Sonic Mediations
Sonic Mediations
Body, Sound, Technology
Edited by
Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Sonic Mediations: Body, Sound, Technology, Edited by Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns
This book first published 2008
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2008 by Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-84718-839-7, ISBN (13): 9781847188397
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ....................................................................................vii
Introduction
Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns ............................................................1
Part I:
Mediating Perception
The Phonographic Body: Phreno-Mesmerism, Brain Mapping and
Embodied Recording
Anthony Enns .....................................................................................13
Audio Virology: On the Sonic Mnemonics of Preemptive Power
Steve Goodman ..................................................................................27
“Quick and Dirty”: Sonic Mediations and Affect
Bruce Johnson ....................................................................................43
Touched by Music: The Sonic Strokes of Sur Incises
Vincent Meelberg ...............................................................................61
Part II:
Mediating Performance
Delegating the Live: Musicians, Machines and the Practice of Looping
Jeremy Wade Morris............................................................................77
“Oh Baby, I Like It Raw”: Engineering Truth
Jan Hein Hoogstad ...............................................................................93
Voice or Ear? The Female Voice and the Listener’s Position in Paul
Lansky’s as it grew dark
Hannah Bosma ...................................................................................109
The Pianist’s Body at Work: Mediating Sound and Meaning in Frederic
Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues
Kathryn Woodard...............................................................................127
vi
Table of Contents
Part III:
Mediating Space
Producing Microscopic Embodied Spaces: The Flautist’s Mouth,
Reverberation Effects and Kaija Saariaho’s Lichtbogen
Taina Riikonen .................................................................................143
Atmospherics
Steven Connor ..................................................................................159
Another Interactivity in Pneumatic Sound Field: On Interactive Sound
Art and Digital Audio Technology
Ruth Benschop .................................................................................175
Hearing History: Storytelling and Collective Subjectivity in Cardiff
and Miller’s Pandemonium
Adair Rounthwaite ...........................................................................193
Part IV:
Mediating Audiovision
Towards Intensive Audiovisual Encounters: Interactions of Opera and
Cinema
Milla Tiainen ....................................................................................211
Do You Want to Be Absorbed? The Knotty Acts of Mediation in
Rosa: A Horse Drama
Tereza Havelková.............................................................................227
Auditory Imagination and Narrativisation in Béla Bartók’s
Bluebeard’s Castle
Pieter Verstraete ...............................................................................243
Sound Bites! Dissonant Audiovisions as Historiophony in Hitler’s Hit
Parade
Carolyn Birdsall ...............................................................................259
Contributors.............................................................................................277
Index........................................................................................................281
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 5.1: Front panel of the Line 6 DL4.................................................83
© 1999 Line 6
Used with Permission of Line 6
Figure 9.1: Bars 338-end (flautist’s score). From Lichtbogen .................151
© 1986 Kaaija Saariaho
Used with Permission of Edition Wilhelm Hansen
Figure 11.1: Pneumatic Sound Field .......................................................183
© 2007 Edwin van der Heide
Used with Permission of Edwin van der Heide
Figure 12.1: View from the catwalk of Cell Block Seven. From Janet
Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Pandemonium, 2005-2006.................195
© 2005 Sean Kelley
Used with Permission of the artists, Luhring Augustine (New York) and
Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site (Philadelphia)
Figure 12.2: Beater attached to a cabinet in a cell. From Janet Cardiff and
George Bures Miller, Pandemonium, 2005-2006 ....................................197
© 2005 Sean Kelley
Used with Permission of the artists, Luhring Augustine (New York) and
Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site (Philadelphia)
Figure 14.1: Multiple projection screens layering representations in
different media. From Rosa: A Horse Drama .........................................234
© 1994 Deen van Meer
Figure 14.2: Madame de Vries addressing the audience. From Rosa: A
Horse Drama ...........................................................................................234
© 1994 Deen van Meer
Figure 14.3: Rosa’s aria “Music for each leg of the horse.” From Rosa: A
Horse Drama ...........................................................................................240
© 1994 Deen van Meer
viii
List of Illustrations
Figure 15.1: Bluebeard with screen projections in background. From
Blauwbaards Burcht................................................................................255
© 2006 Peter Missotten
Used with Permission of Peter Missotten
Figure 16.1: Collage of film stills from Hitler’s Hit Parade (colour and
black-and-white in original). ...................................................................261
© 2003 C. Cay Wesnigk Produktion
Used with Permission of C. Cay Wesnigk Produktion
INTRODUCTION
CAROLYN BIRDSALL AND ANTHONY ENNS
It is no longer necessary to make the common claim that sound is
underappreciated in theory and academic research. In recent years there
has been a tremendous number of conferences, art exhibitions and books
on sound technologies and auditory culture.1 In the field of film studies,
Michel Chion, Rick Altman and James Lastra worked to shift the attention
of film scholars away from their exclusive focus on the visual towards the
sonic dimension of cinema.2 Scholars such as Douglas Kahn, Friedrich
Kittler, Steven Connor, Emily Thompson, Michael Bull and Jonathan
Sterne have also provided comprehensive accounts of the complex role
that sound played in the history of social thought and the transformation of
sound following the advent of modern media technologies.3 While some of
these critics have been hailed as pioneers, they frequently note that there is
a much longer theoretical interest in concerns with voice, sound, music,
noise, orality and literacy, as can be found in the work of German critical
theory, Canadian media and soundscape studies and French
poststructuralist theory.4 In addition, there has been a renewed
1
Some recent conferences include “Sonic Interventions” in Amsterdam, “KunstStimmen” and “Hörstürze” in Germany and the London “School of Sound”
seminar series, to name only a few. Major art exhibitions like “Sonic Boom” in
London, “Phonorama” in Karlsruhe and “Sons et lumières” in Paris suggest that
sound also plays an increasingly significant role in contemporary art.
2
Chion, Audio-Vision; Altman, Sound Theory, Sound Practice and “The State of
Sound Studies”; Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema.
3
Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat; Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter; Connor,
Dumbstruck; Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity; Bull, Sounding out the
City; Sterne, The Audible Past.
4
See, for instance, Adorno, Essays on Music; Ong, Orality and Literacy;
McLuhan, Understanding Media; Schafer, The Tuning of the World; Barthes,
Image Music Text; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Attali, Noise;
Schaeffer, Traite des objets musicaux.
2
Sonic Mediations
appreciation for the importance of sound in the twentieth-century avant
garde.5
Within this flurry of activity many of the scholars working in sound
studies are trying to address the questions raised when the study of sound
crosses disciplinary boundaries to encompass such disparate fields as
music, literature, film and art as well as theatre and performance studies.6
Due to its inherently interdisciplinary nature, however, it remains difficult
to identify sound studies as a discipline. The problem is not a lack of
existing scholarship, as Sterne points out in The Audible Past, but rather
the absence of commonly shared assumptions and theoretical models:
We have histories of concert audiences, telephones, speeches, sound
films, soundscapes, and theories of hearing. But only rarely do the
writers of histories of sound suggest how their work connects with
other, related work or with larger intellectual domains….The challenge,
then, is to imagine sound as a problem that moves beyond its immediate
empirical context. The history of sound is already connected to the
larger projects of the human sciences; it is up to us to flesh out the
connections.7
According to Sterne, therefore, the goal for scholars in sound studies is to
seek out common areas of concern and to fully apprehend how their
objects of analysis can be brought to bear on more fundamental
philosophical questions.
This volume identifies mediation as one of the core concerns for
scholars working in sound studies, not least because sound is a spatial and
temporal phenomenon that always relies on a medium to make itself heard.
Some conceptual ground work has been laid in media studies, where
scholars have variously tried to address the issue of mediation with
terminology as varied as “the medium,” “mediatisation” and
“remediation.”8 That said, much of this work has occurred within a limited
realm of disciplinary-specific concerns. Nonetheless, mediation is a useful
metaconcept for interdisciplinary sound studies because it touches on the
5
For more on sound and the avant garde, see Kahn and Whitehead, Wireless
Imagination; Weiss, Phantasmatic Radio; Campbell, Wireless Writing in the Age
of Marconi.
6
For recent essay collections emphasising the interdisciplinary nature of sound
studies, see Bull and Back, The Auditory Culture Reader; Cox and Warner, Audio
Culture.
7
Sterne, The Audible Past, 5.
8
See, for instance, McLuhan, Understanding Media; Auslander, Liveness; Bolter
and Grusin, Remediation.
Introduction
3
most basic questions concerning the relations between the body, sound and
technology. All of these three concepts have been dealt with in existing
scholarship, but too often one is attributed undue agency at the expense of
the others. On the one hand, there has been a tendency to fetishise the
powers of technology in relation to (listening) subjects.9 On the other
hand, the “corporeal turn” in the humanities has sometimes been charged
with overprivileging the agency of the body and perception.10 As a
consequence, investigations into auditory perception and sound
technologies have sometimes led to theories that posit sound as a passive
in-between or having a bridging function.11 By working with an overarching concept of mediation, such tendencies are forestalled, as scholars
are encouraged to avoid technological determinism or overgeneralise the
phenomenal body. Lastly, the attention to mediation may also allow
scholars to recognise sound as a co-participating agent in cultural practices
and performance.
Rather than taking mediation itself as self-evident, the chapters
collected in this volume therefore invite readers to rethink this concept in
terms of the interactions between body, sound and technology. This
volume provides a series of detailed and focused case studies involving
different sound and music technologies, performances and installations.
Each of these case studies focuses on a set of highly specific questions:
How are audio performances mediated by sound technologies as well as
the performer’s body? In which ways is the immediacy of live
performance influenced by sound technologies? How do bodies and
technologies mediate the experience of auditory perception? What is the
role of the listener in audio-based performances? How does sound mediate
the experience of viewing optical media and how does this complicate
vision-oriented theories of spectatorship? Our aim is not to establish a
particular canon or promote a particular theoretical project, but to allow
for potential overlappings in the approach to mediation by scholars from
diverse disciplinary backgrounds.
The contributions to this volume comprise scholars from disciplinary
backgrounds as diverse as musicology, film and media studies, art history,
comparative literature, philosophy, theatre studies and science and
technology studies. Rather than setting out the four sections in terms of
disciplines or objects, however, the chapters are organised in terms of the
functions and conceptualisations of sound. While each of these sections
9
See, for example, Williams, Television.
For a critical overview of the “corporeal turn” in the humanities, see Shilling,
The Body in Culture, Technology and Society.
11
See, for example, Truax, Acoustic Communication, 11.
10
4
Sonic Mediations
focuses on a specific aspect of sonic mediation, many of the individual
essays also deal with themes of affect, memory, voice, musical gesture,
gender, liveness, sampling, narrative, interactivity and intermediality.
Indeed, these concepts are often appropriated in different ways from one
disciplinary field to another. For example, the narrative concept of
focalisation can be fruitfully adapted for the analysis of sonic elements in
radio plays, music theatre and opera, while the concepts of absorption and
immersion similarly appear in discussions of opera, cinema and sound
installations. Such examples are a testament to the self-reflexive and rich
conceptual crosspollination occurring in interdisciplinary inquiry.
Section I, “Mediating Perception,” examines the body as a mediator
between sonic events and technologies. Anthony Enns’ “The
Phonographic Body: Phreno-Mesmerism, Brain Mapping and Embodied
Recording” and Steve Goodman’s “Audio Virology: On the Sonic
Mnemonics of Preemptive Power” both explore the relationship between
sound technologies, auditory perception and memory. Enns takes several
case studies that challenge the common claim that there was a gradual shift
towards disembodiment with the development of sound recording
technologies. By investigating instances of what he calls “embodied
recording,” in which the body itself functions as a sound recording device,
Enns argues that the body continues to occupy a central position in the
production and reception of sound. While Enns’ chapter highlights issues
of control in concepts of “embodied recording,” Goodman extends this
insight to examine how contemporary capitalism also exercises control
over the body through the deployment of sound. He introduces the concept
of “audio virology” to trace the ways in which sonic branding strategies
like jingles and Muzak function as agents for manipulating consumers.
Bruce Johnson’s “‘Quick and Dirty’: Sonic Mediations and Affect”
approaches the issue of sonic control by examining how responses to
certain sounds have a physiological basis, thereby revealing the precultural factors determining sonic affects, such as anxiety. Vincent
Meelberg’s “Touched by Music: The Sonic Strokes of Sur Incises” also
addresses the relationship between sound and affect by examining the
physical role of the body in the act of listening. Using the concept of
“sonic strokes,” Meelberg develops a theory of how bodies mediate the
experience and meaning of musical listening, which reverses conventional
assumptions about atonal music composition. Like the other chapters in
this section, Meelberg is interested in the extent to which the body acts as
an agent in the act of listening.
The essays in section II, “Mediating Performance,” emphasise the
status of the technological apparatus as mediator by examining the
Introduction
5
intersections between performers and machines. Jeremy Wade Morris’
“Delegating the Live: Musicians, Machines and the Practice of Looping”
and Jan Hein Hoogstad’s “‘Oh Baby, I Like It Raw’: Engineering Truth”
explore the role of digital sound technologies in contemporary music
production. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s notion of technologies as
nonhuman social actors, Morris examines how the DL4 loop sampler
functions as an active participant in musical practice. By “delegating the
live” to the DL4, musicians using the pedal foreground the importance of
repetition and invite a reconsideration of the relationship between live
performance and recorded mediation. Rather than presenting technology
itself as an active agent in music production, Hoogstad focuses instead on
the role of the sound engineer. He examines the sonic interventions
performed by hip-hop DJs like RZA, who employ digital technologies to
create noise and vocal distortion in ways that subvert subjectivity as well
as musical and linguistic conventions. Hannah Bosma’s “Voice or Ear?
The Female Voice and the Listener’s Position in Paul Lansky’s as it grew
dark” focuses on the ways in which sound technologies mediate the voice
in electrovocal acoustic music, which potentially destabilise authorial
control and gender identities. In her reading of Paul Lansky’s as it grew
dark, for example, Bosma shows how the structure, objectification and
distantiation of the acousmatic medium undermine the hegemony of
language without attributing these vocals to a disempowered female
figure. Finally, Kathryn Woodard’s “The Pianist’s Body at Work:
Mediating Sound and Meaning in Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton
Mill Blues” investigates the specific functions of corporeality in the
composition, performance and perception of Frederic Rzewski’s piano
piece. Woodard suggests that the intersection between bodily perception
and knowledge serves to enact and comment upon the power structures
underlying musical traditions, by ascribing different subject positions to
the pianist, who embodies the struggle between genres defined along lines
of race and class. While the other contributions to this section focus on
electronic and electroacoustic means of sonic mediation, Woodard argues
that the pianist’s body also functions as a sound technology in
performance.
Section III, “Mediating Space,” establishes how sound technologies
and installations offer new ways of thinking about how sound mediates
between listeners and the spatial environment. Rather than focusing on the
interactions between musicians and machines, Taina Riikonen’s
“Producing Microscopic Embodied Spaces: The Flautist’s Mouth,
Reverberation Effects and Kaija Saariaho’s Lichtbogen” examines how the
space of the performer’s mouth is mediated during electronic music
6
Sonic Mediations
performances. By adapting Henri Lefebvre’s concepts of social space,
Riikonen investigates how the embodied flautist’s identity is constructed
through the interactions between the instrumentalist, the microphone and
the sound director. The sense of physical intimacy produced in
performance is negotiated precisely through these interactions, as it
depends on the sonic reverberations created with the technology under the
sound director’s control. Steven Connor’s “Atmospherics” also addresses
the issue of intimacy and distance by examining how early historical
responses to the atmospheric noise received by electronic sound
technologies inspired new ways of thinking about the relationship between
people and their spatial environment. With the rise of static interference,
the atmosphere was often perceived as a threatening and chaotic force but
was gradually treated as potentially productive, with instruments like the
theremin introducing the body directly into the circuits of sonic
transmissions. The theremin thus represents an early example of
interactive media and a possible precursor to the use of sensory triggers
and gestural controls within contemporary experimental and sound
installation art. Ruth Benschop’s “Another Interactivity in Pneumatic
Sound Field: On Interactive Sound Art and Digital Audio Technology”
examines the potential interaction between sound, technology and
audience occurring in sound installation. Drawing on ethnographic
fieldwork, Benschop redefines the concept of interactivity in installation
art as the creative engagement of the participants and their awareness of
the sonic environment. Adair Rounthwaite’s “Hearing History:
Storytelling and Collective Subjectivity in Cardiff and Miller’s
Pandemonium” focuses on the ways in which sound installation can also
be employed to convey a sense of history that is dependent on the
listener’s embodied experience and participation. For Rounthwaite, Janet
Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s site-specific installation work creates a
collectively shared event, allowing participants to imaginatively engage
with the space and integrate it into their own present experience. As with
the other chapters in this section, Rounthwaite highlights how noise or
other forms of interference can mediate the relationship between listeners
and the spatial environment.
The final section, “Mediating Audiovision,” addresses the role of both
image and sound in mediating the experience of theatrical and cinematic
events. Milla Tiainen’s “Towards Intensive Audiovisual Encounters:
Interactions of Opera and Cinema” employs Gilles Deleuze’s notion of
“intensities”—a theoretical concept that does not privilege either optics or
acoustics—in order to discuss the mediation that occurs when opera is
incorporated into cinema. In her reading of Luc Besson’s The Fifth
Introduction
7
Element, Tiainen argues that an “intensive approach” is necessary for
explaining how the visual action on-screen and the operatic elements in
the soundtrack are mutually co-creative. Tereza Havelková’s “Do You
Want to Be Absorbed? The Knotty Acts of Mediation in Rosa: A Horse
Drama” takes the opposite approach by examining the use of cinema in
contemporary opera. Havelková argues that Peter Greenaway’s Rosa: A
Horse Drama alternates between operatic and filmic music in order to
oscillate between theatricality and absorption. Havelková applies the
concept of “focalisation” from narratology to describe these different
musical registers and the way they mediate the audience’s relationship to
the action on stage. Rather than treating the theatre as a transparent
medium, in other words, Havelková approaches opera itself as a medium
that foregrounds its own acts of mediation. Pieter Verstraete’s “Auditory
Imagination and Narrativisation in Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle”
similarly examines how the interactions between the visual and acoustic
elements in contemporary musical theatre create a critical distance that
allows audiences to reflect on the effects of theatre itself as a medium.
Verstraete extends the existing concept of “auditory imagination” to show
how the use of minimalist settings and contrasting juxtapositions between
textual and visual elements can draw the audience’s attention to their own
interpretative acts of listening and reveal how theatrical events actually
occur within the mind of the spectator-auditor. Carolyn Birdsall’s “Sound
Bites! Dissonant Audiovisions as Historiophony in Hitler’s Hit Parade”
analyses how the interaction between visual and acoustic elements in
Oliver Axer’s Hitler’s Hit Parade create a critical relationship to the
medium as well as towards fixed historical narratives about the Nazi era.
By using popular music to recontextualise and undercut found footage
from Nazi Germany, Birdsall argues that this film disrupts the listening
conventions, the narrative structure and the emotional registers
traditionally employed in documentary films. The chapters in this section
thus employ a wide range of disciplinary approaches and concepts in order
to discuss the same fundamental issue: how the relationship between
sound and image can potentially create a sense of critical distance or
medial awareness.
In conclusion, the concept of sonic mediation is broad enough to
extend the limitations of existing disciplinary frameworks and musiccentred models, but specific enough to elucidate a finite set of fundamental
concerns that are relevant to scholars working on sound. The first part of
this concept, the “sonic,” encompasses a broader understanding of
categories such as the voice, music, noise and silence, while the attention
to “mediation” sharpens sound scholars’ awareness of the specific
8
Sonic Mediations
contributions of the sonic event, corporeality and the technological
apparatus. By creating a forum for scholars from a wide range of
disciplinary backgrounds, this collection represents a model for sound
studies: not as a homogenous field but rather a mosaic of innovative
approaches. Rather than attempting to consolidate these approaches or
privilege any single one, the particular benefit of sound studies lies in the
fact that it allows scholars from such varied fields to enter into a
productive dialogue around shared theoretical concerns.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music. Edited by Richard Leppert.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Altman, Rick, ed. Sound Theory/Sound Practice. London: Routledge,
1992.
—. ed. “The State of Sound Studies.” Iris: A Journal of Theory on Image
and Sound 27 (Spring 1999).
Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture.
London: Routledge, 1999.
Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New
Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Bull, Michael. Sounding out the City: Personal Stereos and the
Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2000.
Bull, Michael, and Les Back, eds. The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford:
Berg, 2003.
Campbell, Timothy. Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated by
Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Cox, Christoph, and Daniel Warner, eds. Audio Culture: Readings in
Modern Music. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum,
1987.
Introduction
9
Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Kahn, Douglas, and Gregory Whitehead, eds. Wireless Imagination:
Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1992.
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999.
Lastra, James. Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception,
Representation, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press,
2002.
McLuhan. Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.
London: Methuen, 1982.
Schaeffer, Pierre. Traité des objets musicaux: essai interdisciplines. Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1966.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Tuning of the World. Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1977.
Shilling, Chris. The Body in Culture, Technology and Society. London:
Sage, 2005.
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound
Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics
and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2002.
Truax, Barry. Acoustic Communication. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing,
2001.
Weiss, Allen S. Phantasmatic Radio. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1995.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New
York: Schocken, 1975.
PART I:
MEDIATING PERCEPTION
THE PHONOGRAPHIC BODY:
PHRENO-MESMERISM, BRAIN MAPPING AND
EMBODIED RECORDING
ANTHONY ENNS
As historians frequently point out, the development of modern sound
technologies was largely motivated by a desire to isolate and simulate
human auditory functions by mechanical means. Inventions like the
telephone and the phonograph were inspired by devices like Faber’s
talking automaton, Johann Philipp Reis’ mechanical ear and Alexander
Graham Bell’s phonautograph, which effectively replaced bodily organs
with technological prostheses that were capable of perceiving and
producing sounds in the absence of a speaking or listening body. The
notion that these new technologies transform the body into a “prosthetic
god” was most famously articulated by Sigmund Freud in his 1930 book
Civilization and Its Discontents, where he claims that when a human being
“puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent.”1 Freud’s
ambivalence concerning media technologies becomes clearer, however,
when he adds that “those organs have not grown on to him and they still
give him much trouble at times.”2 Contemporary critics are even more
emphatic in their criticism of this history, as they often characterise the
technological simulation of auditory functions as a gradual process of
disembodiment that threatens to displace the traditional notion of the
liberal humanist subject by severing the link between voice and presence.
Charles Grivel argues, for example, that phonograph recordings reveal a
shocking absence of subjectivity by separating the voice from the body
and giving it a presence independent of the speaker, which disrupts any
equation of the voice with individual experience and identity.3 Douglas
Kahn similarly points out that this separation of voice and body supports
1
Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents,” 738.
Ibid.
3
Grivel, “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth,” 35.
2
14
Sonic Mediations
Jacques Derrida’s claim that the temporalisation of speech disrupts the
notion of the individual subject as a being that is present to itself because it
can hear itself speak:
The voice no longer occupied its own space and time. It was removed
from the body where, following Derrida, it entered the realm of writing
and the realm of the social, where one loses control of the voice because
it no longer disappears.4
As a result of sound recording technology, therefore, the voice assumes
many of the same qualities as writing, as it becomes capable of being
separated from the subject and sent out into the world, where it becomes
available for appropriation (or misappropriation) by others. If voice is a
marker of identity and agency, in other words, sound technologies threaten
the autonomy and integrity of the individual subject.
Historians also point out that at the same time sound technologies
were made to simulate human auditory functions, these same functions
were gradually understood in machinic terms. Michel Foucault argues, for
example, that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the body became
an “object and target of power…that is manipulated, shaped, trained,
which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces.”5 Tim
Armstrong supports this claim by examining how the rise of electrical
science introduced the notion of the nervous system as “a reservoir of
energy” that could be disciplined through electro-shock therapy and the
electric chair.6 The notion that new media technologies are closely related
to new conceptions of the body has been taken up most recently by Laura
Otis, who discusses how the nervous system was understood in terms of
telegraph networks in the nineteenth century: “Images of bodily
communications nets have inspired us to build technological ones, and
images of technological ones have inspired us to see them in the body.”7
This understanding of the body in terms of technology thus represents a
precursor to the twentieth-century science of cybernetics and
contemporary speculations about the possibility of plugging media
technologies directly into the brain.
Rather than examining how sound technologies displaced the body
and transformed the reception and production of sound into a purely
technological process, the following chapter will pursue this second line of
4
Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 8.
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136.
6
Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, 34.
7
Otis, Networking, 2.
5
The Phonographic Body
15
inquiry by examining how the body itself has historically been understood
as a sound recording device. This chapter will thus attempt to reverse
Marshall McLuhan’s famous description of media technologies as
extensions of the nervous system by looking at the ways in which the body
itself was conceived as a technological apparatus.8 This notion offers an
alternative approach to the question of sonic mediation, as it suggests that
sound technologies did not simply simulate and displace human auditory
functions, but rather the body also seemed capable of simulating the
functions of sound technologies. Beginning with the nineteenth-century
practice of phreno-mesmerism, for example, scientists began to conceive
of the brain as a device for storing and reproducing sounds. The invention
of the phonograph and the discovery that sounds could be recorded in
grooves also seemed to offer an apt metaphor for understanding how
memories could be stored in the folds of the brain. Experiments involving
electrical stimulation of the cortex in the 1950s and 1960s further
reinforced this notion of the body as a sound recording device, which
encouraged scientists to speculate about the possibility of a direct interface
between media technologies and the brain. Although these examples are
taken from completely different historical periods and they are based on
completely different understandings of neurological functions, they all
share a common conception of the body as a device for storing acoustic
information.
My purpose is thus to present these instances of “embodied
recording” not as empirical descriptions of how the brain actually
functions, but rather as cultural evidence of a desire that was projected
onto the body. Steven Connor has discussed similar phenomena, such as
the nineteenth-century practice of “direct voice mediumship,” which
supposedly enabled the voices of the dead to be channeled through
spiritual mediums during séances. Connor argues that this practice
represents a form of resistance against the disembodying effects of new
sound technologies, as it “gives voice back to the body and the body back
to the voice.”9 The ambiguity of such practices, however, is that they give
the body back to the voice while simultaneously depriving the body of any
control over the voice. The notion of the body as a sound technology thus
emphasises the embodied nature of perception, while at the same time
threatening the equation of speaking or hearing with individual agency or
identity, and my primary argument is that this discourse continues to
privilege the body as the site where acoustic information is received,
8
9
See McLuhan, Understanding Media.
Connor, Dumbstruck, 392.
16
Sonic Mediations
stored and transmitted, while simultaneously revealing the absence of
individual subjectivity. The history of “embodied recording” suggests that
the body and technology remain inseparable, and similar conceptions of
the body continue to inform contemporary theories of “cyborg” or
“posthuman” subjectivity.
Phreno-Mesmerism
Mesmerism was an eighteenth-century science that posited the existence
of an invisible fluid that permeated the universe and manifested itself in
the motions of the planets, tides and atmospheric changes. According to
Robert Fuller, this fluid was seen as the fundamental substance of the
universe, and it “constituted the etheric medium through which sensations
of every kind—light, heat, magnetism, electricity—were able to pass from
one physical object to another.”10 The movement’s founder, Franz Anton
Mesmer, claimed that all illnesses could be explained as imbalances of this
invisible fluid in the body, and these imbalances could be corrected
through the magnetic fields that emanated from a mesmerist’s hands. Over
time, however, studies of mesmerism began to focus more on the rapport
between the patient and the mesmerist, who was shown to be capable of
exercising a tremendous degree of control and influence.11 After attending
a demonstration given by one of Mesmer’s disciples in 1829, John
Elliotson, a professor of medicine at the University of London, began to
conduct research into mesmerism at the newly established University
College Hospital. Elliotson first invited Baron Dupotet to demonstrate
mesmeric treatments at the hospital in 1837, and these public
performances primarily focused on the mesmerist’s ability to manipulate
his patients’ auditory senses:
[H]e would open one sense while the others remained shut. He placed
his finger in one of [his patient’s] ears and she heard slightly at first; she
then began to hear better, and gradually got to the full sense of her
hearing.12
10
Fuller, “Mesmerism and the Birth of Psychology,” 207.
For more on mesmerism, see Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the
Enlightenment in France; Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious; Richards,
Mental Machinery; Gauld, A History of Hypnotism; Winter, Mesmerized.
12
“Abstract of a Clinical Lecture,” 872.
11
The Phonographic Body
17
Dupotet’s experiments thus depicted the mesmeric trance as a state in
which the channels of auditory perception could be isolated and
manipulated by external forces.
In the 1840s mesmerism gradually merged with the science of
phrenology to form phreno-mesmerism. Phrenology itself had been
embraced by the scientific community in the 1820s, and it was widely
accepted even among many of the scientists who rejected mesmerism.
When Elliotson started The Zoist in 1843, a journal dedicated to the study
of mesmerism, he attempted to capitalise on the success of phrenology by
arguing that the two sciences were essentially the same, as they both
revealed an inherent connection between consciousness and the body.
Elliotson claimed that a mesmerist could activate or deactivate the
“phrenological organs” on the human skull using magnetic influence, as
illustrated in the following account:
I demagnetised Hearing….We then spoke to her, but she could hear no
one but the operator….I proceeded to excite Self-Esteem by contact;
when she immediately raised herself in her chair, tossed her head with
much dignity, and informed me, “that she thought herself much too
good to associate with me.” Moving my finger to Adhesiveness, she
clung to me, and exclaimed, “You will not leave me; you shall stop
with me.” On my finger being applied to Philoprogenitiveness, she
talked of children, and of young animals, sometimes nursing the former,
and calling the latter. Conscientiousness being excited, led to a sense of
duty. “She must attend to her master’s business,” she said, “or it would
be defrauding him of her time.” Veneration being touched, she rose
from her chair and said, “Well, I must go…to church”….Benevolence
excited, produced generosity; Acquisitiveness, an inclination to get hold
of what she could, and keep what she had; Ideality, to talk about the
moon, groves, and poetry; Wit, to laugh and say funny things; Firmness,
to refuse to do anything when she had made up her mind…and
Secretiveness, to refuse to tell me anything I asked her, remarking, “that
she kept her own secrets.”13
In other words, mesmerists claimed to activate particular characteristics or
sentiments simply by touching the appropriate phrenological organ.
Phreno-mesmerism thus treated the body as an information storage device
whose contents could be accessed like a phonograph recording or, as
Alison Winter argues, it “likened the mind and brain to an electric
machine.”14
13
14
Brindley, “Phreno-Magnetic Cases,” 173.
Winter, Mesmerized, 117.
18
Sonic Mediations
The connection between mesmerism and sound recording was made
particularly explicit when the practice was employed in musical
performances. During one of James Braid’s demonstrations in 1847, for
example, a mesmeric rapport was established between a somnambulist and
the singer Jenny Lind, which enabled the somnambulist to emulate Lind’s
unique vocal style:
[I]n the sleep [the somnambulist] would prove herself competent to
accompany anyone in the room in singing songs in any language, giving
both notes and words correctly….[T]he queen of song, the far-famed
Jenny Lind, sat down to the instrument, and played and sang most
beautifully a slow air, with Swedish words, which the somnambulist
accompanied her in, in the most perfect manner, both as regarded words
and music. Jenny now seemed resolved to test the powers of the
somnambulist to the utmost, by a continued strain of the most difficult
roulades and cadenzas, for which she is so famous; including some of
her extraordinary sostenuto notes, with all their inflections from
pianissimo to forte crescendo, and again diminished to thread-like
pianissimo: but in all these fantastic tricks and displays of genius by the
Swedish nightingale…she was so closely and accurately tracked by the
somnambulist, that several in the room occasionally could not have told,
merely by hearing, that there were two individuals singing—so
instantaneously did she catch the notes, and so perfectly did their voices
blend and accord.15
Such demonstrations represent an alternative version of Thomas Alva
Edison’s famous “tone tests,” in which audiences were invited to compare
the live performances of singers like Maggie Teyte with their
phonographic recordings; according to Edison’s promotional material,
these tests were designed to show that “there was no difference between
[the singer’s] voice and the New Edison RE-CREATION of it.”16 The
practice of phreno-mesmerism was similarly designed to prove that there
was no difference between the singer’s voice and the somnambulist’s
recreation of it, yet the transmitted voice still retained a living, embodied
presence. Mesmerism’s potential to transform the body into a machine for
receiving, storing and transmitting acoustic information thus prefigured
the phonograph’s ability to preserve and replay vocal recordings.
The concept of the mesmerised subject as a sound technology is
perhaps most vividly illustrated in George DuMaurier’s 1894 novel Trilby,
15
“Jenny Lind,” 456-7.
Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 193. For more on Edison’s tone tests, see
Thompson, “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity.”
16
The Phonographic Body
19
which recounts the story of a Parisian laundress who is mesmerised by a
sinister Jewish musician named Svengali. Trilby suffers from recurring
headaches, which only Svengali’s mesmeric treatments are capable of
curing, yet her friends recognise the danger of these treatments, as
Svengali gradually asserts his control over her body. Although she is tone
deaf, Trilby possesses an excellent singing voice, and when placed in a
mesmeric trance Svengali is able to manipulate her vocal chords in such a
way as to make her sing beautifully. Trilby eventually becomes famous for
these performances, but she is never consciously aware of what is
happening on stage: “[Svengali] had but to say ‘Dors!’ and she suddenly
became an unconscious Trilby of marble, who could produce wonderful
sounds—just the sounds he wanted, and nothing else.”17
As Lisa Gitelman points out, Trilby is effectively transformed into an
automaton or “singing machine,” as she is “neither the author of her self or
of her voice.”18 Gitelman adds that this lack of individual agency and
autonomy is also the reason why audiences are so fascinated by her
performances: “[I]t is partly her lack of intention, the invisibility of
authorial agency, that captivates her audience. Listeners witness a
spectacle of origination within which origination itself is elusive.”19 Like
early phonograph listeners, therefore, audiences perceive Trilby’s voice as
unreal and otherworldly precisely because it does not represent the
expression of her own individual identity. In this way, Trilby’s
performances closely resembled public demonstrations of phrenomesmerism, which similarly illustrated the ways in which the identity of
the singer’s voice was distinctly separated from the identity of the singer
herself. The phreno-mesmerist’s ability to activate various parts of the
brain was also explicitly described as the act of playing a piano:
“[M]esmerizing a particular ‘key’ would make the brain sound the
appropriate psychological ‘note.’”20 Because of their ability to direct and
manipulate musicians, orchestra conductors were also frequently
compared to mesmerists. Like the mesmerist, “the conductor radiated an
influence that coordinated and transformed a group of individuals into a
performing body.”21 By conducting the orchestra during Trilby’s
performances, Svengali radiates an influence that not only metaphorically
transforms the musicians into a single performing body, but also literally
mesmerises the singer as well.
17
DuMaurier, Trilby, 357.
Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, 212.
19
Ibid., 213.
20
Winter, Mesmerized, 309.
21
Ibid., 312.
18
20
Sonic Mediations
The science of phreno-mesmerism was thus frequently associated
with the production and reception of sound. On the one hand, the ability of
the mesmerist to isolate and manipulate the sensory channels of the
mesmerised subject showed how auditory perception could be operated
without the conscious mediation of the listening body, which paved the
way for the technological simulation of auditory perception. On the other
hand, the bodies of mesmerised patients were also capable of recording
and reproducing the sounds of voices that seemed to possess a sense of
presence that did not originate from within the individual subject. This
practice thus clearly illustrates the notion of the body as a media
technology capable of receiving, storing and transmitting acoustic
information.
Electrical Stimulation of the Brain
This notion of the body as a media technology was corroborated by
nineteenth-century physiologists like Paul Broca and Karl Wernicke, who
also employed the phonograph as a model in their attempts to chart neural
pathways. As Friedrich Kittler points out, the use of such metaphors was
practically unavoidable:
A brain physiology that followed Broca and Wernicke’s subdivision of
discourse into numerous subroutines and located speaking, hearing,
writing, and reading in various parts of the brain (because it exclusively
focused on the states of specifiable material particles) had to model
itself on the phonograph.22
Broca and Wernicke’s attempts to isolate the sensory channels in the brain
were thus directly inspired by new sound technologies, and their
conception of the brain as a media technology bears a striking resemblance
to earlier practices like phreno-mesmerism, which similarly conceived of
the brain as a device for receiving, storing and transmitting information.
Kittler adds that the physiological contours of the skull also seemed to
resemble the grooves of phonograph cylinders. In “Primal Sound,” for
example, Rainer Maria Rilke writes:
The coronal suture of the skull…has—let us assume—a certain
similarity to the close wavy line which the needle of a phonograph
engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if
one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a
22
Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 38.