Volume 6 (2012-13)
ISSN 1751-7788

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  Mechanical Instruments and Phonography: The Recording Angel of historiography

 

 

 

 

 

Joćo da Silva
Instituto de Etnomusicologia, Portugal and Newcastle University, UK

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This article strives to examine the historical narrative of music recording in its acoustic era (from 1877 to the late 1920s), at a time when competing technologies for capturing and registering sound and music were being incorporated into everyday life. Moreover, it analyses the significant chronological overlap of analogue and digital media and processes of recording. This sets the stage for a historiographical account that places the interaction between these two types of media at the focal point of a wider narrative of modernity. In this process, my article aims to trace a relationship between people and their past through the field of sound studies. On the one hand, the study of sound has been a frequent presence in areas like musicology, anthropology, sociology, history, or architecture. Nevertheless, it has mostly been perceived as a marginal or secondary approach within those disciplines. This clearly contrasts with the predominance of recorded sound in the historical narrative of both music and modernity. For example, the recent release of phonographic recordings of hand-played rolls by famous pianists illustrates this tendency; this demonstrates that our relationship with the sounds from the past is predominantly created through what was perceived in the beginning of the twentieth century as one among several competing technologies. Moreover, it encompasses a specific form through which contemporary society relates with 'the audible past' that epitomises a major cultural shift that occurred during the twentieth century, a mechanisation that no longer relied on the embodiment of cultural capital associated with playing and instruments, therefore de-skilling music, as Gitelman argues.[1] Thus, phonographic products occupy a dominant position in creating a musical canon for the twentieth century (see Caruso's recordings for The Gramophone Company), an importance that is not always reflected in the attention given to this novel relationship with history that was introduced with recording. In this sense, commercial recordings were key in the establishment of a different relationship between people and historical time in a profoundly modern way, placing recorded music as the audible part of cultural memory, 'the transmission of meanings from the past, that is, explicit historical reference and consciousness.'[2] My paper elaborates on previous work concerning the music industries, following a non-evolutionary approach to the history of recording that sees both analogue and digital media as distinct embodiments of modernity. In this context, 'media archaeology is first and foremost a methodology, a hermeneutic reading of the "new" against the grain of the past, rather than a telling of the histories of technologies from past to present.'[3]

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To address these tendencies, the article focuses on the work of Walter Benjamin and Slavoj ˇi˛ek. Benjamin's insight as an author that bore witness to and analysed the processes of commodification in the period dealt with by this article is essential for a discussion that focuses on modernity, technology, and history. Furthermore, his work on history offers a space in which to address and critique the notion of historicism as an imposing of a narrative continuity to the fragmentary categories of existence within modernity, a stance this article will develop when analysing the historiography of music and sound recording. For Benjamin 'the present determines where, in the object from the past, that object's fore-history and after-history diverge so as to circumscribe its nucleus.'[4] Thus, this work aims to question a reading that dominates the discourse concerning recorded music that is retrospectively constructed through the contemporary dominance of the phonographic object. The work of ˇi˛ek is especially insightful in tracing a distinction between historicism and historicity through a psychoanalytical approach, and in discussing interpassivity, a ritualised form of consumption that is crystallised in a particular form with the dissemination of phonography. In this sense, the novel rituals associated with recorded sound played a key role in a dramatical redefining of the modern experience, evidenced by the rising ubiquity of fixed sounds (to borrow Chion's terminology) in everyday life. This predominance can be read as a product of the recording industry in a way that 'the more the music industry has filled the air with music, the less remarkable the ubiquity of music seems.'[5]

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Picker associates the Victorian period with the transformation of what was considered by the Romantics as a sublime experience 'into a quantifiable and marketable object or thing, a sonic commodity, in the form of a printed work, a performance, or, ultimately, an audio recording.'[6] Therefore, the commodification of music was interconnected with industrial and scientific aspects, like the dissemination of image and sound reproducing technologies, that were integrated in the habitus of people and articulated with a wider social and cultural panorama. Moreover, the incorporation of the innovations mentioned above in the market for cultural goods combined novelty with established business models, resulting in a complex dynamic between the old and the new, the transnational and the national, between sound and music. These innovations fall in two main categories: mechanical instruments and phonography, each of the strands requiring a specific analytical framework.

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Mechanisation and digitisation: the player piano mechanisms

 

 

This section discusses the development of the player piano and its incorporation in the routines of several social groups. According to Ord-Hume,

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Mechanical instruments are those instruments that produce their sounds automatically from a pre-programmed mechanical source and are operated either without human participation (by clockwork, water, wind or electricity) or with musically unskilled human aid (such as by turning a handle or pumping bellows to provide air for pressure, or exhausters for suction).[7]

 

 

These devices had their heyday between 1890 and the early 1930s, overlapping with the  introduction of commercial phonography in the entertainment market.[8] My discussion focuses predominantly on the player piano because of its use as a conveyor of domestic entertainment, and because it was perceived and promoted as a competitor of the both the phonograph and the gramophone. Moreover, Taylor argues that the player piano occupied a key place for the commodification of music.[9] This discussion excludes mechanical instruments who also became part of modern everyday life and lingered on well after the heyday of the player piano, like music boxes, street organs, or chiming clocks, because these were not perceived as direct competitors of the phonograph. This article will not address the player piano and the phonograph in public spaces (like cinemas, cafés, or phonograph parlours), but will concentrate on the redefinition of domesticity through the commodification of music. In this sense, the incorporation of the player piano into the household practices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provides valuable information concerning the process through which 'a broad transformation of the ways that music was made and experienced, helping to constitute it as a commodity in the sense we know it in today's market.'[10]

 

 

Although the history of the player piano can be traced back to the late eighteenth century, the basis of its mechanism was developed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth.[11] In his comparison of the piano player and the phonograph, Taylor argues that the former, a 'seemingly less sophisticated technology provides a better site to address the question of the commodification of music.'[12] This view is shared with Suisman, to whom 'even more than the piano and the phonograph, it is the player-piano that best symbolizes the close relation between music machines and industrial manufacturing - and not just by homology.'[13] Taylor's main argument relates to the penetration of the player piano into American households and its rapid incorporation in everyday life, contrary to the slow integration of phonography as a form of domestic entertainment.[14] Therefore, situating the player piano as a device that could be attached to an already existing household good, the piano, and its univocal function are key aspects in Taylor's analysis. Moreover, he criticises a narrative that situates the player piano as a mere transition between an age of piano-based domestic music making and an age of the primacy of phonography, dominated by interpassive modes of music consumption. Consequently, the embodiment of cultural capital reflected in playing the piano was significantly altered with the advent of mechanisation. Nevertheless, the possibilities of 'regular' piano playing were not annulled by the attachment of the player piano mechanism, which allowed for the instrument to be performed by using both processes.

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According to Suisman, the reconfiguration of human participation in music-making from a position of direct performer to a role of machine operator points to a relocation of the expertise involved in this process to the mechanisms in the player piano and in the phonograph.[15] This position is consistent with the concept of delegation proposed by Latour, that designates a transfer of responsibilities and competencies from one actor to another. Most of the examples he uses involve delegation from human to non-human agents in a way that circumscribes the role of non-human agents exclusively to the execution of tasks assigned by them by human agents.[16] This introduces novel forms of musical practices that rely on the delegation of an important part of music-making to technical apparatuses in a way that radically changed the mode of modern experience, evidencing the tendency to de-skill music mentioned above.

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The notion of interpassivity points to the delegation of music-making, and the associated ideas of pleasure and leisure, to a technological apparatus, promoting a ritualised experience of passive music consumption that would become dominant throughout the twentieth century.[17] However, this form of relationship with music that developed with the fixation of sound has to be problematised. On the one hand, the commercial strategy of the player piano manufacturers emphasised the possibility of easily reproduce pre-fixed music, which marks an important distinction from the Victorian middle-class cherishing of individual achievement and creativity.[18] On the other hand, these devices allowed for human intervention by changing parameters like dynamics and tempo. This created an illusion of interactivity between the person and the apparatus through which the 'artistic results' of the performance depended on the virtuosity of the user.[19] Furthermore, the early phonograph is paradigmatic of the dichotomy between interactivity and interpassivity concerning recorded sound. Picker argues that the framing of the phonograph as a device that, contrary to the gramophone, could be used for home recording, promoted an 'active engagement from Victorians, who could readily make their own amateur records at home rather than purchase them.'[20] Thus, placing all forms of mechanical music as inducers of an interpassive mode of relation is simplistic and problematic during the early stage of phonography. Nevertheless, the tendency of the music industry to 'drive a wedge between production and consumption' is already present and will be intensified in the twentieth century.[21] For instance, in the nickel-in-the-slot phonographs:

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These were repeated, repeatable experiences that suggestively tended to standardize and depersonalize exchange, to collect and yet atomize consumption, and thus effectively to essentialize the marketplace, making it more easily experienced as an abstraction: the market.[22]

 

 

The later dominance of the gramophone as the predominant conveyor of commodified sound reinforced the ritualisation of interpassive consumption, indicating an important shift in cultural practices. Victorian domesticity favoured ways of informal archiving, reflected in family albums or home sound recordings, and held the parlour as a space in which the 'formal presentation and the maintenance of family identity' occupied centre stage.[23] However, in the early twentieth century, the living room progressively replaced the parlour, evidencing a transformation of domesticity.[24] Hence, a room 'considerably more informal in decor and arrangement' that 'admitted more and more mass produced goods' substituted a space 'largely populated with hand-crafted goods and family-specific cultural productions.'[25]

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Returning to the first player pianos, these 'consisted of what looked like a small cabinet which was wheeled up to the pianoforte, and from the back of which felt-covered hammers projected, which were adjusted to the keyboard.'[26] Therefore, the mechanism was external to the instrument and could be adapted both to grand and to upright pianos. The following improvement was 'the placing of the mechanism inside upright pianofortes, which had the great advantage that the pianoforte could then be used as an ordinary pianoforte and played by hand.'[27] Within this framework, manufacturers devised strategies for the mechanism to be incorporated in the instrument, maintaining the aesthetic appearance of the piano as a furniture item. By preserving its morphology through the integration of the player piano mechanism in the instrument's traditional form, the upright piano retained its status both as a musical instrument and as a piece of bourgeois furniture.[28] Thus, the new strain of player pianos merged the traditional role assigned to the piano as a marker of cultural capital and of individual achievement with 'modern' tendencies embedded in the ability to automatically reproduce music at home.

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A sequential set of holes punched in a paper roll contained the music to be performed by the player piano and the mass production of these rolls was symbiotically articulated with the trade of the player pianos. They predominantly contained music that had already been popularised in the theatre, in sheet music, or in sound recording and their mass reproduction bears interesting similarities and differences with sound recording. The most striking similarity concerns the production of a master roll that was manually prepared and then replicated through an industrial process. This contrasts with the recording of a master phonogram, which was directly produced by a technological apparatus. Later, the development of piano keyboard-operated punching machines allowed for the direct perforation onto the master rolls. The musical editor traced and punched the master roll based on the sheet music of a piece (which indicates the interconnection between several forms of commodified music) and then produced its fair copies (known as stencils), that were replicated by automatic punching machines.[29]

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In one large factory, with the capacity of 30,000 records a day, a pneumatic machine is used that makes 128 duplicate rolls at once. The paper passes from the reels at the rate of 170 feet a minute, receiving punctures from batteries of small punches. There are operated by compressed air, the different bars striking with a quick downwards motion that sends them through sixteen thicknesses of paper.[30]

 

 

Despite the technological innovations designed to facilitate the automated production of music rolls, the manual process was not entirely abandoned. Furthermore, various developments associated with this served two very distinct aims. On the one hand, the piano keyboard-operated punching machine mentioned above facilitated the process of mass production of music rolls. On the other hand, the reproducing pianos were music recording devices, consisting of a 'development of the ordinary player piano which, with special reproducing music rolls, can re-enact the original touch and expression of the recording pianist.'[31]

 

 

The reproducing piano was developed in Germany during the first decade of the twentieth century by the firms M. Welte & Söhne and Ludwig Hupfeld AG. These companies developed the Welte-Mignon (in 1904) and the Masterspiel DEA (marketed in 1907), respectively. In the following decade, the American manufacturers The Aeolian Company and The American Piano Company introduced their own reproducing piano devices in the market, evidencing the importance of the player piano in the music markets of the 1910s. Returning to the Welt-Mignon and the DEA, their manufacturers relied on famous pianists and composers to record the so-called hand-played rolls. Therefore, with a new technology that allowed for a more sensitive capture and reproduction of aspects such as tempo and dynamics it became possible not only to reproduce musical pieces in the parlour or living room but also to recreate a performance by a famous pianist in domestic settings.

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The recording  of both the Welte-Mignon and the DEA was not made by directly punching holes in the master roll. Instead, the pianist's performance was recorded with a system that traced ink on a music roll and the corresponding holes were manually punched afterwards.[32] Even before having developed the DEA, Hupfeld had already experimented with recorded rolls towards the end of 1905. Moreover, its Künstlermusikrollen (Artists' Music Rolls) were readily available for both the Phonola (a player piano mechanism manufactured by the firm) and the Phonoliszt ('an expression piano powered by an electric suction pump, with three levels of automatic dynamics, and variable speed crescendos between the levels'), which indicates a complex interpenetration between the market for player piano rolls and for recorded sound.[33]

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The encoding of information and the nature of the storage medium raise interesting questions pertaining to mechanical instruments. The piano rolls can be interpreted as a sequential and digital set of instructions for the instrument to play a piece of music. Sequential because the notation perforated in the continuous roll has a direct chronological correspondence with the musical piece (the instructions are interpreted in strict order as the roll moves) and digital due to its use of mutually exclusive and discontinuous values (on or off, in the case of the mechanisms mentioned above). According to Benson, the information recorded in a sheet of paper is binary because there are only two possible, discontinuous, and exclusive conditions: 'the surface of the paper in any given area is either solid or not.'[34] However, this association is retrospectively constructed because, as Gitelman argues, the ideas of 'the digital' and 'data' were not formulated at the time.[35] Both sheet music and piano rolls were printed on paper, which generated legal conflicts between their manufacturers.[36]  Nevertheless, I will pursue this line of thought because my article gives prominence to the type of information stored in detriment of the materiality of the medium, focusing on the historiography of mechanical music, where the distinction between competing processes of storing data are crucial. Thus, I follow the Kittlerian position where a 'clear division occurs between matter and information, the real and the symbolic' was established towards the end of the nineteenth century and embodied in several technological innovations, like the phonograph.[37]

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Both the Jacquard loom and Charles Babbage's planned (although never built) Analytical Engine, a nineteenth-century calculating machine, used perforated paper as their input device.[38] This points to a transectorial innovation that consisted of using a discontinuous storage medium in mechanisms associated with distinct activities, namely the textile, musical and computing industries.[39] To reinforce the association between the player piano and early computing, both Percy Ludgate in the 1910s and Vandevar Bush in the 1930s projected machines in which the digital data would be stored in perforated paper tape, a similar medium to the one used by player pianos.[40] However, there is an important distinction between both the Jacquard loom and the player piano and the computing machines mentioned above: the former two used a ready-made unchangeable routine while the latter were intended to perform multiple and programmable operations. Therefore, the music roll acted as a sequential read-only memory (because, under normal circumstances, the recorded information could not be altered) and the player piano as a reproducing device for a specific routine.[41]

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Phonography and the commodification of sound

 

 

This article has dealt with the player piano and its relation with the commodification of music during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. However, the development and dissemination of sound recording and reproducing technologies introduced important transformations in this process. With phonography, the commodification of music is paralleled by the commodification of sound itself.[42] However, the development of commercial phonography was an uneven and discontinuous process, which complicated its integration into everyday life in the nineteenth century. For Sterne, 'if we consider early sound-recording devices in their contemporary milieu, the telos toward mass production of prepackaged recordings appears as only one of many possible futures.'[43] As stated above, the debate concerning the multiple applications of the phonograph delayed its incorporation in American sociability routines. During its history, the phonograph 'was used with varying success as an office dictating machine, a scientific instrument, a toy and a coin-slot amusement machine, but in the mid-1890s success was still around the corner.'[44] Nonetheless, from the late 1880s onwards various transformations were essential for the creation of a phonographic market, such as the development of improved versions of Edison's phonograph and the establishment of the Edison Phonograph Company for its manufacture.[45]

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The rapid development of a large-scale market for phonographic goods towards the end of the nineteenth century (almost two decades after its inception) merged technological innovation and  commercial strategies directed towards the marketing of pre-recorded music, thus foregrounding the intended role of the phonograph as a conveyor of entertainment in relation to its use as an office tool:

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By the late 1890s Edison had designed a simpler, spring-driven phonograph; developed procedures for manufacturing pre-recorded musical cylinders on a large scale; and organized a new firm, the National Phonograph Company, to market these machines and records. The lower cost of these machines, combined with an improving economy enabled the National company and its principle cylinder competitor, the Columbia Phonograph Company to dramatically increase sales.[46]

 

 

This shows the complex mechanisms through which, over a period of thirty years, a 'curiosity of little practical value' was transformed in an object perceived as the epitome of modernity, reshaping the role played by music in everyday life.[47] For Thompson, in the short period between 1896 (the year that Edison's device was offered for sale to the public) and 1900, the phonograph began its integration in modern domestic life, becoming a familiar household item.[48] Moreover, she points to the idea that the phonograph was not only perceived as a part of modern domesticity but also as a good that played a key role in defining that same modernity, 'by being put to use in ways that distinctly changed the prevailing culture of music in the home.'[49] However, several alterations had to be made to maximise the dissemination of the phonograph and for its incorporation in the everyday sociability routines to be efficient. This implied the redefinition of the machine in visual, cultural and acoustical terms, an operation undertaken by manufacturers, advertisers and consumers. In sum, 'the phonograph could not just reproduce the sounds of musical instruments; it had to become an instrument itself.'[50] Furthermore, 'for most people under the sway of the phonograph, music could become both entertainment and part of the background noise of everyday life.'[51]

 

 

One point that emanates from this discussion is the reproducibility of sound and the relation between the 'original' and the 'copy.' Sterne argues that the correspondence between live and recorded music in the early years of phonography was situated in the realm of imagination and a correspondence between them had to be articulated to convince the listeners. Furthermore, with phonography 'the sound event is created for the explicit purpose of its reproduction.'[52] Therefore, it becomes impossible to uphold a qualitative distinction between a seemingly authentic original and a debased copy because neither of them 'exists either outside or prior to the process of reproduction.'[53] In this context it is the process of reproducibility that produces both copy and original.[54] Hence, the narrative that draws a direct path from original to copy through technological mediation must be reframed, because a binary between original and copy is admissible only due to the very possibility of sound reproduction.

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For Chion, the idea of reproduction is problematic in other grounds, namely due to a qualitative distinction between 'original' sound and its recorded (or fixed) counterpart, claiming that  the recording registers images-of-sound and not sound itself.[55] Nevertheless, the commercial promotion of phonograms relied on their presentation as a mere modality of transmission of sound, equating live and recorded sounds, a possibility embedded in a supposedly transparent notion of reproducibility and associated with notions of fidelity.[56] In the early days of phonography this is very noticeable because the impossibility of achieving a gold standard for the recordings supported an advertising framework in which 'the best available or the preferable became a stand-in for the true.'[57] Therefore, the development of audile techniques among the listeners implied they acquired skills that allowed them to discern between 'sounds "of" and sounds "by" the network,' and their association with a polarity between interior and exterior sounds in the reproduction.[58] Therefore, posing sound reproduction technologies as a 'vanishing mediator' which had to be repressed between the recorded repertoire and its listeners was frequently used to promote the idea of  fidelity. Chion also points that, despite the improvement of the definition of the recordings, the break between the 'original' and the 'fixed' sounds is reflected and emphasised in the discourse concerning the fleeting notion of fidelity, an idea that is constantly put into question with the development of new technologies.[59] Fidelity takes a specific form when it comes to the hand-played piano rolls, given they were reproduced in an acoustic instrument. In this context, it is not related to the sound itself (that varied according to the existing hardware and its care) but to the ability of the reproducing mechanism to accurately recreate a given performance. This surfaces clearly in a 1925 article in Popular Mechanics, where the ability to 'reproduce with startling fidelity the touch and expression of skilled musicians' is presented as 'a mechanical marvel of the modern musical age.'[60]

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I would like to discuss the duality between the analogue and the digital by recurring to Barthes' discussion on photography and its relation with language. For Barthes:

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From the object to its image there is of course a reduction - in proportion, perspective, colour - but at no time is this reduction a transformation (in the mathematical sense of the term). In order to move from the reality to its photograph it is in no way necessary to divide up this reality into units and to constitute these units as signs, substantially different from the object they communicate; there is no necessity to set up a relay, that is to say a code, between the object and its image. Certainly the image is not the reality but at least it is its perfect analogon and it is exactly this analogical perfection which, to common sense, defines the photograph. Thus can be seen the special status of the photographic image: it is a message without a code; from which proposition an important corollary must immediately be drawn: the photographic message is a continuous message.[61]

 

 

Moreover, language is a digital code (to use Barthes' own words) that translates reality into a system of signification.[62] Therefore, the main distinction between the analogue and the digital is an operative code of signification and mediation between reality and its representation. In this sense, it is possible to produce an analogy between photography and phonography, two activities that experienced parallel developments towards the end of the nineteenth century, translating the focus of Barthes' assumptions from seeing to hearing. If he considers photography as a visual analogue of reality, it becomes conceivable to interpret phonography as an auditory analogue of reality. Thus, sound recording technologies aim to capture the acoustic analogon to reality. To reinforce this assumption, 'because analog recording is an indexical trace of a phenomenon, the analog storage medium will contain whatever information is allowed by the physics of the situation.'[63] However, this framework has its limitations that will be addressed below.

 

 

The novel type of stored information is a key aspect for the study of the phonography and an essential feature in the narratives concerning sound recording. For authors like Kittler, technological developments had a prominent roll in the reshaping of discourse networks, 'the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data,' between 1800 and 1900.[64] In his discussion concerning innovations developed in the last third of the nineteenth century Kittler states:

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Machines take over functions of the central nervous system, and no longer, as in times past, merely those of muscles. And with this differentiation - and not with steam engines and railroads - a clear division occurs between matter and information, the real and the symbolic.[65]

 

 

Therefore, the phonograph takes over the functions of the central nervous system by recording and storing information, a clear example of the delegation proposed by Latour. Therefore, as Hogg argues, phonography can be interpreted as a prosthetic form of memory.[66] This disembodiment and delegation of memory carries important historiographical implications and surfaces clearly in a 1877 article published in Scientific American, where the phonograph is presented as an apparatus that allows for the preservation of the voices of the deceased.[67]  However, the idea of permanently archiving sound in the early phonographic period has to be placed in its context as an intended (as well as desired) possibility and not as an established reality. The possibilities of storing and archiving allowed by sound recording ('its potential to preserve sound indefinitely into the future') were present in the discourse of both users and publicists from an early stage of the commercialisation of these technologies.[68] However, this contrasted with the actual practice of sound recording in a period when 'the first recordings were essentially unplayable after they were removed from the machine' and 'later wax cylinder recordings and even metal or shellac disks were often treated by their makers as ephemera.'[69]

 

 

Comparisons between technological processes that involve the impression and deletion of traces on a substrate and the workings of the human memory have been especially pervasive in Western culture.[70] The analogy between the process through which a phonograph inscribes and stores information on a cylinder and the working of human memory was made in the very early stage of phonography. For example, Jean-Marie Guyau's 'La mémoire et le phonographe' (published in 1880) makes a direct comparison between memory and the working of phonograph, whereby a stylus makes an inscription in the brain cells.[71] Recollection is described as the needle passing over the corresponding groove, which deploys the corresponding sensation.[72] Evidencing the circulation of this trope in a wider context, the Portuguese journalist Pinto de Carvalho in História do Fado (History of Fado) describes Cesįria, a fado singer from the Alcāntara district of Lisbon, by stating that 'in her memory, as in a phonograph, she stored hundreds of verses.'[73] The working of mnemonic processes also occupies a privileged space in historiographical narratives. According to Walter Benjamin 'memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation.'[74] Therefore, the construction of a history of recording can be read too as a history of the processes of remembering and archiving, of the modes people select to engage with their past.

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A technological determinist approach to phonography proves to be highly problematic and reductionist. On the one hand, the possibility for recording and reproducing sound was essential to its commodification. Conversely, the processes that shaped these technologies into media and facilitated their incorporation in everyday life played a key role in creating a phonographic market. For Gitelman, media are 'socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation.'[75] This non-reductionist perspective is shared by Sterne, who sustains that the introduction of phonographic technologies was a part of a complex process through which the social and institutional establishment of a network based upon these new technologies interacted and transformed the cultural frameworks of hearing.[76] Moreover, he develops a theory on phonography that is centred on the human ear and on the auditory process:

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The key element, the defining function, in these early versions of sound reproduction technologies is the diaphragm - a simple mechanical principle, a principle that connects ear to machine through analogy, imitation, or thumbscrews. This construct of the ear as a function that can be abstracted from the human body, transposed across social contexts, produced, proliferated and mutated through technique and technology, suggests that the ear (and specifically the diaphragm) does not simply come to be a representation of sound reproduction in this period; the ear - its tympanic character - becomes the diagram of sonic reproducibility. The ear, as a mechanism, becomes a way of organizing a whole set of sounds and sonic functions; it is an informal principle by which a practice is organized.[77]

 

 

Thus, the development of 'audile techniques' predates the dissemination of sound recording and was associated with two middle class professional areas: medicine and telegraphy. 'Medicine and telegraphy were two fields where techniques of listening provided professional ethos and prestige' and 'both the stethoscope and the telegraphic "sounder" were technologies that crystallized already-extant techniques of listening.'[78] Moreover, classifying as tympanic the sound reproducing technologies 'is to understand them as all functionally related, as sharing a set of common operational and philosophical principles, and, most important, as embodiments and intensifications of tendencies that were already existent elsewhere in the culture.'[79] This resonates with Weidman's perspective where phonography fostered a novel type of engagement with music in which 'the purity of hearing alone was distilled.'[80]

 

 

I would now like to return to the analogue/digital dichotomy presented by Barthes and relate it with the narratives of recording. On the one hand, phonography was presented as something able to capture an unmediated and continuous analogue to reality. Conversely, the digital code operating in the player piano bears important parallels with language, acting as a mediated system of signification that represents notes and dynamics, instructing the mechanism to perform gestures that will then generate musical sound. In their analysis of early analogue sound recording, Rothenbuhler and Peters state that phonographic recording involves the inscription of the music's 'acoustic being in time,' stressing the existing break between the music's materiality (the sound waves themselves) and previous storage media in which a code was present (like the conventions associated with written music notation, for instance).[81] Therefore, 'phonography captures not the code but the act, not the script but the voice, not the score but the performance.'[82] Their theoretical stance bears striking parallels with Barthes' theory of photography. This identification of the stored information with a supposedly unmediated (thus objective or scientific) reality is an important point in the study of phonography, and a symptom of a shift from a Romantic perspective of music fruition as a sublime experience to a position in which music had been converted to 'a quantifiable and marketable object or thing, a sonic commodity.'[83] In this process the use of technological mechanisms for collecting data played a key role in guaranteeing an intended objectivity by reducing human intervention.[84] Thus, technological apparatuses were perceived to gather exclusively quantifiable and empirical data, functioning as prostheses that extended the capacities of its users.[85] By relating the rise of an ideology of objectivity with Kittler's discussion of technologies that perform the functions of the central nervous system, Weidman argues:

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At issue was not simply that new technologies expanded the possibilities of storage, but that what was stored by these new technologies was thought of as fundamentally different from what was stored by writing in the nineteenth century; this new stored material came to be experienced as the 'real.'[86]

 

 

Moreover, she makes an important statement on the relation between the status of the phonographic object and the processes of musical transmission by associating phonography with the emergence of a 'new kind of real in which the purity of hearing alone was distilled,' a mechanism that tended to limit the auditory process to sound itself and to relegate aspects such as gestural postures or inaudible traits to the background.[87] Therefore, phonography cannot be perceived as a reduction without transformation (to use Barthes' terminology) of music, but as a new form of  event, a stance that reinforces Chion's distinction between the 'original' and the 'fixed' sounds. By using the analytical framework argued above, it becomes possible to situate the complexities of the early recording of music within the wider context of the main historiographical narratives concerning sound. For Suisman,

 

 

If both the player-piano and phonograph were forms of inscription, they diverged in what they inscribed - and this divergence illuminates the complementary ways the two technologies contributed to the underlying constitution of modern society. The phonograph inscribed and conveyed sound-in-time - that is, sound as the ephemeral vibrations in the air produced by a specific instance of musical labor (or other sound-making activity). The player-piano, by contrast, represented a system of sound-in-knowledge - that is, information and instructions on how to make music. It inscribed and conveyed how to perform, over and over, the labor required to produce certain predetermined sounds.[88]

 

 

Therefore, sound recording history from 1877 onwards can be simplistically interpreted as a sequential and almost teleological transition from analogue to digital technologies. However, because of the overlapping of qualitatively distinct storage media during a significant part of the twentieth century, evidenced by the coexistence of the so-called hand-played piano rolls with cylinders and flat records, the narrative concerning recorded music can only be multilayered and complex. This complicates the placement of the player piano as an intermediate stage in a clear segmentation between the age of domestic amateur music making, focused on the embodiment of vocal and instrumental technique, and the age of phonographic reproduction that carries the possibility for interpassivity and is associated by authors like Adorno with 'an atomised and passive form of musical experience.'[89] In addition, the coexisting technologies (whether analogue or digital) were important in the market for domestic entertainment and were symbiotically articulated with each other and with other music commodities, establishing themselves as part of the sociability routines.

 

 

Returning to Suisman, the technologies associated with the mechanical reproduction of sound and music (materialised in the player piano and in the phonograph) encapsulated two contrasting, yet complementary aspects of modernity.[90] On the one hand, he associates the player piano with the rationalisation of aspects such as culture, labor, and knowledge by displaying a progressive trend towards 'quantification, mechanization, automation, and digitization.'[91] Conversely, the phonograph marked and contributed to the reorganisation of the sensory perception of both space and time, a process that encapsulated a metaphysical transfiguration of human experience under the sign of modernity.[92]  Even agreeing that mechanical instruments and phonography embody specific trends of modernity and value distinct characteristics of this process, the translation of this binarism into two mutually exclusive forms of music-making proves to be reductionist and simplistic. This is especially noticeable in Melville-Clark's Apollo-Phone, a rare player piano with a built-in gramophone in which both mechanisms were set to motion by the same spring motor, condensing in one household item the two major trends of mechanical music.[93] Therefore, the history of phonography and mechanical instruments is both discontinuous and hybrid, where certain practices associated with technology, commercial strategy, and sociability are prized in detriment of others, evidencing the fluidity associated with the historical nature of habitus.

24 

 

 

 

 

Historicism, historicity,  and recording

 

 

 This final section discusses historicism and historicity concerning music recording. Moreover, I intend to problematise a reading that favours the phonographic recording as the apex of a teleological process predominantly grounded on continuity. For this purpose, it will draw on the work of Walter Benjamin and Slavoj ˇi˛ek (for reasons stated in the beginning of this article), aiming to improve the dominant narrative. One of the central tenets that permeate Walter Benjamin's work on history is an unremitting critique of historicism. Despite never providing a clear definition for the concept, it is possible to ground his view of historicism as the working of three different perspectives of history.[94] According to the analysis of Benjamin's work undertaken by Vardoulakis, historicism is the establishment of history as a teleological process, the attempt to identify 'independent historical disciplines' (like history of music or sound studies), and an endeavour of cumulatively collecting facts and portray them as self-evident.[95] Vardoulakis argues that these modes rely on a notion of continuous time, which presupposes 'a linear chronological development, which is always dependent on empathy with the rulers who determine that linearity.'[96] Furthermore, he argues that, according to a Benjaminian perspective, historiography is underpinned by an operation of temporal discontinuity, relocating its object from a philosophy of history towards a philosophy of time.[97] A similar point is made by Osborne, who reads Benjamin's notion of historicism as a 'functional replacement within the time-consciousness of modernity for the continuity of historical time previously established by tradition.'[98] The idea of historiography as a philosophy of time is part of ˇi˛ek's analysis of the works of Benjamin, privileging aspects like history and truth. ˇi˛ek traces an incompatibility between truth (that, according to his reading of Benjamin, stands alongside an unhistorical stasis) and history (presented as an always false narrative that legitimises the victor), an aspect he will further develop in his theorising on historicity and historicism.[99] This process of legitimation surfaces clearly in the historical narratives concerning recorded music that tend to privilege phonography retrospectively over other modes of music recording in a period when both products were significant for domestic music making.

25 

 

As stated before, the transformation of phonography from a technological novelty into the victor of the battle for the control of the worldwide business of recorded music was complex. For example, many narratives emphasise the role played by Edison in the development of sound recording technologies (which Sterne designates as 'the cult of Edison in phonograph historiography'), relegating to the background other important inventors, like Bell or Tainter.[100] This values the principle of recording over other aspects (like storing or playing sounds), a reductive approach to the complexity of devices embedded in early phonography. In this period many patents were filed not only to improve the recording and reproducing apparatus but also of the storage medium and of the process of fixating sounds. Moreover, the commercial success of Edison's competing technology, the gramophone, adds a new layer of complexity to a narrative that tends to privilege his role in the creation of a market for fixed sounds. However, in this case the victory of Berliner's gramophone and the lateral-cut flat record over Edison's phonograph and the vertical-cut cylinder in the entertainment market of the early twentieth century is not sufficient to obfuscate the latter's aura in the historiography of recording. This complicates a simplistic narrative whereby the victor is legitimised, and evidences a chain of tradition in which the articulation of very distinct elements became second nature and crystallised in a seemingly self-evident genealogy. Recording is an activity that is inextricably bound up in the operations of history both as a product and a producer of historicity. Thus, even the partial history that is conveyed through the study of recorded sound is a complex construction informed by a wide range of cultural practices that include technological novelties and the way these were incorporated into everyday life in a way they came to epitomise modernity and were set as standards for what ‘being modern’ meant.

26 

 

ˇi˛ek draws a distinction between historicism and historicity, whereby 'historicism deals with the endless play of substitutions within the same fundamental field of (im)possibility, while historicity proper makes thematic different structural principles of this very (im)possibility.'[101] Moreover, historicism 'obfuscates concrete historicity qua the change of the very global structuring principle of the Social.'[102] In this sense, 'historicity proper involves a dialectical relationship to some unhistorical kernel that stays the same - not as an underlying Essence but as a rock that trips up every attempt to integrate it into the symbolic order.'[103] Therefore, the main distinction he draws between historicity and historicism lies in the presence of an unhistorical kernel in the former, an argument that can be related with ˇi˛ek's reception of Benjamin's positioning of truth on the side of an anhistorical stasis.[104] Furthermore, ˇi˛ek presents historicity as a contested space:

 27

 

historicity is not the zero-level state of things secondarily obfuscated by ideological fixations and naturalizing misrecognitions; historicity itself, the space of contingent discursive constructions must be sustained through an effort, assumed, regained again and again.[105]

 

 

For him historicism is unable to incorporate the 'unhistorical traumatic kernel of the Real' in its matrix, a statement that points to the author's affiliation with the theories of Jacques Lacan.[106] In Lacanian theory the constitution of the subject as a separate entity is marked by its entering the Symbolic order, a realm that may be defined as 'the collection of codes and distinctions embodied in language and culture.'[107] In this process, the subject is placed between the symbolic order (in which digital systems of signification are operating, to use Barthes' terminology) and the traumatic Real that resists symbolisation altogether. Nonetheless, 'the Real cannot be signified not because it is outside, external to the symbolic order, but precisely because it is inherent to it, its internal limit.'[108] Relating this theory with the narration of history, ˇi˛ek interprets historicisation as a process of symbolisation, which re-enacts 'the gap between the inertia of the prehistoric Real and the domain of historicity, of multiple and shifting narrativizations.'[109] Therefore, it reinforces the argument that, in its entry into the symbolic order, historicity proper engages with an unhistorical core of the Real while historicism fails to integrate it. To return to Benjamin's ideas, one of the reasons for this failure might be historicism's constitutive reliance on the notion of a continuous time, which prevents the incorporation of the unhistorical, what was 'suspended of the historical continuum.'[110]

 

 

Privileging phonography over mechanical instruments points to a strand of historicism that  presents sound recording as a technology of the Real (to use Kittler's terminology), and as the means to access and record a supposedly unmediated reality, relegating to the background other forms of music recording. Thus, phonography became the predominant form through which contemporary societies engage with their 'real' sonic past, glossing over what was already symbolised, like the codes of mechanical instruments that are, by definition, integrated in the symbolic order. This complicates a straightforward Lacanian reading but proves to be a useful insight. If this analysis is taken one step further, it becomes possible to question the narrative concerning digital media and processes of recording as a new development in a linear and teleological continuum of technological innovations. Moreover, the overlap of mechanical instruments and phonography during a significant period, as well as the circulation of mechanical instruments like the street organ in the era dominated by phonography, complicates a possible interpretation that places the recuperation of digital technologies towards the end of the twentieth century as a return of the repressed. The permanence of mechanical instruments in everyday life indicates that, even if phonography prevailed over player pianos in domestic contexts, these recording modes were still part of the sonic fabric of modernity. Furthermore, the development of digital audio in the late twentieth century, when phonographic products and interpassive consumption were dominant in the market for cultural goods, is made within a different cultural framework from the one that integrated the player piano or the fairground organ. The later retrieval of digital modes of storage was 'shaped by analogue practices: it allowed people to do more quickly and easily what they were doing anyway.'[111] Hence, this is not a simple recuperation of the codes and practices associated with earlier mechanical instruments, but an intensification of tendencies that were embedded in the modes of relating with music based on phonography. The development of digital audio technologies has to be read against the grain of analogue recorded sound and not as a direct resurfacing of earlier technologies. However, this is not true for the late nineteenth-century, when mechanical music was introduced as a novelty and its predecessors can be traced to modes of consumption that rely on the embodiment of cultural capital, like playing the piano, and to activities like medicine or telegraphy.

28 

 

Taking the history of recording music as a discontinuous and hybrid process introduces the possibility of distantiation from a narrative that presupposes a continuous time, a product of historicism, to embrace a Benjaminian framework in which historical discontinuity is favoured. However, a history of sound and music recording (or sound studies at large) is a move towards the identification of independent historical disciplines, a mode of historicism mentioned above. Nevertheless, it becomes possible to improve a historiographical narrative that is always-already partial and selective. However, Benjamin's emphasis on discontinuity and dialectical stasis implies the possibility of emancipatory action by suspending the continuum of history, an operation that, for ˇi˛ek, allows to glimpse at the unhistorical kernel of the Real which resists symbolisation. Therefore, the dialectic between the historical and the unhistorical is taken as a defining characteristic of historicity that may be reflected in the ideas of permanence and ephemerality inherent to recording. Furthermore, the contingent and contested space of historicity has been deeply bound both with historicism and with a phonographic canon whereby the sound waves of the past are materialised. This creates historical points of reference that include heterogeneous products like Caruso's recordings or The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, focusing on phonographic events to establish a genealogy and a system of values. Nevertheless, the recuperation of other modes of recording music involves questioning our own assumptions about the past and the ways it has been told, taking the sounds fixed by phonography and by mechanical instruments as historically situated products whose interpretation is bound up in the contingencies and limitations of producing acts of knowledge. Therefore, music recording illustrates the contested space in which modernity itself operates, evidencing the complex relation that subsists between people's routines and historical time. 

 29

 

The circulation of both digital and analogue media and processes in the era of acoustic recording complicates a historical narrative that places the type of recorded information (the sound itself) as its central object, and whereby facts are collected and portrayed as self-evident.[112] In a sense, a presentist reading informed by the primacy of recorded sound in contemporary societies contributed to a teleological discourse that can be framed as 'a narrative of the victor who legitimizes his victory by presenting the previous development as the linear continuum leading to his own final triumph.'[113] This means that Benjamin's Angel of History has too often been identified with The Recording Angel, the logo of one of the earliest trade marks of The Gramophone Company, etching the groove into the gramophone record and in the historical fabric of human memory.[114] In this sense, the establishment of a tradition that begins with the invention of the phonograph and privileges recorded sound over recorded music is the legitimation of the victors through the lens of historicism. However, the reconstruction of the obfuscated chapters of this history, pointing out the hidden and forgotten alternatives, is a profitable venture to understand how modernity and historiography comprise heterogeneous and even contradictory tendencies. Nonetheless, this recuperation probably does not contain the emancipatory potential that both Benjamin and ˇi˛ek see in historicity either by blasting the object of history out of the continuum of historical succession or by creating a caption point that allows for the integration of the unhistorical kernel of the Real in a historical narrative.[115] Therefore, the recuperation of the submerged strands in the history of recording does not hold the potential to introduce a break in historical time, a stasis in the dialectical progression. Nevertheless, it calls for a new understanding of our relationship with sound and music, underpinned by a more nuanced historiography of modernity.

 30

 

 

__________________________________________

[1] Paul Thebèrge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997),  29 and Lisa Gitelman, ‘Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or, the Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls, in Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil (eds), Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2004), 207.

 

[2] Jeffrey K. Olick; Joyce Robbins , Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’, Annual Review of Sociology, 24 (1998), 112.

 

[3] Geert Lovink, My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers), 11.

 

[4] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 476.

 

[5] Suisman, Selling Sounds, 17.

 

[6] John Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10.

 

[7] Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume, ‘Mechanical instruments’, in John Shepherd, et al., Continuum encyclopedia of popular music of the world, vol. 2 (Performance and production) (London/NY: Continuum, 2003), 323.

 

[8] Ord-Hume, ‘Mechanical instrument’, Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com (21 July 2010).

 

[9] Timothy D. Taylor, ‘The commodification of music at the dawn of the era of “mechanical music”’, Ethnomusicology, 51/2 (2007), 281–305 and Alfred Dolge, Pianos and their makers (Covina, CA: Covina Publishing Company, 1911), 131–162.

 

[10]  Taylor, The commodification of music’, 283.

 

[11]  Ord-Hume, ‘Player Piano’, Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com (21 July 2010).

 

[12]  Taylor, ‘The commodification of music’, 284.

 

[13]  David Suisman, ‘Sound, knowledge, and the “immanence of human failure”’, Social Text 102, 28/1 (2010), 19.

 

[14]  Taylor, The commodification of music’, 284–285.

 

[15]  David Suisman, ‘Sound, knowledge, and the “immanence of human failure”’, 22.

 

[16]    Peter-Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2005), 169. See also Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

 

[17]  Robert Pfaller, ‘Little Gestures of Disappearance(1) Interpassivity and the Theory of Ritual’, Journal of European Psychoanalysis, 16/2003. Retrieved from http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number16/pfaller.htm (accessed 8 August 2012) and Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Interpassive Subject: Lacan Turns a Prayer Wheel’, in How to Read Lacan (London/NY: Norton), 2239.

 

[18]  Paul Thebèrge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997),  29 and Lisa Gitelman, ‘Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or, the Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls, in Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil (eds), Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2004), 207.

 

[19]  G. C. Ashton Jonson, ‘Mechanical Piano-Players’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 42/1 (1915),  19.

 

[20]  Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 112.

 

[21]  David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 17.

 

[22]  Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 48.

 

[23]  Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press: Durham, NC/London, 2003),  204.

 

[24]  Sterne, The Audible Past, 204.

 

[25]  Ibid, 204.

 

[26]  Jonson, ‘Mechanical Piano-Players’, 17.

 

[27]  Ibid, 17.

 

[28]  Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Curves of the Needle’, October, 55 (1990), 51.

 

[29]  ‘Thousands of Player-Piano Rolls Made From Master Record’, Popular Mechanics Magazine, 43 (February 1925), 183 and  ‘History of the Pianola - Music Roll Manufacture’, The Pianola Institute (2008), http://www.pianola.org/history/history_rolls.cfm (2 August 2010).

 

[30]  ‘Thousands of Player-Piano Rolls Made From Master Record’, 183.

 

[31]  Frank W. Holland and Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume, ‘Reproducing Piano: 1. History and technical development’, Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com (10 August 2010) and Dolge, op. cit., 57-58.

 

[32]  See ‘The Reproducing Piano – Welte-Mignon’, The Pianola Institute (2008), http://www.pianola.org/reproducing/reproducing_welte.cfm (2 August 2010).

 

[33]  Ibid.

 

[34]  Richard Benson, The Printed Picture (NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 274.

 

[35]  Lisa Gitelman, ‘Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or, the Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls’, in Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil (eds), Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2004), 204.

 

[36]  Gitelman, ‘Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital’, 199–217.

 

[37]  Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 16.

 

[38]  Thebèrge, Any Sound You Can Imagine, 27–29.

 

[39]  Ibid., 27–29.

 

[40]  Brian Randell, ‘From Analytical Engine to Electronic Digital Computer: The Contributions of Ludgate, Torres, and Bush’, Annals of the History of Computing, 4/4 (1982), 327–341.

 

[41]  Thebèrge, Any Sound You Can Imagine, 28–29.

 

[42]  Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 117. For an overview of phonography during the period of mechanical recording see Michael Chanan, Repeated takes: A short history of recording and its effects on music (London/NY: Verso, 1995), 1–36.

 

[43]  Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press: Durham, NC/London, 2003), 203.

 

[44]  Pekka Gronow, ‘The record industry: growth of a mass medium’, Popular Music, 3 (1983), 54.

 

[45]  Walter L. Welch and Leah Brodbeck Stensel Burt, From Tinfoil to Stereo: The Acoustic Years of the Recording Industry, 18771929 (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1995), 25-26. See Thomas A. Edison, ‘Improvement in phonograph or speaking machines’, U.S. Patent 200,521, 19 Feb. 1878,

 

[46]  Leonard DeGraaf, ‘Confronting the mass market: Thomas Edison and the entertainment phonograph’, Business and Economic History, 24/1 (1995), 89.

 

[47]  Ibid., 89.

 

[48]  Emily Thompson, ‘Machines, music, and the quest for fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877–1925’, The Musical Quarterly, 79/1 (1995), 138.

 

[49]  Ibid., 138.

 

[50]  Ibid., 140.

 

[51]  Eric W. Rothenbuhler and John Durham Peters, ‘Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory’, The Musical Quarterly, 81/2 (1997), 244.

 

[52]  Sterne, The Audible Past, 241.

 

[53]  Ibid.

 

[54]  Ibid.

 

[55]  Michel Chion, El sonido (Barcelona: Paidós, 1999), 272–273.

 

[56]  Ibid., 254.

 

[57]  Sterne, The Audible Past, 275.

 

[58]  Ibid., 283.

 

[59]  Chion, El sonido, 263.

 

[60]  ‘Thousands of Player-Piano Rolls Made From Master Record’, Popular Mechanics Magazine, 43 (February 1925), 183.

 

[61]  Roland Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’, in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (NY: Hill and Wang, 1978), 17.

 

[62]  Barthes, ‘Rethoric of the Image’, in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text , 41.

 

[63]  Rothenbuhler and Peters, ‘Defining Phonography’, 252.

 

[64]  Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 369.

 

[65]  Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 16. The direct association between specific technologies and Lacanian terms in Kittler’s work is very problematic. According to Hogg, ‘Kittler attempts to ground his reading of the three technological developments in the title of his book in Lacanian terms – typewriter as Symbolic, film as Imaginary and gramophone as Real, but though apparently elegant, these mappings are not convincing for a number of reasons, not least of which is a drastic misunderstanding of the Lacanian Real itself, and a disregard of the essential contribution of the Symbolic order in film reception.’ See Bennett Hogg, The cultural imagination of the phonographic voice, 1877-1940, PhD thesis (Newcastle University, 2008), 148. Nevertheless, the association of sound recording with the real (in lowercase) was a cultural trope during the first years of recorded sound, crystallised in notions such as fidelity or authenticity.

 

[66]  Hogg, The cultural imagination of the phonographic voice, 1877-1940, PhD thesis (Newcastle University, 2008), 23–26.

 

[67]  ‘A Wonderful Invention — Speech Capable of Indefinite Repetition from Automatic Records’, Scientific American, 17 November 1877, 304.

 

[68]  Sterne, The Audible Past, 288.

 

[69]  Ibid.

 

[70]  James Burton, ‘Bergson’s non-archival theory of memory’, Memory Studies, 1/3 (2008), 322.

 

[71]  Jean-Marie Guyau, ‘La mémoire et le phonographe’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, Tome IX, janvier-juillet (1880), 317–322.

 

[72]  Ibid, 320.

 

[73]  Pinto de Carvalho, História do fado (Lisbon: Empreza da História de Portugal, 1903), 175.

 

[74]  Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller”, in Hale, Dorothy J (ed.) The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000 (Malden, MS: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 371.

 

[75]  Gitelman, Always Already New,11.

 

[76]  Sterne, The Audible Past, 84.

 

[77]  Jonathan Sterne, ‘A machine to hear for them: On the very possibility of sound's reproduction’, Cultural Studies, 15/2 (2001), 284–285.

 

[78]  Sterne, The Audible Past, 98.

 

[79]  Ibid., 34.

 

[80]  Amanda Weidman, ‘Guru and Gramophone: Fantasies of Fidelity and Modern Technologies of the Real’, Public Culture, 15/3 (2003), 464.

 

[81]  Rothenbuhler and Peters, ‘Defining Phonography’, 243.

 

[82]  Ibid., 243.

 

[83]  Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 10.

 

[84]  Hogg, 'The cultural imagination of the phonographic voice', 201.

 

[85]  Ibid. and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ‘The image of Objectivity’, Representations, 0/40 (1992), 81–128.

 

[86]  Weidman, ‘Guru and Gramophone’, 462.

 

[87]  Ibid.,, 464.

 

[88]  David Suisman, ‘Sound, knowledge, and the “immanence of human failure”’, Social Text 102, 28/1 (2010), 23–24.

 

[89]    Max Paddison, ‘The Critique Criticised: Adorno and Popular Music’, Popular Music, 2 (1982), 206. However, several authors have critiqued this view, pointing out that this ‘passivity’ to music is actively constructed by the subject. See Emilie Gomart and Antoine Hennion, ‘A Sociology of Attachment: Music Amateurs, Drug Users’, The Sociological Review, 46/S (1998), 220–247 and Tia DeNora, After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 91–93. 

 

[90]  Suisman, ‘Sound, knowledge, and the “immanence of human failure”’, 24.

 

[91]  Ibid., 24.

 

[92]  Ibid., 24.

 

[93]  See ‘Pianola Institute Factsheet – The Apollo Piano Player’, The Pianola Institute (2008), http://www.pianola.org/factsheets/apollo.cfm (8 August 2012).

 

[94]  Dimitris Vardoulakis, ‘The Subject of History: The Temporality of Parataxis in Benjamin’s Historiography’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Walter Benjamin and History (London/NY: Continuum, 2005), 122.

 

[95]  Vardoulakis, ‘The Subject of History’, 122.

 

[96]  Ibid.,122–123.

 

[97]  Ibid., 123.

 

[98]  Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-Garde  (London/NY: Verso, 1996), 116.

 

[99]  Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (London/NY: Routledge, 2008). 92–93.

 

[100]   Sterne, The Audible Past, 28.

 

[101]   Žižek, ‘Class Struggle and Postmodernism’, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London/NY: Verso, 2000), 112.

 

[102]   Žižek, ‘Class Struggle and Postmodernism’, 112.

 

[103]   Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London/NY: Verso, 2005), 199.

 

[104]   Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 94.

 

[105]   Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London/NY: Verso, 1997), 53.

 

[106]   Ibid., 53.

 

[107]   Lewis A. Kirshner, ‘Rethinking Desire: The objet petit a in Lacanian Theory’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, 53/1 (2005), 86.

 

[108]   Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 217.

 

[109]   Ibid., 53.

 

[110]   Ibid., 80

 

[111]   Paul Thebèrge, “Plugged in”: technology and popular music’, in Simont Frith, Will Straw and John Street (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 32.

 

[112]   Vardoulakis, ‘The Subject of History’, 122.

 

[113]   Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 92–93.

 

[114]   Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1938-1940, 389–400, and Richard Middleton, ‘“Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”: Avians, Cyborgs and Siren Bodies in the Era of Phonographic Technology’, Radical Musicology, Vol. 1, 2006, http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk (17 January 2011), par. 25.

 

[115]   Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 475 and Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 199.