In the Pocket

Somewhere between 1915 and 1920, a gesture as simple as fumbling through one’s pocket came to signify a completely different kind of cultural technique.  Rather than sifting among a private collection of utilitarian or discarded objects, the user of the “pocket wireless” receiver now opened himself up to a “receptive situation” in which live bits of information (time, weather, stock quotes) or messages from home might be skimmed from the airwaves.

Five or six years ago, [Leon W. Bishop of Elizabeth, NJ] won a reputation as being more or less of a nut because he might often be seen walking about the streets with wires dangling from his hat and running down to a cane, while another wire trailed from one foot.  Occasionally Bishop would hold out his cane, put one hand in his pocket, fumble with something—and announce that he was receiving a wireless message.  Today almost anyone would know what he was doing, but five or six years ago the man who knew anything about wireless was an exception and unless Bishop took the time to let spectators ‘listen in’ to the dots and dashes, no one believed him.

(Binns, Jack, “Amateurs Race to Make Vest-Pocket Set,” New-York Tribune, February 19, 1922, p. 6.  Above, illustration from F.H. Collins’s 1898 patent application for the Magneto Ear Phone.)

Review: Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past

Since its publication in 2003, Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past has become a staple in the growing field of sound studies. A story about the development of sound-reproduction technologies, Sterne’s book was one of the first in a now well-populated list of scholarship across many different disciplines that aims to rigorously examine sound as an historical, analytic, and philosophical category. Recently referencing The Audible Past on his blog, Sterne writes,

I guess the main thing to say is that the book was written at a time where there wasn’t a whole pile of other contemporary scholarship on sound that was aware of OTHER scholarship on sound. So there is a lot of effort to think through what it means to talk about sound in the humanities and why that matters. I’m not sure someone starting a sonic project today has to do that kind of work or deal with that kind of problem.

The foundational status of this book may account for some of its slightly awkward moments. Neologisms such as the “Ensoniment” (as opposed to Enlightenment) take some getting used to, and continuous polemics against the “visual bias” in the humanities at times become redundant (if only because the field of sound studies has since gained so much traction). But the conceptual trajectory of the book as a whole is so well organized, one which makes such a pointed intervention not only in the historiography of sound, but of technology in general, that the reader can easily overlook these slight bumps.

The Audible Past surveys the history of––to name only a sample of the devices Sterne deals with in this book––the stethoscope, sound telegraphy, telephone, phonograph, graphophone, gramophone, headsets, recording studios, wax cylinders, and hearing aids. However, Sterne is careful to characterize the scope of his study as “a deliberately speculative history” (27). In the book’s introduction, entitled “Hello!”, Sterne acknowledges the massive task facing the historian of sound-reproduction technologies. Rather than aspiring to any claims of exhaustiveness or finality, Sterne writes, “this book uses history as a kind of philosophical laboratory” (27), an approach that requires the book to “continually move between the immediate and the general, the concrete and the abstract” (29). From long forgotten aberrancies such as the ear phonautograph (constructed out of an actual cadaver ear) to modern telephone networks, Sterne seeks to locate amid these various devices a unifying set of cultural practices and beliefs. Read the rest of this entry »

Super Heroes and The Phonograph

This passage from Adorno’s 1927 essay, “The Curves of the Needle”:

“With its movable horn and its solid spring housing, the gramophone’s social position is that of a border marker between two periods of musical practice. It is in front of the gramophone that two periods of musical lovers encounter each other. While the expert examines all the needles and chooses the best one, the consumer just drops in his dime—and the sound that responds to both may well be the same.”

Setting aside the sort of dated yet often repeated point that the audience member enjoys not the film or music she goes to see but the money she spent on it, I think the real brilliance of this passage lies in the conflation of the audition with the auditor, and the needle with the curves–no matter what is played, the sound remains the same to all. What is the selfsame sound that each type of musical lover hears? It is, of course, the sound of the dime dropped to purchase the needle. It is the sound of the music subsequently enjoyed in the privacy of the home. And it is the sound of the needle itself, that is to say, those crackles and shifts in pitch that reveal the actual machinery of reproduction. This triad of commerce/sound/technology will most likely structure any discussion on the semantics of listening in popular culture. Today, the latter two terms, sound and technology (along with the listener floating ambiguously somewhere in between), create the most productive and interesting tensions.

Adorno goes on to say of the apparent improvement in the quality of sound reproduction technologies that “The moment one attempts to improve these early technologies through an emphasis on concrete fidelity, the exactness one has ascribed to them is exposed as an illusion by the very technology itself.” The rhetoric of technological fidelity is a productive paradox. Constant improvements such as Hi-Fi or Dolby 5.1 are not necessarily steps forward in sound quality, but a shift towards a new style of hearing things. This point was made in Sound Theory Sound Practice, I believe it was. This is to say that the spectacular sounds that accompany the otherwise awful Spider Man 3 straddle many points of audition. The recent spate of super hero movies humping claims of realism (the “this could actually happen!” aesthetic) are not only rehashing/warping the Frank Miller led The Dark Knight Returns aesthetic of the 80s, but are constantly making an argument for the medium through which these mythologies are now pushed.

I met Jonathan Lethem (see his list of the five most depressed superheroes) at a book signing and nervously asked him something inane like, “what do you think about the new Superman movie?” In my defense, the teaser trailer was absolutely breathtaking—it looked like a scene right out of the 1940s animated serials, an aesthetic that would pull cgi and tights out of dimensions other than the ostensibly real. He said that he had learned not to stop getting his hopes up for comic book movies, as there is something in the medium that is inherently untranslatable.

But the superhero is not a medium, it is a perfectly translatable commodity–television, action figures, games, costumes, film, books, etc. The mythology of superheroes today is squeezed through the nascent field of digital cinema ever proclaiming its fidelity to the our world so that we can look up walking the streets of New York and half expect to see a red and blue blur sling overhead. Going into Spider Man 3, I expected the cgi to be significantly improved on the previous film, there having been years elapsed and most likely technological leaps made. Spider Man always looked a little awkward and unnatural in 1 and 2. It wasn’t until halfway through the movie that I realized not only have the graphics not really changed, but their verisimilitude is not what matters anymore. The sound of Spider Man 3 seems to take an unprecedented amount of control, to the degree that the most spectacular way possible to defeat Venom at the end of the film is, and I’m not making this up, with sound. Spider Man discovers the symbiot’s weakness to sound waves, and beats a series of metal pipes, driving the black goo away.

While the plasticity of the image has been made virtually infinite thanks to cgi and digital film, it is still strangely anchored in some rhetoric of ever greater fidelity to the real or photographic. Sound is employed to an ever greater degree in recent popular film as a sort of filler, enhancing these images through synergism and sync points and added dimensions that allow the spectator relief from the images that often fail, look flat, seem taken out of a video game. And this is why digital film today is such an exciting sound medium. While cgi is bogged down in claims to verisimilitude, sound is free to improvise in countless dimensions with breathtaking results, making up for the mistakes of the clumsy image. Seriously, go see Spider Man 3 and listen to the Dolby TrueHD.

Soundscapes

An abstracted and tentative outline of history professor Emily Thompson‘s interesting book, The Soundscape of Modernity. Note that this is not her table of contents, but my own sense of the book’s formal arc. Maybe it’s strange to extract this outline from an already mapped out narrative of events, but there has always been something about historiography—that is, the writing of history—that makes me uneasy. Using narratives to stitch together an event makes more sense to me than using events to stitch together a narrative. The former construction seems more proud of its stitches.

1) traditional sound, space, and listening – surveys some final intersections of reverent performance spaces and music as Art with a capital ‘A’ before the opening of Boston’s Symphony Hall in 1900, the first building engineered with the new science of acoustics developed by Wallace Sabine. The strange condition of listening as “a way to worship at the temple of great art” (47) and “an elevating mental recreation which is not an amusement” (49). The relationship of these three elements—space, sound, and listening—begins to shift around this historical period.

2) sound rediscovered – The experienced (shells) and applied (proto-radar) sound of WWI. The process of listening and the concept of sound become increasingly externalized as machines come to help us understand the physics of sound. From its very inception, our understanding of the physical reality of sound is mediated. Amazingly, a formal science of sound didn’t really exist until the early 1900s.

3) noise – the new problem of uncontrollable “noise pollution” in the modern city from 1900-1933.

4) listening redefined – cathedrals and temples begin using new sound muffling technologies in order to hollow out a silent, reverent interior space by merging new technologies with classical design. The natural sound signatures that had always been ascribed to certain types of spaces become a thing of the past.

5) space redefined – “modern” architecture in late 1920s begins to hermetically seal off outside noise pollution and integrate all interior systems: acoustic insulation, ventilation, and lighting all work in concert. The advent of wholly manufactured interior environments.

6) sound redefined – newly engineered sounds that are freed from spatial restrictions by radio, phonograph, and telephone, begin to fill these hermetically sealed spaces.