If there are vibrations in all domains, a sort of universal acoustics, then music and information, both universals in some way, should be able to construct an epistemology founded on harmony just as easily as that which since Plato we have founded on vision.

Serres - Musique, 84

Michel Serres (1930 – 2019) stood as a unique and vital voice. Nominally a philosopher of science, his vast output addresses all aspects of contemporary thought and life: the relationships of the human with themselves, with each other, with their thought, culture, technology and environment. Serres’ thought resists reduction to a brand, to a concept©; it is a guided invitation to see, to understand, to act in new ways. He describes his thought as relational, procedural, rather than declarative. Serres’ navigating of new paths is inherently cross-disciplinary, and his ethos of thinking with rather than about our companion life-forms is essentially post-human. In the polyphony of his topics there is coherence as he identifies patterns, isomorphisms and figures as vehicles for his investigation.

Music is a continuous presence: from specific discussions in Hermès and The Birth of Physics, through the conflictual relationship described in The Parasite, the investigation of hearing and music in The Five Senses, to Serres’ exposition of its fundamental place in his late Musique and the revealing of his early ambition to become a composer. Music is the summation of all the arts. It precedes language and science; it calls into question received modes of knowledge. Like all forms of life, music receives, stores, processes and emits information.

Noise is also everywhere, a pregnant, constantly-bifurcating constant – “the background noise of the world”, “the first object of metaphysics”, the source of energy from which signals might be heard, from which resonances with other objects might emerge: “no logos without noise… Noise is the basic element of the software of all our logic”

Waves emerge to bring rhythm to the universe. They are the constant movement that radiates from every action, every thought, the waves that interfere with each other to produce new patterns, disturbances or echoes, those of the wind or the sea – another foundational element in Serres’ world.

Serres’ isomorphologies run beyond specific references; these elements become constant operators in his thought. This symposium will consider the crucial role of music in Serres’ work, and the relevance of his thought to current and future musical thought and practice. As well as the explicit place of music in Serres’ writings and life, we hope to explore the ways in which music could be seen as a further character in his community of figures, how aspects of his work could be understood as musical, and how musicians might find models for their own thought in his writing.

Thursday 12 November

Time	Concert hall
13:30 - 14:00	Registration
14:00 - 15:30	Paper session 1 Wiebe Koopal — Finding a Voice amidst the Noise: Michel Serres Listening to Francis Poulenc’s La voix (in)humaine Kevin Hunt — Music, Poetry, and the Language of Slow Portraiture: Michel Serres and the Rhythms of Real Time in Emily Andersen’s Somewhere Else Entirely Elena Peytchinska / Thomas Ballhausen — The Murmur of a Book: Music, Time, and Body in Serres' "Biogée"
16:00 - 17:30	Paper session 2 Damien Delorme — L’écoute écologique chez Michel Serres : Musique plus-qu’humaine et soin des écologies sonores Peter Nelson — Against Harmony: Music as a radical figure of thought in the crisis of planetary health Anothioy Gritten — Music, Ecology, Entropy: Reading Cage’s Plant Pieces through Serres
18:00 - 19:00	Keynote 1: Rick Dolphijn — From Euterpe to Erato: The Earth in Resonance Today
20:00 - 22:00	Performances 1 Sequence to be determined Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn — Paraphone Richard Craig — Michel Serres and the ur-musician Vittoria Quartataro — upon winged boxes Michel Kessler — Acherontic Waves

Friday 13 November

Time	Concert hall
09:00 - 11:00	Paper Session 3 Danilo Mandic — Matter and Information: the resonant quasi-object Gemma Joliffe— Interpreting wind-sound and mobilising turbulence through Serres’ Genesis Jonathan Impett — "La Musique n'est pas un savoir, mais un puits d'où sortent toutes les inventions possibles" Zeynep Toraman — The Interrupted Feast: On Aurality, Polyphony, and Parasitism
11:30 - 12:30	Keynote 2: Élie During — Music’s vertical embrace: time and the inhuman
14:00 - 15:30	Paper session 4 Paulo De Assis — Footnote 27: Deleuze, Guattari, Serres, and the Epistemology of the Anexact Lucas Braga — Looking inside the furnace: noise, music, myth, and the “acoustic turn” Hans Kretz — Rendering a Shared World Audible: Music-making, Mediation, and Collectivity
16:00 - 17:00	Keynote 3: Lucie K. Mercier — Multi-modal thinking: Harmony and the Cosmos
17:30 - 19:00	Performances 2 Sequence to be determined Uliana Bychenkova — The Dark Continent of Noise. A Feminist Politics of Excess Juan Parra Cancino — Reconstructing the Parasite: Jaap Vink, Feedback Performance, and Michel Serres’ Philosophy of Noise Burak Korkmaz Schwichow — The Third Audible and Orpheus in the Hum
19:30	Dinner

Saturday 14 November

Time	Concert hall
09:00 - 10:30	Paper Session 5 Violaine Boutet de Montvel — The Visual Parasite: Noise, Recursion, and Creative Emergence from Video Synthesis to Generative AI Rin Takahashi — La mathématique d'Orphée : musique et bruit chez le premier Michel Serres Michael Castelle — Bottou Implements Serres: Originary Noise in the the Training Processes of 21st-Century AI
10:30 - 11:00	Performance Boryeon Choi — Sonic Metamerism and the Voices Between Species
16:00 - 17:00	Keynote 4: Steven Connor — Sing with Understanding Also: The Operation of Angels
12:30 - 13:00	Wrap-up

Venue

Orpheus Instituut, Ghent (Belgium)

Selected contributions may be invited for inclusion in a post-conference publication.

Organised by

Jonathan Impett, Orpheus Instituut Ghent, Music Thought and technology research cluster.
Zeynep Toraman, composer, performer, and independent researcher

Registration is only possible via the form below:

Register now

Fees

Early bird fees (until 11 October 23:59 CEST)

Participation fee: €70 (regular) / 45 (students)

In addition, we offer a networking dinner on the evening of November 13. To help us reduce food waste and ensure accurate catering, participation in the dinner requires a small additional contribution of €25.

Normal fees (after 11 October 23:59 CEST)

Participation fee: € 100 (regular) / € 60 (students)

In addition, we offer a networking dinner on the evening of November 13. To help us reduce food waste and ensure accurate catering, participation in the dinner requires a small additional contribution of €30