The momentum is the message: an analogue theory of analogue music

Since the relentless expansion of digital technologies in the latter decades of the twentieth century, the distinction between the analogue and the digital has become a perennial source of debate across a variety of fields and disciplines. In these discussions, the analogue and the digital are frequently positioned as opposites, with each term acquiring a symbolic weight that extends far beyond its technical meaning. In musicological discourse, it is difficult to escape ongoing debates concerning the advantages of one format over the other. In this thesis I argue that conceptions of analogue music technologies and their role in music production are consistently vague and enwrapped in romantic notions of authenticity and presence. Drawing upon the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, I develop a conception of analogue musicking that understands these technologies through his philosophy of becoming and modulation, treating them not as ideals of authenticity or purity but as material and operational systems defined by continuity and variation.

The fundamental distinction between analogue and digital is that analogue technologies operate continuously while digital technologies operate discretely through quantisation and calculation. Whereas analogue music technologies collect and store continuous signals in or on the media used, such as tape, digital technology quantises signals and stores them through a binary discretising process. In this thesis, I frame the conflict between analogue and digital music in terms of the broader philosophical distinction between continuity and discreteness. I construct a relation between analogue music technologies and the continuous philosophy of Deleuze. In his recent work, Alexander Galloway argues that Deleuze, with his emphasis on continuity and smoothness along with his rejection of formal axiomatics and traditional semiotics, is a pro-analogue and anti-digital philosopher. Informed by this reading, I stage a critical encounter between Deleuze’s analogue philosophy and analogue music, showing how it can shed light on the specific operations and behaviours of these technologies.

While Deleuze provides the primary orientation, I also draw upon Bergson’s conception of duration and Simondon’s theory of individuation and the open machine. Together, these philosophies reveal analogue musicking as an ontogenetic process that generates difference through modulation and continuous transformation.