Monochord

Following Heller-Roazen’s evocative retelling of the monochord’s origins (Heller-Roazen 2011), Chapter 1 opens with a closer look at the situations that prompted Pythagoras’s famous acoustic experiments. Provoked by the consonances created by the ringing of four hammers used simultaneously in a forge, Pythagoras extrapolated the rules of proportion that dictated their degree of consonance and dissonance, which he then extended to a number of different acoustic experiments including, most famously, the monochord. Resurrected centuries later by Boethius, the harmonic phenomena inherent in a single string divided into specific proportions provided the theoretical grounding for Western tonal harmony. The evolution of that musical practice, though, departed in significant ways from the actual acoustic phenomena of Pythagorean harmony, mirroring the distortions and contortions of Pythagoras’s original experiments. In Heller-Roazen’s reading, Pythagoras’s choice to ignore the fifth, dissonant hammer embodies dramatic symbolism of a more complex paradox at the heart of Pythagoreanism: the coexistence of an irreducible incompleteness alongside the compulsion to elide that deficiency. Frances Dyson expands on Heller-Roazen’s reflections in order to explore how this foundational “glitch” within Western culture supported a philosophical grounding for contemporary capitalism’s penchant for coercing irreducible multiplicity into an illusory unity of thought, purpose, and practice (Dyson 2014: 4). Dyson’s call for “resistive echo-ing, or echopraxia” embraces acoustic decay as a template for cultivating multiplicity and divergence, sown from “[t]he echoes of corporeal communication [that] rebind as they rebound” (Dyson 2014: 152-3). In turn, Annie Goh turns to the mythical character of Echo to indicate how “sounding situated knowledges” carry the imprinted traces of the myriad agencies and spaces that converge in their messy coalescence (2017: 4-5). Drawing on Goh’s Echo alongside Dyson’s echographic (Voegelin 2019: 21) critique of capitalist hegemony, I relate how the conception and construction of an alternative monochord from the chaff of industrial capitalism can craft an alternative narrative wherein the single string of the monochord braids together hybridity, relationality, and cacophony.