Afterword: Recording: From reproduction to representation to remediation

Abstract

The literary form of the Afterword is an attractive one: it gives one licence to reflect on this Companion to Recorded Music as a whole, compendious and diverse as it is, while bringing out and expanding upon some of its core themes. In this sense the Afterword itself recapitulates one of the key properties of media: the capacity to rework existing ideas or cultural material. In relation to literary media, the seminal work of Jack Goody and Ian Watt identified how the transition from oral to written transmission of knowledge and information enabled the development of a series of externalised aids to thought: the production, in written or graphic form, of lists and summaries, groupings and categories, classification and comparison, and hence the potential for a reflexive and critical engagement with past ideas, and for objectified histories. Visual media such as painting, photography and film proffer their own particular versions of these techniques, among them, variously, framing and focusing, close up and long shot, montage and jump cut. Electronic sound and auditory media proffer yet other analogous properties: splicing and editing, sequencing and looping, sampling and remixing. Writers on ‘new’ or digital media, in turn, have identified in them a series of capacities, many of them prefigured by the properties of ‘old’ (or earlier) media, but all of them reinflected by the physical and symbolic architectures of computer software and hardware: automation, modular and fractal organisation, replicability and variability, and transcoding – the repeated translation of a concept, process, object, image or sound from one format into another.