Drone,Repetition And Power:Sonic Grounding Acts

This paper explores the notion of drones and their grounding function in a variety of sonic contexts.Understood musically as sustained tones ”with little or no variation in pitch” and present in different traditions of organized sound,in its core drone is the repetition of a sonic event at a stable frequency.Drones exist across different orders of magnitude from infrasonic to ultrasonic.Given the conceptual flexibility of this term,we can assume that there's a certain context-specific“floating”threshold ofintensityatwhichmererepetitioncanberecognizedasdrone ranging from periodic cycles of mathematically infinite sine wavesto discrete acoustic events within the structure of the musical composition and beyond it.It is thus possible to extend the notion of drone to cover a variety of sonic phenomena where ”sonic” denotes not the anthropocentric concept of audible sound,but the total-ity of oscillatory phenomena.The central concept of this research is that of the ground.Paying close attention to its etymology allows us to access a multitude of meanings the English word“ground”contains.Human existence relies on a variety of physical and symbolic grounds,and certain kinds of repetition,such as that found in rituals,we engage in may be regarded as the acts of “grounding”,the search for the ultimate origin being their goal.Paradoxically repetition commands powers of both forgetting and remembering,distorting time and at the same time structuring it.The main research question of this paper can then be formulated as following:if we consider drone as sonic repetition par excellence,the ultimate sonic ground in its audible and inaudible manifestations,what new perspectives on questions of time,memory and technology can we get by lending an “impossible ear” to long tones.