History or Resonance? Techno-Sonic Tempor(e)alities

A Different Kind of Archive: Sonic Memory

Research into past ways of listening has emerged as a new discipline of historical knowledge. Historical culture is being enriched by the ‘sonosphere’, or alternatively: ambient sound.

So far historiography has privileged visible and readable archival records (thus fulfilling Marshall McLuhan’s (2011[1962]) diagnosis in the Gutenberg Galaxy that since the Renaissance we have been dominated by a visual organization of knowledge). But since Thomas Edison’s phonograph sound, noise and voices can be technically recorded and thus culturally memorized. The Phonograph (which is to say Emile Berliner’s gramophone) registers an impressive range of acoustic events. Whereas in the musical notation (developed by the Greeks and Guido of Arezzo in analogy to the alphabet) a symbolic recording takes place, the phonograph registers the physically real frequency. The alphabetic symbolism reduces acoustic events to the ‘musical’ (harmonic order), whereas the register of the real encompasses the sonic (including noise, a-rhythmical temporal phase shifting such as ‘swing’, differing amplitudes and frequencies) – an anarchive of sound (technological storage) as opposed to the archival order of musical notation.

As a research method, an archaeology of listening differs from the desire to ‘hear history’; it does not simply aim to widen the range of source material for historians (Smith, 2004). Let us propose something like a ‘diagrammatic listening’, with the diagram having no indexical or iconic relation to a concrete sound, but rather representing a structural image (Hörbild). This brings listening into a symbolic, logical, rather than ‘historical’ field.

To what degree is listening dependent on sound as physical event? In the symbolic order of score notation, ‘structural listening can take place in the mind through intelligent score-reading, without the physical presence of an external sound source.’ As once conceived by Theodor W Adorno, ‘the silent, imaginative reading of music could render actual playing as superfluous as speaking is made by reading of written material’ (Rosengard Subotnik, 1996: 161ff).

With the phonograph, hearing becomes attentive to all kinds of sounds, regardless of their source and quality, just like the inner ear transduces vibrations analogue to electro-mechanical sound reproduction (Sterne, 2003: 33). With phonographic recording, listening became ahistorical, subject to the time-invariant reproducibility of signals. The phonograph provided sound production with a different kind of unhistorical index preserving (in Walter Benjamin’s terms) its unique ‘auratic’ experience, keeping the ‘aural’ quality (in both senses) of its time quality since a tone exists only in transience, that is, as Husserlean ‘time-object’.

The essential operation to create an archive of ‘time-based’ events, of course, is recording: either symbolically (by notation in the tradition of writing), or by media endowed with the capacity to register the physically real audiovisual signals. Therefore media-active archaeology can be applied to past sound, generating a different kind of audio-archive. The recorded signal principally stays invariant over time. But the media archaeologist, with all his or her Nietzschean ‘passion of distance’, does not hallucinate life when he or she listens to recorded voices; the media-archaeological exercise is to be aware at each given moment that we are dealing with technical media, not humans, that we are not listening to the dead but rather that dead media operate.

Sound recording does not simply unfold as an evolutionary course of technology in history, but the phonographic record on the one hand and the magnetic record on tape on the other, and finally the digital recording represents fundamentally different materialities and logics (techno/logies) in terms of their ways of registering time-variant signals, time-based forms of reproduction and their ‘archival’ being in time. The electronic tube, especially the triode, once liberated technical media from mechanical constraints thus, from erasure over time; still the tube or transistor are subject to decay over time themselves. Negentropic persistence against decay owes its ahistoricity rather to its different form of registering: not by signals (recording the physically real acoustic event), but by symbols.

Let me – in accordance with Günther Stern’s unfinished habilitation Die musikalische Situation (c. 1930) – fundamentally question the historicity of music, arguing instead for an archaeology of sound, and insist that in many respects sound – heard, recorded or transmitted – is radically ahistorical; its specificity could not be captured and subsumed by the logocentrism of traditional narrative historiography. Serious engagement with ‘the sonic’ – sound as sound and sound as time – could open up access to a plurality of non-narrative temporalities, beyond history-writing’s reliance on Gutenberg-era structures of printed language and narrative contextualization. Historians among us will probably respond with reservations on this point, stressing the cultural context of sound’s perception, production and consumption, and suggest that sound history, as any other, should guard against the persistent chimera of unmediated access to the past. ¹

Remembering Past Sonospheres by Technical Media

The presence-generating power of technically recorded voices differs fundamentally from the gŕamma-phonic notation of speech in the vocal alphabet:

In … sound recording the men and women of the past are present. Marcel Proust makes me think of bygone times. When I hear Kirsten Flagstad as Isolde, with the Royal Opera House Orchestra under the leadership of Sir Thomas Beecham, the voice of the opera legend is concretely present to my ears. The intellect tells me that the recording is 72 years old and stems from Covent Garden, but for my senses, she is with me in space, here and now. (Jakobsen, 2010: 134, emphasis in original)

Edison’s cylinders need archival protection, for sure. But once Caruso’s voice is articulated by re-playing its recording on Edison’s cylinder, human perception forgets about the archive. Historians among us will probably respond with reservations on this point, stressing that there is no unmediated access to the past. But let us not forget: technologies of memory, addressing our perception on the affective rather than cognitive level, successfully dissimulate the archive.

‘Discourse analysis cannot be applied to sound archives or towers of film rolls’ (Kittler, 1999: 5). But there is another, rather un-archival type of sound and noise sources – which is close to what humanities and classical studies have long known as the archaeological object. As an historian of science, technology and modern culture, Karen Bijsterveld (2008: 26) reminds us of that dichotomy:

Hearing the cracks and noises of a phonograph recording may initially enlighten their historical status as ‘mechanical’ instruments. Yet, the very same sounds complicate our understanding of the ‘tone tests’ of the early twentieth century in which audiences were unable to hear the difference between performers and records playing … Thus, if we take seriously the historicity of perception … recordings are a far less informative or a much more complex source.

In terms of communication engineering, such cracks belong to the kind of ‘noise’ introduced by the channel of transmission itself that is here: the channel called time (Shannon and Weaver, 1949).

When listening to ‘ancient’ recordings from Edison’s wax cylinders, nowadays being restored with techno-mathematical software as digital re-production of sound, we might ask with Michel Foucault (in context, which is slightly different from medical auscultation): message or noise (Foucault, 1994[1966]: 559)?

Media-archaeological listening to the sonic past is about listening to the technical signifier rather than to the acoustic or musical signified. Of course, both levels are interlaced; the culturally semantic content of a medium (according to McLuhan) can never be separated from the message of the medium itself.

‘Re-presencing’ Disembodied Voices

In order to convince the audience of the sonic fidelity of phonographic recording, the Edison Company in 1916 arranged for an experimental setting in the New York Carnegie Hall:

Alone on the vast stage there stood a mahogany phonograph … In the midst of the hushed silence a white-gloved man emerged from the mysterious region behind the draperies, solemnly placed a record in the gaping mouth of the machine, wound it up and vanished. Then Mme. Rappold stepped forward, and leaning one arm affectionately on the phonograph began to sing an air from ‘Tosca.’ The phonograph also began to sing ‘Vissi d’ Arte, Vissi d’Amore’ at the top of its mechanical lungs, with exactly the same accent and intonation, even stopping to take a breath in unison with the prima donna. Occasionally the singer would stop and the phonograph carried on the air alone. When the mechanical voice ended Mme. Rappold sang. The fascination for the audience lay in guessing whether Mme. Rappold or the phonograph was at work, or whether they were singing together. (New York Tribune, 1916: 3)

A similar staging of human vocal performance versus apparative acoustic operativity had been commented on by the Boston Journal in the same year: ‘It was actually impossible to distinguish the singer’s living voice from its re-creation in the instrument’ (quoted in Thompson, 1995: 132; see also Wicke, 2008). What took place is the chrono-Sirenism of His Master’s Voice, which is a presence-generating illusion, induced by technical recording.

From the first sound recording onwards, humans (like the dog Nipper on the notorious gramophone record label His Master’s Voice) can listen to the voice of the dead. This has since been a shock to the logocentristic occidental culture; logocentrism is not metaphysics any more but has become actual physical signal recording. This technologically induced trauma has not been epistemologically digested yet.

Starting in 1902, Enrico Caruso made a large number of disc phonograph recordings most of which have been re-engineered and released over the last century. It is one of the most persistent … instances of sonic remediation, as Caruso’s voice migrated from shellac to vinyl to CDs and i-pods, while all around his voice orchestral accompaniments were enhanced, removed and overdubbed. (Winthrop-Young, forthcoming, referring here to Ernst, 2011)

The posthumous career of Caruso is a sequence of media-archival transformations:

All media technologies are ‘archives of cultural engineering’, and in ways which give a lot of additional meaning to McLuhan’s mantra that the content of one medium is always another medium, each archive recursively processes another …

… These recursive remediations are not only aesthetic and commercial undertakings, they are also archaeological endeavours. If, for instance, the inscribed phonographic traces on wax cylinders from Edison’s days are opto-digitally retraced, inaccessible sound recording become audible again … Media are the new capital-s subjects of media archaeology. (Winthrop-Young, forthcoming)

Voices that have been confined to analogue and long-forgotten storage media wait for their algorithmic unfreezing.

If, for this reanimation of dead sounds and images, I dare to use the word ‘redemption’, this is not simply a reference to Walter Benjamin’s ‘messianic’ historical materialism. We might phrase it rather the other way around: Benjamin’s awkward phrasing is now itself redeemed by technical media.

Is There a ‘Sound of the Archive’?

Differing from the archive as symbolic order composed of records in historiographic, that is, in alphabetic notation, there is a para-archival modality of sub-textual, signal-based recording of the past: the sound of times past. The BBC World Service has launched the ‘Save Our Sounds’ project, looking to ‘archivize’ sounds that may soon be lost due to the post-industrial world.

The traditional sonic experience in real archives is silence; historical imagination (as expressed by the Romantic French historian Jules Michelet) though hallucinates the voices of the dead here. The media-archaeological ear, on the contrary, is trained to actually stand archival silence, gaps, voids.

But silence itself can become part of the archive. The software for sound analysis Audacity actually provides an algorithm called ‘Silence Finder’.The sheer endurance of periodic frequencies is a Bergsonian time which passes. While an empty space within a painting positively endures with time, silence in acoustics is always a temporal (though negative) event itself that I call its ‘sonicity’. This term is reminiscent of the fact that explicit sound is just a thin slice of a wider spectrum which is audible to humans. Beyond this phenomenological range, sonicity media-epistemologically refers to implicit sound as an object of knowledge about temporal forms of the vibrational event, to time signals as such (for a related approach, see Goodman, 2009, and Price, 2011).

In the negative sound of the archive, its silence, we listen to the past in its truest articulation. Let us pay respect to absence instead of converting it into the spectres of a false memory.

Written records or printed texts necessarily miss sound matter. But in the deeper sense there is implicit sonicity even in images, diagrams and graphs which are derived from sound sources; any sonagram keeps an indexical relation to the sonic event.

There is sound even from the digital archive. When an ancient ‘Datassette’ is being loaded from external tape memory into the ROM of a Commodore 64 computer, we are actually listening to data music. What we hear is not sound as memory content like an old percussion-assisted song, but rather the sound of computer memory itself, that is, a software program which is ‘scripture’ (though in the alphanumeric mode). We are listening to the data archive that is not sonic memory but sonicity.

Audio-Recordings and Their Media-Archaeological Understanding

Dis-covering the temporal implications (rather than metaphorical ‘layers’) of the archive is not just an operation of the mind or the eyes, but of hearing and literally archival ‘understanding’ as well (the German word verstehen refers to auditory as well as to cognitive perception).

Acoustically, archival silence might be re-interpreted as an enduring negation of time-based sound, as performed in John Cage’s piece 4’33’’. Whereas the classical archive which is based on alphabetic scripture is a static array of records (like parchments and papers) on the grand scale and letters on the microscale, which can be set into motion only by the act of human reading line by line, the Edison phonograph at first glance looks like the first form of ‘archive in motion’, since its ‘records’ (notably the early ethnographic field recordings around 1900, leading to the Vienna Phonograph Archive and the Berlin Phonogramm Archive) are based on a continuously rotating, technically moving apparatus both in recording and in re-play.

Strictly speaking, the phonographic record which consists of infinitesimally continuous signals instead of alphabetic or other elementary symbols is no ‘archive’ at all – with the archive being both composed of and itself representing the symbolical order of discrete elements (letters on the lower level, archival tectonics on the upper oganizational level). Phonographic inscription is different from cinematographical recording and projection of visual movement that is based on discrete, mechanically interrupted frames.

When we listen to an ancient phonographic record, the audible past (alluding to Jonathan Sterne’s, 2003, book title) very often refers rather to the noise of the recording device (the ancient wax cylinder) than the recorded voice or music. Here, the medium talks both on the level of enunciation and of reference. What do we hear most: the cultural content (the formerly recorded songs) or the medium message such as limitations in vocal bandwidth, even noise (the wax cylinder scratch and groove)?

With digital sampling and processing of audio-signals, analogue noise is usually significantly filtered, thus silenced. But the former noise is being replaced by an even more endangering challenge: the ‘quantizing noise’ on the very bit-critical (technical) level of signal sampling, and the migration problems of digital media data and the physical vulnerability of electronic storage media in terms of institutional (cultural) sound tradition. This is not just a technical question; it has an epistemological dimension as well.

The (A)Historicity of Musical Articulation and Listening

The attention to silence as the ‘sound of the archive’ leads us to discuss the relation of time, historicity and sound in a more fundamental sense.

Since the emergence of acoustics, declared once by Archytas of Taras in South Italy in the name of aisthesis (which is physiological, not cognitive perception), the physical science of sound and the cultural notion of harmonic relations drifted apart. It was Hermann von Helmholtz who insisted on their interlacing; in the world of harmonic scales, both natural laws and cultural historicism converge (Rehding, 2004: 378).

Hugo Riemann once wanted to take his share in the prestige of natural sciences, in search of the (scientifically impossible) undertone. What does this indicate? It shares with the (natural) sciences the assumption of a-historical, time-invariant laws, in an effort to translate this into aesthetic experience. A similar Kantean Widerstreit between natural-physical a-temporality and the irreducible cultural historicity takes place with technological media like sound recording. Musical listening especially merges both areas.

Musical listening, for Riemann (1914/1915: 2), is ‘logical activity’, a primarily mental process, thus a rather cognitive impression of tones, different from the merely physiological sensation of sound as physical event.

Every cultural entity, according to Wilhelm Dilthey, has a horizon of understanding (Verstehenshorizont). This leads to the familiar hermeneutic circle. Usually, we reconstruct the historicity of a piece of music by reconstructing the time horizon of its epoch; thereby we write general history and treat music as an element of that general history. But

the predominant manifestation of this spirit is the musical work itself, or to be more precise: the event of the musical work. There is no other relevant time structure for understanding a piece of music than the time structure of the music itself. The historicity of music is enclosed in the music itself. (Bayreuther and Carlé, 2012)

This eigenzeit emancipates from the standard theory of historicism.

Music creates its own history which has nothing to do with Dilthey’s and Ranke’s concepts of a Universalgeschichte. Nevertheless, we do not believe that music history according to this standard theory is redundant. Classical historical knowledge of music has its legitimation when the question is how music is embedded in broader cultural textures. (Bayreuther and Carlé, 2012)

But if we ask for the genuine historicity of music, classical historiography can only be the first step. ‘The second has to be a reconstruction of the specific time structures unfolded by the piece of music itself. These temporal relations cease to be historiographically linear ones’ (Bayreuther and Carlé, 2012) just as Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder (composed at – and for – the end of his life after the Second World War), re-enacts tonal time shapes from previous compositions in recursive transformation.

To What Degree Does the Historicity of Sound Depend on Its Material Embodiment?

The artistic media-archaeologist Paul DeMarinis (2010[2002]: 247) asks:

Is the sound of an existing Roman era bell dating from the third century a more ancient sound? For this to be the case we would have to think of the bell itself as an encoding of some ‘sound’; that sound, in turn, would have to include the splashing of the molten brass, the beating by smiths’ hammers etc. But the sound the bell produces in its current use is far from being a recording of these sounds.

Phonographic ‘engraving’ on the contrary is sound in latency. The ontological status of recorded sound is waiting to be activated (German in-Vollzug-Setzung), that is, to become medium (the Heideggerean ‘being-in-time’)?

This can be correlated with the temporal ‘window of present’ of musical experience which itself corresponds with micro-temporal actions within both primary physics and derived technologies. In fact, the Heideggerean ‘being-towards-death’, which is the temporal experience of human existence structurally (not explicitly), corresponds with musical listening when a melody is mentally experienced as a unity even if acoustically it consists of a discontinuous or fragmentary series of single tones – a phenomenon both mentioned by Henri Bergson’s philosophy of temporal duration (as opposed to mathematized time of clocking) and by Edmund Husserl as an example of innere Zeiterfahrung (the Augustinian experience of subjective time). It is its finality that determines the aesthetic experience of a melody. All of a sudden, the physically impossible ideal sinus wave in Fourier Analysis is epistemologically confronted with the transient momentum of the actually performed tone.

Modernist Spatio-Tempor(e)alty: ‘Acoustic Space’

Research into past sonospheres from long ago has emerged as a new branch of memory studies. ‘Sonic environment’ is commonly associated with industrial and other sources of noise. Let me fundamentally argue for an archaeology complementary to the social history of such sonospheres, in the epistemological sense attributed to sonic expression by Marshall McLuhan. Technical sound is not just mechanical violence to the ear or aesthetic pleasure for the brain (Von Helmholtz) but addressing the human (pseudo-)sense of temporality. The ‘tuning of the world’ (Schafer, 1994[1977]) is a timing of the world as well. What looks physical (acoustic) is temporal in its subliminal affect. If the ‘sonic environment’ is extended to so-called Hertzean waves as well, electromagnetism turns out sublime in all ways.

The chrono-poetical specificity of such sonic articulation cannot be captured and subsumed by the logocentrism of traditional narrative historiography. ‘Acoustic space’, as emphasized by Marshall McLuhan, is of a different temporal nature: not linear, but synchronous or reverberating. McLuhan once called it ‘echo land’.

Let us take this metaphor literally: acoustic echo implies delay, the very temporality induced by the medium as a channel of signal transfer which once led Aristotle in his treatise Peri psyches to deal (media-)philosophically with the ‘Inbetween’ (to metaxy) – no neo-logism as a term by Aristotle, rather a graphical neo-graphism by writing the adverb with a capital letter, thus turning it into a noun which (after its translation by medieval scholars) turned into the well-known medium.

In accordance with McLuhan, Walter J Ong (1982: 72) emphasized: ‘Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time’ – a perspective vanishing point (privileging the chrono-causal notion of origins in the time field). ‘When I hear … I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once: I am at the center of my auditory world …. You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound.’

Telephone, gramophone and radio are wave signal-based technical articulations of post-literate, and thereby post-historical, space. Such a space is understood here as the epistemological dimension of sound. Notwithstanding his confusing electricity and electronics, McLuhan thereby made a crucial discovery about the intrinsically ‘acoustic’ structure of electronic mediascapes. In a letter to PF Strawson, author of Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959), McLuhan quotes from that work: ‘Sounds, of course, have temporal relations to each other … but they have no intrinsic spatial characters’ (McLuhan, 1987[1969]: 367).

The immediacy of electricity has been valued by McLuhan as essential as the definite difference to the Gutenberg world of scriptural and printed information; whereas the typographic age resulted in abstractionism because it separated the visual faculty from the other human senses:

… today it is threatened, not by any single factors such as television or radio, but by the electric speed of information movement in general. Electric speed is approximately the speed of light, and this constitutes an information environment that has basically an acoustic structure. (McLuhan, 1987[1963]: 466)

At the speed of light, information is simultaneous from all directions and this is the structure of the act of hearing, i.e. the message or effect of electric information is acoustic – even when it is perceived as an electronic image (as defined by the video artist Bill Viola in his essay ‘The sound of one line scanning’, 1990).

Very media-archaeologically, McLuhan’s term ‘acoustic structure’ evidently refers to an epistemological ground, not to the acoustic figure (what ears can hear). This ground-breaking took place with the collapse of Euclidic space into Riemann spaces and culminates around 1900 with quantum physical notions (the para-sonic wave/particle dualism, up to the ‘superstring’ theory of today) on the one side, and Henri Bergson’s dynamic idea of matter as image in the sense of vibrating waves and frequencies (see Bergson, 1950: 276). McLuhan’s ‘acoustic space’ is oscillating time and implicitly returns in Gilles Deleuze’s ‘interval’ philosophy.

In an epistemological sense, the sonic is not about (or limited to) the audible at all, but a mode of revealing modalities of temporal processuality – even in the visual.