listening to repeating

Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, by Greg Milner

While I prefer fiction, I don’t read many contemporary novels or poetry.  That said, Greg Milner’s book, including the writing style, is a real joy to read.  Sure, you might quibble with the emphasis on the Edison genealogy of sound; nevertheless, his coverage of recorded music (especially from the Eighties forward) is great stuff.  It blends theory with pop culture, sound engineering with music composition, and visuals with audio through what might be called a fragmented or blog-like mode of writing.  At strategic points in his chapters, he cuts to a new scene or historical moment without offering an obvious transition.  Accordingly, I wanted to continue reading to determine more concretely how scene Y intersected with scene Z.  Plus, as someone who is working on a dissertation with similar questions and archives, I really appreciate how Milner communicates his history to a broad range of audiences.  To boot, he manages some really smart readings of sound, often looking to their visualizations through audio editing software like Audacity.  Still,  you don’t have to be a sound nerd, music geek, or tech enthusiast to stay attentive to this one.   Tho, if you want a quick taste, then try Chapter 6, “Perfect Sound? Whatever.”  The Albini quotes alone are worth it.

Translating or executing?

In the last few days, I’ve become incredibly interested in Yevgeny Alexandrovitch Sholpo and the variophone (1930), as well as Daphne Oram and oramics (1959).  Both Sholpo and Oram drew sound onto 35 millimeter movie film.  With a little work, they could then listen to these drawings.  Writing could be played.  It could be animated.

Here’s an example film strip drawing for the variophone, and here’s an image of the oramics machine.  If you prefer movement, then a significant portion of the following video, “Theremin, Variophone et musiques nouvelles russes 1930,” is dedicated to the variophone.  There’s also a lot of theremin action in there, too, so you can’t really resist.

In Protocol, Alexander Galloway writes: “Code is the only language that is executable” (165, emphasis his).  Granted, in the case of the variophone and oramics, we might not have “language,” per se.  For one, unless they were somehow formalized to compose music, I’m not sure what the grammar of either would be.  So call these soundings “noise.”  Fine with me.

What we do have are graphic images that are systemized and written and can actually be heard—they can be executed as audio. Here, the graphic images for the variophone or the oramics machine differ from, say, the grooves of a long play (LP) album in that sound (e.g., of a musical instrument) is not just recorded and stored to be played back later.  Instead, sound (once heard or not) emerges from the act of writing.  While I would imagine (and I am only speculating) that both Oram and Sholpo could read their graphics much like a musical score, a score cannot enact itself.  Scores are not executable, and record grooves can only reproduce.

Whereas Galloway’s notion of code implies both “semantic meaning” and the “enactment of meaning” (166), I’m wondering if a system of executable audio, including Sholpo’s and Oram’s graphic images, could still be an example of code.  Of a system that can actualize a phenomenon—that can actualize a sound—through the graphic image without ever making sense.   Executable audio might be code without denotation or connotation, where a shape, a line, a figure never intends to mean, even if it is put into a sequence.

Yes, yes: Executable audio could not escape the desire for meaning-making.  It will forever be nested or embedded in interpretations, in explanations.  All code is.  Nevertheless, it’s interesting to posit a code without semantics.

Obviously, I need to think through the implications of all this.  In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from Oram’s “Rockets in Ursa Major.”

I’ve been working on a condensed version of my research interests before I flesh out the prospectus for my dissertation. That said, here’s a draft:

As a PhD candidate in English at the University of Washington, my research interests are framed around three primary areas of study: sonic modernity, the digital humanities, and science and technology studies. My dissertation research, in particular, emerges from the argument that most approaches to digital media and humanities computing are subtended by visual paradigms of knowledge-making, which tend to stress, for example, the stable space of the page, the architecture of typography, and the mass reproduction of images. With this premise in mind, I am in the process of writing a critical genealogy of sound technologies in the 19^th and 20^th centuries in order to not only diversify and enrich approaches to literary criticism, but to also augment and make more complex our existing understanding of digital media and their relation to the senses. For this project, my primary artifacts are novels, poetry, and other forms of fiction, including 19^th century telegraphic fiction, Harlem Renaissance novels, and mid-20^th century experiments with magnetic tape conducted by writers. The time periods in which these artifacts materialize are crucial, if nothing else, because they correspond with the rise of specific sound technologies. My investment, however, is in exploring how these technologies—the telegraph, the phonograph, and magnetic tape, in particular—intermediated with new ways of writing, storing, and transmitting experiences, especially those experiences where the interpretive agent is ambiguous or difficult to locate. Indeed, in a post-press, pre-Internet era, new sound technologies did more than allow for the mass reproduction and circulation of sounds. They helped produce new forms of materiality, movement and embodiment. And by unpacking these new forms through a critical genealogy, I hope to conclude my dissertation with a chapter on what that genealogy suggests today for the creative and democratic uses of digital technologies.