The media epistemic value of sonic analytics tools. A commentary

Abstract

While automatized content identification of audio data, in critical discourse analysis, is bound to the symbolic order of monitoring, control, surveillance, censorship and copyright protection, the very tools and algorithms which have been developed for such purposes can be turned into instruments of knowledge production in the scientific sense. Audio content identification is not simply an extension of cultural taxonomies to machine listening, but an operation with its own eigen knowledge. Audio content identification is not simply a continuation of analog techniques for monitoring sonic objects. From a media-epistemological perspective, new forms of audio content identification open different orders of the sonic archive. What is practiced in the online domain has been preceded by experimental investigations of archival storage. The real l'archive, though, are the technological (hardware) and mathematical (software) criteria defining content identification. A media archaeology of audio content identification reveals the technological l'archive governing such forms of enunciation.

Keywords:

• Audio content identification
• sonic archive
• algorithm
• machine listening
• media archaeology
• technológos

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Wolfgang Ernst

Wolfgang Ernst is Full Professor for Media Theories at the Institute for Musicology and Media Science at Humboldt University in Berlin. Having been academically trained as a historian and classicist (Latin Philology and Classical Archaeology) with an ongoing interest in cultural temporalities, Ernst grew into the emergent technology-oriented “German school” of media science. His academic focus has been on archival theory and museology, before attending to media materialities. His current research covers “radical” media archaeology as method, the epistemology of technológos, the theory of technical storage, the technologies of cultural transmission, micro-temporal media aesthetics and their chronopoetic potentials, and sound analytics (“sonicity”) from a media-epistemological point of view. Ernst's latest booklet in English is entitled The Delayed Present. Media-induced interventions into contempor(e)alities (2017).