os processos composicionais de Xenakis foram utilizados de forma concomitante com o material extramusical presente na literatura oulipiana de Italo Calvino.…”

Glacial Sensing: Entanglements of Sound and Vision

“…Drawing from physics, Gilbert Simondon's work expresses transduction as a process by which energy is converted from one state to another: as Paulo de Assis (2017, 695) describes it, “a dynamic operation by which energy is actualized, moving from one state to the next, in a process that individuates new materialities.” In music and the arts, as much as in science, transduction refers to the beginning moment in which an “infinite reservoir of possibilities exists … a cloud of high energetic potentialities” (696). Here the virtual or “spectral” signals are not ghostly doppelgängers of some real thing in the world but echoes of an actual material perceived in the moment.…”