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Language Games by Eric Schmid

by Eric Schmid

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released April 8, 2024

Eric Schmid's latest sound art release, "Language Games," is a compelling synthesis of philosophy, mathematics, and computer-generated music that invokes a unique auditory exploration of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical text, Philosophical Investigations. The album incorporates text-to-speech renditions of Wittgenstein's work alongside the sonification of complex mathematical concepts such as homotopic path deformation in Euclidean spaces, with and without singularities.

The central theme of "Language Games" revolves around the translation of these high-level concepts into auditory experiences, reflecting Wittgenstein’s philosophy where language defines the limits of our world — the idea that understanding comes through linguistic frameworks, or "language games." Here, Schmid turns mathematical language into sound, playing with its interpretative limits much like Wittgenstein played with semantics.

The use of homotopy type theory (HoTT) in this context can be seen as an extension of Robert Brandom’s logical expressivism, which can be formalized through dependent type theory. Brandom's philosophy, deeply rooted in the pragmatist tradition, argues that meaning arises from use, not from representation. In Brandom's terms, logical vocabularies serve to make explicit the inferential roles that underpin semantic content. Similarly, HoTT enriches this view by structuring types (or propositions) in a way that any computational or logical expression reflects a potential transformation or pathway in its underlying topological space — essentially illustrating how these expressions evolve within their defined parameters.

The sound art of "Language Games" becomes a meta-commentary not only on Wittgenstein's text but also on Brandom's interpretative framework. By sonifying the deformations in R^n and R with a singularity, Schmid audibly represents the transformations and pathways, making explicit the inferential and expressive roles these mathematical constructs play in a formalization of a semantic space through type-theoretic and by extension, homotopic kernels of "language games." This is akin to Brandom’s expressivism, where the expressivity of logic lies in making these inferential roles explicit, which is reflected in the structural and transformational nature of HoTT.

Moreover, the choice to introduce a singularity partway through the composition echoes Wittgensteinian themes of the abrupt shifts in understanding that can occur as we play different language games via the conventionality of indexicality and its arbitrariness, underscoring the pragmatic "received wisdom" imparted from Master to Apprentice and its limits a la Borges' Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. This limitation of language aligns with the mathematical idea in HoTT of encountering a fundamentally different algebraic invariant of a topological space and the limitations of vast spaces such as R^n being completely equivalent to a point (up to homotopy); but when a tiny infinitesimal set (i.e. a single point) is excluded from these n-dimensional spaces, the removal breaks entire/analytic functions because said singular holes fundamentally reconstitute the space homotopically, as would the very aporias of propositional language itself.

In "Language Games," Eric Schmid not only explores the boundaries between language, music, and mathematics but also offers a rich sonic environment where philosophical and mathematical ideas resonate in harmony and tension. This release invites listeners to engage with these concepts on a sensory level, challenging them to discern the implicit logic and meaning woven through the soundscape, much as one navigates and negotiates meaning within language games themselves.

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Force Inc. / Mille Plateaux Frankfurt, Germany

Anonymous, dark, black, hidden, concealed, encrypted, opaque, undercover, incomprehensible: Ultrablack of Music dares the exodus and listens to those forces and sounds that tell of the unheard in music. Sound is the vibration, resonance and diffraction of waves in the black cosmos. ... more

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