Michel Serres: Music and Noise, Waves and Rhythm

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.

Themes and topics

Proposals are invited for papers and artistic presentations on all aspects of music in Serres’ work, or its relevance to practice and thought in music. Topics and questions might include:

• Is there a fundamental musicality to Serres’ own thought, speech and writing? What can a musician learn from his way of working?
• Does music constitute one of Serres’ “figures of thought” (Hermès, the parasite, the quasi-object, angels, the troubadour of knowledge, Thumbelina and many others), or does it subsume them?
• How might any of these figures, or indeed the practice of identifying such elements, be relevant to the practice or understanding of music?
• Serres presents Orpheus as the ur-musician, listening for signals in the noise. Does this provide a model and ethos for the musician in our current environment?
• Serres’ thought operates in language but he presents music as ‘pre-predicative’. How might we bring ideas from Serres’ writings into the space of making or understanding music?
• He describes the musical instrument as a tabula rasa, a matrix, and as paradigmatic of the technical object. How might this help us rethink the design, role and use of instruments?
• How might Serres constant search for the narrow paths between apparently discrete domains or discourses ("The North-West Passage") relate to the state of the contemporary musician as they traverse received boundaries of discipline, language, genre or expertise?
• “Music is irreversible, yet saturated, swollen, dense with the reversible. … Its time is directed from the past into the future, but its time is that of the return.” “Music … makes the present flame out”. ("The Birth of Physics", 180-181) Does Serres’ understanding of time have implications for how we might make or conceive of music?

Format

We welcome proposals in one of the following formats:

• Presentation / conference paper (20 minutes + 10 minutes for questions)
• Research-framed performance presentation / lecture-recital (up to 30 minutes + 10 minutes for questions)

Presentations may take theoretical or practice-based forms related to the conference themes.

Submission guidelines

• Deadline: 15 June 2026
• Notification of Acceptance: 9 July 2026

Please include

• Abstract (max 300 words)
• Short bio (max 100 words)
• Format (traditional paper or performance-based presentation)
• Technical rider (if applicable)

Submissions are accepted in English and French.

Participation fee: €60 (regular) / €40 (students) The fee includes participation in the full conference programme and two lunches.

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