Neo-Auratic Encoding: Phenomenological Framework and Operational Patterns

In the theoretical model of the Audiotactile Formativity which has recently been put forward by the author, two crucial notions can be identified: the audiotactile principle (ATP) and the neo-auratic encoding (NAE). The latter is intended, from the point of view of a cognitive anthropology, as the whole of the cognitive and aesthetic processes which spring from the availability of audio(visual) recording. The function of the NAE is highly relevant as far as the phenomenological detection of those musical traditions called “audiotactiles” (jazz, rock, world music) which, albeit showing shared formative-receptive devices with oral cultures under the poietic and aesthesic point of view, keep their distance from them from the perspective of the anthropology of the text, which ceases to be evanescent and transitory, and crystallizes on the audio(visual) medium. The audiotactile music is thus made available to the criteria of the late-modern aesthetic by this state of affairs, and in this respect it differs from the music of traditional cultures; moreover, textual identity cannot be traced back to a mere performative tradition, as it happens in oral cultures, but it physically takes the shape of the recorded artifact. This essay analyzes some of the operational modalities through which the cognitive processes linked to the NAE participated in and underwent modifications during the history of rock and jazz, and in correlation with recorded Western art music. In the first part of the twentieth century, the neo-auratic phenomenology, influenced by the pre-magnetic recording techniques, allowed for temporal reversibility only with an aesthesic function, with the ability to listen repeatedly to a given recording. This cognitive dimension (Primary NAE) promotes the priority of the performative aspect, with its irreversible internal temporality, of which the recording represented a sound document (an “allographic” documentary function in the case of Western art music, and “autographic” in the case of jazz). In the second half of the twentieth century, with the introduction of recording techniques on magnetic tape, which allowed editing and montage processes, temporal reversibility is established at the poietic level as well, allowing the insertion of allogenic temporalities in the recorded artifact (Secondary NAE), homologously to musique concrète and electronic music. This introduced a new cognitive image of the recorded artifact, which moves away from the documentation of an irreversible event, becoming a self-determined phenomenological object, made more and more independent by the performative process (rock phenomenology is connected more to this cognitive shift than to stylistic processes). These different operational models of the NAE mark the transition from the Era of Technical Reproducibility of work of art – for audiotactile music, but also for Western art music – to that of Technical Producibility, in which we still live