History or Resonance? Techno-Sonic Tempor(e)alities

Abstract

Is there a ‘sound of the archive’? Sonic memory operates on a different time base from the historical archive with its text-based alphabetic and visual records. Listening to disembodied voices allows for a specific kind of ‘re-presencing’ the past (Sobchak, in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications, 2011). Remembering past sonospheres by technical media induces short-cuts of the historical distance itself, whereas audio-recordings ask for a media-archaeological understanding in its most literal sense: listening to the articulation of the medium itself. The ahistoric resonances of sonic articulation and listening are counter-balanced by the radical historicity of its material embodiment. In order to exercise a different language to express such media-induced tempor(e)alities, McLuhan’s concept of ‘acoustic space’ (as alternative to the dominance of the eye in the typographic era) is further developed into the notion of ‘sonicity’ to describe media-epistemological constellations where time and technology meet.