Beginning with the invention of Scott's phonautograph, there seems to a very close connection between the history of sound reproduction and that of writing. Even Edison's gramophone was met with praise that it would make stenography much easier. Why was early sound reproduction associated this way?
One of the reasons from Sterne's The Audible Past involves the attempt to give deaf people a way of communicating without needing sign language (which for Bell meant that they were no longer "normal" people and this was bad). What's particularly perplexing about this connection to writing is that one of Sterne's main arguments was that the success of sound reproduction came from the movement away from mimicking the voice box and into mimicking the ear. I naturally think of sound originating in the ear, but that's probably because of otology's current acceptance. It's not hard to see the limitations of the automatons made by Descartes and Bell and others, but this movement to the ear would not (again, at least not from my perspective) immediately lead to writing.
Perhaps the answer actually comes in Sterne's second chapter about Laennic's stethoscope. Laennic pushed to find ways of taking what he had heard and putting it into writing (though his methods were fairly inconsistent and difficult to follow). This inability to write about or talk about sound (Sterne points out that the words we have to describe sound-- pitch, timbre, volume--are vastly limited compared to what we have as tools to discuss visuals) could be why sound recording needed to have a writing-based application. I'm not entirely sure if this is correct, but I think that this need to visually see the writing migh have been just the natural inertia to associate new technologies of communication with old ones (for example, the desire in the 90's to put the letter "e" in front of regular words to show that they had a digital counterpart).
Interestingly, and slightly related, I was particularly interested with the reference to the application of the video/audio editor's need to visualize sound with the traditional squiggley lines. In my stop-motion animation when I use dialogue, I rely heavily on this to match timing with sounds, so that in a way, I'm "reading" the sound, so it's neat to see that this was Scott's original hope, but used for completely different applications.
My second question is about the discussion of the separation of senses. While Sterne cites that one of the crucial steps in the process of the "invention" of sound reproduction was to separate the senses. Taking this idea further, he even explained further separation when discussing the quality of the stethoscope creating a sort of framing device for the sound (so that there was a signal and noise separation). First, how did people perceive senses before this? I can't imagine all sensation not being separated. There was the idea of Viktor and his socially constructed sound interpretation, but this didn't sit well with me (they fired a gun near his head and he didn't react at all? The mere overload of sensory information seems like it would make anything alive react that, regardless of the way that the senses are viewed). In what applications were the senses discussed before their "separation"?
I'm incuding a trailer for the movie The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, which isn't a particularly good film (even though the brilliant stop-motion animators the Brothers Quay directed it), but it involves a series of automatons designed to reproduce an opera from a dead woman.
Also, I'm including this picture
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You point towards Sterne's claim that the audible past was tied to a scriptual past, tied to putting things into writing. One possibility, as you note, is that this is tied to a "scopic" culture, a culture driven to visualize. The power of visualization - as control, as knowledge... But writing isn't per se visualization. Why not pictures? The power seems also tied to translation, i.e. from one domain into writing, where power comes from the movement across and the effect of force that comes with it.
ReplyDeleteThe point you're making is also one insisted on in different ways by the critical theory of the last several decades: the schema of inscription and reading dominates our systems of knowledge. (Galileo wanted to "read the great book of nature" etc.)
Now, it might be that this schema is wrong or limited. There may be other modalities that are just as important. But it seems inarguable that inscription and reading have been the dominant discourses. There is only sound - or sense, or interiority, or what have you - if it is written.
In terms of the separation of the senses: the common reference is the notion of a "sensus communis" or common sense; basically, that our sensation arrive in the mind and are organized or looked over by a single sensing entity (the consciousness? the mind?). The separation of the sense suggests that this entity is fictional, fragmented, or nonexistent. We receive separate input and process it more or less separately; or at least the overlap is delusive and spurious.