Notes on sound studies, cinema, and digitalisation

(This post originates from 2020, when it appeared in an email newsletter I was writing during my postdoc)

The limits on auditory perception mean that we tend not to hear interruptions in recorded sounds if the signal is complex enough: e.g. speech or music. There is an interesting history to this kind of research which goes back at first to studying the effect of tape “dropout” (both analog and digital, interestingly) and, in turn, to some fundamental psychoacoustics carried out (separately) by Miller, Plomp, and others (c. 1950s).

In their work, which is generally concerned with bursts of “noise”, they examine how intelligibility of tones or speech is interrupted by additional signal. In the dropout research, it’s an absence of signal: but, of course, its figured as noise. It’s interesting how silences - a supposed absence of signal - can be figured as undesirable signal. Anyway, in the paper, I leave it more or less at Jonathan Sterne’s door with a reference to “perceptual technics”. The human ear “hears through” these silences (at least, it does when the sonic context affords it) and the media engineers exploit these facts to make the channel more capacious than it would otherwise be if we insisted on a greater reproductive definition.

Where I don’t go in the paper is into another strand of thinking related to Paul Virilio, an architect and - well - media theorist. Virilio’s concern is with the negative effects of the acceleration in technological developments that’s typical of modernity, in which military applications are not just complicit but are the animating force. One “problem” with Virilio - probably one reason that many demur on the question of whether he is a theorist or not - is that his many essays rarely advance a “way out”: what I’ve read has been on the main darkly pessimistic and fairly forthright.

Despite their prescience and sensitivity to contemporary technological developments (particularly in regard to mass media), they often fall short of polemic because they don’t really end up with a concrete analysis of the politics of the particular situation under consideration. In this particular aspect, as a fairly conservative/reactionary, if ultimately humanist, thinker, Virilio is of a piece with Kittler.

But Virilio’s work is much more journalistic, meaning that anecdotes and references to print media abound with not a huge deal of fact checking. Despite this, Virilio has plenty of great soundbites. For example, what would you say to the CD being figured in terms of the fusion of optics and kinematics, a Virilian idée fixe articulated in War and Cinema (1989)? The moving image camera yokes two classical disciplines together in the action of the shutter, and there’s a rich seam of film and visual criticism that makes a big deal of the gap between the operative medium of cinema, punctuated as it is at n frames-per-second, and the continuous passage of time it strives to depict.

It’s probably a lack of imagination on my part, but there’s never really been a comparable discourse in sound studies, perhaps because we were never confronted with something which discretizes recorded sound so aggressively until we got to the digital age. The problem - as I see it - is that this basic gesture of chopping up the time of sound recording was introduced to the vast majority of people (critics and the public alike) much later than it was introduced in visual culture: perhaps as late as the same moment as digitalization (1970s-1980s?), and, as a consequence, was conflated with it.

Discussions of digital audio expressed anxieties about the aliased, jagged compromise of the flow of time that it represented as if it were the first time that the apparent flow of sound had been discretized. Diastematic and mensural musical notation (the Middle Ages) are some candidates here; treatises on “pinning” music boxes like Engrammelle’s La Tonotechnie (1775), Denis Gabor’s quantal theory of hearing (1940s), others. Roger Moseley’s work points in a similar direction to what I’ve outlined here.

Conversely, to talk a shift from continuous and discrete inscription techniques when it came to sound was to be pigeonholed as participating in the broader analog/digital discussion, for which there is both more at stake (as it affected all aspects of culture and society, not just sound recording), and less (because its novelty as an apparent categorical distinction will pass). Even if analog-to-digital conversion was the beachhead of the discretization of sound, it feels like early discussions of digital audio (say, Rothenbuhler and Peters in 1997 and even John Mowitt) viewed digital culture’s felt presence - zeroes, ones. circuits, chips, electronics engineers, boffins, boosterist label executives - as the as the causes themselves of the loss of integrity in sound reproduction these critics bemoan.

What’s more interesting, to me anyway, is to think about the questions like: Under what sign did these various actors ally? What alliances across media/disciplines did digital audio need? What is the basic media-theoretic gesture or media-archaeology trope/topos at work in all operative digital audio systems: a cut? a slice? a buffer? a filter? Better, I think, to try to understand whatever the digital audio moment was in terms that are medium-independent, drawing on theories of inscription and the rich parallel tradition of writing about visual culture, and in terms that avoid making prior distinctions between analog and digital technology the linchpin of the critique.