M+M: Erin Edwards: Sutures and Grooves: Modernist Skull Media and the Sounding of the Human

Respondent: Gavin Steingo (Music)

In a 1919 essay entitled “Primal Sound,” Rainer Maria Rilke fantastically imagines using the phonograph stylus to “play” the coronal suture of the skull, thereby liberating a previously unknown range of sound, music, and emotion. “Primal Sound” describes a posthuman positionality whereby one might use the prosthetic extension of technical media to engage in a radical self-examination—an “auto-autopsy” that bypasses the evaluative apparatus of the rationalist subject and directly accesses the previously buried acoustic life of the human…