Exeposé
| WEEK TWENTY TWO
Music
www.exepose.ex.ac.uk
25
Are sounds real? Hugh Dignan finally reveals the truth about sound - is music merely an illusion, have we been lying to ourselves all this time?
grander affair – a “bit indulgent really,” Steadman chuckles, “but we had to have some fun!” If its Maccabees-esque production value and diverse instrumentation hint at pretension or desperation though, these boys – whose audience interaction, unlike their masterful performance, is sparse and bashful – show that it’s just another tool in the box.
ARE sounds real? Is music real? Think about it, have you ever heard anything? You may think you hear something but do you truly hear? I am of course referring to ‘hear’ in its original, proto-germanic form of ‘hausjan’ – meaning to follow or obey. Do we really ‘obey’ sounds and music? Do we follow them? No. We do not. Sound and music are things that are beyond sight and touch, therefore it is physically not possible to follow them. Nor, for that matter, are they capable of issuing orders as they lack a consciousness or any form of sentient thought. They’re not even alive. Therefore it is ridiculous to insinuate that one has ever ‘heard’ anything in their entire life. Our current outdated concept of hearing refers to the moment when sound waves enter the ear and are processed by the brain into auditory images. It makes this transfer via the vestibular and cochlear nerves inside the ear and this leads me to propose that we change our current audio ter-
minology to a process I refer to as ‘auditorial cochvest transfiguration’. For example: “I just experienced auditorial cochvest transfiguration to Justin Bieber’s latest sound wave emanations.” This new terminology more accurately reflects the scientific process of experiential sound wave penetration referred to as ‘hearing’. It also functions to emphasis the physical and psychological limitations of the process of penetration. No longer are we referring to some vague, semi-sentient German-
What follows are my spontaneous thoughts, written down while watching the video: They are in a van, that guy is definitely gay, why are they all wearing white. “Tough lives”? Bit of an understatement. Twats in an airport. Twats in an airport. That guitar doesn’t even sound real. Everything is fake. What is happening, why are they gurning so much when they sing. Oh Christ,
he said “Let’s go”. OH WHAT A TWAT WHY ARE YOU SKIPPING. Africa looks a lot like London at this point. Oh wait, here are some Africans. They’ve changed song – SO EFFORTLESSLY. This is awful. Do they know what they’re doing. They seem to be disproportionately outside Downing Street. HOLY SHIT DAVID CAMERON HOW FUNNY THIS IS BRILLIANT HE IS A POLUTICIAN
“Beethoven is an illusion, Radiohead is an illusion, Eiffel 65 is an illusion. All sounds and music are what I refer to as audiovacuum pretensions” ic command from what is essentially vibrations in the air. No longer shall atmospheric tremulousness talk. One could then move this hypothe-
sis further and declare that my previous hypothesis is in fact incorrect and that sound waves as a concept themselves do not exist and that sound is a mere illusion. For one sound does not move in waves. Therefore every wave-shaped sound you have experienced auditorial cochvest transfiguration to is in fact an illusion. Beethoven is an illusion, Radiohead is an illusion, Eiffel 65 is an illusion. Even the sound of birds is in fact an illusion. Speech is an illusion. All auditorial cochvest transfiguration is an illusion. Therefore the term ‘auditorial cochvest transfiguration’ is in actuality an utterly redundant and outdated descriptor for the silence that is reality. Therefore all sounds and music are in fact what I refer to as ‘audio-vacuum pretensions’. This is a short extract from the ‘Sound Is A Lie And So Is Your Family’ section of the full 3000-page essay ‘Nothing Is Real – Even This’. To read more find it at the edge of space where Dr.Heinrich Woolfstadm has made his home.
“We just live up to what we did before and keep going, because we’re very happy and I think we’ve managed to tell these stories honestly, and we wanna do that again next time. The next three years of life - we’ll tell the stories from that on the next album!” Catch Stornoway at Exeter Phoenix on Sunday 24 March.
One direction, one jar Frankie Plummer gives us a play-by-play analysis of One Direction’s charitable effort NOT content with destroying the first world, One Direction have opted to cover, and thereby ruin two musical classics, and are taking the third world down with them. I haven’t listened to One Direction before, largely because I’m not an 11-year-old girl. But seeing as this is the song representing one of the UK’s biggest charitable drives I thought I’d give it a go. The music video is very much
what you’d expect from a charity fundraiser, the group saying they don’t want to spend loads of money making it, instead shooting it ‘casually’ on tour. Plausibly, as the video shows, they were going to tour Africa anyway - this definitely not being a contrived way to patronise orphans with A-grade twattery. Bizarrely, the opening involves them explaining what Comic Relief actually is, as though the audience are so pre-pubescent they haven’t evolved a yearly memory capacity. As you might expect, the video involves a large amount of gurning and gaffawing, and quite a lot of jumping up and down and skipping through famine. It’s quite unsettling the amount of fun they’re having in such barren and mundane terrain. They’re so cheery by comparison that the orphans look outright glum. I found myself frequently urging the children to cheer up, I mean – IT’S HARRY STYLES WHY AREN’T YOU CRYING WITH HAPPINESS JESUS CHRIST DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW LUCKY YOU ARE?
HE’S NOT IN THE BAND HAHA HOLY MOLEY AHAH OHMYDAYS HAHAHA ORPHANS CHEERING YAY YAY ONE DIRECTION FUN FUN FREE THE WORLD FUN FUN THEY’VE CURED FAMINE YAY YAY GIVE US YER FECKIN MONEY YAY YAY ONE DIRECTION RED NOSE DAY YAAAAAAY. 7/10