Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments by Alexander Refsum Jensenius (review)
Patrick Connor Dittamo · Notes · 2024
Reviewed by: Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments by Alexander Refsum Jensenius Patrick Connor Dittamo Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments. By Alexander Refsum Jensenius. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022. [xx, 283 p. ISBN 9780262544634 (paperback), $45; ISBN 9780262372213 (ebook), price varies; ISBN 9780262372206 (open access PDF), https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14220.001.0001.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Scholars have found new reason to engage with musical instruments over the last twenty years, both from within the ostensibly insular disciplinary fortress of organology and from without. While some have articulated new visions for organology, others have sidestepped internecine disputes and [End Page 501] profitably employed instruments as a lens to examine human music making and its culture, material or otherwise. For his part, Alexander Refsum Jensenius, a music technologist and researcher at the University of Oslo, endeavors to reexamine our epistemology of instruments in his wide-ranging book Sound Actions. Jensenius offers a theory of musical instruments rooted in a techno-cognitive approach, oriented by research on our cognitive processes as we interact with (music) technology. This perspective is borne out of the author's work in embodied music cognition. At the core of his theory is the relationship between our actions and the resulting sounds mediated by instruments, hence "sound actions." This theorization is not an abstract exercise. Jensenius sees humanity's musical future as predominantly (but not exclusively) electro-acoustic and is deeply concerned with the design principles underlying the instruments of the future. Sound Actions consists of twelve chapters, bookended by a prelude and postlude. While the book is divided into four thematic sections, the chapters are functionally independent, and I will treat them out of order. The first six chapters serve to ground Jensenius's theory. In chapter 1, Jensenius introduces Christopher Small's expansive concept of musicking (Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening [Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998]) and provides his own schematic gloss, the "musicking quadrant" (p. 7), a loose taxonomy of four kinds of musical engagement (creator, performer, analyst, perceiver), divided on the one hand by the modality of engagement (creative or experiential) and on the other by its temporality (in the moment of musicking, or outside of it). Jensenius offers a primer on embodied music cognition in chapter 2, canvassing a number of theoretical models and studies. Of particular importance to his theory are the sonic affordances of objects for music making (pp. 33–37), which he rechristens as an object's "action–sound palette" (p. 35). In chapter 3, Jensenius is principally concerned with the definition of musical instrument, a question which is interconnected with musicians' professional identities and increasingly complicated by the rapidly expanding arsenal of tools for modern musicking. For Jensenius, an instrument is best defined as "a mediator between action and sound" (p. 43). The author is of two minds, acknowledging the importance of definitions while also retaining a resistance to any attempt at a strict definition, as evinced in his postlude (p. 244). Ultimately, Jensenius believes taking consideration of the techno-cognitive properties of the instruments we design and use is more consequential than how we define them. Chapters 4 and 5 are closely allied. In the former, Jensenius sets out to define basic terminology for discussing "music-related body motion"—that is, any human bodily activity in a musical context (p. 53). In the latter chapter, the author taxonomizes types of music-related body motion based on their relationship to sound production (pp. 71–72). The author reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of methods for representing sound in chapter 6. He begins with a compact treatment of Western musical notation and its shorthand before turning to abstract methods of communication between electronic devices, covering the Musical Instruments Digital Interface (MIDI) standard and attempts to replace it. In chapter 9, more akin with the first six chapters, Jensenius expounds on his concept of " 'spatiotemporal distance' to explain the spatial dislocation and temporal lag between action and sound" (p. 159), which modern [End Page 502] technologies have gained the capacity to expand. To facilitate the theorization of telematic performances, he offers the relative terms in space and out of space (p. 173) to complement...