[It is] in the phonograph
record as a thing that its potential significance—and
also its aesthetic significance—resides
Adorno, 'The Form
of the Phonograph Record' |
This paper is an attempt to divine a medium's message, that
medium being the phonographic recording, primarily but not only
in the form of the record. There are, of course, a plethora of
excellent studies of recording and the record, but these have
tended to examine the effect of recording on music (the work of
Michael Chanan, Mike Katz and others), the cultural meanings and
practices associated with recorded music (the seminal essays that
form Eisenberg's The Recording Angel), or the wider sociocultural
history of sound technologies (Stern's Audible Past for
example). What remains less explored are the aesthetics of the
record itself: how is the record, as a technology with a well-documented
history, also a signifying medium that has generated certain meanings,
and modes of aesthetic production and reception? Adorno's
suggestive but scant writings on the relationship between music
and the phonograph come closest to initiating such a project.
So, Adorno-like, it is with the thingness of the record that I'll
begin, initiating a series of epigrams linked by a somewhat associational
chain of thought.
Time-binding.
The sound recording did what no medium had done before: it captured
and preserved the flow of time, turning sounding-flow into a virtual
object, creating a river which can—contrary to the words
of Heroclitus—be stepped into twice. The recording can thus
be described as a time-binding medium (Innis in Peters, 2004,
p.138). In contrast to that other great 19thC invention, the photograph,
which preserves a point in time, the phonographic record allows
the revisitation of a time-stream, rather than the sequence of
stills which create the illusion of continuous time in the tellingly
misnamed moving image. Despite this significant difference, all
three media produce permanence from evanescence, reifying fugitive
experience and turning it into a thing in the form of a print,
a reel of film, a wax cylinder, a shellac disc. Adorno, again:
'evanescence and recollection… has become tangible and manifest
through the gramophone recording' (1934/2002, p.279).
The Intractable Recording.
It is perhaps a measure of the extent to which recording has been
naturalised that we're disinclined to reflect on the ontology
of recorded sound: yet it is worth denaturing. Reading the recording
through the lens of the photograph's ontology tells us much in
this regard. Of the photograph, Barthes writes that its referent
is 'not the optionally real thing to which an image or
a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has
been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph…
in Photography, I can never deny that the thing has been there'
(1980/2000, p.76). Prior to our digitally over-equipped era, which
has given rise to a maelstrom of ontologically nebulous sound
objects, the same was true of phonography: in order to be transduced
and inscribed onto the surface of a rotating disc or cylinder,
the subject had to be acoustically, which is to say physically,
present as a sounding body before the ear of the phonographic
recorder. Barthes considers this necessary constraint to be 'the
very essence… of Photography', the name of this essence
being '"That has been," or… the Intractable' (p.77).
Although he seems inclined to reserve it for photography alone,
it strikes me that phonography—up to a certain point in
sound history—can be defined by this same essence: the intractable
fact that Edison was there, speaking, is the one undeniable fact
of the following.
Audio Thomas Edison (1927).
'Mary had a little lamb'.
The Veridical.
Edison wrote of the phonograph that it made possible 'the captivity
of all manner of sound waves heretofore designated as "fugitive",
and their permanent retention' (1878, p.530). Here at the dawn
of recorded sound, an explicit contrast is made between the essence
of sound as "'fugitive"' and recorded sound as 'permanent'.
With permanence comes what Barthes' calls the intractable and
with this in turn comes a tendency to read the phonographic recording
as a veridical document, an empirical record of past reality,
thus emanating an aura of truth-value. (As the saying goes, 'It
is a matter of record that… ') We should not confuse the
aura of truth for truth itself, or put in another way, an image
of reality for reality; nonetheless, this aura has a certain gravity,
particularly for genres of sound art which have truck with the
real. Soundscape, for example, relies on the listener's willingness
to accept the recording as veridical: to accept the aesthetic
parameters of soundscape is to agree to listen for the real, even
when the soundscape is clearly composed of fragments—a pseudo-document
as Michael Dellaira put it (1995, p.195).
Audio Chris Watson (2003).
Ol-Olool-O, 1:40-2:10.
In listening veridically, it could
be said that we listen pragmatically – this pragmatism understood
in the philosophic sense: we agree, commonsensically, that what
we hear had to have happened in order for us to hear its reproduction.
It is this sense of the real that underpins Barthes' that-has-been.
Voice and Verity.
The tendency to interpret sound as veridical is nowhere more evident
than in recordings of the human voice. Such a reading, it seems
to me, is encouraged when a vocal recording has one of two qualities:
either it is technologically transparent, as if the voice were
there, right before our ears (like the face before the eye of
the camera); or, it is technologically opaque in such a way as
to provide technological proof of the voice as real (the bandwidth
reduction of a dictaphone, the bit-depth reduction of a digital
answering machine). In both instances, it seems our belief holds
that the recorder, like the camera, never lies: the overt absence
or presence of machine and medium functioning as sworn oath. It
should here be observed that this is not a matter of fealty as
both transparency and opacity carry the connotation of veracity.
The following examples demonstrate the infidelity of phonographic
veracity.
Firstly, there is Sleep Exposure
(1979), by New Zealander John Cousins. This anecdotal work begins
in the present tense as Cousins, close miked in a dry ambience,
describes his dream of his grandfather, Pop. This is followed
by a shift to a resonant acoustic environment in which Cousin's
voice is distant and embedded in a gently percolating texture
of disjointed speech-fragments and ambiguous pitched sounds.
Audio John Cousins (1979).
Sleep Exposure, 1:41-2:15.
Here it could be said that the technological
opacity of the second part of this excerpt (which evidences transformation
via reverb, editing, etc) connotes the voice as unconscious, irrational,
emotional—a zone of the psyche in Doyle's words (2005, p.17)—an
inner voice within the reverberant theatre of memory: the medium
of the dream and anything but empirical. By contrast, the first
part of the excerpt is technologically transparent—Cousins
is heard as if he were speaking before our ears. Here, close miking
and the absence of an ambient context connotes 'an emanation of
past reality' (1980/2000, p.88) and by extension, the connotation
of rational consciousness, of verity. By contrast, in popular
music technological opacity is often used to connote veracity.
Here I have in mind the familiar trick of simulating bit-depth
or band-width reduction on a vocal recording as if to signify
'this happened' because ushc processes make a recording sound
as if it originates from a documentary technology such
as an answering machine, or from the paradoxically immediate but
mediated technology of telephony.
Authenticity and the "Real".
It is well known that the veridical nature of the recording was
almost immediately seized upon by musicians and others of an ethnographic
bent who heard in the recording a means to preserve and access
musical truth: Frederico García Lorca, 'it is not possible
to copy down [folk] songs on music paper; it is necessary to collect
them with a gramophone so as not to lose that inexpressible element
in which more than anything their beauty lies' (in Chanan, 1985,
p.11). Lorca's comment suggests that at best transcription is
transformative, at worst corruptive, and always incapable of capturing
the essence of its subject. In contemporary parlance, what's lost
is Simon Frith's version of authenticity, the element that 'keeps
it real'. For sound artists and composers who deal in the real,
the simplest way around this impasse has been to incorporate the
recording into the work, thereby supplementing artifice with the
authenticity of the (veridical) recording.
A number of examples suggest themselves,
but for me Berio's Naturale is particularly interesting
because it does not seek to establish an entirely homophonous
or harmonious relationship between the composed and the recorded.
Rather, the poignancy of Naturale derives from the distance
it sets up between artifice (the instrumental writing) and recorded
reality (the human voice), a distance traversed only when the
voice's colours suffuse and warm the instrumental parts. In this
way, the recording is framed as the wellspring of the work's discourse,
granting Naturale the air of artlessness.
Audio Luciano Berio (1985).
Naturale, 4:10-4:53. (see discography)
The Analytical Recording.
The connection between the veridical recording and the search
for music authenticity, for essence or truth, suggests another
interpretation of the recording. Closed-miked recordings, revealing
a surfeit of sonic detail, are often termed analytical
recordings. This description understands analysis in an empirical
sense, rather than a psychoanalytic one. But the latter reading
is worth pursuit and not only because psychoanalysts have been
known to record the "conversations" they have with patients/clients.
Walter Benjamin, for example, links technologies such as photography
and sound recording to Freud's psychoanalytical work. 'The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' is the source that's
usually quoted, but Benjamin's 'A Small History of Photography'
(1931/1985) makes the point more concisely: 'It is through photography
that we first discover the existence of [the] optical unconscious,
just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis'
(p.243). This suggests that the analytical recording tells us
more than we may care to know, especially when we are listening
to ourselves; the machine, after all, is unforgiving, incapable
of adapting its superhuman power of exact recollection to suit
the foibles of human subjectivity. As Beckett has Krapp say, 'Just
been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty
years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that' (1957, 24).
No wonder that we tend to choose not to listen to ourselves but
to surrogates capable of providing us with a flattering likeness
of ourselves. In Adorno's words, 'What the gramophone listener
actually wants to hear is himself, and the artist merely offers
him a substitute for the sounding image of his own person... Most
of the time records are virtual photographs of their owners…'
(1927/2002, p.274).
There a number of sound works which
explore this frisson engendered by the clash between
human subjectivity and machinic objectivity. A good example, again
from John Cousins, is Tense Test (1986), which explores
the paranoia provoking properties of the sound recording, replete
with psychoanalytical overtones. The piece cuts between two elements:
Cousins interviewing himself in an attempt to get to the communicative
heart of a recorded interview, the second element, between himself
and a journalist. At first, the reflexive interview reads objectively—as
rational and distanced analysis of the recorded interview. But
as the piece progresses, this aura of objectivity is fogged: Cousins'
and his doubles, as well as the listener, become increasingly
confused as to what was objectively "then" and what
is subjectively "now". The result being that the truth
promised by the apparent objectivity of the reflexive interview
retreats in response to the increasing subjectivity of Cousins'
(plural) interpretative efforts: the recording, which parrots
but cannot talk or think, becomes a hall of sonic mirrors, refracting
into noise, losing Cousins' and listeners in a hermeneutic imbroglio.
Audio John Cousins (1986).
Tense Test, 5:57-7:47.
Pets and Phonographs.
My reading of Tense Test suggests the recording to be
dumb but not mute: the recording is a component in talking
machine that speaks but does no more. In this sense, my earlier
description of the recording as an object that parrots is not
just a turn of phrase. The recording can, literally, do no more
than parrot what it is directed to hear. However, if what Adorno
says is true, that is, that listeners expect recordings to be
flattering portraits of themselves, then this parroting articulates
a very personal relationship between listener and the recording.
As such, it may seem (in fact it should seem) that the recording
is speaking to me, the listener, as if it knows my innermost
needs and is able to respond to these. For Adorno, such a mode
of listening was representative of a growing inability on the
part of listeners to approach music objectively, to listen to
music for what it is, rather than what the listener wants from
it. But in an age of mass consumption, the dual orbit of subjectivity
and objectivity around the record, or indeed around any consumer
object, has become a profound matter. It could be said that objects
are now auratic by dint of their owners' relationship to them,
rather than because of their singular uniqueness and location
within a particular culture and history. I don't want to get sidetracked
by cultural politics, so let me steer this back in the direction
of sound art. If the recording is a parrot of sorts and also the
object of a very personal, perhaps even needy relationship, then
it might be said that the recording can be regarded as a kind
of pet: both subject and object, neither entirely autonomous as
a being nor entirely emasculated as an object. A featherbrained
metaphor perhaps, but one which is clearly visible in the relationship
between Nipper and His Master's Voice (Fig.1, below), and one
also borne out in Ages Ago, by Australian sound artist
Sherry DeLys. In this radiophonic work, DeLys explores the relationship
she has to certain objects, objects which hold a special meaning
for her, but which are undeniably kitsch, such as a liqueur bottle
that miraculates a bouquet of cigarettes when you take the lid
off. What strikes me as interesting about this in relation to
phonography is threefold: firstly, that DeLys' exploration of
her fascination for such objects is set within the context of
time's passing. Like the photograph and the recording, DeLys'
objects are symbols of that-has-been and thus the narrative
of the work is concerned with what was; secondly, her
relationship to objects is a profoundly personal, which is to
say arcane, one. As we'll hear her quote, her attachment to things
'was always for reasons which other people didn't grasp' (isn't
musical taste often a very similar matter?); thirdly, and here's
the point I really want to make, her companion in this nostalgic
exploration is a parrot. It's tempting to dismiss this as a novelty,
even if one appropriate to the piece, but in fact the presence
of a parrot functions as mise-en-abyme, a heraldic summation
of De Lys' relationship to objects in Ages Ago. The parrot,
like the recording, is a kind of prosthetic ego, an extension
of the self into another form, which as a thing is both independent
of and conjoined with its owner. The parrot is not another person
and one's relationship to a parrot is thus not properly interpersonal,
but within De Lys' world it seems that the parrot acts as a surrogate
for relationships to other people, as pets often do. Furthermore,
De Lys' relationship to her pet is paralleled by her relationship
to field recordings, documents of her past. If her parrot has
become people, then recordings have become her world, surrogates
for actually being in the world, and are precious as a record
of a being in the world which Ages Ago intimates she
no longer wishes to experience directly.
Audio Sherry De Lys, Ages
Ago. 0:00-4:10.
|
Fig. 1. Nipper and His
Master's Voice |
Music's Doubles.
In thinking of the recording as an extension of the listener's
ego in sonic form, there's another path that we might follow,
the gate to which was, again, put in place by Adorno.
The turntable of the talking machine is
comparable to the potter's wheel: a Ton-masse [tone-mass]
is formed upon them both… the finished tone/clay container
that is produced in this manner remains empty. It is filled
only by the hearer (1927/2002, p.274) |
The point of this passage relies on the double meaning of the
German Ton, signifying both clay and sound or tone. The
polyvalence of clay/sound is interesting, for it suggests that
the sonic vessel spun on the wheel of the turntable is essentially
contentless until heard; content in this sense, is something that
listeners make in audile relationship to the record.
Like a clay vessel, the sonic vessel is pure form, empty, until
filled by its user. To take this further, the vacancy of the Ton-Masse
suggests a link to another empty clay vessel, the golem. In appearance,
the golem is a real person, yet lacks the essential human features
of personality and intellect. Like Adam, a golem is created from
clay, and is given life through a kabbalistic process using God's
special name. The golem is given life to perform some kind of
mission or errand. Once this is done, the name of God is removed
from him and he is returned to the earth.
That the golem lacks personality
or intellect is interesting enough, as a direct parallel of Adorno's
notion of the recording as an empty mass of Ton, of sound/clay:
recorded music is golem-like without a listener to make something
human, something meaningful, of it. Moreover, the metaphor of
the record as golem also articulates the opinion, often expressed
of recorded music, that it isn't real music; a recording is but
a surrogate, a stand-in, a golem, in comparison to the living
music that has been captured in the grooves of the record. When
music is performed, it feels and thinks via the performer, but
when a performance is recorded, the process of recording cryogenically
freezes this intelligence. The listener is needed to meaningfully
reanimate the music (though, worryingly for Adorno, there is no
guarantee of the listener's ability to do so). In this we hit
upon another aspect of the modern golem myth: the golem was created
to defend Jews, but turns against his makers and thus must be
speedily returned to the earth. Recording, as a kind of golem,
is similarly feared because although it may defend music against
the evanescence of sound, it also poses a threat to living music.
Let loose upon the world, the recording may, innocently, undo
its makers, undo the real music it preserves, replacing it with
simulations that will, eventually, stifle music as a living, feeling,
thinking, human phenomenon. John Philip Sousa's well-known reaction
to the invention of the phonograph articulate exactly this fear:
'The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself
to the ennobling discipline of learning music… Everyone
will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards'
(in Ross, 2005). For those of us who spend our time perfecting
golems, such comments appear rather quaint, but there is something
in them, at least where they concern music made in real-time,
as the living now of a long tradition:
A peasant living in the remotest part
of the bush listens to the radio every day and hears every
kind of music except his own. So invasive, so insistent
is this music that it becomes what his children listen
to, replacing their own music (Randrianary,
2005)
|
Doubles and Others. Randrianary's quote
(above) suggests that the concept of the recording as a double
can be a very negative one; it shows recorded music to be a force
for unprecedented cultural change when it comes into contact with
cultures for which the music disseminated by the recording or
broadcast is entirely other. For better or worse, this is a consequence
of recording: once recorded, sound and music take on a life potentially
independent of the context in which the recording was made. This
may entail phonographic and radiophonic forms of cultural imperialism,
the kind of thing Randrianary is pointing towards, or various
forms cultural appropriation that may or may be not be ethical
in nature (the most infamous being Deep Forest's unsanctioned
sampling of a Taiwanese folk singer). Edison, ever prescient,
anticipated that appropriative power of the phonograph. In the
following statement, Edison seems not to be particularly concerned
with the ethical consequences of recording; rather, his attitude
is non-ethical, as if what would now be regarded a breach of human
rights is simply a fait accompli:
Essential features of the phonograph…
5. The captivation of sounds with or without the knowledge
or consent of their source of origin (1878, p.530)
|
I'll return to the subject of phonographic ethics shortly, but
for the meantime I wish to pursue the ways in which the recording
creates doubles, which – golem-like – become in various
ways autonomous to their origins, their makers and masters. This
independence can be regarded as productive of forms of otherness,
in which the separation of sound from source generates others,
doubles that assume forms, or allow the creation of forms, often
very different to the original (remixes and mash-ups are a good
examples). The other, as typically cast within cultural theory,
is an entity – a culture, group, person – which is
in some ways very similar to the self, but also significantly
different to it, to the extent that the other is – stereotypically
– perceived of either as a potential threat to the self
(in which case the other is usually imagined as male), or, as
highly desirable (in which case the other is usually cast as female).
The concept of the other connects
to another trope associated with music, particularly in the 19thC,
that of music's power to undo the self, to transform self into
other. Take the following, from Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata,
as a representative statement: ''Music causes me to forget myself
and my true state; it transports me to another state that is not
my own' (in Kramer, p.56). To draw together music's transcendental
and transformative power and the notion of otherness, it might
be said that music has the power of othering –
music can turn the listener into somebody (or something) else.
To connect this to recording, it can also be said that in separating
sound from source, recording implies an othering: evanescent sound
event becomes something fundamentally other than what it truly
is when it is recorded and made permanent as a sound object. Such
othering is acutely transformative when the technology itself
is unstable or unreliable: the wind-up phonograph is just such
an instance of an unstable technology. As Adorno (1927/2002, p.275)
observed some eight decades ago:
With the advent of the gramophone, absolute
pitch runs into difficulties. It is almost impossible to
guess the actual pitch if it deviates from the original
one. In that case, the original pitch becomes confused with
that of phonographic reproduction |
In the terms I was using earlier,
Adorno's statement suggests that the phonographic other may transform
the original, the self if you like, to the extent that the other
altogether displaces the self. Where a recording features the
human voice, such othering involves gender transformation, male
pitching towards female and vice versa due the effect on pitch
of playback that is too fast or too slow. With the advent of recording
then, Tolstoy's transport 'to another state that is not [his]
own', is a form of unmanning. To return to the subject of ethics,
whether or not one wants to be unmanned (or unwomanned) is another
question, one that, if Edison's non-ethical stance is adopted,
does not need to be answered. Indeed, such a combination of ethical
disregard and transgender detournement might be regarded
as an ontological consequence of recording, a conclusion that
may well have informed the production of this notorious gem, the
gender and identity politics of which are complex indeed.
Audio John Oswald. 'Dolly
Parton – Pretender'. (see discography)
The Spectral Recording.
I've traced a path that has taken us some distance from the analytical
recording. I'd now like to return to this psychoanalytic starting
point in order to follow a related line: the uncanny. Gender transformation
is certainly an instance of the uncanny, but I'm not going to
pursue this subject here. Rather, I'd like to return to an earlier,
Barthesian, point: that the recording can be considered an emanation
of the real. Barthes apologises for the banality of this observation,
but also holds that its consequences are significant. It elucidates,
for example, the fin de siecle tendency to regard the
phonograph as a transcendental medium. Some examples, by way of
illustration: 'Death has lost some of its sting since we are forever
able to retain the voices of the dead'; 'phantasms of the living,'
a phrase used in the late 19thC by Frederic Myers of the British
Society for Psychical Research to describe the apparitions proliferating
through newly invented communication technologies; more recently,
Friedrich Kittler has written that 'The spirit-world is as large
as the storage and transmission possibilities of a civilisation'
(all in Peters, pp.139-144). The talking dead, phantasms, spirits:
emanations of the real, but not the real. The uncanny, in other
words. Barthes' notion of the photographic spectrum explains this
phenomenon: '[Spectrum] retains, through its root, a relation
to "spectacle" and adds to it that rather terrible thing
which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead' (p.9).
Likewise, in the recording, sound spectra are preserved so as
to allow departed but audible presences to emerge from black boxes:
spectres from spectra.
For these apparitions to be understood
as spectres (as ghosts), it is necessary that we allow a degree
of the uncanny into our reception of them: what we hear must be
recognisable yet unfamiliar, known yet strange, a thing but not
the thing itself. By extension, we might say that phonography
makes the most of its medium when the ostranenie (Shlovsky,
1917), the estrangedness, of recorded sound is embraced.
The spookiness of this is something that listeners have grown
accustomed to in over a century of recorded sound. Yet it still
provides an essential backdrop to phonographic practices. Acousmatic
music, for example, is predicated on sound without sounding bodies.
This is not simply to say that acousmatic music, like all recorded
music, is "by nature" estranged (or schizophonic), but
rather, that acousmatic practioners have made a fetish of the
schizophonic nature of sound recording. At best, this is an intensely
poetic practice, revelling in the possibilities for intimation,
suggestion, allusion, that inhere in a mono-sensory medium. At
worst, it is a practice, which (indecently) leaves no room for
the imagination but rather presents a succession of unambiguous
images or forceful materialities. This tension between the concrete
and the abstract, intimation and overstatement, is a difficult
one for sound artists to negotiate: when to hide, when to reveal?
When to state, when to intimate? Yannis Kyriakides' Wordless
(2004) opts exclusively for the latter, and as such its success
depends on the listener's willingness to enjoy intimation and
the ever-receding goal of revelation: the referent, the human
voice, is only ever heard as an absence, a sonic negative.
Audio Yannis Kyriakides
(2004). "Pensioner_0496", 00:00-0:45, from Wordless.
Spectres and Affect.
The spectral nature of recording also inheres in phonographic
practices that are as much concerned with sound semantics as they
are with sound for sound's sake. I'm thinking of the way in which
presence in absence, the phonographic sign as a pointer to Barthes'
that-has-been, grants phonography a certain native ability: that
of creating affect which emerges from distance and separation;
nostalgia and melancholy being the most obvious of these (Naturale
is an excellent example in this regard). To illustrate, the musical
style of the following excerpt from Cousins' Sleep Exposure
clearly indicates the recording's bygone-ness (it is Bing Crosby's
1947 recording of 'The Whiffenpoof Song'); this connotation is
heightened by surface noise from the record. The evocation of
nostalgia would be inevitable, were it not for the preceding stabs
of noise from the needle in a locked groove: these point to a
darker territory, signifying an incursion across the border from
nostalgia to melancholy.
Audio John Cousins (1979).
Sleep Exposure, 3:38-4:01.
Remove the torment from melancholy
and the feeling becomes, perhaps, nostalgia. The word is a translation
of the German Heimweh (homesickness), indicating a longing
for something that exists at a spatiotemporal distance, which
is to say, exists in the mind as a memory. There has long been
an association between the record and nostalgia, via the Freudian
notion of the recording as a form of prosthetic memory. For the
recording to engender nostalgia, presumably it must house music
which itself no longer has a home. In this way, a particular recording
may become a metonym, a stand-in, for a time and place that is
no more. But it is not just the recording, as a cultural object,
which generates nostalgia: the record itself also signifies nostalgia
when it shows signs of age—crackling and hissing as indices
of phonographic senescence. This aesthetic phenomenon is widespread
enough not to warrant further comment, but by way of a final example,
it is interesting to observe that surface noise, or its surrogates,
are often the analogue of photographic soft focus: the haze around
the sound figure signifying, in a mellow tone, that-has-been.
Audio Yves Daoust (1989).
Suite Baroque: L'extase, 3:00-3:28.
Coda.
There are many other ways in which the phonographic record, as
a signifying medium, can be interpreted: reading the record as
a body, its senescence is a form of aging, a physical process
resulting in transformations and accumulations of meaning (exemplified
by Christian Marclay's Record without a cover, 1985).
Taken further, this bodily reading suggests the degrading action
of the stylus to be a wounding, transduction becoming incision,
and the resulting noise a scream (the music of the medium, perhaps?);
read as mind, the schizophonia of recording can be understood
as a form of madness; read as writing, the recording can be understood
to grant ephemeral sound the sovereign permanence of the score.
This present paper has, I hope, provided some orientation as to
the directions in which these and many other lines of interpretation,
concerning aspects of phonography that I've not even touched upon,
might be pursued.
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