Hearing pastness and presence: the myth of perfect fidelity and the temporality of recorded sound

ABSTRACT

This article rethinks the experience of listening to technologically reproduced sound and music by dispelling the myth of perfect fidelity or the ideal of complete similitude between originals and copies. It does so, on the basis of a media archaeological analysis of the symbolic idealisations used in mathematical acoustics and the physical processes that turn these idealisations into media technological operations. Contrasting Friedrich Kittler’s media theoretical take on the idealised sonic purity of the sine wave with Jacques Derrida’s epistemological concept of the temporal “delay” that defines all mediatic operations, the article argues that the inevitable introduction of transient elements – noise, distortion and randomness – shapes the listener’s experience of the multi-layered temporality of recorded sound and music. By no longer focussing on the input and output of a recording chain but on the transmission channels in between, it is argued that recorded sound and music simultaneously marks pastness and presence. Pastness in the sense that sound recordings resonate with the transience, temporal irreversibility and finitude of all physical phenomena; and presence in the sense that they also produce the experience of the constant flow of time through the here and now.

KEYWORDS:

• Sound recording
• noise
• media archaeology
• acoustics
• uncertainty principle
• Kittler
• Derrida

Acknowledgments

For Doris. This article was made possible by the support of research project Sound and Materialism in the 19th century, hosted by the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, as well as Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam). Many thanks to David Trippett, Melissa van Drie and the two anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable commentary, remarks and suggestions. I also want to thank my other colleagues in Amsterdam, Cambridge and elsewhere. Lastly, this essay would not exist without the invaluable support of Sander van Maas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. At the Cambridge Science Festival 2017, I joined a project initiated and put together by Melissa van Drie, in which a group of researchers and artists performed several pages from Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, a 193-page graphic score that can be interpreted in any way one sees fit. As part of the performance, British artist and researcher Aleks Kolkowski brought one of the phonographs from his collection of early recording devices to make a recording.

2. In Claude Shannon’s information theory of 1948, noise is not conceived as external disturbance but considered to be internal to the communication system. Although this allows one to calculate the amount of noise that accumulates during a transmission, it also shows that complete noise reduction is fundamentally impossible. A clear and concise introduction to these principles in the context of audio technology can be found in Sterne (2012, 81).

3. In Earth Sounds, Kahn (2013, 62, emphasis in original) uses the term transperception “to denote the perception of those characteristics” acquired “through the course of their propagation, acoustically and electromagnetically.”

4. On the history of the concept of fidelity, see for instance (Sterne 2003, 221/276; Thompson 1995, 131–171; Siefert 1995, 417–449).

5. Moles (1966, 84) writes that Einstein proved how “in the last analysis, background noise is due to the agitation of electrons in conductors.” This means that random noise is present down to the level of elementary particles, and proportional “to the absolute temperature.”

6. The Dirac impulse or delta function is named after British physicist and mathematician Paul Dirac or the sign that represents the function, the $\delta$.

7. Siegert (2003, 251) describes the impossible temporal exactitude of the infinitesimally short Dirac impulse as a “cut that freezes the movement.” In his discussion of Kant’s aesthetics in The Truth in Painting (1987, 89), Derrida writes about the “sans of the pure cut” (“le ‘sans’ de la coupure pure”) or the paradox between the finitude that is inherent to the application of a cut and the ideal infinity of a pure cut that leaves no traces of its cutting. In a different context, Barad (2007, 114) discusses the problem of separating observer and observed in quantum mechanics: “So the question of what constitutes the object of measurement is not fixed: as Bohr says, there is no inherently determinate Cartesian cut. […] The apparatus enacts a cut delineating the object from the agencies of observation.”

8. Kittler (2006, 71) also notes that “before a deep organ tone can turn into an event, many high trebles have already been recognized.” He does not credit a source, but it seems highly likely the example is from Wiener’s article.

9. English translations of untranslated German sources are my own.

10. Kittler and many others attribute these words to Edison himself, but Sterne (2003, 298) notes that they actually appeared in an 1877 editorial comment on Edison’s invention in The Scientific American.

11. It is possible to technically reverse a sound, but this procedure always leaves an audible mark, because it turns the attack into a decay and vice versa. Even though one hears the reversal of a signal’s temporal flow, time itself is still experienced as irreversibly flowing in one direction.

12. Following Heidegger’s notion of Dasein’s being-towards-death, the possibility of the event of death, which remains beyond representation, separates the domain of technical filters that administer a physical cut from the plane of the ideal filter, administering a clean cut. Just like the awareness of the, as Heidegger (1962, 310) puts it, “indefinite certainty” of death highlights the “not-yet” of not having died yet, the transient presence of sound signals resonates both with the inherent finitude of life and with the current being-alive of Being.

13. Up to and including Hermann von Helmholtz’s mid-nineteenth century work on sound and hearing, the separation between musical “sound” and unmusical “noise” was a basic fundament of Western music theory. Although Helmholtz (1875, 101) acknowledges that non-periodic noises accompany most instrumental sounds and “facilitate our power of distinguishing them in a composite mass of sounds,” he still consistently differentiates between (periodic) “musical tones” and (non-periodic) “noises” (11–13). For Helmholtz as well, the periodicity of musical tones supports the ideal of well-ordered music, which is diametrically opposed to the non-periodicity of noise.

14. Serres (1982, 65) famously calls “what is between, what exists between,” or “the middle term,” a parasite.

15. The models produced on the basis of “so-called natural laws,” argues Flusser (2011, 46), are not objective descriptions of physical processes, but ways to process and decode the “gigantic quantity of indications, signs, clues” that we are confronted with. They symbolically create order and reduce complexity. Similarly, every transmission, reproduction or representation requires a reduction of physical complexity – a choice, a focus, a selection – that allows the signal to be transmitted.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council [638241].

Notes on contributors

Melle Jan Kromhout

Melle Jan Kromhout works on the intersection of musicology, sound studies and media studies. His work focusses on the conceptual relations between music, sound and media from the nineteenth century to the present. He completed a PhD at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam) and recently worked as postdoctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Music and Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. His first monograph, The Logic of Filtering. How Noise Shapes the Sound of Recorded Music, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.