Sound Recording Technology Research Articles

Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong by Joeri Bruyninckx

Reviewed by: Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong by Joeri Bruyninckx Christina Katopodis (bio) Joeri Bruyninckx, Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018, 237 pp. $34.00 paper. How does the practice of scientific observation change when scientists must close their eyes and trust their ears? Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong by Joeri Bruyninckx addresses the challenges of accuracy and authenticity in sound recording and traces the history of how standard practices for collecting, interpreting, and sharing those recordings were established. Listening in the Field offers a refreshing analysis of the science of birdsong by refusing to isolate science from aesthetics, and by examining the interdisciplinary networks of collaboration that contributed to the field. Focusing on major shifts in technology and method, Bruyninckx argues that sound recording practices offer science an opportunity to redefine itself and engage with a public audience. Listening in the Field invites us to reflect on how the instruments scientists use are not as objective as we might think; rather, sound recording technologies and practices shape end results, impacting a listener's perception of sound. Listening to a recording of a thrush at the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds, for instance, one must critically examine the sonic context of the recording and the curative choices made by recordists. Bruyninckx, by tracing the history of sound recording from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, emphasizes that recordings are not simply found in the field, as one might assume, but are, in fact, made. Bruyninckx centers his study around key pivot points in sound recording, such as radical departures from traditional musical notation, and attends, in particular, to the implications of new inventions, such as the parabolic reflector, magnetic tape, and the sound spectrograph. In addition, Bruyninckx treats sound recordings as circulating knowledges in translation between fields of study and between recordists working toward very different goals in science, in libraries, in entertainment, and, in [End Page 120] some cases, simply for the love of sound. Countless case studies reveal that birdsong is perpetually encoded and decoded across changing disciplines, from ornithology to ethology to anthropology, and recordings of birdsong are reshaped between academic scholars, amateur naturalists, and radio stations and filmmakers that draw from natural soundscapes. While Listening in the Field focuses particularly on technology and notable collaborations, it gestures toward larger theoretical questions of knowledge production; problems of authority and authenticity when recording in a breathing, living soundscape; the relationship between science and culture; and the ethics of ownership and access. Bruyninckx begins in the late nineteenth century when attempts to capture the elusive qualities of birdsong in musical notation reveal the inadequacy of human musical notation for the task, mainly due to the limiting factors of human hearing and the standardized key and time of music. Efforts to notate nonhuman music led to elaborate visual illustrations that attempted to capture the multidimensionality of sound. The diverse attempts to narrate, notate, draw, mimic, whistle, and represent sound visually or through syllabic onomatopoeia demonstrate the difficulty in translating situated knowledge from the field to paper, nonhuman music to human understanding, and the aural to the visual. Would sound recording technology resolve these tensions? The answer Bruyninckx offers is, resoundly, no. Bruyninckx argues, for example, that an invention such as the parabolic microphone, which focuses closely on sounds coming from one direction at a time, generates a "perspectiveless close-up recording" (p. 88) that shrinks the perceived space between listener and sound producer in the listener's experience. It also isolates the individual bird as a standard unit of analysis by eliminating other ambient sounds. Directional recording techniques contributed to what Bruyninckx calls the "laboratorization" of the field (p. 90). Although sounds were recorded as they were found, really, those recordings are not representations of "authentic nature" but, instead, have been artificially isolated and made to sound closer than they were in the field. Once magnetic tape enters the scene, sound recording rapidly changes the field of ornithology by generating a large amount of data not just about individual birds but also about particular species and variations in...

Vibrational Epistemology in the Nineteenth-Century American Soundscape: Music and Noise in Thoreau's Walden

Vibrational Epistemology in the Nineteenth-Century American Soundscape:Music and Noise in Thoreau's Walden Christina Katopodis (bio) Henry David Thoreau was an illimitable and precise surveyor of sounds. Recording nonhuman sounds in Walden (1854), Thoreau listens promiscuously: to soliloquizing squirrels, belching bullfrogs, ringing church bells, and hissing steam engines. He translates close listening into writing sonic phenomena in all their nuance: trains heard from a distance and up close, owls heard willingly and unwillingly at night, echoes through thick forest trees, lovely melodies and violent cacophonies. While scholars have previously analyzed sound in Thoreau's writing, the relatively new field of sound studies offers systematic methods for analyzing the author's listening theory and practice embedded in his musical lexicon. He treated music as natural to all beings, eschewing the artificial hierarchies humans imposed on nature, particularly between human and nonhuman. Listening, for him, is a learning mode, what I call a vibrational epistemology: a situated listener's embodied knowledge of the heard sound connects her to its source and to the particular environment shaping its direction and texture. Sound, in other words, does not exist in a vacuum. Furthermore, in Walden, sensing sonic vibration is as much about embodied feeling (sound's material pressure on the skin, the ear's tympanic membrane, the hairs [End Page 382] in the cochlea, and the skull) as it is about affects (emotions, feelings). Adding my own approach to sound studies based in new materialism, I argue that embodiment, relationality, agency, and situatedness are key to Thoreau's listening theory as well as to reading and hearing Walden. I show that the text offers an open-ended survey of sounds, a comprehensive yet never totalizing account. Walden's soundscape breathes, rustles, and screeches in natural rhythms that shift with the weather, migration patterns, and mating seasons; thus, Thoreau could not fully contain, finish, or visually map Walden's vibrating soundscape. I begin with sound and the body, how sound waves penetrate the individual and bring one into relation with other pulsing beings. Karen Barad and Jane Bennett help demonstrate the ways in which sonic vibrations unsettle boundaries and charge beings in agentic, reciprocal exchange.1 Next, I explore how different musical formulations characterize these exchanges by examining two key binaries Thoreau uses without hierarchical or moral judgments: harmony and discord, and music and noise. Combining musicological and ecocritical methods to analyze these four musical elements in Walden illuminates the power dynamics between agentic beings competing for sonic territory in a crescendoing soundscape. Finally, I center environmentalist politics on situated listening, reading sonic violence as a disruptive, climate-changing force, and adopting Thoreau's figure of the echo to imagine what multidirectional listening beyond the individual sounds like. Using sound felt within the individual as impetus to turn outward—especially toward relations with nonhumans—reorients the body as "part and particle" of nature, to use Ralph Waldo Emerson's phrasing from Nature (1836). Situated listening recovers nature's particularities and gives us cause, not for more idealization or ideation of nature, but for self-examination—of our (borrowing from Barad's formulation) "response-ability" in the ontoepistemology of sonic relations.2 [End Page 383] Studying the aural in Walden uncovers the agency Thoreau ascribes to nonhuman sound producers and the responsibility he accepts as a situated listener. Writing before the existence of sound recording technology, he bears witness not just to the vaunted natural sounds often associated with transcendentalism but also to diverse industrial tones and improvised music, such as his hoe tinkling against stones in his bean field.3 Walden is, by the author's own declaration, an intentional exercise in listening: he sets out at the very start to convey what he himself hears rather than what he has "heard of" through other ears (W, 3). He transcribes sounds from the train's steady beat—par-tridge, par-tridge—to the martins' twittering and chickadees' day day day. Each tap and chirp activates the hinged relations between vibrating beings. Sharon Cameron comments on Thoreau's concern in Walden with the "discovery of sound," and I take her intuitive observation a step further: analyzing Walden's aural complexities reveals Thoreau's deliberateness...

Design it yourself? Punk’s division of labour

Abstract Punk’s do-it-yourself call to arms led to a widespread adoption of the rhetoric, if not always the practice, of independence from traditional means of production – although it should be acknowledged that do-it-yourself ideals go back a lot further than the punk explosion of the 1970s, from traditional folk music through to the bottleneck rural blues players of the 1930s and 1940s, the 1950s UK skiffle boom and early 1960s US garage bands. The punks may have articulated the do-it-yourself vision most clearly, turning it into a mantra, but they were inheriting a tradition that was established many years earlier. During the early period of punk’s development in the United Kingdom, a distinct division of labour can be seen in the impact of an ‘anyone can do it’ DIY ethos on a range of activities. These range from live performance to the creation and manufacture of punk artefacts (clothes, posters, flyers, fanzines, records). While some of these areas offered new opportunities for amateur producers, within more technical areas of manufacturing, including the physical production of records, do-it-yourself could only have a nominal impact. Many punk groups did not have access to sound recording technologies, and even if they did, they would have to hand over the cutting and pressing of vinyl to a professional outfit. There was certainly a widespread and outspoken desire to take artistic control away from mainstream sources, but in reality the full ownership of the means of production was at best a naive ambition. Similarly, sleeve artwork could be created by untrained designers, but print reproduction was often left to the services of a professional print studio – doing-it-yourself had obvious limitations when it came to large-scale production and distribution.

Ghosts in the Phonograph: Tracking Black Canadian Postbody Poetics

Sound technologies enact cultural interventions and enable radical experiments of identity through the practice of stripping away, spinning, and splicing sounds — especially the sound of the human voice. This paper reads Black Canadian spoken word and turntable poetry for the symbolic use of sound technologies and other sonic schemas, focusing on Wayde Compton’s “The Reinventing Wheel” (2004) and Tanya Evanson’s “The African All Of It” (2013). In both of these works there is an emphasis upon the role of the body (and postbody) in the production of sound. I present both the spectral figure and sound recording technologies as postbody projections, and read the work of Compton and Evanson for transmissions that cross spatial, temporal, and body boundaries.The paper engages with posthumanist thought and the work of musicologist R. Murray Schafer to advance that sound technologies forge portals through time and space, as the dub plate reincarnates Compton’s disembodied, pre-recorded voice. Compton’s ghosts are quasi-material, zombies dancing in cargo holds — a reference to the Middle Passage — enacting a kinetic impulse capable of “moving the text” (103); Evanson’s acoustic experimentations with antiphony stress the kinetic and the sensory, and debinarize the relationship between speaker and audience. Finally, I argue that the ghostly emanation of postbody sounds from the turntable challenges culturally constructed binaries and forges a blended space for the celebration of plural, hybrid, and mobile identity formations, demolishing paradigms that work to enclose and encode Black Canada.

Вплив технологій звукозапису на створення та трансляцію музичного твору

The article is devoted to the analysis of the influence of technology evolution on the process of producing and replicating works of art. There is a transformation of musical creativity, which occurs due to the opportunities that arise because of sound recording technologies development, processing and reproduction of musical sound. The process of performing a musical pieces and actually creating it are experiencing great improvisation. Live looping enables recording and playing looped audio samples in real time using special devices or software. The ability to create audio tracks and to use them in "real time" can concern both the concert activity of leading and well-known musicians, recordings in professional studios of performers of different genre and style directions, but the most expedient and influential are those who create compositions in "amateur" single. This expediency is based on the spectrum of practical application of one's own voice, which is impossible without devices equipped with such a technology. The development of artistic practice is not possible beyond the cultural context. Changes in one of the cultural spheres associated with emergence of ability to record audio, emergence of new technologies, software – necessarily lead to essential or structural modifications in other areas. Using the principle of live looping allows you bypass most of the links associated with the show business infrastructure. However, the essence and stages of creative process remain largely unchanged. Improvisation, which is proclaimed as the main form of presentation of musical material while using live looping, becomes a pledge of creative maturity and skill of the performer, who acts as a composer, arranger and sometimes even a conductor. The development of the technological level helps create artistic projects, the appearance and implementation of which will depend on one person.

Entendiendo la complementariedad de dos métodos de muestreo en el estudio de comunidades de aves de un bosque mesófilo de montaña en temporada reproductiva

Point counts are the most commonly used survey method for the study of birds in the tropics. However, thanks to the development of new sound recording technologies, the bioacoustic method has recently been suggested as an alternative to point counts or to complement them. In this study, we examined the estimates of richness, diversity, community structure and composition, number of species detected at each sampling point and probabilities of species occupancy and detection, obtained using the point count method and the bioacoustic method individually or in a complementary way. This study was carried out in the Cloud Forest Sanctuary of Xalapa, Veracruz, during the breeding season of the birds. A total of 32 species were recorded using point count method, 37 species using the bioacoustic method and 38 species with both methods simultaneously. The sampling efficiency was 94% for point counts, 84% for the bioacoustic method and 95% for the combination of methods. Six species were detected exclusively with the bioacoustic method, while only one species was recorded exclusively with point counts. Although the results do not show a clear superiority of the simultaneous use of both methods, we recommend it because it lets to make additional records and offers the possibility of store bird recordings.

К истории создания этномузыкологических центров в ХХ веке

Ukrainian ethnomusicologist Lina Dobrianska (Лiна Добрянська) collected rich information concerning rise of institutional scientific centres on ethnomusicology in Europe and in Soviet space during the 20th C. She emphasizes, that rapid development of music folklore studies in the 20th C. was caused by epochal invention of sound recording technology as well as moving to well-organized research ethnomusicological centres. Most of them were maintaining sound recording archives. The history of founding important research centres in Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv and Lviv in European tendencies institutionalization of ethnology is outlined in the article including departments at High music schools. Key words: department of folk music, phonogram archive, high music school. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15181/td.v12i0.1552

Design it Yourself? Punk’s Division of Labour

Punk’s do-it-yourself call to arms led to a widespread adoption of the rhetoric, if not always the practice, of independence from traditional means of production. During the early period of punk’s development in the United Kingdom, a distinct division of labour can be seen in the impact of an ‘anyone can do it’ DIY ethos on a range of activities. These range from live performance to the creation and manufacture of punk artifacts (clothes, posters, flyers, fanzines, records). While some of these areas offered new opportunities for amateur producers, within more technical areas of manufacturing, including the physical production of records, do-it-yourself could only have a nominal impact. Many punk groups did not have access to sound recording technologies, and even of they did, they would have to hand over the cutting and pressing of vinyl to a professional outfit. There was certainly a widespread and outspoken desire to take artistic control away from mainstream sources, but in reality the ownership of the means of production was at best a naive ambition. Similarly, sleeve artwork could be created by untrained designers, but print reproduction was often left to the services of a professional print studio – doing-it-yourself had obvious limitations when it came to large-scale production and distribution.

The Concrete ‘Sound Object’ and the Emergence of Acoustical Film and Radiophonic Art in the Modernist Avant-Garde

Radiophonic art could not have emerged at the end of the 1920s without an intense period of experimentation across the creative fields of radio, new music, phonography, film, literature and theatre. The engagement with sound recording and broadcast technologies by artists radically expanded the scope of creative possibility within their respective practices, and more particularly, pointed to new forms of (inter-)artistic practice based in sound technologies including those of radio. This paper examines the convergence of industry, the development of technology, and creative practice that gave sound, previously understood as immaterial, a concrete objectification capable of responding to creative praxis, and so brought about the conditions that enabled a radiophonic art to materialize.

His Master’s Voice?: A Hemispheric History of Phonographic Fictions

This article explores the relationship between writing and sound recording technologies by constructing a genealogy of “phonographic fictions” connecting Spanish America to the United States. Starting in the early nineteenth century, the circulation of a system of shorthand known as “phonography” (or fonografía) touted the benefits of “sound-writing” for literature, commerce, and democratic law. Yet these connections became more fraught with the invention of the mechanical phonograph, given that the emergence of the recording industry and other inscriptive technologies was fueled first by the Spanish American War and then by the United Fruit Company’s creation of banana export enclaves in Central America and the Caribbean, which relied on and reinforced repressive political regimes. How did literature respond to these contradictions? The article dwells first on Spanish American modernismo before tracing trajectory of novels set in so-called banana republics that feature phonographs in brief but revealing roles. After examining a long-overlooked text by the U.S. writer O. Henry, it winds its way through several pillars of the Spanish American canon─including examples of magic realism and the dictator novel─and asks how an attention to the material infrastructures of sound recording can shed light on the development of the Spanish American literary field.

Ear Training, Solfège and Sound Education

Motivated by Marshall McLuhan’s suggestion that advances in technology serve to alter sense perceptions, and that it is the role of artists to be aware of such changes, the author explores intersections and contrasts among five different approaches to the subject and practice of ear training in the context of sound recording technology, with attention to how these approaches serve to expand and challenge traditional ear training pedagogy and what these changes to tradition reveal about how sound recording technology has altered our sense perceptions.

Sonic Explorations of the Southernmost Continent: Four composers’ responses to Antarctica and climate change in the twenty-first century

Composers have been drawn to the world’s southernmost continent, Antarctica, for creative inspiration since the so-called ‘Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, it has only been since the final few years of the twentieth century that professional composers have had opportunities to travel to the far south as part of arts residency programmes to experience its environment – and its unique soundscapes – first-hand. Most composers who have visited Antarctica to date have utilised sound recording technologies to document their journeys sonically and have subsequently created compositions that feature their soundscape recordings. Typically, such compositions include biological sounds, such as vocalisations of penguins and seals (both on the ice and underwater); non-biological or ‘geophysical’ ambient sounds that emanate from the natural landscape, such as those created by wind, blizzards, and ice cracking and calving; and/or anthropogenic (human) sounds recorded within the Antarctic environment.This article examines a series of recent compositions by four established composers who have visited Antarctica and used their experiences and field recordings to inform their creative work: Douglas Quin, Jay Needham, Lawrence English and Philip Samartzis. The primary aim of this research is to investigate what these composers’ Antarctica-related works reveal about their individual encounters with and perceptions of the frozen continent, as well as to consider the role of such compositions in conveying messages related to climate change to listeners around the globe – the vast majority of whom are unlikely to ever see orhearthe place in person.

Never Mind the Bollocks: A Tech-Processual Analysis

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols was a record made under highly unorthodox circumstances. In this article, four contextual cornerstones of record production study are considered: the recording workplace (studio); recordist(s); the sound recording and production technology; and production processes and techniques. The tech-processual context of Never Mind the Bollocks is considered in full, before a detailed production analysis of the track “Sub Mission.” The analysis reveals the extent of the contribution made by recordists Chris Thomas and Bill Price to the overall sonic character and shape of the record. This is not an example of “auteurism,” but an illumination of how Never Mind the Bollocks has come to be understood as a quintessentially rock—as opposed to punk—record.

Stenography and the public sphere in modern Russia

Stenography brought about an unsung revolution in the modern world: for the first time ever, writing could keep up with speech*. In Russia, the adoption of this technology came later than in France or Britain, but it was concentrated in time and tied to a particular civilizational project: the Great Reforms launched in the 1860s, with their key values of glasnost´ and publichnost´. Over the decades that followed, stenography would play an important role in helping Russian society to imagine itself. Even if the right to publish was contested, stenography would also change the stakes and possibilities of political discourse. With the exhaustively recorded debates in the State Duma, stenography entered a Golden Age, which continued into the revolutionary and early Soviet periods. With the mushrooming of Soviet institutions and forms of assembly, the demands for stenographers’ services had never been greater. From the mid‑1920s onwards, stenography once again became contested territory, as the question of who got to control the transcript became paramount. Yet, even with the tightening of the representational system known as Socialist Realism, stenography retained—at least until the adoption of user‑friendly sound recording technology in the mid‑1940s—much of its significance as a documentary record of public speech.

Appropriation, Culture and Meaning in Electroacoustic Music: A composer's perspective

This paper explores issues related to cultural appropriation in acousmatic electroacoustic music. Through its use of sound recording technology, acousmatic electroacoustic music facilitates a broad range of potential mechanisms for cultural appropriation, from the abstract (idea) to the concrete (sound object). But appropriating culturally identifiable material is not without its hazards, and the composer may face accusations of superficial exoticism, cultural offence, or the violation of personal or legal rights. To complicate matters for the composer, each listener will bring his or her own knowledge to their understanding of the meaning of the material. A similar reception effect occurs with any artistic medium, of course. But in electroacoustic music, the clarity and immediacy of high-fidelity recording and playback can strongly enhance the identifiability of the material, and, by extension, the audience's potential attachment to it. As illustrations, I refer briefly to several works, including three of my own acousmatic pieces, that have made use of appropriation. Through those examples, we consider both the broader issues noted above and some specific concerns about language and voice. The goal is to provide an overview of some of the opportunities and possible pitfalls of cultural appropriation in electroacoustic music, as well as a brief map of one composer's journey through that thorny landscape.

Thomas Edison’s Poetry Machine

The tradition of spoken-word recording began with Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph. Hence, this article makes the case that 1878 is a more important year to the history of literature than has yet been recognized for its experiments with verse and sound-recording technology. Although the tinfoil phonograph’s first decade has been well documented by media historians, literary critics have singled out 1888 as the noteworthy year since that is when Edison’s improved phonograph made it possible to record prominent figures including Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. Taking Edison’s original tinfoil phonograph as an alternative starting point reveals how the 1878 phonograph demonstrations, despite technological limitations, undertook acoustic experiments that enabled audiences to discern new forms of meaning, pleasure, and pathos in even the most well-known material. The recordings considered here include ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ as well as scripts by Tennyson, Caroline Norton, Edgar Allan Poe, Shakespeare, and others. Such recitals illustrate the extent to which Edison’s talking machine influenced the reception of texts while at the same time giving rise to performances unheard of in previous cultures.

I Hear America Suing: Music Copyright Infringement in the Era of Electronic Sound

Twentieth-century developments in audio recording, copying, and broadcast technologies thoroughly altered not only how popular music is distributed and consumed, but also how it is created. By the 1960s sound recording technologies had become so refined, ubiquitous, and economically accessible that they, and no longer music notation, had become the primary means by which popular songs were created and documented. Audio technologies democratized authorship of popular music, but also led to the gradual lessening of original primary musical parameters (melody in particular) in many popular genres. Paradoxically, despite this general diminishment in original musical expression, the number of copyright infringement claims has grown inexorably, decade-by-decade, since the 1960s. The bases of these claims have also grown remarkably attenuated, often involving nothing more than a similar sound or a common word or two shared by two songs. This article traces developments in sound technology, popular music, and music copyright infringement litigation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It argues that if courts today were more cognizant of the deep changes in the creation and musical content of popular songs since the Tin Pan Alley era of the early twentieth century, they might more confidently dispose of most music copyright infringement claims by dismissal or summary judgment.

Elegy, Effigy: Alchemy and the Displacement of Lament in As I Lay Dying

.Libby Catchings Faulkner Journal Elegy, Effigy: Alchemy and the Displacement of Lament in As I Lay Dying Somebody in the house begins to cry. It sounds like her eyes and her voice were turned back inside her, listening; we move, shifting to the other leg, meeting one another’s eye and making like they hadn’t touched. Whitfield stops at last. The women sing again. In the thick air it’s like their voices come out of the air, flowing together and on in the sad, comforting tunes. When they cease it’s like they hadn’t gone away. —As I Lay Dying (91) T hese are the sounds of the women mourning the death of Addie Bundren . Warwick Wadlington frames this moment as a meditation on the relationship between the voice and death, in which the women’s singing enacts a “ritual crossing of mortal boundaries” that refuses physical dissolution in favor of a shared social recognition of human mortality (109-11). However, I would suggest that there is another ritual in Faulkner’s novel that prepares for death even as it refuses communal recognition—one that might be understood via Jonathan Sterne’s notion of sound reproduction technology as an embalming of the human voice. The primary agent of this ritual is Cash, who both mitigates bodily decay though careful construction of Addie’s coffin and seeks preservation of the voice through pursuit of Suratt ’s “talking machine” (AILD 190). Taken together, these two gestures con­ stitute an alchemy that supplants grief with effigy, endeavoring to immortalize Addie’s voice rather than transition to a life without her. By the novel’s end, Cash’s alchemy is complete; for, though her body is in the ground, the imprint of Addie’s maternal voice lingers in the records Cash now plays on the family graphophone. In this sense, Cash reverses the introjective process by which Addie has brought him into the speaking world, ultimately retreating into a domestic space where the maternal voice yields to the consumable object: bananas, false teeth, and mail-order records (260-61). So positioned, the “effiguration ” of Addie Bundren—her being made into an effigy—might also be understood as an auxiliary to the erosion of communal life Julian Murphet sees as Faulkner’s indictment of the modern media ecology (6). At the same time, the mirrored becoming and unbecoming of this modification resonates with Theodor Adorno’s conception of the graphophone as transmitting, in the 25 26 Libby Catchings Displacement ofLament in As I Lay Dying way that other sonic technologies of modernity do, a radiative, umbilical qual­ ity towards a “cosmic death drive” (Adorno qtd. in Zeitlin 122)1 —a distinctly (Freudian) maternal relation2 made all the more poignant by an Alexander Graham Bell recording from 1881: “I am a graphophone, and my mother was a phonograph” (qtd. in ‘“Hear My Voice”’).3 1. Technologies of Sonic Consolation According to John T. Matthews, the novel’s graphophone is a commodity ob­ ject that recalls the “illusorily prosthetic qualities of novels themselves” by “simulatjing] life and speech” to gratify the listener as he or she experiences life’s losses and disappointments (“Machine Age” 90). However, Sterne’s fram­ ing of phonography as “a modification of the relations between life and death” (293) urges us to consider the graphophone’s significance in the novel beyond the function of consolation, to where it might constitute an alteration of the characters’ engagement with the living, speaking world. Such an alteration serves to reinforce Matthews’s thinking that Faulkner was interested in “the way modern technology might create new structures of human feeling, new relations to one’s own body and place, and new possibilities for human imagi­ nation” (Seeing Through the South 62). It should be noted that the graphophone in Faulkner’s novel is a sound recording technology situated in a particular historical moment and identi­ fied by a distinct technique, whereas Sterne’s use of phonography is meant as an umbrella term for all sound reproduction.4 The phonograph, an inscription technology developed by Edison, featured a stylus which made indentations of sound on metal foil; due to the pliability of the material, however...

The Victorian Walkman

The Victorian Walkman Matthew Rubery (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution From “La fin des livres” (Uzanne and Robida). By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Why bother reading a novel to yourself when you could have one read to you? This was the question facing readers after Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph made it possible to listen to the recorded voice for the first time in history. Edison’s list of potential uses for the device included playing “phonographic books” for those who were either unable or unwilling to read print for themselves (“The Phonograph and Its Future” 534). The idea was an attractive one for audiences who to this point could only dream about hearing a tale away from the presence of a live storyteller. The printed book had proven itself over several centuries to be the most convenient way of reading. Now readers began to ask whether books might be made even more convenient. It was not long before engineers, utopianists, and novelists began to speculate about the possibility of mobile phonograph technology, or what [End Page 9] we might playfully call the Victorian Walkman—a tiny portable phonograph that enabled people to listen to the spoken word while on the move. Such speculations predicted with impressive foresight three key features of the portable listening devices to come in the next century: mechanization, miniaturization, and mobilization. Portable phonographs fulfilled a desire not just to hear books read aloud whenever people liked but also to hear them read aloud wherever people liked, whether at home, on a train, or even, as we will see, on top of a mountain. The intersection of sound-recording technology and the book raised profound questions about the place of reading (both literally and figuratively) in a changing media ecology. The era of recorded sound began with the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb” played on a tinfoil phonograph in December 1877. The prototype consisted of a grooved metal cylinder with a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around it to capture the vibrations created by speaking into the phonograph’s mouthpiece. The result was a tinfoil record capable of playing back the human voice to the wonderment of audiences who had never before heard speech mechanically reproduced. Edison improved the design in 1888 by replacing the flimsy tinfoil slip with a more robust wax cylinder. This was the model used to record the voices of eminent Victorians, including Sarah Bernhardt, Robert Browning, William Gladstone, Henry Irving, Florence Nightingale, Arthur Sullivan, and Alfred Tennyson. After decades of alleged neglect of aurality, Victorianists have turned their attention to such instances of the recorded voice with the fervour of a disc jockey rummaging through a crate of vintage LPs.1 The phonograph’s debut left the public in the curious position of figuring out what to do with it. Edison preferred to market the phonograph as a device for taking dictation in business settings. Yet the uses of new media are determined as much by their social contexts as by the dictates of their inventors, and the public had in mind more imaginative tasks for it. Cartoons in Fun and Moonshine proposed using the phonograph to deliver parliamentary speeches by proxy, to record witness testimony in court, and to scare away burglars with a pre-recorded hue and cry. Such humorous sources suggest that the phonograph’s impact would be felt in personal as well as professional life, by giving women the means to catch philandering husbands in the act, to incriminate breachers of matrimonial promises, and to abet bashful lovers in speaking the amorous words they were too shy to recite in person—at the risk of falling into the wrong hands with farcical consequences (“Some Uncontemplated Possibilities” 42; “The Phonograph” 168). Of course, music was the most obvious use for the phonograph (Katz 56–79), but while the phonograph’s role as a music machine has been thoroughly documented, little attention has been given to its use as a reading machine. Audiences recognized immediately how easy it would be to listen to books read aloud on the phonograph. The most optimistic predictions were of a future in...

American poetry in performance: from Walt Whitman to hip hop

Tyler Hoffman brings a fresh perspective to the subject of performance poetry, and this comes at an excellent time, when there is such a vast interest across the country and around the world in the performance of poetry. He makes important connections, explaining things in a manner that remains provocative, interesting, and accessible.---Jay Parini, Middlebury College Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop is the first book to trace a comprehensive history of performance poetry in America, covering 150 years of literary history from Walt Whitman through the rap-meets-poetry scene. It reveals how the performance of poetry is bound up with the performance of identity and nationality in the modern period and carries its own shifting cultural politics. This book stands at the crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences; it is a book of literary and cultural criticism that deals squarely with issues of performance, a concept that has attained great importance in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology and has generated its own distinct field of performance studies. American Poetry in will be a meaningful contribution both to the field of American poetry studies and to the fields of cultural and performance studies, as it focuses on poetry that refuses the status of fixed aesthetic object and, in its variability, performs versions of race, class, gender, and sexuality both on and off the page. Relating the performance of poetry to shifting political and cultural ideologies in the United States, Hoffman argues that the vocal aspect of public poetry possesses (or has been imagined to possess) the ability to help construct both national and subaltern communities. Poetry in Performance explores public poets' confrontations with emergent sound recording and communications technologies as those confrontations shape their mythologies of the spoken word and their corresponding notions about America and Americanness.