[ON PHONICITY]

PHONETIC ANALYTICS
Case study: "Lautarchiv", Humboldt University
"Short dictaphone bio"
Lautarchiv analytics
Technological analysis of phonetic recordings
Case study: Kurenniemi a(r)chi(e)ved with Constant
Listening to magnetic tape recordings
Frequency analysis: Popular music as technical memory

GUSLARI ON-LINE
Electrified memory
Transcription versus technical recording
Rescuing the ephemerality of sonic articulation from "historic" time: symbolic
notation and signal recording
The Wire Recorder (technical description)
Technical recording vs. symbolic transcription (Bartok)
Discovering sub-semantic poetic articulation: Interpretation by measuring
Novi Pazar trip report
Computerprints for Albert Lord, MPC 1982
Homeric Singing - An Approach to the Original Performance (Danek)
McLuhan on Parry / Lord
Technologies for uncovering the correlations between oral poetic articulation
and senso-motoric instrument feedback

THE PHONOGRAPHIC APPARATUS

Inbetween the present and the immediate past: acoustic delay
Phonography: Recording the volatile
Phonograph versus magnetophone: Electronics makes a difference
Technological memory: The sound of the phonograph itself
The Aluminium disc
Lord's Wire Recorder

TECHNOLOGICAL WITNESSING OF POETICAL MEMORY: GUSLARI ON-LINE

Re-discovering the sound of texts: "Oral poetry"
Technically induced "secondary orality"
Retextualizing audio(visual) records: Digitized sound
Re-discovering the sound of "texts": Oral poetry
Speech becoming "immortal"
Trans-cultural musical memory? A techno-cultural paradox driven by traumatic
"future in the past"
Disembodied voices from analog to digital analytics
Singers and Tales in the 21st Century: digital memory
P.S.: Re-play (Hamdo 2006)
[Archival phantasms / auditory hallucinations]
[Motion and immobilization: the audiovisual archive]
Reverberative memory

TOWARDS A MEDIA-ARCHAEOLOGY OF SIRENIC ARTICULATIONS

Time Shards (in the media-active test)
Siren songs
Locating the Sirens

TECHNOLOGICAL VOICING OF TRAUMATIC MEMORY

Technological de-humanizing of oral testimony
"Bad recording" of beautiful voices
Let the medium speak: ghost talk

ARCHIVING AUDIO-PRESENCE
Techno-traumatic irritations
Archiving Presence: From Analog to Digital
Techno-Trauma: From Analog to Digital
"Prayers of a Phonographic Doll" (Anderson Blanton)

VOICES AS PHONOGRAPHIC EVENT

Phonographic recursion of the phonetic alphabet
Historical versus media-archaeological reconstruction of sonospheres
Indirect transmission of sound (the vocal alphabet)
Sound archaeology
Technologies of sonic tradition: a signal-to-noise ratio
"First Sounds" (Patrick Feaster): (Archaeo-)Phonography avant la lettre
Active media archaeology: Sonic revelations from the past (Au claire du lune)
Sonic arts / acoustic archaeology

SPEECH SYNTHESIS / VOCODER

The Vocoder
[Un-natural: Artificial voices]
"Frozen" voices
"Harmonizing" voices by sampling
"Cold" speech synthesis

PHONETIC "SOUND" AND THE UN-ARCHIVABLE

A different kind of recording: The phonographic un-archive
Remembering past sonospheres by technical media
Is there a "sound of the archive"? Listening to silence with media-
archaeological ears
Material entropy of the signal versus symbolic (archival) endurance of sound
recording

PHONETIC ANALYTICS

Case study: "Lautarchiv", Humboldt University

- phonetician Otto Bremer, founder of the Schallarchiv at the University of Halle

in Germany (1910), rescued a dying German dialect (the "Wangeroogische" on
North See island) in 1924 by direct phonographic interview =
http://edoc.bibliothek.uni-halle.de

- application of dynamic time warping (DTW) in automatic speech recognition,

to cope with different speaking speeds; to warp: verdrehen, verzerren,
entstellen; time warp = Zeitschleife; L. R. Rabiner / B. Juang. Fundamentals of
 speech recognition, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1993 (chapt. 4)

- cultural analysis historically contextualizes the Lautarchiv recordings and

concentrates on their ambiguous cultural meaning; this approach matched by
cultural analytics which is expressed by spectographs for audio content - a
dramatic hift of emphasis from the symbolical textual field to the processing of
the real audio signals. All of the sudden, voices may be identified by their very
spectral individuality, not exclusively subjected to alphabetic registration in
written metadata any more. Next to the well-known symbolic order of the
archive (which goes with the symbolic order of administration, bureaucracy and
the state governmentality) a signal memory arises: the phonographic record

- media-historiographically canonized „first“ technical, not just symbolical

recording of a human voice (the children song „Mary had a little lamb“)
resulted from the experiment of Thomas Alva Edison with the tinfoil
phonograph in 1877; this primary scence re-enacted by the elderly inventor
(Edison) himself. While the recorded signal principally stays invariant over time,
the body from which the song originated apparently has aged, being strictly
subjected to what we call historical time; Beckett's drama Krapp's Last Tape
(1958)

- media-historiographically canonized "first" technical, not just symbolical

recording of a human voice (the children song "Mary had a little lamb") resulted
from the experiment of Thomas Alva Edison with the tinfoil phonograph in
1877; this primary scence has been re-enacted by the elderly inventor (Edison)
himself, re-enacted 3o years later by his same / different voice for a sound film:
Mary had a little lamb. While the recorded signal principally stays invariant
over time, the body from which the song originated apparently has aged, thus
being subject to historical time.

- To convince the audience of the sonic fidelity of phonographic recording, the

Edison Company in 1916 arranged for an experimental setting in the New York
Carnegie Hall: "Alone on the vast stage there stood a mahagony phonograph
<...>. In the midst of the hushed silence a white-gloved man emerged from the
mysterious region behind the draperies, solemnly placed a record in the gaping
mouth of the machine, wound it up and vanished. Then Mme. Rappold stepped
forward, and leaning one arm affectionately on the phonograph began to sing
an air from "Tosca." The phonograph also began to sing "Vissi d' Arte, Vissi
d'Amore" at the top of its mechanical lungs, with exactly the same accent and
intonation, even stopping to take a breath in unison with the prima donna.
Occasionally the singer would stop and the phonograph carried on the air
alone. When the mechanical voice ended Mme. Rappold sang. The fascination
for the audience lay in guessing whether Mme. Rappold or the phonograph was
at work, or whether they were singing together."1

- similar staging of human vocal performance versus apparative acoustic

operativity has been commented by the Boston Journal in the same year: "It
was actually impossible to distinguish the singer's living voice from its re-
creation in the instrument" = = quoted here after: Emely A. Thompson,
Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity. Marketing the Edison Phonograph in

1 "Edison Snares Soul of Music", in: New York Tribune, 29. April 1916, 3
 America 1877-1925, in: The Musical Quartely Bd. 79 (1995), 132. Dazu Peter
Wicke, Das Sonische in der Musik, in: Das Sonische. Sounds zwischen Akustik
und Ästhetik, in: PopScriptum 10 (2008), online http://www2.hu-
berlin.de/fpm/popscrip/themen/pst10/index.htm. What took place is the chrono-
Sirenism of His master´s voice, which is the presence-generating "illusion of
being present" (Peter Wicke), induced by technical recording.

- immediately after its invention, the Edison phonograph was announced in the
journal Scientific American. It obviously triggered phono-archival phantasms in
the Romantic tradition of the historian of the French Revolution Jules Michelet,
who in early Nineteenth century believed to hear the murmurs of the dead in
the archives. A true Lautarchiv is being declared: "That the voices of those who
departed before the invention of the wonderful apparatus [...] are for ever
stilled is too obvious a truth; but whoever has spoken or whoever may speak
into the mouthpiece of the phonograph, and whose words are recorded by it,
has the assurance that his speech may be reproduced audibly in his own tones
long after he himself has turned to dust. [...] A strip of indented paper travels
through a little machine, the sounds of the latter are magnified, and our great
grandchildren or posterity centuries hence hear us as plainly as if we were
present."2

- Berlin Lautarchiv, as its very name expresses, not just an audio archive of
human voices and ethnic songs from the past, but as well an archive of Laute,
which in German refers to phonetic and sonic, even noisy articulation - that is,
all kind of acoustic enunciations. Listening to the records with media-
archaeological ears, one detects not only the human speech but the expression
of the recording apparatus und storage media themselves - the scratches and
the revolving rhythms of the Edison cylinders. In the online-inventory of the
Lautarchiv, among page-long enumeration of recorded ethnic songs, two
artefactual devices are listed which embody the media-archivological condition
for listening to such voices from the World War One past at all: items no. (ID)
9311 (type "Plastisches Objekt") Zwei Tonabnehmer (electro-magnetic pick-
ups)

- on the linguistic field that the first computational algorithms for voice
recognition have been developed - as "Umwaldung der physikalisch meßbaren
Schwingungsverläufe von Sprachsignalen in elektrische Impulssignale"3

- key operation of time-signal-to-frequency transformation: "Schwingungen

können durch Folgen von Zahlen repräsentiert werden."4 Thus, sonicity can not
be reduced to the dynamics of waveforms, but encompasses mathematical
operations (and their computing machinic embodiments) as well.

2 Anon. (The Editor), A Wonderful Invention - Speech Capable of Indefinite

Repetition from Automatic Records, in: Scientific American, 17. November
1877, 304; see chap. 6 "A Resonant Tomb", in: Jonathan Sterne, The Audible
Past. Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Durham / London (Duke University
Press) 2003, 287-334 (297f)
3 See H. Schnelle, Automatische Sprachlauterkennung, in: Kybernetische
Maschinen. Prinzip und Anwendugn der automatischen
Nachrichtenverarbeitung, Frankfurt/M. (S. Fischer) 1964, 208-219 (208)
4 Schnelle 1964: 211
 "Lautsprachliche Merkmale" (Schnelle) can be differntiated into vokalisch,
stimmhaft, sonant, (ex-)plosiv, geräuschhaft5.

- "statistic tools from corpus-based linguistics have been adopted for music
analysis in recent years. "While the basic elements and features <...> over
which statistics are computed naturally differ between linguistics and
musicology, the statistical concepts that allow us to infer regularities within the
specific domain are quite similar or nearly identical. Among the chief statistical
concepts that can be derived from frequency counts of <...> features <...> in
both fields, are Markov models, entropy and mutual information, association
measures, unsupervised clustering techniques, and supervised classifiers such
as decision trees" = Müllensiefen et al.: 140

- target of sonic analytics is not speech as semantic content in the hermeneutic

sense, but first of all the very materiality of such bio-cultural articulation: the
phonetic "Laut" (phoné). Thus the very name Lautarchiv can be deciphered
literally, and different from other sound archives this one is especially apt for
sonic analytics on the ground of its very "phonetic" target which was inscribed
by its original promotor Doegen from the beginning - notwithstanding the
circumstances of its coming-into-being in a prisoner camp (Wünsdorf close to
Berlin) during World War I. While Kulturwissenschaft (cultural analysis)
concentrates on this ambivalent historical and discursive context, the media
archaeological ear rather listens to the actual media articulation contained in
the Lautarchiv itself

- these recordings became integrated as Lautabteilung into the Prussian State

Library in Berlin after World War I to be reproduced on schellack discs and as
transcription for educational distribution6; the relation between spoken orality
and its grama-phonic derivative (the phonetic alphabet as invented for the
recording of the musicality of Homer's oral poetry) was reversed again by the
intrusion of real audio speech signals into the previously merely symbolical
order of the printed text in a library

"Tones can be made visible. The oscilloscope, through electrical processes,

ftransforms vibrations of the air into a picture that appears on an illuinated
screen. It is the picture of a wave line. <...> An experienced observer can
accurately read the aocustical qualities of the tone from the outline of the
curce. <...> The one thing he could not in any way deduce from the picture is
the dynamic state of the tone. <...> the dynamic, the musical difference, does
not appear in the curve" = Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol. Music and
the External World, New York (Pantheon) 1956, 22; corresponds with the
material, tonally integrative engraving of a musical event in the phonographic
groove: "The chains of physical events that at every instant give rise to the
auditory experience all go back to the same point of origin, the point of the
phonograph needle. The motions of the point of the needle are translated,
through a number of technical intermediate esteps, into vibrations of a

5 Schnelle 1964: 210. See esp. Fig. 1 "Schematische Darstellung der

Signalverarbeitung zur Erkennung des Merkmalpaares
stimmhaft/stimmlos", in: Schnelle 1964: 213
6 Edition Lautbibliothek: Phonetische Platten und Umschriften, ed.
by the Lautabteilung der Preußischen Staatsbibliothek, 1920s
membrane and thus into air vibrations. Like every material point, the point of
the needle can make only one movement at one time. <...> The illuminated
disk of the oscilloscope shows only one line, no matter how many tones are
sung into the microphone simultaneously <...>. <...> what the apparatus
registers as one wave, we hear as multiplicity of tones - and as a organized
multiuplicity <...>. <...> in our / hearing, this single visible line becomes a
combination of lines exhibiting vertical and horizontal relations of the highest
cpmplexity <...>. To be sure, mathematical analysis of the shape of the line
permits us to deduce the individual waves that are combined in it. Yet <...> our
ear accomplishes, effortlessly, continuously, and instantaneously, what costs
the skilled mathemtician a considerable expenditure of time and energy" =
Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol. Music and the External World, New York
(Pantheon) 1956, 333 f. - until Fast Fourier Transform arrived in digital real-time
computing

- techno-metrical analysis of phontic recordings, limited by the signal

bandwidth of mechanical sound records from the past (terminus ante quem) as
compared to electro-magnetic (or sound film) recording

"Short dictaphone bio"

- for Harvard University (Musicology) Sawyer seminar on "Hearing Modernity"

website, invitation to produce a short web bio as a sound file. "If you have a
smartphone, this can most simply be recorded with the dictaphone function" =
Alexander Rehding, e-mail 16 March 2013. Actual recording: "This is the voice
of Wolfgang Ernst, recorded for the design of the website of the Sawyer
seminar on "Hearing Modernity" at Harvard University. Is this is my voice? Does
one recognize me when listening to this audio recording like the dog Nipper
once's recognized "His Master's Voice" from gramophone? Being a true media
archaeologist, I did not use the dictaphone function (as "app") of a smartphone
(I do not even dispose of such a mobile communication device). To produce this
sound sample I rather enacted a recording on a real dictaphone from the Media
Archaeological Artefacts Collection at Humboldt University, Berlin. My voice
audibly is subject to unintended and entropic accelerations or slowing down
since this recording and re-play takes place on an antique analog electro-
magnetophonic medium (even though, in order to become part of this Internet
website, this recording had to be sampled and compressed into a digital data
format which claims to be invariant towards temporal change). This dis-
embodied voice tells as much about the technological biography of the
dictaphone itself. 'This can be a simple narration about yourself'; thus I have
been invited to contribute to this experimental form of acoustic media theatre.
Simply narrated, my academic curriculum vitae starts with my passion for
times past which once led me to study ancient history, Latin and Greek
philology and even classical archaeology. All of the sudden, with my increased
interest and awareness of the technical infrastructures of collective memory
and historical knowledge I grew into an emerging science called Media Studies,
thus turning from a trained historian to a media archaeologist. The recursive
moment here is my re-iterated interest in temporal processes which finally lead
me to investigate what I call sonicity (or somewhat artificially das Sonische in
German, to differentiate it from simple sound as Klang). Sonic articulation, like
techno-mathematical media, are in beeing only when unfolded in time. This
 leads to the close affinity between sound and media dynamics. Will this audio
recording, my "narration about myself", eventually be used to forensic speech
recognition and sound recorder analysis at a later moment, to authorize the
live recording of my forthcoming talk at Harvard?"

- media-archaeological reminder and re-call of Thomas Alva Edison: sound

recording technologies not invented for narrative purpose, but for bureaucratic
dictation - except "oral poetry", perhaps. The arbitrary implementation of
symbolical vowels which once modified the Phenician alphabet into phonetic
writing still used today happened for poetic reasons, to write down the
musicality in the voice of Homer. So let me finally include a sound that I pay
respect for, the epic song of the legendary Yugoslav guslar Avdo Medjedovic,
from the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard University.

Lautarchiv analytics

- "Schematische Darstellung der Signalverarbeitung zur Erkennung des

Merkmalpaares stimmhaft/stimmlos", in: Schnelle 1964: 213, Fig. 1

- oscillograms by Brandl, from: Britta Lange, Playback. Wiederholung und

Wiederholbarkeit in der frühen vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft, Preprint 321
of the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Berlin (2006)

- sonic analytics (provided by Nikita Braguinski) for a recording of the folk Song
Vo kuznice, 1916 with a chorus of Russian war prisoners; Lautarchiv inventory
no. PK135-Mersbach; instead of traditional alphabetical transcription, open
source linguistic software like Praat allows for (and incites) new kinds of
"archive" mobilization: signal-based speech analysis. Under such observation,
audio recordings are not just archival objects any more, but become items in an
experimental laboratory of presence. This presence is a distorted one, though.
Trendelenburg describes the distortions of sound fidelity which are essential
features of phonographic and grammophonic records.7 This is the bandwidth
limit of mechanical sound records from the past as compared to electro-
magnetic and finally digitally processed recording

- recordings of famous voices (which for political reasons were partly

neutralized or even destroyed after 1945); truly phonetical recordings of local
speech dialects, based on a set of artificial word sequences in order to achieve
formal comparability (so-called Wenker-sentences) with the speed of the
recording beeing controlled by a supplementary oscillographic time code, and
early recordings for musical ethnology (mostly Africans and Indians from the
French and British Army in the World War One Halbmond prisoner camp at
Wünsdorf south of Berlin)8

7 Ferdinand Trendelenburg, Klänge und Geräusche. Methoden und Ergebnisse

der Klangforschung, Schallwahrnehmung, grundlegende Fragen der
Klangübertragung, Berlin (Julius Springer) 1935, 51
8 See Britta Lange, Ein Archiv von Stimmen. Kriegsgefangene unter
ethnografischer Beobachtung, in: Nikolaus Wegmann / Harun Maye / Cornelius
Reiber (eds.), Original / Ton. Zur Mediengeschichte des O-Tons, Konstanz
(Universitätsverlag) 2006, 317-341 (esp. 335f). An almost complete list of
- phonological target inscribed into the Lautarchiv by its promotor Wilhelm
Doegen from the beginning - notwithstanding the circumstances of its coming-
into-being with recordings in a prisoner camp. While cultural analysis
concentrates on this ambivalent historical and discursive context, with a
different epistemological vantage point media archaeology lends its ears to
knowledge which can be derived from the actual media articulation contained
in the technical archive itself.

- Lautarchiv currently in a dormant state, a "frozen" archive, "cold" storage of

recorded voices. To wake it up does not necessarily mean to transform it into a
public museum; activating the store (respectively the data bank) today rather
means transforming it into an informatinal space <see Kittler 2007: 112>

- not turning the Lautarchiv into cultural museum, but informations system
(Thomas Nückel

- to become such an informational system, the digital sampling of its analog

contents (both in terms of hardware and of signal recording) is necessary

- digital "archive" absorbs all previous media - not materially, but as formats =
Kittler 2007: 113

- limits of digital archive-"tectonics": even lossless compression results in

bandwidth limitations in recorded frequency spectrum

- digitized sound file is subject to new kind of invisible, sublime protocols - the
new archive in Foucault's sense; loss of material original sound carrier, though,
would make research with future, yet unknown analytic technoliogies
irreversively impossible

Case Study in sonic analytics: Kurenniemi's audio-diary, re-activated

by Constant

- listening to recorded sound through the ears of the algorithms; multiple

correlations vs. fixed taxonomy; thus: not single sound files are being reveiled,
but relations within sound bits within, a diagrammatic sonic archive

- Kurenniemi's cassette tapes (Philipps-Recorder); analysis of digitized audio-

Inhalte with Spectrum sort-Algorithmus (loudness / dynamics in decibel),
thereby extracting song-like passages; apply to Lautarchiv; separate speaker
from (noisy) background; Constant file associative_memory.aif; Herfried Weiser,
quasi-phonetic commanding of video cuts by Kittler's articulation

- sonicity refers to search algorithms as well: sonic analytics; algorithmic

("automated") tagging (mark-up), a kind of metadata from within the medium;
oppose / combine with "social tagging" which is non-classified in similar ways:

the both phonographically and symbolically registered recordings

is provided online: http://www.sammlungen.hu-
berlin.de/sammlungen/78.
hybridisation

- algorithmically / automatically tagging "silence" (intentinonal and non-

intantional one); "analysis"-tool under AUDACITY: "Silence Finder"; under
"Effects" option: "Stille entfernen"; further: "Echo"; "Beat Finder"; frequency
analysis (choice of sampling rates)

- algorithmic annotation with software from computational linguistics:

temporalizing phonems, software PRAAT (Netherlands), PLP Laboratory;
University of Mons: voice synthesizer; experimentation with the a priori of data
organization

Kurenniemi's development of DIMI-A = Digital Music Instrument, Associative

Memory, 1969, with its characteristic mode of choosing audio data according to
content in the memory, not with addresses / hashing

- Fast Fourier Transformation, by which any kind of (digitized) sound is being

broken down into discrete time slices / shunks of sound

- According to Fourier, any sound can be decomposed into its single sine waves
which - in reverse - can be expressed (and thus: computatinally addressed) as
frequency, i. e.: numbers; sound as addition of tones = drone ("Ge/Summe"),
both kymatically and mathematically

- Erkki Kurennimi - A Man from the Future, edited by Maritta Mellais, Helsinki
(Finnish National Gallery) 2013; online
http://www.lahteilla.fi/kurenniemi/fi/a-man-from-the-future

- http://activearchives.org/wiki/Archive_in_motion_presentation#Audiogrep

- life-logging; cp. Gordon Bell (at Microsoft), project Life Caching

- Kurenniemi's assemblage of different live-recording media (now deposited at

the Central Art Archives of the National Gallery in Helsinki). Keeping this legacy
"open" requires stopping making pre-figurated sense by classification, in favour
of stochastic, Markov-chain based retrieval

- Constant Association for Art and Media based in Brussels; Active Archives
project in 2006: "How can archives be active beyond preservation and access?
What would it take to give material away and receive it transformed? [...]
Constant members Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé have been running a
series of experiments with a subset of the Kurenniemi’s archive."

- project Online Archive: Erkki Kurenniemi (In 2048) commissioned by Kurator

and Documenta 13 in partnership with the Central Art Archive of the Finnish
National Gallery and Contemporary Art Museum KIASMA in Helsinki

- website of Constant's Kurenniemi project, the "logbook" (includes Constant’s

probes into the archive, sample visual data and allows for interaction with the
data radio

- multiple correlations turn out versus fixed taxonomy; thus: not single sound
 files are being reveiled, but relations within sound bits within, a diagrammatic
sonic archive

- algorithmic analysis is driven by source code implemented into operative

computers. Constant defines the "active archive" as "[...] strategies and tools
that amplify and diversify the process of archival work, to actually reveals its
technological conditions: "a software-machine, as readable, writeable and
exectutable", in an effort to let the material "'speak' for - itself"9 - which is the
Rankean fiction (itself a media effect of early phonotgraphy as indexical
"selbst-registration" of nature, or the kymograph als self-registering sonic
signals, to archive-based writing of history); beyond traditional historicism:
nagivating audio-visual data (once sampled into bits and bytes) from within,
that is: truly media-archaeologically, suspended from metadata

- while traditional archival format for records (spatial order, classification) will in
many ways necessarily persist, the algorithmization of its digitized records is
radically temporalized, ephemeral, multisensual, corresponding with a dynamic
user culture which is less concerned with records for eternity but with order by
fluctuation

- to derive new insights from the Finnish artist-engineer Erkki Kurenniemi's

audio-cassette-diaries from the 1970s by means of the "active archive",
Constant has developed a "Spectrum Sort" tool.10 An audio file is beeing
digitized in samples of a a tenth second, resulting in a set of dynamic levels.
With their strongest values being extracted, a new audio file is being created
which is sorted from the lowest to the hightest frequency bands. Thereby the
moments when Kurennemi does not dictate speech any more but occasinally
starts singing can be identified immediately from the mass of his cassette
tapes

Listening to magnetic tape recordings

- acoustic evidence: "And if there are gaps within the signal, we can usually
organize the incoming signals into a meaningful pattern, or a complete gestalt,
by filling in those gaps“11; Joseph Jastrow's experiments with visual ambiguity
around 1900 (figure-grund-ambivalence as perceptional relais)

9 Geoff Cox / Nicolas Malevè and Michael Murtaugh, Archiving the Data-body:
human and nonhuman agency in the documents of Kurenniemi, to be published
in: <Kurenniemi>, MIT Press 2015; online:
body_human_and_nonhuman_agency_in_the_documents_of_Kurenniemi
(accessed July 15, 2014)
10 See Jussi Parikka, DIY futurology. Kurenniemi's Signal Based Cosmology, in:
Erkki Kurenniemi - A Man From the Future, ed. by Maritta Mellais (Helsinki
Finnish National Gallery) 2013, 32-55;
http://www.lahteilla.fi/kurenniemi./en/content/erkki-kurenniemi-%E2%80%93-
man-future (accessed July 16, 2014)
11 Helmut Esau, The „smoking gun“ tape: Analysis of the information structure in
the Nixon tapes, in: Text. An interdisciplinary journal for the study of discourse,
vol. 2 (4), New York / Amsterdam (Mouton) 1982, 293-322 (306)
- listening to the magnetic tapes recording Nixon´s wordls in the Watergate
skandal,

- Oliver Stone's film Nixon - Der Untergang eines Präsidenten (USA 1995);
magnetic tape recording of Nixon´s words in the Watergate skandal: "Nothing
here now but the recordings" (William Burroughs). "Although my assistant and I
listened to the line repeatedly with great care, we were able to hear neither on
with nor off, but only unintelligible noise. Thus depending on who listens to the
line, the resulting gestalt is very different" = Esau 1982: 309

- Human eyes and ears tend to overlook and overhear noise as information =
Harris 2001: 122, otherwise compressing algorithms for streaming data in
computing not acceptable; human hermeneutic preference for Gestalt, the
filtering out of noise; non-human senses more sensitive to noise but unable to
separate from meaningful signal; communication happens not only between
humans any more, but in an emerging intra-technological intelligence

- "Nothing here now but the recordings" (William Burroughs); same author: The
Electronic Revolution (Expanded Media Edition, 1970). "Although my assistant
and I listened to the line repeatedly with great care, we were able to hear
neither on with nor off, but only unintelligible noise. Thus depending on who
listens to the line, the resulting gestalt is very different" = Esau 1982: 309

Frequency analysis: Popular music as technical memory

- turn a passive archive (or collection) composed of silent sound carriers

("Tonkonserven") into an active archive. by applying measuring and algorithmic
analysis media themselves become "archaeologists" of sounds past

- take the visible image of grooves in a vinyl record literally and analyze them
as what they apparently are: wave forms

GUSLARI ON-LINE. A technological interpretation of oral poetry

Electrified memory

- non-philological analysis of "oral poetry", when its notation for analysis does
not take place in symbolical writing (the phonetic alphabet since the age of
archaic Greece, or more recently, musical notation) any more, but by
(electro-)physical recording media like the phonograph, as performed by
Milman Parry on aluminium discs; micro-events in performing oral poetry thus
get under consideration, near-discontinuous change, probabilities of transitions,
re- and protentions which require stochastic rather than simply statistical
analysis. The "realtime" feedback on the sensomotoric level which takes place
between the human articulation and the rhythmic gusle play turns out to be of
a servo-mechanical rather than musical character; Godoy

- paradox of "preserving the ephemeral" of oral poetry by transcription of

phonographic recording (Parry / Lord, Bowles et al.); documentation by
 arbitrary, coded, disctrete signs is symbolic, remains outside ephemeral
cultural articulations; signal recording captures it, while at the same time
freezing it; no active tradition but memory in latency

- as long as scripture-based archives only, the phantasma of recording the

acoustically real, i. e. the non-recordable (which has been, until the occurence
of the phonograph, the human voice and musical expression) generated
rhetorical, symbolic and scriptual forms of memorizing sound in imaginary
ways. With the emergence of the phonograph, new type of signal recording has
still been subjected to forms of inventorization and administration which were
developed in the long-time context of paper-based archives

- pre-phonographic metaphors of writing in medieval times: Horst Wenzel, Die

"fließende" Rede und der „gefrorene“ Text. Metaphern der Medialität, in:
Gerhard Neumann (ed.), Poststruktuarlismus: Herausforderung an die
Literaturwissenschaft, xxx

- ethnomusical recordings taken by the ethnologist Selenka who went to India

in 1907; by over-sampled digitizing of the original wax cylinder, possible today
to listen to this play-back in exactly the same quality as the Indian natives
could in 190712

- "cultural" memory (notably oral poetry) of a different nature if it is not

mechanically recorded by phonograph or gramophone which is still close to
graphical "writing", but electronically on magnetic wire or tape, as performed
by Albert Lord on the same ground around 1950

- irritation of the temporality of cultural memory with phonograpic recording of

the real voice. Next to traditional notions of archival historicity, with
recordability of oral poetry as a physical audio-event (not just symbolically like
on the phonetic alphabet) kind of re-presentation of past performances takes
place which remains largely invariant towards chance in historical time. Media-
inherent temporality differs from the established notions of cultural history

- is the digital processing of analogue recordings just another technical

extension or does it transform the very essence of oral literature? In a crude
way, algorithmic processing of poetic rhythms, as genuinely re-generative,
might be closer to the "formulaic" principle detected by Parry than any other
kind of technical reproduction was before

- two chrono-technical cycles: tradition of songs and tales, for millenia,

happened in mnemotechnics of oral transmission, increasingly accompanied
(supplemented, deferred) by notational writing (the vocal alphabet, musical
notes). The 20th century enabled a media-induced re-entry of orality, a
secundary orality (Walter Ong) based on analog recording technologies like
phonography, magnetic tape and kinematography. In the 21st century, the
symbolic notation has re-entered as well: in the form of the alphanumeric code
within computing

12 See http://www.gfai.de/deutsch/projekte/bildverarbeitung-industrielle-
anwendungen-projekte/spubito.html (accessed November 4th, 2013)
- from Cultural Analysis (name of Institute at Amsterdam University) to
"Cultural Analytics" (in terms of Lev Manovich)

Transcription versus technical recording

- in the mid-1930s Harvard scholar Milman Parry investigated the South

Yugoslavian unwritten memorizing techniques of epic singers (the guslari) as a
living analogy to Homer's ancient songs; direct phonographic sound recordings
on aluminium discs provided the analytic basis for the resulting theory that
hour-long oral tales were regenerated for each occasion from a stock of existing
formulae (the formulaic theory of oral poetry); take this formulaic theory
technologically: "Even Homer's rose-fingered Eos was thus a goddess
transformed into a piece of chromium dioxide that was stored in the memory of
the rhapsodes and could be combined with other material to create entire
epics" = Kittler 1986: xxx

- cultural feed-back: What happens when such a recording is being re-played

these days to the local culture in Serbia from the sound recordings using the
same device? Media archaeologist in Lord's position when recording a guslar
performance with a historic Webster Wire Recorder today?

- Webster wire recorder (Webster Chicago Corporation), 1948; wire coils, tube
amplifier, built-in loudspeaker; electronic (vacuum tube-based) storage
medium for conserving sound, based on the transverse-magnetization of a
steel wire drawn across a recording head; the device developed by Valedmar
Poulsen around 1900 was originally intended for office dictation or telephone
answering machine; records with 2.200 meters of wire and a speed of around
60 cm/sec., thus capable of storing up to one hour of sound. Model 80
manufactured by WEBSTER CHICAGO, in 1945, and was nicknamed an
"Electronic Memory"

In 1950/51, Parry's assitant Albert Lord returned to the scene to repeat or

continue some of the first recordings, sometimes with the same singers. But
this time he used a new technology, a magnetic recording device (based on
steel wire). Which difference does it make if popular song recording does not
take place gramophonically on aluminium discs any more but electro-
inductively happens on magnetic medium? Mechanical recording is a passive
storage techology; magnetic recording, though, requires a electro-dynamic re-
enactment to be reproduced

- mechanical sound recording directly corresponds with (and to) the mechanical
vibrations of the Gusle string and the Guslari voice; magnetic recording
requires the intervenence or a literally technical "medium" which is the
apparatus of electro-magnetic induction. The wire recorder, by its very
recording medium (a steel wire), directly corresponds with the telephone line -
thus allowing for a kind of direct transmission of recorded songs from storage
to presence ("re-storing presence")

- "Wirephones use the same principle as tape recorders, i.e. a magnetic

recording of sound on a moving magnetic carrier. This carrier is in case of
wirephone a thin steel wire of the diameter about 0.1 mm. The wire moves
with the speed 1 m/s" = National technical museum in Prague =
http://www.ntm.cz/en/heslar/wirephones.html; Zugriff 7. Juni 2006

- auloi "tragen die Mathematik in sich"13, since they require - different from
flutes with discreetely punched air holes - continuous tuning

- around 1820, the Darmsaite in Manchester is replaced by metal strings (for

piano first); Amerikan "Idee, diese Stahlsaiten wie elektrische Impulsegeber zu
behandeln" = Kittler ibid.; such inductive vibrations can be transduced, and
upon the basis of the thermionic tubes (later transistors) be amplified. Fed back
into the guitar, non-linear distortions happen; Tomaszyk on metal string

- in media-archaeological sense, read title "the electrified Gusle" (rather a

sociological reading) most literally: Tanja Zimmermann, The folk instrument
gusle and its resistance to electrification; the metal string directly corresponds
with the Wire Recorder

- wire recorder like the "Webster Chicago" used by Lord is not a phonograph,
which, as the name suggests, is still part of the tradition of graphical
recordings, but instead transforms the sound memory into a different physical
state. The process of electromagnetic recording and reproduction is, however,
not a continuation of writing in a new form, but rather a fundamentally different
and genuine technical media event born of the very nature of electricity

Rescuing the ephemerality of sonic articulation from "historical" time:

symbolic notation and signal recording

- musical notation „saves“ (or deprives) music from time: sonic articulation is
ephemeral and time-based and self-annihilating by definition. Lionardo da
Vinci's Trattato di pittura: Whereas painting and sculpture are „permanente“,
music „sie va consumando mentre ch'ella nasce“ = quoted after: Hammerstein
1966: 1; quote Hegel: tone / transition, in: ZEITWEISAKUST; Isidor from Sevilla
(died 630): „Nisi enim ab homine memoria teneantur soni, pereant, quia scribi
non possunt“ <zitiert auch von Hammerstein 1966: 4> - until the arrival of
Guido of Arezzos notation of musical duration (symbolically) and the
phonograph (signal-really) allowed for fixing sonic articulation

- what articulates „it“self in listening to Edison cylinders is noise such as can be

expected in any transmission channel according to the theory of
communication developed by Claude Shannons - a theorem which can be
extended to transmission in time as well, that is: tradition. In such noise
articulates itself what baroque allegories showed as the nagging „tooth of
time“ - the articulation of physical entropy, the manifestation of the temporal
arrow; according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics each system tends,
over time, to increasing dis-order

13 Dionysios <sic> Revisited. Vom patriarchalischen Ideenhimmel und dem

Reich der irdischen Liebe, Gespräche von Frank M. Raddatz mit Friedrich Kittler,
erschienen in: Lettre international, 89. Heft, 2010. Hier zitiert nach dem
Wiederabdruck in: Friedrich Kittler, Das Nahen der Götter vorbereiten, München
(Fink) 2012, 62-86 (80)
- traditional archival endurance of records, being based on the very materiality
of its carriers (storage media), changes its nature from endurance to the
„enduring ephemeral“ (Wendy Chun) when record not fixed any more on a
permanent storage medium but takes places electronically; flow (the dynamic
essense of electric current) replaces inscription (storage)

The Wire Recorder (technical description)

- Webster Chicago Corporation, 1948: wire coils, tube amplifier, built-in

loudspeaker; electronic (vacuum tube-based) storage medium for conserving
sound, based on the transverse-magnetization of a steel wire drawn across a
recording head; the device developed by Valedmar Poulsen around 1900 was
originally intended for office dictation or telephone answering machine.
Webster wire recorder records with 2.200 meters of wire and a speed of around
60 cm/sec., thus capable of storing up to one hour of sound; entry "Webster
Wire Recorder M80" in: Institut für Medienarchäologie (ed.), Zauberhafte
Klangmaschinen. Von der Sprechmaschine bis zur Soundkarte, Mainz (Schott)
2008: 112

- media undead: wire spool; to Garnet Hertz, Telharmonium Press, Hollywood,

California: enclosed a long stripe of "recording wire" (as it was once called in
the US by the Webster Wire Recorder Company, Chicago, for the Webster Wire
Recorder of 1948), kind of mnemonic trace, electronic memory reduced to the
thinnest possible form of electric writing (0,1mm). It does not come from a
removable supply reel of Webster Chicago, but of a wire recorder produced by
the German company "Lorenz Radio" (Schaub-Lorenz) from roughly the same
years: from 1952, a device called Supraphon 52; see
http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/schaub_supraphon_52.html; as well the paper
description which accompanied the original reel box, explaining how to knit a
piece of wire in case it disrupted (which often happened while re-playing it on
the recorder); cut it e. g. in pieces to add it to the Problems like with the stripes
of punched Morse code for the first edition. Which brings me to a second, more
deeply media-archaeological point: Just like the piece of punched Morse code
might be now re-inserted into a reading mechanism which can decipher the
latent massage, the piece of wire most probably magnetically stores a voice or
piece of music (well, sound waves) once uttered around 1950 and recorded on
wire, so any reader of the second edition of the Problems might insert it into a
working wire recorder (re-activated, maybe, from a technological museum) and
perceive unexpected voices. So in a strict way, this is not about dead media,
but on: media undead. There is an untimeliness of media which is incorporated
here.

Technical recording vs. symbolic transcription (Bartok)

- musical transcription which Bela Bartok provided for Milman Parry's

recordings of Guslari songs on aluminium disc. What the discs were able to
record, though, was a surplus: the non-musical articulations, noise or bird-
singing in the background, even Avdo Mededovic's coffing. Thus media-
archaeology uncovers a mémoire involontaire of past acoustic, not intended for
tradition - a noisy memory, unaccessable for alphabetic or other symbolic
recording.

- different from notational transcription into musical scores, technical signal-

recording of cultural articulation allows for the electro-physical measuring of
recorded events (digitally done by "sampling"). This exposes the cultural event
to analytic, even mathematical experimentation, thus enabling a non-
hemeneutic analysis of cultural articulation on the sub-philological, even sub-
alphabetic level

- not just oral poetry recorded but as well noise, while the transcriptions into
musical notation treat the sonic event as "oral literature" (as the Harvard
Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature actually calls itself), thus keeping the
analysis within the disciplinary discourse of the researchers (Parry, a trained
philologist)

- not just oral poetry was recorded but as well noise, while the transcriptions
into musical notation treat the sonic event as "oral literature" (as the Harvard
Collection actually calls itself), thus keeping the analysis within the disciplinary
discourse of the researchers (Milman Parry, trained philologist)

- guslar Avdo Mededovic, Parry / Lord recorded 45000 poetic lines on

phonographic discs, and 33500 lines in manual transcription = Gertrud Leuze,
Homer und "Oral Poetry". Milman Parrys These und meine Erfahrungen im
ehemaligen Jugoslawien, in: Würzburger Jahrbücher für die
Altertumswissenschaft. Neue Folge, Bd. 26 (2002), 5-12 (Anm. 8)

- with so-called digital culture, the alphabetic communication returns again - no

"recursion" (supposed within the same cultural algorithms) but as re-
occurrence, rather re-invention, re-generation, from within the alphanumeric
code, invisible to most human users of such technologies

- 1950/51, Albert Lord returns to the scene to repeat or continue some of

Parry's first recordings, even with the same singers; this time use of a new
technology, a magnetic recording device (based on steel wire). Which
difference does it make if popular song recording does not take place
gramophonically on aluminium discs any more but electro-inductively happens
on magnetic medium? Mechanical recording is a passive storage technology;
electromagnetic recording, though, requires a dynamic re-enactment to be
reproduced

- wire recorder like "Webster Chicago" used by Lord is not a phonograph, which,
as the name suggests, is still part of the tradition of graphical recordings, but
instead transforms the sound memory into a different physical state. The
process of electromagnetic recording and reproduction is not a continuation of
writing in a new form, but rather a fundamentally different and genuine
technical media event born of the very nature of electricity

- while Lord re-enacts some of Parry's first aluminium disc recordings with the
same singers, in the meantime, technology has advanced. His wire recorder
registered sound in non-mechanical ways, in the dynamics of the
electromagnetic field. Electromagnetic recording and reproduction is not a
 continuation of writing in a new form, but a different existence of "memory".
When a singer is replayed in electronic form in "high fidelity", the technology
itself seems to efface itself in a way which apparently lets the originality and
individuality of the singer shine through the apparatus, as dead as he might
biologically be. The cultural, human aspect is being expressed in the most un-
human medium; the circle of vibrations and frequencies in technology and
poetry is complete; coldest media archaeological device is the best way to
memorize unique moments of human culture, such as oral poetry

Discovering sub-semantic poetic articulation: Interpretation by

measuring

- by (electro-)physical recording media like the phonograph, as performed by

Milman Parry on aluminium discs. Micro-events in performing oral poetry might
thus get under consideration, near-discontinuous change, probabilities of
transitions, re- and protentions which require stochastic rather than simply
statistical analysis (known from Claude Shannon's mathematical analysis of
communication and more specifically from his analysis of dynamic toys,
described as "Mathematical Theory of Little Juggling Clowns"14). The "realtime"
feedback on the sensomotoric level which takes place between the human
articulation and the rhythmic gusle play. e. g., turns out to be of a servo-
mechanical rather than musical character

- formulaic theory (Parry) involves a similar topic like the analysis of

(anti-)aircraft ballistics in Second World War: the time of decision

- Norbert Wiener interested in responses of a linear resonator to random

impulses: "This is physically realized by the well-known 'shot-effect' in vacuum
tube circuits. In such a circuit, the current is carried across the vacuum by
individual electrons, and, since these are indivisible, is subject to fluctations
which are independent for non-overlapping intervals of time, and have a
constant mean square average" = Norbert Wiener 1941 "On Linear Prediction",
1 (NA-227-D7-GP, Box 4, Folder: Project 6), quoted after: Roch 2009: 57

- "Ein Signal, Bomber oder Elektron, lässt sich dann als Impuls von
fluktuierenden Schwankungen trennen" = Roch 2009: 58

- "transition time from straight to curved flight" according ao account from Bell
Labs 1943 = ca. 3 secs15 - the human "time-window" of the present. Anti-
aircraft artillery: "There is a silent music to it."16 The pre-calculated list /
statistics becomes part of the actual present itself, register, online as condition
of data processing in real-time <Roch 2009: 162>: Shannon: "artificial
languages <...> we merely define abstractly [as] a stochastic process which

14 See Axel Roch, Claude E. Shannon: Spielzeug, Leben und die geheime Geschichte
seiner Theorie der Information, Berlin (gegenstalt Verlag) 2009, 163f
15 NA-227-D7-GP. Box 12, Folder Project 11, "Diary of DJS Conference at NACA v.
9. März 1943, hier zitiert nach: Roch 2009: 74
16 Robert Silverberg, zitiert von Claude Shannon; hier zitiert nach: Roch 2009:
188
 generates a sequence of symbols"17

["Statistik beschreibt Häufigkeiten und Verteilungen im Raum, Stochastik

beschreibt Ereignisse als Sequenzen in der Zeit, quantifiziert also die
Wahrscheinlichkeiten, mit der Symbole als Sequenzen in der Zeit aufeinander
folgen. Nicht mehr nur Frequenz, Häufigkeit oder Verteilung der Buchstaben,
sodnern die mathematische Beschreibung der Übergänge, die Bindungen der
Buchstaben bzw. Elemente technischer Sprachen als Folgen aufeinander." =
Roch 2009: 112]

Novi Pazar trip report

- apply electro-magnetic and digital filter operations, Fourier-analysis, oscillo-

and sonography to this recorded songs, since they have been translated in the
electro-magnetic field which is waves (like sound) instead of elementary
discrete symbols (the alphabet), giving access to a micro-world of technologies
of culture

- "real-time poetry" (micro-temporal poetry in the field between neurobiology,

philology, cultural performance and media recording)

- Parry's apparatus disappeared long ago; designed by Lincoln Thompson, a

graduate of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and founder of the Sound
Specialties Company in Waterbury, Connecticut

- Milman Parry Collection at Harvard not digitizing the original spools, but tape
copies that were made in the '70s

- strange cultural-technological correspondence between audio-frequencies

produced by the Guslari voices and Gusle strings on the one hand, and the
electro-magnetic field which is induced to oscillate in the same frequencies, but
finally being able to turn it into numbers (thus computing) instead of letters
(both Parry and Lord neglected from a philological perspective the neuro-
physiological role the accompanying use of the Gusle plays for the realtime
performance of the singers - with the Gusle sound not being intended to be a
musical performance of its own quality, but a sono-metrical assitance to the
embodiment of the formulae)

- singers had difficulty performing their songs without the aid of the gusle. In
fact, after the assassination of King Alexander in 1934, there was a ban on
singing, and Parry found that he would often have to give the guslar a gusle to
finger (silently) while reciting; otherwise the guslar might be unable to give a
correct text

- Lord´s re-recording on Wire Recorder which is electro-magnetic in its full

sense, not more "engraving" the voice like the grammophone but distributing
sound spectra in a Faradayan "field" - a stochastic approach no more in the
sense of "stoicheia" but in the sense of probabilitic mathematics (Maxwell),
closer to radio (Hertz) than to writing

17 Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, Piscataway (IEEE Press) 1993, 5

- subject the recording to Fourier analysis of acoustic spectra performed by
higly sensitive oscillographic and digital measing devices; switch to another
mode of observation which is not fixed at the human performer any more

Computerprints for Albert Lord, MPC 1982

["File printouts from May (?) Hyde for Albert Lord, dated 02/06/82" in Milman
Parry Collection, Widener Library; archival examination by Peter McMurray]

- technical hardware employed by Milman Parry (phonographic recording on

aluminium discs) and Albert Lord (wire recorder spools) is significant for the
"analog" age, while the application of software (algorithms) for the analysis of
prosodic patterns in oral poetry looks like an early example of "digital
humanities" research avant la lettre (in every sense)

- Georg Danek at Vienna University; experiments in computer analysis of oral

poetry (similar approach with Homeric texts)

- Assembly? re-enginneering

- transcription of additional notes from the computer programmer to Albert

Lord; very first line: "At long last you get some output!," written on a printout
deemed a "jobfail"

- Lord/Hyde computer printout in the MPC box; check if we can identify the
program code and re-engineer the automated search, against the handwritten
remarks (kind of computer philology); the "rhythmic" pattern woven by the
printout with the spacing

Homeric Singing - An Approach to the Original Performance (Danek)

- a technique of singing the Homeric epics, appropriate for the primarily oral
tradition from which these poems emerge. "The Homeric bard sang his songs to
the four-stringed phorminx, improvising his four-note melody at the same time
as he improvised his text, which was unique in every performance. His
monotonous melody, far from interpreting the text, served only as a medium to
transport the words and to catch the listeners' attention by their intrinsic
rhythm" = http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/sh/index.htm; accessed 20-12-06; apply
to servo-motoric feedback function of gusle instrument; Georg Danek,
Bosnische Heldenepen, Klagenfurt / Celovec (Wieser) 2002, including
translation of Avdo Medjedovic, Die Hochzeit des Vlahinjiç Alija, 37 ff.
(Einleitung); 43-230

- theory "not to be understood as the exact reconstruction of a given melody,

but as an approach to the technique the Homeric singers used to accommodate
melodic principles to the demands of the individual verse, guided by the
accentual structure and sentence-intonation of the Ancient Greek language as
well as by metrical structures" = http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/sh/index.htm
- sample: Demodokos' song about Ares and Aphrodite: Od. 8, 267-366 =
http://www.real.com/products/playerReal Player. MP3 File (Just the beginning of
the song: Od. 8, 267-299, 2.4 MB). WAV-File (Just the very first lines: Od. 8, 267-
273, 811KB)

- M. L. West, The singing of Homer and the modes of early Greek music, Journal
of Hellenic Studies 101 (1981), 113-129. [General considerations; the tuning of
the phorminx (but see: Ancient Greek Music, Oxford 1992, 328)]

- G. Danek, "Singing Homer". Überlegungen zu Sprechintonation und

Epengesang, Wiener Humanistische Blätter 31 (1989), 1-15

- S. Hagel, Zu den Konstituenten des griechischen Hexameters, Wiener Studien

107/108 (1994), 77-108. [Statistics, general melodic contours]

- G. Danek / S. Hagel, Das Geheimnis der Lieder Homers - mit dem Computer
entschlüsselt, Kremser Humanistische Blätter 3 1999, 47-55

- epic performance originally sung; Greek aoidoi "in unison with the
accompaniment of the four-stringed phorminx, which implicates the use of only
four notes for the melody"

- performance of Ancient Greek verse, "as heard today, which involves the so
called ictus which overrides the word accents, has nothing in common with the
ancient pronunciation"; ancient Greek poetry expressed by means of pitch, not
of stress; early Greek hexameter poetry likely to have been sung to a fixed set
of four notes, the melody governed by word accent and sentence intonation.
"These results lead to a technique of Homeric song, which can be learned. The
performer has to accommodate the accentual rises and falls of the individual
words of the individual verse to the melodic contour which results from
syntactical and metrical features. With some training anyone who is able to
read Homer can achieve to improvise the melody to any given Homeric text
easily" = Stefan Hagel 24 October 2002, http://member.linkexchange.com/cgi-
bin/fc/fastcounter-login?787479

McLuhan on Parry / Lord

- McLuhan, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, "acknowledges Milman Parry and Albert

Lord, who observed the cultural effects of technology on poetry – poetry within
written and oral cultures, and the differences. McLuhan points to examples of
cultural and sensory experiences within many cultures: Elizabethan, Russian,
African and Greek. He insists that some senses are extended and privileged by
technologies (speech, writing, print and finally television) at the detriment of
other senses 6. He calls this an ‘outering’ or ‘uttering’ of sense, which creates
‘closed systems’: meaning that a simultaneous experience of senses is knocked
off balance; McLuhan, Eric and Frank Zingrone. Essential McLuhan. (Toronto:
House of Anasi Press), 1995, 101

NEURONAL GUSLARI
 Technologies for uncovering the correlations between oral poetic
articulation and senso-motoric instrument feedback

- one-string gusle, during the epic performances of oral poetry, applied by

guslari (singers) not for musical instrumental company to the singing voice, but
rather functions as a servo-motoric and acoustic feedback device which helps
to time-critically decide which words to interpolate in a poetic line (i. e. the
hexametric "time window" of poetical presence); extend software analysis to a
transcription of the verbal song, so that the graphic analysis of the bow
movements can be correlated with the micro-rhythm of poetic articulation, in
order to detect the micro-temporal dynamics of oral memory techniques which
take place without textual learning

- auditory and somatosensory information stored in short-term human brain

memory; neural maps and processing modules, which process a syllable as a
whole unit (specific processing time window around 100 msec and more);
connect sensory state maps within the sensory-phonetic processing modules
and the directly connected motor plan state map

- auditory (gusle) feedback as aid in order to decide metrically on micro-timing

of speech as well as of singing. It is assumed that auditory feedback beside
other feedback mechanisms (e.g. somatosensory feedback and visual
feedback) helps to verify whether the current production of a passage of
speech or singing is in accord with the acoustic-auditory intention.

acoustic-auditory speech signal can be interpreted as the result of movements

(skilled actions) of speech articulators

- Rolf Inge Godøy, Marc Leman (eds.), Musical Gestures

Sound, Movement, and Meaning, New York / London 2010 (Routledge);
http://www.hf.uio.no/imv/english/people/aca/rolfig

- http://www.uio.no/english/research/groups/fourms = Music, Mind, Motion,

Machines: research group working on issues in music cognition, sensor
technologies and machine learning = the cybernetic premise; motiongrams and
sonogram made from a video recording of oral poetry performance: AVDO.mov;
line in the motiongram represents the changing light form an infrared motion
capture camera that was also active during recording; parallel to typing
articulated speech in its rhythmic pattern; cp. Nicolai Bernstein's chrono-
cyclograms; see Julia Kursell, "Moscow eye"; Braguinski analysis of Berceby;
motion caputure of musical gestures inculdes video-based computer vision
techniques, infrared, electromagnetic, ultrasound, mechanical and inertial
motiuon capture systems

- explicitely opposed to "notebook-orientated scholars"18, Alan Lomax used

mechanic and electronic recording devices of acoustic signals to catch folk

18Alan Lomax / Irmgard Bartenieff / Forrestine Paulay, Choreometrics. A Method

for the Study of Cross-Cultural Pattern in Film, in: Ronald D. Cohen (ed.), Alan
Lomax, Selected Writings 1934-1997, New York / London (Routledge) 2005,
275-284 (275)
songs more precisely than any symbolic score notation can do (which has been
developed to suit "harmonic" occidental music); the kinesis approach: W.
Condon "first makes a detailed phonetic record of the speaker in a scence. This
micro-phonetic record becomes his base line. Condon then studies the
speaker's bodily behavior phone by phone, frame by frame, using a stop
motion projector." = Lomax et al,: Choremetrics: 27; Denis Gabor's creation of
"acoustic quanta via film projector

- Condon "found that the body parts of every speaker move in rhythm to his
own phonation and that all those within earshot synchronize their bodily
movements in the most precise synchrony with those of the speaker" = 277

THE PHONOGRAPHIC APPARATUS

Phonography: Recording the volatile

- December 2007, to celebrate 120 year of Edison's "invention", Phonographic

Salon i n and a s Media Theatre (Media Studies, Humboldt Univeresity); what
literary historians all know, but never tested: Rilke's writing on the
"Urgeräusch". Borrowing a skull from Humboldt University Hospital, application
of a phonographic pick-up to listen to the zigzags of the "Kronen-Naht" (techno-
like sound, indentions are rather a saw-tooth-signal); recording voices on blank
Edison cylinders as well; finally test "Final Scratch" (Traktor) so reflect upon the
re-entry of the vinyl groove into the digital disk-jockey world as an "analogue"
regulating device

- as signal communicated via air pressure, sound is material, even violent; but
as a temporal form it is volatile and perceived as "immaterial" phenomenon

Inbetween the present and the immediate past: acoustic delay

- “recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into
the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce
themselves so that any semblance of my speech with perhaps the exception of
rhythm is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant
frequencies of the room articulated by speech" = Alvin Lucier, I am Sitting in a
Room, 1969

"This particular <...> piece is based on recording himself narrating a text, and
then playing the recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new
recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated 32
times" - the heritage of the magnetic tape player (echo delay)

Phonograph versus magnetophone: Electronics makes a difference

- difference between analog and electro-magnetic audio recording not just a

technical, but as well an epistemological one. While the phonograph belongs to
what Jules-Étienne Marey once called the "graphical method" (analog
registering of signals by curves), the magnetophone has been based upon the
electro-magnetic field which represents a completely different type; alphabetic
writing substituted by electronic recording, nowadays re-turns with digital
encoding in a different quality; sampling and quantizing of acoustic signals
transforms time into frequencies (by analysis as a condition for re-synthesis, in
fact: between Fourier analysis and Fourier synthesis). Digitalization means a
radical transformation in the ontology of the sound record - from the physical
signal to a matrix (chart, list) of its numerical values. Media culture turns from
phonocentrism to mathematics

- phonographic record vs. magnetic record on tape; finally the digital recording
represent fundamentally different materialities and logics (techo/logies) in
terms of their ways of registering time-variant signals, time-based forms of
reproduction and their "archival" being in time; electronic tube, especially the
triode, once liberated technical media from mechanical constrains, thus: from
erasure over time; still the tube or transistor are subject to decay over time
themselves

- "Entropy is the measure of the second law of thermodynamics - which states

that the energy disorder of any closed system tends to increase and points to
an uniform equilibrium. <...> it says that everything decays and especially that
heat tends to irradiate and dissipate" = lecture by Matteo Pasquinelli,
"Introducing Four Regimes of Entropy: Notes for a Biomorphic Media Theory",
27 April 2011, Institute of Musicology and Media Studies, Humboldt University,
Berlin

- negentropic persistence against entropic time ows its ahistoricity rather to its
different form of registering: not by signals (recording the physically real
acoustic event), but by symbols

- difference between mechanical (material) and electro-magnetic (almost

immaterial) audio recording not just a technical, but as well an epistemological
one. While the phonograph belongs to what Jules-Étienne Marey once called the
"graphical method" (analog registering of signals by curves), the
magnetophone is based upon the electro-magnetic field which represents a
completely different type of recording; non-invasive writing has re-turned from
within computing, as digital encoding

- occidental phonocentrism striving for means to store the human voice in the
memory apparatus - be it the „dialogical“ hallucinations of speaking with the
dead in historical imagination or the efforts to preserve folk song traditions in
the age of enlightenment. Technical means since the nineteenth century made
it possible to inscribe traces of the human voice both literally in the already
established archival institutions of cultural memory and in the epistemological
„archive“ (Foucault) as dispositive of cultural (re)cognition. This means that
what looks rather unique, idiosyncratic in the case of Hornbostel´s ethno-
phonographical archive, is to be read as part of an overriding practice of
classification, data processing and information storage leading to early
twentieth century efforts to create a universal documentation science.

- the "acoustic real" as registered in phonography extended to the magnetic

cassette tape (where the noise of the apparatus and the inscription medium -
after high-frequency "sonic" pre-magnetization - is less co-present to human
perception, thereby dissimulating the machinic, non-human sonic agency

- between mechanical and electro-magnetic audio recording not just a

technical, but as well an epistemological difference; phonograph belongs to
what Jules-Étienne Marey once called the "graphical method" (analog
registering of signals by curves) and explicitely compared to a musical score,
thereby integrating the graphical method in familiar cultural techniques of
writing; when a record is not fixed any more on a permanent storage medium
but takes places electronically; voltage replaces the stable inscription

- magnetophone based upon the electro-magnetic field which represents a

completely different type of recording, in fact a true "medium". What used to
be invasive writing has been substituted by electronic recording. This results in
a different kind of contact zone between implicit sonicity and explicit sound

- when sound recording on gramophone disc re-sonates by replay, what

happens between the pick-up of the technical device and the material sound
wave recording on disc is different from reading a musical score by a musician
or a musicologist; Fig.: Lautarchiv-Tonabnehmer.jpg Berlin

- music as concept and sound vs. event (sounds very Hanslickean); music:
necessity for embodiment in order to become (e)motive: a correference
between music and high-tec media in relation to their irreducible being-in-time
to unfold at all

- sound technology provides music-makers with set of physical and

psychological constraints but nevertheless allows a certain degree of agency /
versus non-human agency of such machines

- May 2011 two Black Boxes could finally be rescued from the ground of the
Atlantic sea two years after the Air France aeroplane crash: the data recorder
and the voice recorder keeping the last words of the pilots in the cockpit but as
well the background noises which retrospectively signal the unfolding desaster;
recordings miraculously intact: memory chips which keep their magnetic
charge, different from mechanically vulnerable previous recording media.
Whereas mechanical records still represent the culturally familiar form of
physical impression (writing), electro-magnetic latency is a sublime, uncanny
form of insivible, non-haptic memory. The voices and sounds emanating from
such a black box are radically bodyless, "acousmatic" in a new, informational
sense, no longer in historio-graphical time; Brian Kane, Sound Unseen.
Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice, Oxford / New York (Oxford UP) 2014;
Murray Schafer's term "schizophonia"; shock induced by phonograph: the
bodyless voice

- refinement of the Phenician syllabic writing system to the Greek phonetic

alphabet by adopting individual letters to express single vowels (which Ong
actually called a "technologizing of the word"), acoustic articulation (speech,
singing, oral poetry) symbolically recordable for real re-enactment as a kind of
"phonography" not avant but literally à la lettre. Still, this notation remained a
symbolic code
 - Béla Bartók on the memory conditions of the phonographic recordings of oral
poetry made by Milman Parry which he transcribed into a symbolic musical
score: "Aluminum disks were used; this material is very durable so that one
may play back the records heaven knows how often, without the slightest
deterioration. <...> copies can be made in almost limitless numbers"; physical
reality of such storage devices over time is the evidence that they are
increasingly subject to increasing physical entropy such as the material
deteriorisation of Edison cylinders or magnetic tapes. And copying as act of
tradition, for analog media, is subject to a negative signal-to-noise ratio. At that
point, the strenght of almost lossless symbol copying becomes evident

Technological memory: The sound of the phonograph itself

- record in the Vienna Phonograph Archive of emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-

Hungary written deep into the wax cylinder (a recording from Bad Ischl, 2nd
August 1903); instead of replaying this recording for historic reference, media
archaeological listening starts here: phonograph as media artefact does not
only preserve the memory of cultural semantics but stores past technical
knowledge as well, a kind of frozen media memory embodied in engineering
and waiting to be listened to by media-archaeologically tuned ears, waiting to
be made explicit again

- Austrian emperor Franz Joseph's actual statement. Significantly, this

statement - one of the first voice recordings preserved at all - tuns out to be
the pure message of the medium. When a new technical medium emerges
humans are very aware of its technicality (which afterwards, when it becomes
mass media, tends to be forgotten in favor of so-called "content"). The emperor
expresses his joy to literally "incorporate" his voice into the Vienna phonograph
archive: "Es hat mit sehr gefreut, auf Wunsch der Akademie der
Wissenschaften meine Stimme in den Apparat hineinzusprechen und dieselbe
dadurch der Sammlung einzuverleiben." Indeed possible, today, to listen to
human voices which exterminated hundred years ago, by applying laser
reading of the wax cylinders which do not destroy its source in the act of re-
play. But what do we hear: Message (the emperor) or noise (the scratch)?

- paraisthesis = noise of the wax cylinder itself which the record articulates
whenever it is being re-played is not discursive (cultural) but media-
archaeological information of the physically real event; not exclude it
hermeutically like in the proverbial Cocktail party effect of auditory
communication between humans; with the micro-physical close reading of
sound, the materiality of the recording medium itself becomes archivally
poetical.19 Instead of musicological hermeneutics the media-archaeological ear
listens to signals; power of signal-based technical media lies in their ability to
actively (re-)create real presence; an unvolontary memory, thus: the memory
of the real sonosphere which inadvertedly inscribes itself into the record:
"There are many 'conversations' in addition to the songs incorporated in the
recording, talks between collector and singer concerning data connected with

19 Karl Sierek, Die weiße Leinwand, in: ders., Aus der Bildhaft. Filmanalyse als
Kinoästhetik, Wien (Sonderzuahl) 1993, 115-130 (122), referring to: Umberto
Eco, Semiotik, 263 f.
the song, with the singer, with the circumstances referring to the performance
of the song, etc. When you listen to these "conversations" you really have the
feeling of being on the spot, talking yourself with those peasant singers. It
gives you a thrilling impression of liveliness, of life itself." = Bartok ibid.

- Bartók's comment on his transcriptions of recordings of Yugoslav oral poetry

from the 1930s: "You really have the feeling of being on the spot <...>. It gives
you a thrilling impression of liveliness, of life itself" <op. cit.>.

- media archaeology, without passion, does not hallucinate life when he listens
to recorded voices; the media archaeological exercise is to be aware at each
given moment that we are dealing with technical media, not humans, that we
are not speaking with the dead but operative recording keeps sound un-dead

The Aluminium disc

- 1934, Pyral Company of France and the Presto Corporation in the US, working
independently, introduced an improved instantaneous disc which coated an
aluminum base plate with a lacquer composed primarily of cellulose nitrate.
Though highly flammable in its raw state and chemically unstable, this coating
proved much more durable and easy to use than the uncoated discs, and was
an instant success when introduced in the US late in the year. The two
technologies existed side by side for several years, and uncoated aluminum
recordings can be found dating as late as the early forties...but it was the
lacquer disc that was adopted by the networks as their preservation medium of
choice" = http://www.old-time.com/mcleod/mcleod6.html, accessed 12-10-06

- same Lincoln Thompson, who founded the Sound Specialties Company in

Waterbury, Connecticut, and provided Parry with a direct cutting aluminium
disc phonograph with two drives, "interested in developing technologies for the
sound cinema; in my opinion, Thompson supplied Parry with the motion picture
camera used for the "Kino" because of this interest (information e-mail 3rd
January 2007, David Elmer)

Lord's Wire Recorder

- Parry „showed how it was possible to make a text out of oral poetry, evidently
a contradiction in terms. The singer sings and the scribe records, whether on
aluminum wire or discs or by means of graphemes on a flexible substance.
<...> / There is no audience to entertain, except the recorder <...>, the
recording of the poem is doing something to the shape of the poem" = Powell
2002: 6 f.; neither Parry nor Lord "interested in the nature or history of the
technology that had made the text of Homer possible, any / more than Parry
investigated the history of the recording machine" = Powell 2002: 7 f.

- Albert Lord "discovered a new way to make a text. He carried to Yugoslavia

the best electronic recording equipment he could find, when <...> some songs
were taken down on aluminum wire, others on metal discs. In the Milman Parry
Collection at Harvard, Albert Lord showed <...> several rolls of this wire,
hopelessly tangled in a drawer - what lost songs does this tagled text preserve?
 Aluminium wire <...> is not oral song, but a kind of text <...>. Parry´s
aluminum discs and wire, just as much as a papyrus with graphemes scratched
thereon, provide a material basis - obviously liable to corruption - for a code
impressed upon it. In either case the text depends on technological innovation:
the Greek alphabet <...>, inscribed on parchment or papyrus, and electronic
magnetization <...>. All texts are useless without the technology to decode its
symbols: the rules of Greek alphabetic writing <...>, a tape-player <...>" =
Barry B. Powell, Writing and the Origins of Greek Literautre, Cambridge u. a.
(Cambridge UP) 2002, 6

- wire tape spaghetti in the Milman Parry Collection at Harvard; acquire a

Webster Steel Wire magnetophon which is still operative; driving this heavy
piece of post-alphabetic equipment to ex-Yugoslavia and Albania, to perform a
reverse media archaeology of Parry (and Lord) recording Homer-like bards, by
visiting the spots and recording (mabye the waves at the shores of Albania,
which are closer to the spectrum of the electro-magnetic field, and the ultimate
challenge to the vocal alphabet which could never actually write down the
sound of breaking waves which - with Leibniz - can only be calculated or
recorded by electro-magnetic media - a rupture in tradition under the guise of
continuing it)

TECHNOLOGICAL WITNESSING OF POETICAL MEMORY: GUSLARI ON-LINE

Re-discovering the sound of texts: "Oral poetry"

- Florens Chladni experimented with his visualisations of acoustic wave figures

in sand as created by the vibrations of the violin bow; „Goethe's definition of
literature did not even have to mention optical or acoustic data flows"20 which
concern oral poetry; legends as oralized segments of bygone events, after the
practice of oral tradition has been literally silenced by the general
alphabetisation, „only survived in written format; that is, under
pretechnological but literary conditions. However, since it has become possible
to record the epics of the last Homeric bards, who until recently were
wandering through Serbia and Croatia, oral mnemotechnics or cultures have
become reconstructible in a completely different way" 21

- The archive of recorded oral poetry from the former South Yugoslav countries
located at Harvard University is called "Milman Parry Collection of Oral
Literature". But media-archaeologically recognized, there is no text but
recorded voices and sound, which only afterwards became transcribed into
literature and musical notation (among others by Bela Bartók); textualization of
oral traditions

Technically induced „secondary orality“

20 Kittler 1999: 7
21 Kittler 1999: 7, referring to: Walter ]. Ong, Orality and
Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word, London 1982, 27
 - misunderstandig starts with the notion of "Oral Literature" (nomination of the
Parry Collection at Harvard University). There is nothing "literal" in oral poetry,
no letters, no alphabet, no recording. The message of the medium is neuro-
temporal (realtime poetics), not spatially literal

- "musical" aspect of guslari performances lies not in its harmonic (melodic) but
its rhythmic aspect - the chrono-poetic aspect of prosody

- note zu Ismail Kadare's novel The File on H.: "In fact, part of the Milman Parry
Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard has been digitized, and it is now
possible to hear some of their field recordings online!"22

Retextualizing audio(visual) records: Digitized sound

- active media archaeology (opto-digital reading of otherwise unaccessible

sound recording) retrieves past sound signals by digital sampling and
quantification; what appears to the ear like the restituted sound, is in fact the
function of a mathematical matrix

- Fig. "Spektrogramm einer rekonstruierten Tonaufnahme

(Wedda-Gesang, Ceylon 1907)" in: Stanke / Kessler, xxx; digital close reading of
sound dissolves any signal into discrete blocks. Thus the textual regime returns
(in alphanumeric codes)

- by optical reading of signals and application of digital filters, it is possible to

digitally trace past acoustic signals from records. From such an operation we
expect sound - just like the first officially archivized record of sound in Norway,
a tinfoil flattened to a "document" and annotated by a remark by its former
collector. The digital reading of this record by a laboratory in Southampton lead
to a kind of re-sonification where the ear wants to detect something like music
or speech but hear nothing but noisy patterns

- algorithmic archaeology is the return of "textuality" in the representation of

the past, but this time, the text itself becomes media-active - a kind of
operativity which the handwritten or printed text never knew. Digitized signals
at first sight resemble the tradition of music notation; they wait to be
algorithmically executed.

- early application of phonography for philological research, a recording of the

oral poet Avdo Medjedovich in former Yuguslavia by Milman Parry and Albert
Lord around 1935: online Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, Harvard
University. In listening to such a sound, we tend to be trapped by the referential
illusion, believing that we are confronted with the audio signal. But in fact
discrete bit-strings are being processed - sublime textuality, operating on the
subliminal level of our understanding; Leibniz, "nesciens" - mathematically
calculating perception, breaking waves; how textuality becomes powerful
beyond humans, within technomathematical machines

22 http://www.amazon.com/File-H-Novel-Ismail-Kadare/dp/1559706279;
Zugriff 22 September 2006
- "[H]istory, in its traditional form, undertook to <...> lend speech to those
traces which, in themselves, are / often not verbal, or which say in silence
something other than what they actually say" = Michel Foucault, Archaeology
of Knowledge, transl. A. M. Sheridan Smith [*1972], London / New York
(Routledge Classics) 2002, "Introduction", 3-19 (7). Today, this is the relation
between performative ("textual" or audiovisual) surfaces to what is being
operatively processed on the other side of the coin, within the Central
Processing Unit of microprocessors

Re-discovering the sound of "texts": Oral poetry

- technological dynamics of recording devices deserve close description to

reveal its media-epistemologic potential for a refreshed terminology of
"memory" and "time"

- escalation between the alphabetic "technologizing" of the spoken word

(Walter Ong) and mechanic and electronic signal-recording of "oral poetry"
(Milman Parry / Albert Lord in former South-Yugoslavean guslari culture); finally,
creative algorithms mobilize the digitzed voices for a different kind of insight;
still, the techno-traumatic event of the dis-embodied voice and the means its
spectrographic analysis haunt cultural memory, since they remind of the
technicity of sound within the human itself (like "thinking", with Turing / Lacan)
= media-theoretical turn-around (Kehre)

- gusle in a vitrine of an ethnological museum is a mis-placement; like most

other "historical" musical instruments, it actually has to be played in order not
to decay physically. This form of direct use - which in case of techno-historical
electronics means replacing some active or passive electronic elements (case
of the archaic electro-acoustic instrument Subharchord in the archive of the
Academy of the Arts, Berlin) - does what is strictly forbidden in traditional
archives: to interfere with the original "record". The re-performance (signal
processing) is the essence of musical and technical objects; the archive in
motion is its only way of existence: active material philology

- gusle not simply a musical augmentation of the textual narrative in Oral

Poetry but actually a functional device of re-actualizing (feed-back) this
memory in acoustic re-presencing

- contrary to other forms of popular music which have become commercial

audio-visual turbo-folk in the meantime, gusle resists becoming object of a
media music industry, but only for discursive reasons: "It became a voice of the
death, speaking to the living. Nationalistic rituals, in which the instrument
played a central role, created an aura, which forbid its mixing with electronic
instruments and new media" = Tanja Zimmermann, The Voice of gusle and its
Resistance Against Electrification, in: Dimitri Zakharine / Nils Meise (eds),
Electrified Voices. Medial, Socio-Historical and Cultural Aspects of Voice
Transfer, Konstanz (Unipress) 2012, 403-410 (409). In media-archaeological
terms, the very fact that the gusle has been recorded on aluminium discs
(Parry) and magnetic wire (Lord) undoes this "resistance", rather revealing the
affinity between electronics (oscillators, resonance circuit) and vibrational
events in human / instrumental culture
 - technically induced „secondary orality“ / media-archaeological Kehre: with
phonograph recording (since Murko), a secondary (Walter Ong) or "derived"
(Foley 1990) orality took place, revealing the phono-graphic (vibrational rather
than phonetic-alphabetically discreet) nature of human "orality" itself

- hexametric verse as mnemo-technique, combined with l'archive in

Foucauldean sense of a generative / conditionng grammar. Even the same
singer does not repeat the same epic when performed (time-shifted) next time
(re-generative); variance (Zumthor / Cerquelini) vs. technological
Gleichursprünglichkeit

Speech becoming "immortal"

- acoustic records, since 1877, closer to cinematography (1895) than to other

historical records, since only media able to register physically real signals can
deal with time-based events like sonic articulation and movement

- technical media as archaeologists of sound: re-gaining acoustic information by

laser-optical scanning from Galvano copper negatives

- If sound is kind of evasive, liquid, in itself unrecordable and transferable

beyond the bodily range, then technical media (different from alphabetic
phonetic writing which "freezes" the human voice, as expressed in the middle
ages, by reducing it to a range of a very limited symbolic code) are able to de-
freeze recorded voices in all its frequencies (that is, the Lacanean "real" of the
voice) by re-play; after two millenniums of alphabetic sound recording there is
a new kind of cultural technology as heritage of the Edison wax cylinder.

"Speech", as it were, has become immortal", Thomas Alva Edison announces in

Scientific American of 1877 immediately after finding of phonographic signal
recording.23

- the technical "undead" in signal recording media; interlacing of temporalities

between (a)live and recorded on tape: "That is perhaps most uncanny when
you hear a program about someone who is dead, and that person´s voice is
broadcast and is as `real´ sensorially, as `present´, as those who are speaking
`today´ and who are alive" = Weber 1996: 160

- Arthur Schnitzler, when speaking into the phonograph on 19th March 1907,
admitted that confronted with the phonograph literature had lost its unique
privilege to transmit the memory of human language: "Lebendige Stunden? Sie
leben doch nicht länger als der letzte, der sich ihrer erinnert. Es ist nicht der
schlechteste Beruf, solchen Stunden Dauer zu verleihen, über ihre Zeit
hinaus."24

- ability, today, to listen to human voices which exterminated hundred years

ago, by applying laser reading of the wax cylinders which do not destroy its

23 As quoted in Kittler 1986: 37

24 Track 3 auf CD hörBar, Signatur Ph 536
 source in the act of replay. But what we hear is not simply the vocal message
but the noise (the scratch) of the wax cylinder itself - which is no coded content
from cultural history, but media archaeological information, an articulation of
the techno-real itself. A task of media studies is to open the ears for such
understanding

- micro-physical close reading of sound, where the materiality of the recording

medium itself becomes poetical25, dissolves any semantically meaningful
archival unit into discrete blocks of signals. Instead of musicological
hermeneutics, the media-archaeological gaze is required here - materially.

Trans-cultural musical memory? A techno-cultural paradox driven by

traumatic "future in the past"

- avant-guarde of memory studies = trauma studies in connection with

Holocaust; media-archaeological counter-hypothesis: fixation on a unique
historical experience overlooks a deeper trauma rootet in the technological
shock (since Edison's phonograph) and the "deadly" ambivalences of recording
"live" itself

- effects and affects of re-presencing the past by media memory

- let the viewer / listener be co-affected or even be "co-traumatized" (Jan-Claas

van Treeck); stems from the technological setting itself which continuously
challenges and irritates the human sense of presence

- recording projects in ethno-musicology; Berlin Lautarchiv (resulting from

prisoner recordings in World War One) a technological function of traumatic
anxiety about the disappearance of indigenous cultures, resulting in techno-
archiving practices in the temporal mode of "future in the past"

- like the phonographic archives established in Vienna and in Berlin around

1900, the photographic expeditions undertaken by Albert Kahn for his Archives
de la Planéte in the 1930 and further projects, Bowles' Marroccean folk song
recordings was driven by a kind of anticipatory trauma that the indigene
culture he referred to was about to be extinguished. Appararently he never
listened himself to the tapes he feverishly recorded; almost forgotten they
time-invariantly rested in magnetic (rather than cultural) latency until they
were discovered for re-play

- not "collective memory" but a collection of recordings in technical storage -

meant as memory of an anticipated futurum exactum, driven by a virtual
trauma; reverse: the current "Retromania" (Simon Reynolds) in popular music
which compensates for the absence of utopean or avantgardist perspectives in
current musical culture - a thought expressed by Jan Rohlf for the 2014 theme
of CTM - Festival for Adventurous Music and Art "DIS CONTINUITY", Berlin
(January / February, 2014)

25 Karl Sierek, Die weiße Leinwand, in: ders., Aus der Bildhaft. Filmanalyse als
Kinoästhetik, Wien (Sonderzuahl) 1993, 115-130 (122), referring to: Umberto
Eco, Semiotik, 263f
- "The archival potential of such <sc. phonographic> recordings came at a time
when many indigenous cultures were already severely threatened, or had
already disappeared, ironically as a result of the same Western industrialization
that produces the technology used for the documentation. [...] the fact remains
that the technology provided a literal documentation that surpassed the results
of even the most sensitive transcriber. <...> many ethnomusicologists were so
conditioned by Western muscial practice that they intepreted what they heard
and transcibred it according to Western musical notation, ignoring the
microtonal variations that can still be heard on original recordings. Therefore,
such objective documentation can be said <...> to preserve the aural artifacts
of a culture" = Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, Norwood, N. J. (Ablex)
1984, 118 - in facts its sonic aura. The technical recording (that is, the media-
archaeological ear) preserves acoustic signals which might have already been
obscured by symbolically coded cultural memory. Even if "[t]here is no
guarantee that one can ever bridge the gaps between cultures" - and temporal
distance between sonic articulations -, "the perspective of time and familiarity
can certainly clear a way some of the veils that obscure a culture from us" =
Truax ibid. - revealing the sonicity of the cultural unconscious.

- like Alan Lomax' notorious recording of American folk songs had been
commissioned by the Music Division of the Library of Congress, same institution
let an American resident in Tanger, the writer Paul Bowles, record native
Maroccean folk songs and rhythms on magnetic tape (financed by a Rockefeller
Fondation Grant) in 1959. Bowles' initiative was driven by the fear that recently
independent Marocco was about to destroy that native folk music culture in an
effort of national modernization

- Even if Bowles got copies of all the tapes he sent to Washington, he never
listened to one of them again. The issue was conservation (German
"Tonkonserve"), materially canning the acoustic event, for a (principally)
infinitive time interval. A different kind of non-living memory is at work here, in
both cultural and magnetic latency. When there was not alternating but direct
current in some of the local villages, no recording took place at all with the
AMPEX magnetophone equipment.

- Such anticipatory technological recording while the culture itself is still intact,
escalated in ballistic World War II anti-aircraft prediction. In order for the
artillery to fire is bullets "just in time", the data of the approaching enemy
aircraft had to be recorded and calclated in real time to anticipate its future
position. This corresponds with the temporal grammar of futurum exactum, the
"future in the past" - that which will have been. History not in the past any
more but anticipated in a projected future

- this temporal figuration became more time-critical in the subsequent World

War II when electronic Analog, then Digital computers performed predictive
calculation of enemy moves in real time, applied to anti-aircraft defence, by
literally calculating future in the past - like nowadays the predictive analytics
algorithms exercised by the NSA in the survey of current telecommunication
data; no archive from the past but actually an archive of the future

- techno-cultural dissonance roots in the fact that the very audio-visual "new
 media" of documentation were part of the same modernization and
industrialization which is responsible for the destruction of more traditional
ethnic cultures constituting the object of recording

- Inbetween use of material (museum), signal-based (audio-visual recording)

and symbolic (alphabetical) records to replace a living cultural memory by
manipulatable storage, is was the case for the present with the Theresienstadt
ghetto film from 1944/45 and the Central Jewish Museum project in Prague
under German occupation 1940-43 to create a futurum exactum

- Albrecht Meydenbauers German Monument Archive (das Deutsche

Denkmälerarchiv), based around 1900 on photogrammetric measuring of
historic architectural heritage, anticipated future destruction of the originals
caused by possible wars already. The pre-emptive media archive embodies the
time-reversed trauma, known from grammar as "future in the past" (futurum
exactum); from the technological condition of photography, cinematography
and phonography itself that the traumatic futurum exactum as a kind of
reverse non-historical trauma arose: the concept that a cultural articulation
might possibly be extinguished and thus in anticipatory ways needs technical
pre-recording

Disembodied voices from analog to digital analytics

- German Service of the BBC recorded voices of survivors immediately after the
liberation of the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen and broadcasted them
repeatedly via radio

- photo-/phonographic (logo-centristic / presentistic) momentum: The

recordings made almost immediately after the event, says the according CD
Booklet, are "much more authentic than more recent statements of 'witnesses'
which have been transformed by new experiences and mental processing"26 -
signal-witnessing. The recordings of the Jewish cellist Anita Lasker and Lotte
Grunow are preserved in the Phonothek of Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv in
Wiesbaden.27 The booklet of its edition on Compact Disc tries to catch the
medium specificity of such signal memory; referring to tape system-internal
recordings "which illustrate the 'spirit' and character of the regime much more
impressively than any printed text might ever achive"28 - or archive

- On track 21 concentration camp survivor Lotte Grunow expresses her dispair

with trying to organize her fresh memories into a narratable form: "Da weiß

26 In German: "[...] um ein Vielfaches authentischer als andere, durch

neue Erfahrungen und gedankliche Verarbeitung überformte
Statements of 'Zeitzeugen'."
27 They have been published on Compact Disc by the Institut für
Zeitgeschichte (Munich / Berlin) 2003 Dokumentation Obersalzberg.
Tondokumente. Täter Gegner Opfer, ed. by Albert A. Feiber / Volker
Dahm, track 20 and 21
28 "<...> die <...> 'Geist' und Charakter des Regimes sehr viel
eindringlicher veranschaulichen, als dies ein gedruckter Text je
könnte"
 man nicht, wo man anfangen soll" ("One does not know where to begin"). This
fundamental aporia marks the traumatic momentum. At several instants of the
recording, her voice seems to hesitate or to double for a micro-phonetic
moment.

Is this an index of read text, of traumatic speech iteration, or a technical effect

of digital buffering of the audio file itself? In the latter case, the apparent
traumatic shock turns out to be a function of technology itself.

A techno-sonic analysis of such recorded voices allows for the memorization of

such traumatically experienced presence in revealing subtle nuances of voicing
(somewhat deconstructing the message of the official "acousmatic"
commentator voice from the off29).

Instead of traditional alphabetical transcription, linguistic analysis software like

Praat allows for (and incites) new kinds of rather signal- than archive-b(i)ased
mobilization of recorded memory: phonetic speech analysis, active archaeology
of past sounds. In such algorithmic analysis, audio recordings from the the past
are not just archival objects any more, but become items in an experimental
laboratory of "archived presence". Semantic emphasis can be identified as a
function of tonal pitch in the recorded voice, just as Max Planck - in a recording
from 1939 in the Lautarchiv collection "Stimmen berühmter Persönlichkeiten"30,
raises (in German: "erhebt") his voice with the very German word "erhebt"
itself, and lowers it with rhetorical skill at the end of his phrase in the last word
"Gelehrten" (scholars). The techno-mathematical analysis of intonation,
performed by Nikita Braguinski with the software Sonic Visualizer, reveals
Planck's application of quasi-musical phrasing and thereby bridges the gap
between semantics and affect; "Avdo movie" with abrupt technical ending

- apply such sonic analytics to sonic records from traumatic past as well.
Recent experiments with the "archival" a priori of digital audio memory
organization have resulted in more dynamical tools of inquiry: search
algorithms which are closer to the mechanism of human remembrance which is
always in motion itself.

- automatically tagging both intentional and non-intentional (even traumatic)

"silence" in audio files - inaudible sound where nothing but time (and the
recording medium) speaks, as provided by the "Analysis"-toolbar of the audio
software Audacity under the explicit term of "Silence Finder"; might be applied
to the magnetic tapes from the historic Frankfurt Auschwitz trial

- "Effects" tool, on the other hand, allows for "removing silence" or to create
"echo" from audio signals, which is manipulation of the sonic time event on its
minutest level. The "echo" itself embodies the time figure of delayed presence
or even "archiving presence": Only recorded presence can be echoed. In
reverse, the echo is a temporal mirror of presence itself, thereby undercutting
the clear observational distinction between presence and past which is
emphasized by systems theory (Spencer-Brown / Luhmann).

29 See Michel Chion, Audio-vision. Sound on screen, New York (Columbia

University Press) 1990
30 See Web site of the Lautarchiv = B8-29 Max Planck
 Is such cultural analytics (algorithmic analysis as defined by Lev Manovich) un-
ethical when it comes to traumatic testimony like audio and video recordings of
Holocaust survivors?

- Todd Presner, The Ethics of the Algorithm: Close and Distant Listening to the
Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, typeskript (conference paper draft,
March 2012, http://www.toddpresner.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/09/Presner_Ethics.pdf

- Derrida definies his sensation of the anima in voice recording: "I am always
overwhelmed when I hear the voice of someone who is dead, as I am not when
I see a photograph or an image of the dead person"31

- in spite of the Barthean punctum. Visual presence is based on electro-

magnetic wave signal transmission ("radio"-like): almost immediate, whereas
acoustic sensation is based on slow run-tíme in mechanical matter: "I can be
touched, presently, by the recorded speech of someone who is dead. I can,
here and now, be affected <!> by a voice beyond the grave"32; according to an
hypothesis developed by John Durham Peters, this double media only takes
place with analogue media and abruptly ends with digital data processing

- in signal recording, indistinction between message and noise, referential

recording and the articulation of the recording device itself - while binary data -
though technically still being embodied in electrophysics and driven by current
energy - per definitionem in communication theory abstract from the material
implementation

- recording of the acoustically or optically "real" physical signal is opposed to

symbolic notation by the alphabet not only in a technical but also in an
epistemological way: the difference between physical signal as indexical and
the arbitrary cultural symbol. With computing, though, this dialectic opposition
becomes synthesized, since Digital Signal Processing (notably sampling of
audio events) is a function of discrete symbolization, a re-entry of the
"alphabet" in numerical and logical form. If according to Walter Ong the
electronic revolution in mass media communication devices like radio and
television has led to a "secondary orality", communication based on the
symbolic machine (computing) has led to a (hidden) secondary alphabetic
revolution, with bits and bytes inheriting the typeset, but different from the
printing culture in a dynamic way. The voice turns silent and still articulates - in
implicity mathematical sonicity which is the ultimate shock to occidental
logocentrism.

Singers and Tales in the 21st Century: digital memory

31 Jacques Derrida, Above all, no journalism, in: H. de Vries / Samuel Weber (eds),
Religion and Media, Stanford, CA (Stanford University Press) 2001, 56-94 (71).
See Paddy Scannell, Television and the Meaning of Life, Cambridge
(Polity) 2014, 126
32 Derrida 2001: 71
 With digitization, a dramatic change of memory records takes place. We can
focus the exact moment of metamorphosis where "big data" of past recordings
are generated and social memory is transformed into computability; not just a
further escalation of the pick-up / record groove constellation, but in fact an
epistemological transsubstantiation. This statement may seem "metaphysical",
but no less mind than the philosopher Leibniz (who designed the first binary
calculating machine) was convinced that the language of metaphysics could be
completely mathematized itself. Even with infinite approximation an algebraic
calculus will never equal the physical world. "Womöglich sind Wolken keine
Computer, die jeden Regentropfen berechnen, und umgekehrt Computer keine
Maschinen, die Wolken das Regnen abnehmen" = Friedrich Kittler, Ein Tigertier,
das Zeichen setzte. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz zum 350. Geburtstag, in: mtg
(Medien/Theorie/Geschichte) Nr. 3 des DFG-Projektverbunds Theorie und
Geschichte der Medien (1996); http://www.uni-
kassel.de/wz2/mtg/archiv/kittler.html

Once a human epic performance is being recorded, it becomes post-memorial

and technical storage instead. The carrier of the cultural information is not a
human signal (voice and gesture) but magnetic tape. With digitization, an even
more dramatic change takes place which transcends the transduction of epic
songs from Gusle string to steel wire:

- same kind of steel wire which has been the basis for Albert Lord's magnetic
recordings in former Yugoslavia in 1950 is all of the sudden used for a grid
which constitutes the Cartesian x / y texture of the earlieste electronic
computer memory, so-called Magnetic Core. Ironically, this digital memory
hardware has become the media-archaeological condition for a "social
memory" of a second order such as the "Community Memory" project, a
telephone-line, Modem- and computer-based social network which emerged
around 1970s in the San Francisco area, figuring centrally a Time-Sharing main
frame computer (the SDS 940). What has been "collective memory" in
sociological terms has become cold storage, and the use of the term "memory"
for both implementations (human bodies and minds vs. hardware) is rather
misleading.33

As RAM the SDS 940 consisted of magnetic core memory units; its very image
internally "mirrors" the social "net-work" literally = Höltgen 2014: 397 f.;

Höltgen 2014: 398, Fig. 5. This is truly and non-metaphorically called "social
memory 2.0", since memory here is a direct function of the capacities and
limits of the computer data storage.

From sich recording situation arises the „archival“ question: What happens to
oral poetry when the "online"-performance (on the gusle string) and the
"online"-recordings (literally Lord's wire spools) become accessible "online" in
the World Wide Web sense? Does the media-critique of writing as recording

33 See Stefan Höltgen, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace".

Öffentliche Erinnerungen, demokratische Informationen und restriktive
Technologien am Beispiel der "Community Memory", in: Ramón Reichert (ed.),
Big Data. Analysen zum digitalen Wandel von Wissen, Macht und Ökonomie,
Bielefeld (transcript) 2014, 385-403 (386)
device, articulated once by Platon in respect to the ambivalence of alphabetic
notation as cultural technique of memory, become valid again?

- tradition of songs and tales, for millenia, by mnemotechnics of oral

transmission, increasingly accompanied (supplemented, deferred) by notational
writing (the vocal alphabet, musical notes). The early 20th century enabled a
media-induced re-entry of orality, a secundary orality (Walter Ong) based on
analog recording technologies like phonography, magnetic tape and
kinematography. In late 20th century, the symbolic notation took revenge by its
re-entry: in the form of the alphanumeric code within computing. The
digitization of the audiovisual legacy of Parry and Lord on aluminium discs and
wire spools makes a difference to the essence of its cultural content; Plato's
primary „media“ critique of writing as an ambivalent memory technology is
valid again.

P.S.: Re-play (Hamdo 2006)

- mathematically discovering sub-semantic poetic articulation; stochastics

(Markov-chains) to simulate actual choice / prosodic decision in formulae of oral
epics; senso-motoric feedback gusle / guslar; cybernetic coupling / arbitariness
vs. probability (like plugging the string itself: d'Alembert / Euler; Siegert 2003)

- almost surrealist proximity of the Gusle and the wire recorder and created a
new image: the mysterious correspondence between the string (horse-hair
chord) that was being bowed and the recording wire (steel); artistic craft
expressed precisely in the playing of the instrument, and its was the wire
recorder that recorded exactly this momentum: the circle of vibrations in
technology and poetry was thus complete; the most human was at the same
time the most inhuman - precisely the coldest media archaeology ear was
listening to the most magical of all sound machines

Archival phantasms / auditory hallucinations

- main task of the traditional archive so far: keep legally valid documents intact
for proof and re-use. Once the archive is being searched for different purposes,
mainly by historians, this leads to a misreading of its administrative nature. The
aesthetics of the archive is radically non-narrative. Transforming such records
into a historiographical narrative is an act of mis-reading the (in)formation of
the archive in an effort to humanize it

When French historian Jules Michelet visited the parliament archives in Paris to
write abut the recent past of the French revolution, he almost believed he could
hear the obstinate murmur of documents, the voices of the dead - as if
recorded on gramophone, so to speak. Romantic historical imagination, in
many ways, prefigured the technological media of later epochs = Kittler,
Discursive Networks

By vocalizing silent archival records in his reading performances (his Memory

Arena series) the media artist Arnold Dreyblatt imbues memory with a diversity
of voices; "speaking" archive is a hallucinogenic form of memory, resulting
 from the cultural-poetic (or rather prosopo-poietic) phantasms of trying to
"speak with the past", as confessed in the introduction of Stephen Greenblatt's
Shakespearean Negotiations which became a pamphlet for the method of "new
historicism" in literary studies: "It all began with the desire to speak with the
dead" = Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations. The Circulation of
Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley 1988, 1: "I began with the
desire to speak with the dead. <...> If I never believed that the dead could
hear me, and if I knew that the dead could not speak, I was nevertheless
certain that I could recreate a conversation with them."

Motion and immobilization: the audiovisual archive

Whereas the scripture-based classical archive is a static array of records on the

grand scale and letters on the microscale, which could be brought in motion
only by the act of human reading line by line, the Edison phonograph looks like
the first form of "archive in motion", since its recording (notably the early
ethnographic field recordings around 1900, leading to the Vienna Phonograph
Archive and the Berlin Phonogramm Archive) is based on a rotating, technically
moving apparatus both in recording and in re-play; parallel to early
cinematographical recording and projection.

- In media-archaeological awareness, such a recording primarily memorizes the

noise of the wax cylinder itself - which is different kind of "archive", not
cultural-historically, but cultural-technologically, a different kind of information
on the real. Media archaeology opens our ears to listen to this as well, not to
filter this out.

Thus the phonograph as media artefact does not only carry cultural semantic
like words and music, but - like any work of art - is at the same time an archive
of cultural engineering as well, by its very material fabrication - a kind of frozen
media knowledge, which - media-archaeologically - waits to be de-frozen,
liquified.

Different (media-)archival tempor(e)alities: As opposed to an "archival"

transcription of, for example, oral poetry by alphabetic or musical notation, its
recording by phonograph or gramophone creates a presence in latency, a
different temporality, since these sources can be re-played with equal
originality (gleichursprünglich): Repetition with difference on the macro-
temporal time axis, but identical reproduction of its inherent temporal event,
invariant towards "history". Bela Bartok once transcribed Yugoslav folk music of
gramophone recordings (both from aluminium disc or later from
electromagnetic wire recorder) in the Milman Parry Collection at Harvard
University (Cambridge, Mass.)34 , thereby translating the physically real
articulation into the symbolical regime which increases "information" in terms
of order and selection, but looses additional information like the individual
intonation, the temporal subtilities and the accidents, the "noise" as the
authential trace of the unique performance event. Listen to the coffing when
the guslar (singer) Avdo Mededovich starts to perform in one of the recordings:

34 Bela Bartok, Parry Collection of Yugoslav Folk Music, New York (New York
Times) 1942
Since the age of technical reproducibility of movement and sound, cultural
memory has been liberated from restrictions to symbolical notation which
leaves us with a bifurcated memory: the symbolical and the real.

Provided that there is still a player, the recordings themselves can be originally
be replayed and re-transcribed in completely new, variable ways. The acoustic
event can be measured by oscillographical visualisation or spectral analysis:

Even Avdo's caughing thereby is subject to techno-mathematical, non-cultural

analysis

- first uses of sound film for musicological documentation = "Avdo movie",

Milman Parry Collection website:

"Ej, kad svati na Rasku dodose

Avaj, Jaca Seremeta pita <...>."

"When the wedding-guests came to Raska

Alas, Sava inqured of Seremet <...>." (Transl. by A. B. Lord)

At 1:20 min. the sound recording abruptly ends in the middle of a verse line
("Ni bih ..." / "Nor would I ..."), while the sound of the rotating disc takes over
rythmically: Now the medium speaks.

And a few seconds later (1:37), the kinematographic recording breaks down as
well. With that rupture, the real of the medium is at work, and physically breaks
into the symbolic cultural scene. Watching such a record, an anthopological
mis-reading happens: We tend to forget about the recording apparatus and
concentrate on the body and voice of the singer, looking at him as if he was
still alive, being touched by his performance which is in fact nothing but a
technological re-play. Thus let me contrast this emotional audiovisual record by
showing such a recording as a technological event

- constant reminder that there is no human voice but a machinic voice, in the
sense of the transduction of body-based voices into a electronically
reprocessed voice. The frequencies, even the timbre of the voice, miracolously,
is still the same in both "media"

- Albert Lord on the recording of Yugoslav guslari: Unintentionally, the recording

turns improvised oral poetry into a fixed text like the jazz improvisation
recorded and electronically mastered provided for a immutable reference
version and photography freezes a moment of live into a still. "Proteus war
photographiert worden [und] an dieser Aufnahme wurde hinfort jede
Veränderung gemessen - sie wurde zum "Original". Albert B. Lord, Der Sänger
erzählt. Wie ein Epos entsteht, München (Hanser) 1965, 185; AO: The Singer of
Tales

- electromagnetic recording preserves unique feature of the oral performance

(different from its alphabetic, immobilizing transcription) which can be derived
from how French language calls the recording device: écriture magnétique.
Electromagnetic recording, by its very physical immateriality, only comes into
 existence as part of a dynamical process, the inductive act of re-play ("writing"
different from "printing"). In his preface to Albert B. Lord's The Singer of Tales
Harry Levin remarks: "The Word as spoken or sung, together with a visual
image of the speaker or singer, has meanwhile been regaining its hold through
electrical engineering."35

- notion of the archive is in transition. As long as there have been symbolical,

alphabet-based archives only, the phantasma of recording the acoustically real
(predominantly the human voice) has generated imaginary forms of
memorizing sound in supplementary ways.

Technology is within two temporal forms of existence. Hardware (techné) is

subject to entropy; the symbolic code (logos) survives.

With the necessity of digitizing phonographic records in order to preserve them

against physical, media-archaeological entropy, a new epistemological option
emerges which demands media-theoretical attention,

- as expressed in the presentation of the SpuBito project of www.gfai.de:

"The retrieved sound documents can directly be stored on digital media (e. g.
CDs) for archiving or processing" - the "archive in motion" indeed

With algorithmically driven ("automated") tagging (mark-ups), a set of

metadata gained from within the auditive signal event reveals its inherent
spatial geometry and temporality. Such digital archaeonautics is the opposite
but may be combined with "social tagging" in Open Access Web 2.0 circulation
which is non-classified in similar ways: a hybridisation of order and random
access, of techno-logical and "collective" memory.

When it is not historians but software as archaeologist which listens to

audio(visual) recordings from the past in the method of sonic analytics applying
linguistic software such as Praat,

- on the linguistic field that the first computational algorithms for voice
recognition have been developed

- Folke Müller, Die Tonhöhe historischer Filmstimmen als soziolinguistische

Variable, in: Zakharine / Meise (eds) 2010: 233-247

Reverberative memory

- towards a non-anthropocentric and technomathematical theory of cultral

transmission

- Milman Parry's and Albert Lord's phonographical and electronic recording of

the oral poetry of the southern Yugoslavian guslari culture in the 1930s; yet
they accessed this culture through transcriptions that focused on words
only: philology neglected the vocal micro-timings and the one-stringed Gusle

35 Boston (Harvard University Press) 1960, xiii

 instrument that was integral to the performance. Reverberative memory can
only preserved by signal recording. The sonicist relation between present and
past is based on resonance: a non-historicist figure of time that is itself
temporal in its articulation. Sonicity, with its time-critical qualities, is here a
metonym for the temporality of the world as event. This perspective is further
underscored by the mnemo-generic capacities of recorded sound and in
particular digitized sonic materials that are susceptible to the operative
memory of algorithmic procedures.

Sóonia Matos on the archival potentials of a purely sonic language

in danger of extinction, namely the whistle language known as Silbo Gomero
that is still partly in use on the La Gomera island, in: Ina Blom et al. (eds.),
Memory in Motion, AUP, 2017. This language composed of sounds that have no
relation to alphabetic transcription; its articulation is also much a function
of the spatial context (echo and reverb). Linear recording and storing of
linguistic units fails to convey the actual functioning of the language in acoustic
space; discard traditional ideas of archival preservation that usually support the
protection of endangered languages

TOWARDS A MEDIA-ARCHAEOLOGY OF SIRENIC ARTICULATIONS

- sonic media archaeology not simply about the re-sonification of materialle

obsolete first recordings or even prephonographic sound inscriptions avant la
lettre but re-tracing the arché of sound as temporal event

- "Siren" sound better understood by radio waves

- not accidentally, question of the acoustic authenticity of the Siren motive in

Homer's Odyssee arose within grammophone and radio culture, which for the
first time made the voice not symbolically (alphabet), really recordable

- measuring Siren singing: "The white noise signal recorded between the two
smaller islets showed higher amplitudes in the 1000-5000 Hz frequency range
than the same signal recorded just in front of the islands (fig. 3). The natural
signals (human voices and seal calls) were louder at the positions between and
just behind the two smaller islands [...] than just in front of them [...]. This
result can be seen clearly in the lower harmonics where the main energy of
sound is located. The changes in loudness were distinctly perceived even to the
naked ear. Our results lead to the conclusion that the specific geographical
constellation of the island acts as an acoustic amplifier [...]."36

"As a matter of fact, [...] intervals given together by two [sc. technical] Sirens
at Li Galli can only be differentiated as being 'accords', that means having two
separate sources, if their overtone structures do not merge. This is [...] the
case [...] at first with the third and further with less 'consonant' intervals
counting up the overtone series. Since the pure major and minor thirds are
typical for enharmonic scales and less ‘consonant’ intervals are not likely to be

36 Karl-Heinz Frommolt / Martin Carlé, The Song of the Sirens, paper

proposed to the xxx conference at Munich, year xxx
 of great use for any harmonic accompaniment, this finding adds to the
evidence that (i) pure thirds are the characteristic intervals of enharmonic
tuning in Ancient Greece and (ii) that it has been developed from an early
diaphony for which next to the double-aulos the casus dualis in the song of the
two sirens holds."37

Sirens with Blanchot: "[...] parce que les Sirènes qui n'étaient que des bêtes
[...] pouvaient chanter comme chantent les hommes, elles rendaient le chant si
insolite qu'elles faisaient naître en celui qui L'entendait le soupçon de
'inhumanitè de tout chant humain."38

- Ernle Bradford reports that he heard the Sirens sing while serving on H.M.S.
Exmoor in early September 1943 in the Gulf of Salerno: "[...] there was about it
a human quality, disturbing and evocative"39

- media-archaeological question arises: It there something like a physically

given setting, a grounding in the "real" of signal processing, that kept cultural
memory insisting on that place and which only sonic measuring media can re-
veal (analog to Benjamin's notion of the "optical unconscious" which can only
be detected by the camera lense40); "grey zone between natural sounds and
specifically addressed messages with a human quality. "Meaning emerges from
noise and reinforces its content by activating a cultural memory of antiquity - a
Lacanian transfer from the real (waves) over the symbolic (encoded
communication) to the imaginary [...]."41

- on the literally "symbolic" level: between Iliad and the Odyssey lies the
invention of the Greek alphabet, i. e.: the adding of vocal symbols to the
syllabic Phenician alphabet in order to record the musicality of Homer's oral
poetry = Barry B. Powell, Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet,
Cambridge 1991. Sirens are literary expressions of this vocality. A sonic media
archaeology of the Odyssey has to confront an (a)historic dilemma: How can an
acoustic event which is supposed to have happened before the age of
gramophonic recording be verified? test and reconstruct such acoustic events
by media-archaeological means — a sound analytical provocation to classic
philology

- the myth "echoes" actual acoustic phenomena on the site. For such a precise
location of cultural memory, there must be a foundation in the acoustic real

- Sirens "non-human" in terms of machinic or cyborg sound. What makes the

mythologic Siren motive relevant for present media archaeology of sound is the
intervention of the phonograph, since for the first time, the replay of recorded
voices was considered like the presence of humans while at the same time

37 Frommolt / Carlé ibid.

38 Maurice Blanchot, Le live à venir, chap. I "Le chant des Sirènes", section "La
Rencontre de l'Imaginaire", 9-18 (10)
39Ernle Bradford, Ulysses Found, London (Hodder and Stoughton) 1963,
130
40Walter Benjamin, Kleine Geschichte der Photographie, in: Gesammelte
Schriften vol. II/1, Frankfurt/M. [*1972], 2nd ed. 1989, 371
41Winthrop-Young, op. cit.
 knowing it is reproduced from dead signals on a storage medium - and even
more with electronic sound processing. Here, the uncanniness of the
monstruous Sirens corresponds with the imaginary of technology itself.
"imaginary media" (Jussi Parikka) such as the mythic Sirens address the non-
human side of technical media; the fact that technical media are media of non-
solid, non-phenomenologial worlds (electro-magnetic fields, high-level
mathematics, speeds beyond human comprehension"42 - which, beyond the
phonograph, is true for electronic sound media up to the digital sound
processing of today with "ultra-sonic" speed of processing.

- zone of indeterminacy between human and non-human sound is what Maurice

Blanchot once identified as the "acoustemic" core of the Siren songs. Blanchot
takes into account the notion of human singing turned upside down: "Some
have said that is was an inhuman song - a natural sound [...] but on the
borderline of nature, at any rate foreign to man; almost inaudible [...]. Others
suggested that it [...] simply imitated the song of a normal human being, but
since the Sirens, even if they sang like human beings, were only beasts [...],
their song was so unearthly that it forced those who heard it to realise the
inhumanness of all human singing."43

- vocal effects of presence achieved even by completely computational

artefacts. Uncanniness derives from the technological Turing test.

- Kittler: Sirens are examples of "resursive history 'where the same issue is
taken up again and again at regular intervals but with different connotations
and results' [...] to the nineteenth-century technical use of the term in the form
we understand it, i. e. as a signalling device with a sound, subsequently playing
a key part in the mapping of the thresholds of hearing [...]."44 This re-
occurrence, though, is not within history, but in a coupling of human cultural
time and a non-human evidence.

Fig.: Vocal Siren, from: Hermann von Helmholtz, Ueber die physiologischen
Ursachen der musikalischen Harmonie (lecture 1857), in: Vorträge und Reden
von Hermann von Helmholtz, vol. 1, 5th edition, Braunschweig (Vieweg) 1903,
119-155, Fig. 1

- the agency of sound-archaeological research is the technical siren apparatus

indeed to synthesise vowels - especially in the double siren version as
developed by Hermann von Helmholtz, remarkably corresponding with the
casus dualis of the Homeric Sirens

- explicit harmonic analysis of acoustic vibrations (in adoption of Fourier's

mathematical analysis) for the sensation of hearing "tones" achieved by G. S.

42See the chapter: Non-human media, in: Jussi Parikka, What is Media
Archaeology?, Cambridge / Cambridge, Mass. (Polity Press) 2012,
55-61 (62)
43 Maurice Blanchot, The Sirens's Song. Selected Essays, Bloomington (Indiana
University Press) 1982, 59-65 (59)
44 Parikka 2012, 67, quoting John Armitage, From Discourse Networks
to Cultural Mathematics. An Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler,
in: Theory, Culture & Society vol. 23, no. 7/8 (2006), 17-38 (33)
 Ohm, Ueber die Definition des Tones, nebst daran geknüpfter Theorie der
Sirene und ähnlicher tonbildender Vorrichtungen, in: Annalen der Physik und
Chemie, vol. 59 (1843), 513-565

- experimental settings of the Li Galli expedition has been to fold both

meanings of the "siren" upon each other - the cultural and the artefactual one,
by emiting across the island, acoustic impulses generated by the technical
double-siren.

With the technical siren as sonic device (developed by Cagniard de Latour and
refined by Hermann von Helmholtz) the vocal formants became mathematically
analysable and thus calculable, with a retro-effect towards the metaphysics of
the voice in occidental ontology: Since then, a human voice is considered and
perceived as a frequency-based vibration event in itself, no less "mechanical"
than technical machin communication and recording like telephony and the
phonograph. When the technical siren as acoustic pulse generator confronts its
mythological other, the Homeric Sirens, the myth itself fails and dissolves into
a knowledge-driven material and dynamic construction of a signal event which
is not controlled but simply modulated by humans; not invented, just dis-
covered in culture. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young points out the special twist of this
forensic Siren analysis: "[...] one of the sound-producing devices used to
disconceal the ancient Sirens was an aerophone, a noisemaker that produces
signs by interrupting the air flow—in other words, a modern siren. Sirens track
Sirens" - which is both acoustic media archaeology and media archaeology of
the acoustic.

- S/sirens: The typographic slash both folds and breaks cultural discourse and
techno-logical implementation. Against the suggestions of the historic timeline,
"[r]ecursions fold time and thus enable direct contact between points and
events (and S/sirens) that are separated when history time is stretched out on
a continuous line."45 Such a procedure was carried out on a technical level:
sound-producing technologies were used to project sounds to and from the Li
Galli islets while being recorded by storage devices. The subsequent technical
analysis of the recordings produced an truly techno-logical insight: "Sounds
emanating from the main island Gallo Lungo hit the Siren rocks Castelluccio
and La Rotonda and, much like a ball caught between the flappers of a pinball
machine, start to echo between the two, resulting in the disorienting sonic
phenomenon experienced by Bradford [...]"46, while even more addressing ears
which are turned by the archaic Greek theory of musical sound ratios closer to
Pan's double flute (auloi) than to the classic Apollinic lyra

In terms of cultural techniques, the condition for such an awareness was the
phonetic alphabet47; the mythological Sirens are a (auto-)poietic function of
phono-graphy avant la lettre; ancient Greek notational practice of the vowel
alphabet in use both for musical and for speech notation set an epistemological
a priori. From the point of view of the archaeology of knowledge, this kind of
vocal analysis does not contain its telos in the phonograph, spectrogram and
Vocoder but remains within the regime of the symbolic (thus "cultural") order. It

45 Winthrop-Young, op. cit., note 5

46 Winthrop-Young, op. cit.
47 See Walter Ong, The Technologizing of the Word, London 1982
 is the radical break with the phonetic alphabet, a paradigmatic shift /
replacement by a truly media-technological, indexical relationship to the sound
of the voice, that the phonograph resulted - with the allegorical design as
"Siren" or "Loreley" just being a mythological re-call.48

In section XIV of his essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, there are "critical epochs in which a certain art
form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed
technical standard"49. This happens on the level of the symbolic signifiers as
well. The alphabetic vowels transposed Homer's voice into symbolic recording,
while the technical siren generates tones by numbered holes representing
numerical frequencies as the reverse of the time domain of wave forms.

- epistmological rupture between "analogue" and "digital" electronics,

incorporated in a literally transitional device: the analog-to-digital converter
("Sampling"). A voice transposer who does not simply want to produce the
Mickey-mouse effect (by speeding up tape recordings of a voice) must contain
a mirco-processor (which in Kittler's case had been programmed in
ASSEMBLER).

- "The phonograph is [...] incapable of achieving real-time frequency shifts. For

this we need rock bands with harmonizers that are able to reverse - with
considerable electronic effort - the inevitable speed changes, at least to
deceivable human ears. Only then then [...] women can be men and men can
be woman again."50

- It is not from within cultural poetics that a non-mythologic "real" of the Siren
motive can be revealed; aural analysis in its media-archaeological sense does
not retroactively reveal a truth in the Homeric theme, but reveals evidence
which is a poriori different from discursive expression, beyond traditional
philological methods: "The white noise signal recorded between the two
smaller islets showed higher amplitudes in the 1000-5000 Hz frequency range
than the same signal recorded just in front of the islands. [...] This result can be
seen clearly in the lower harmonics where the main energy of sound is located.
The changes in loudness were distinctly perceived even to the naked ear. [...]
the specific geographical constellation of the island acts as an acoustic
amplifier [...]."51

- Sirens like Muses remain oral poetry, while entities of real experience
provided even non-human wisdom from within and through the audible domain.
"[a]s our experiments show, there is only a sharp line between real acoustic

48 See W. E., Der Appell der Medien. Wissensgeschichte und ihr Anderes, in: Ana
Ofak / Philipp von Hilgers (eds.), Rekursionen. Faltungen des Wissens, Munich
(Fink) 2010, 177-97 (182)
49 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. Essays and Reflection, ed. by
Hannah Arendt, New York (Schocken) 1968, 237
50 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone - Film - Typewriter, Stanford (Stanford UP) 1999,
as quoted here in: Jonathan Sterne (ed.), Sound studies reader, London
(routledge) 2012, 243
51 Karl-Heinz Frommolt / Martin Carlé, The Song of the Sirens
(typescript)
 phenomena and acoustic hallucinations at the Sirens’ Island", while in early
Greek thinking Sirens incorporate acoustical features of [...] musicological
relevance."52

[Media archaeology focuses on the acoustic "evidence" or (in order to avoid

oculocentrism) rather sonicity which arises from such archeo-acoustic research:
"[...] intervals given together by two Sirens at Li Galli can only be differentiated
as being ‘accords’, that means having two separate sources, if their overtone
structures do not merge."53 Enharmonic tuning in Ancient Greece has been
developed from an early diaphony for which next to the double-aulos the casus
dualis in the song of the two sirens holds. This could therefore have been
acoustically motivated which leads media archaeology to a musicological
hypothesis of an early Greek diaphony based on enharmony. Methodically, this
indicates that from the closest techno-archaeological analysis new cultural
insights arise once coupled with aesthetic knowledge. For further acoustic
reasoning on the site, there is still latent sonicity waiting to be unfolded media-
archaeologically

- to arrive at "non-Pythagorean sound"54, it required a media-technical

archaeology of listening, by focusing on the non-human means of observation,
measuring and recording as active agencies of knowledge on hearing; the
loudspeaker as sonifyer played a crucial role. It was with the invention of the
electric telephone and the vacuum tube-based, thus amplifying loudspeaker
that prevously non-acoustic phenomena (such as small electric currents in
human nerves) could be sonified in physiology and other branches of science.
The fact that in recent years so-called "cultures of listening" and techniques of
sonification have emerged within cultural studies is itself such a media-
technological effect. In previous centuries, sonic articulation has belonged to
the most transitive cultural phenomena; hidden acoustic knowledge has not
eben been existent to cultural consciousness though it was co-present in any
articulation

- listening to modernity55 and to past sono-spheres; the World Soundscape

Project of Raymond Murray Schaffer and other projects to "archivize"
soundscapes

- historicist re-enactment of music from the past: When instruments from the
past are not just objects in historical museum but re-used to perform ancient
music, they change their essence from historical to processual hardware, thus:
truly becoming media (again); they transform from historical to media-
archaeological objects; embody the physics of past soundscapes

- trying to re-access transient articulations, past modes of listening - which vary

52 Frommolt / Carlé, op. cit.

53 Frommolt / Carlé, op. cit. See as well Martin Carlé, Enharmonische
Archäologie der griechischen Musiknotation, in: W. E. / Friedrich
Kittler (eds.), Die Geburt des Vokalalphabets aus dem Geist der
Poesie, Munich (Fink) 2006, 281-297
54 A term coined by Johannes Kroier, Berlin
55 See the Sawyer Seminar lecture series Hearing Modernity at Harvard
University (Dept. of Musicology), winter term 2013/2014
 with cultural history - can not only be reconstructed by written descriptions;
both past and present ears can rather be coupled to the same media
mechanisms - be it the Pythagorean monochord, be it the Edison phonograph;
acoustic or musical experience which depends on electronicdevices is
appropriately calld sonics. Such technically embedded logics, exactly because
it is non-human itself, allows for a non-historical immediacy, a co-original
(German: gleichursprüngliche) situation. The media archaeologic assumption is
that the human auditory apparatus is forced to obey laws imposed by the
media apparatus itself; historicity therefore is deferred by and to such
technologies

(Pre-)Edison sound(s) can not be historiographized at all, since they do not

exist as historical but diagrammatic records56; best method to understand a
medium is by re-engineering it and by its functional (re-)enactment: on
"reenactment" as historical method: R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History
[*1946], rev. ed. Oxford et al. (Oxford University Press) 1993. When procedure
which Pythgoras experimented with the monochord in the 6th century B.C. re-
enact today, that is: when pulling such a string, actual re-enacting the techno-
physical insight of the relation between integer numbers and harmonic musical
intervalls which once led Greek natural philosophers to muse about the
mathematical beauty of cosmic order in general (including the experience and
fear of deviation of this aesthetic ideology resulting in the "Pythagorean
komma", that is: irrational number relations); in terms of cultural discourse,
certainly not same situation like Pythagoras; "historical" circumstances, even
the ways of listening and the psycho-physical tuning of our ears, is different.
Still, the monochord is a time-machine in a different sense: It grants
participation at the original discovery of musicolgical knowledge, since - the
techno-original experience is repeatable; the re-enacted experiment allows for
com/munication across the cultural-historical gap by providing a storage-
channel; reverberating chord is an operative sonic media diagram. Charles
Sanders Peirce described diagrammatic reasoning as such: "[...] similar
experiments performed upon any diagram constructed to the same precept
would have the same results [...]."57 Once human senses are coupled with a
technological (especially sonic) setting, man is within its autopoietic temporal
field, a chrono-regime of its own dynamics (or mathematics, when data are
registered digitally). Such couplings create moments of literal ex-ception: Man
is taken out of the man-made cultural world (which is Giambattista Vico's
definition of "history") and confronts naked physics and / or pure logical
reasoning.

- Barbara Engh, referring to Theodor W. Adorno's writings on phonographic

recording, accentuates the extent to which the Sirenic singing is not human;

56 See Axel Volmar, Gespitzte Ohren. Akroamatische Dispositive und

musisches Wissen als Grundlage für eine Geschichte epistemogener
Klänge, in: MusikTheorie. Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, vol.
22 (2007), no 4 (thematic issue: Perì mousikès epistéme. Zur
Aktualität des antiken griechischen Wissens von der Musik, edited
by Sebastian Klotz), 365-376 (366)
57 Charles S. Peirce, The New Elements of Mathematics, vol. IV: Mathematical
Philosophy, The Hague / Paris (Mouton) / Atlantic Highlands, N. J. (Humanities
Press) 1976, 48
 "wherein the more perfectly the machine is able to represent the human, the
more thoroughly is the human removed [...]."58 Therein resides the techno-
traumatic element of the voice itself as "the site at which, in the distinction
between the cry and the song, the human and the inhuman are differentiated
in a state of perennial irresolution."59

Time Shards (in the media-active test)

- video-interview of a fictitious archaeologist, with sonagrams under the title Le

Vase (Internet search term: "ancient sound / archaeology")60

- reverse phonography / acoustic media-archaeology: SF; orig. 1979; online

2000: Gregory Benford, Time Shards: "As workers at the Smithsonian prepare a
time capsule to be buried in 2000 AD, a scientist tries to resurrect voices from
1000 AD" (Robert J. Sawyer); listen to the voices of people from a thousand
years ago by rading grooves on pottery =
www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook243.htm

- convert the grooves in ancient pottery (Roman vases from our Archaeology
Department) by gramophonic sampling into analog and digital signals, by
software-based signal-to-noise analysis separating any trace of phonetic
articulation from the scratch of the material (signal-to-noise ratio); Wolfgang
Heckl: apply nano-physical research tools; double sense of German "Tonspur"
(record groove)

Siren songs

- media-archaeological dis-ambiguation of "the ambiguity surrounding the

Sirens´ song"61, close to Maurice Blanchot´s interpretation of the
"superhuman", not even anthropomophic <Doherty 1995: 136>; Turing test
("Imitaiton game")

- contrary to Walter Benjamin's anecdote of the dwarf within the mechanical

chess-player, media archaeology refers to the inhuman mechanisms within the
human itself; vocal automata no more represent an allegoric discourse about
the instrumentalization of the human body, reveal the automativity within the
animal itself

- reverse phonography is acoustic media-archaeology; experimentally realistic

by the options of quantum microscopic reading of atomic surfaces; Gregory

58 Barbara Engh, Adorno and the Sirens: tele-phonographic bodies, in: Leslie C.
Dunn / Nancy A. Jones (eds.), Embodied voices. Representing female vocality in
western culture, Cambridge et al. (Cambridge University Press) 1994, 120-135
(126). See as well Thomas Y. Levin,For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age
of its Technological Reproducibility, in: October 55 (Winter 1990), 23-47
59 Engh 1994: 134
60 www.zalea.org/article.php3?id_article=496
61 Lillian Eileen Doherty, Siren Songs. Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the
Odyssey, Ann Arbor (University of Michigan Press) 1995, 61
 Benford, Time Shards, orig. 1979; online 2000: FictionWise eBooks. "As
workers at the Smithsonian prepare a time capsule to be buried in 2000 AD, a
scientist tries to resurrect voices from 1000 AD" (Robert J. Sawyer) by reading
grooves on pottery = www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook243.htm

- Wolfgang Heckl, "fossil voices"; sound of the past (still) in the air, if it is
understood in its physical nature which is (calculable) vibrations, as expressed
by Charles Babbage in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: "The track of every
canoe, of every vessel which has yet disturbed the surface of the ocean,
whether impelled by manuel force or elemental power, remains for ever
registered in the future movement of all succeeding particles which may
occupy its place. <...> and these again once moved, communicate motion to
others in endless succession."62

- discrete pulses, acoustic signal processing, resulting in an instrumental siren,

developed by Charles Cargniard La Tour in 1819; improved by Hermann v.
Helmholtz, linking sound production to the mathematics of Fourier series

- Edgard Varèse, in his piece Ionisation, performs "corporification de

l'intelligence qui est dans le sons" with technical siren

- with optical film soundtrack end 1920s, sound photoelectrically recorded on a

narrow track beside the images, "and the fact that it is visible means that is
can even be monitored and analysed. Most of the photoelectric organs and
organ-like instruments from the late 1920s and the 1930s were based on the
mechanism of a rotating disc that interrupted the passage of a beam of light
between its source and a photocell <...>, thus avoiding the wear and tear of
direct contact with the surface of the recording. Many of these systems used a
principle derived from that of the siren [...] a rotating opaque disc in which
holes or slits had been cut" = Davies 1994: 6; Abb. = 7; synthetic sound; a
technical "vocoder"

- Resonance of Siren Songs; how can an acoustic event which is supposed to

have happened before the age of gramophonic recording be verified? test and
reconstruct such acoustic events by media-archaeological means

- John Cage's experience in the anechoic chamber

Locating the Sirens

- counter-audio: impulses from Helmholtz Double-siren tone generator;

Youtube-video xxx

- Karl-Heinz Frommolt / Martin Carlé, The song of the sirens, in: Nordic Journal of
Aesthetics, 2014

Since antiquity, the Li Galli islands at the Amalfi coast (Italy) are believed to be

62 The Works of Charles Babbage, ed. Martin Campbell-Kelly, vol. 9: The Ninth
Bridgewater Treatise. A Fragment, 2nd ed. 1838, London (Pickering) 1989,
Kapitel IX, 37
the place were Odysseus during his journey heard the famous voices of the
Sirens; sound propagation experiments at the original historical place,
broadcasting both synthetic signals (sine tones, white noise) and natural voices
(vocalizations of Monk seals, voices of two female singers) via loudspeaker. The
Signals were then recorded along an thought line along which Odysseus could
approach the Siren Island. The acoustic analysis of the recordings revealed
strong evidence for an acoustic effect which could explain the nature of the
mythic song of the Sirens. The specific position of the three Islands yielded in
an deformation of the acoustic signal in form of amplification and changes in
the timbre. [...] However it remains still under question who was the emitter of
the song.

- explicitely two sirens, a mirror-image of the double-flute as muscial

instrument with disharmonic joints

- Aaccording to Homer, Ulysses heard the Siren songs just because a divine
power, a daimon, camled down the sea around the Siren islands

- hypersonic spotlights and sonic hallucinations appear in the Dictionary of Non

Lethal Weapons edited by John B. Alexander: "Voice Synthesis / Morphing
Device to synthesize the voice or images of a known figure, to deceive,
produce false orders, or gain acccess"; psycho-acoustically, "no one can escape
from the inner voice, the acoustic hallucination has power over the
hallucinating" (Arndt>); ultrasound spotlights target messages and silently
adress people; sound packet, whatever it contains, is only heard in the head of
the target person, the skull bones play the role of a resonator, which changes
the hight frequency waves back into audible sound - "demodulation, just like
with radio waves" = Olaf Arndt, Wer nicht hören will muss fühlen = Voices of
the Mind III, in: Babel No 4 (May 2004), 32-41 (38)

- In 1925, Sigmund Freud's A Note upon the `Mystic Writing Pad´ in which he
compared human memory apparatus with a common children´s toy. One makes
incisions onto a way tablet, over which has been stretched a thin sheet of
cellophane; cp. acoustic membrane/ microphone. When one pulls up the
cellophane, the marks on the surcace seem to disappear. "Yet the traces of the
incisions remain in the wax, almost unreadable, yet present all the same" =
paraphrased in: Arnold Dreyblatt, Inscriptions, 2005 Frankfurt /M., 32. Original:
"If we lift the entire covering sheet <...> off the wax slab, the writing vanishes
and <...> does not re-appear again. The surface of the Mystic Pad is clear of
writing and once more capable of reveiving impreessions. But it is easy to
discover that the permanent trace of what was written is retained upon the
wax slab itself and is legible in suitable lights. But htis is precisely the way in
which <...> our mental apparatus performs its perceptual function." = Sigmund
Freud, A Note upon the `Mystic Writin gPad´, in: International Journal Psycho-
Analysis, 21 (4), 469-74, trans. James Strachey 1950

- Heckl's design for archaeo-acoustic experiment: re-play of grooves from

ancient pottery, and Gergory Benford's Science Fiction novel Time Shards

This idea is not media-archaeologically far-fetched, but the missing link is

Platon in his dialogue Theaetet (§ 191), where Platon lets Socrates say: "Please
assume <...> that there is in our souls a block of wax <...>. this is the gift of
Memory, the mother of the Muses, and <...> whenever we wish to remember
anything we see or hear <!> or think of in our own minds, we hold this wax
under the perceptions and thoughts and imprint them upon it, just as we make
impressions from seal reings; <...> but whatever is rubbe dout or cannot be
imprinted we forget and do not know."

- in the age of Turing tests, uncertainty whether the sounds we are confronted
with are organic or technologically produced. The constellation, the dispositif
(to take a term from the French apparatus media theory of Baudry and others)
of listening to Siren songs is metonymic of a further state of uncertainty: is
such a sound meant to be communicative, is it directional (a signal) or rather a
pure utterance (acoustic impulse)? is it acoustic, sonic or musical? These are
the three media-archaeological layers for analytic differentiation of sound as
event (with the acoustic denotating the physical event, with the sonic being
already technoculturally prefigured and the musical being semantically charged

- sound = the channel of the real. It leaves traces in our bodily memory
likegrammophone grooves. Wax cylinder is an essential recording medium,
because - according to Descartes and Fritz Heider - is provides a loose coupling
of elements, on which a tight coupling ("form") can be impressed - in/formation.

TECHNOLOGICAL VOICING OF TRAUMATIC MEMORY

Technological de-humanizing of oral testimony

- sonic tatoos: Skin Motion is a mobile app and platform for playing back sound
wave tattoos; http://wtop.com/tech/2017/05/listen-new-app-plays-audio-
tattoos; accessed 16 May, 2017

- once explicit human testimony based on phonographic recording, electronic

(im)materialities and algorithmic processing, it is implicitly co-experienced by
the receiver as irritating tempor(e)alities in a sub-traumatic sense: an ongoing,
but rather subliminal irritation, persistent exactly because it is not experienced
consciously

- digitally mediated oral testimony not simply a modification of "mediated

memory" but a radical gap - both in epistemological terms and in the
phenomenology of temporal experience; de-humanization of "digital testimony"
both a tragedy and a productive chance for different experimentation (and
experience) of cultural memory and a re-definition of the human in the neo-
cybernetic sense

- co-induction of voice testimony by technolgy itself

- In times of digital sound recording and processing, no more "noise" (traumatic

intrusions of the real) in listening to phonographed voices from the past;
silence of the noise of the apparatus as "historical" testimony is even more
sub-traumatically irritating to the senses (case audio CD)
"Bad recording" of beautiful voices

- direct recording of Callas' voice from 1954 concert Lucia di Lamermore in

Scala, Milano; for radio broadcasting nowadays considered almost unplayable
as so-called "bad recording", normally accompanied by an excuse by the
classic radio Dj; "Callas"; as if perceived by short wave radio: Tenor, in Gaetano
Donizettis Lucia di Lammamoor, recording Scala Milano, 1954 under Karajan. In
the midst a radio signal interferes with the concert recording itself.

- Callas' voice rivalling with microphone distortions, demanding for close

listening with media-archaeological ears; radio wave interference with cultural
soundings. When broadcast in German Kulturradio, the speaker in advance
apologized for "bad" recording; positively defend the medium expressing itself,
documenting; opera recordings from the past in 20th century is possible only
by means of technologies; critically (or ironically) allow them to be co-
enunciative

Let the medium speak: ghost talk

- control noise by mis-interpreting it as communication; Stephen Greenblatt

wanted to communicate with the dead beyond the textual archive acoustically,
letting sound pass through the open mouth, the empty void of the (death)
mask in Greek and Roman theatre (personare) or - closer to our concern - in
front of a sequence of ancestor masks in a Roman aristocratic house: "I began
with the desire to speak with the dead. <...> If I never believed that the dead
could hear me, and if I knew that the dead could not speak, I was nevertheless
certain that I could recreate a conversation with them" = Stephen Greenblatt,
Shakespearean Negotiations. The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance
England, Berkeley 1988, 1. In the electronic media age, though, the medium to
speak with the dead is not texts any more, not literature, but the radio

- tuning of a radio in search not only for channels but for the inbetween of
channels (the noise intererential spaces) functions only with analog radio sets,
with an „elastic“ scale

- against "noiseless" digital aesthetifs, electronic analog media still know what
noise is

- any figurative image is emphatically negentropic

- radio jamming interpreted by the human ear (which immediately, as

cognition, strives to makes sense or at least message or at least melody out of
noisy signals) as voice from beyond (noise): „No Morse-code, nor a radio
amateur“

ARCHIVING AUDIO-PRESENCE

Techno-traumatic irritations
 - traumatic momentum from micro-shocks technologically induced in human
media perception; whether the audio-visual "witness", once digitized, on most
essential technological level looses its indexicality; does Shannon / Nyquist
sampling theorem for analog-to-digital signal conversion actually guarantee
that the indexicality of the signal remains intact? "Part of the implicit ideology
of digital audio is that with increasing sample rates and bit depths we come
closer and closer to representing the real, but the 'real' seems to recede from
each attempt to grasp it"63; central aspect of "Digital Humanities" addressed
thereby

Whereas the "traumatic" moment in analog media testimony resulted from the
phonographic presence of the voice in re-play, the photographic punctum as
identified by Roland Barthes (see Markos Hadjioannou, From Light to Byte.
Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema, Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
2012, esp. 50ff on Alain Resnais' documentary film Night & Fog from 1955) and
the indexial trace of light in electronic video (see Laura U. Marks, Touch.
Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Pr.,
2002; Mary Ann Doana, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Cambridge, Mass. /
London: Harvard UP 2002), with the digitization of such technical records their
status is transformed or even "transsubstantiated" (to borrow a term from
Christian liturgy) in technological, historical (source) and ethical (Holocaust
memory) ways.

- "algorhythmicized testimony" (proposal Amit Pinchevski); a looped timing of

the digital Yale Holocaust Archive voices. "Data processing is the name given to
the manipulation of data to produce a more useful form, which we shall call
information. <...> The sequene of operations required to perform a specific
task is known as an algorithm" = J. D. Richards / N. S. Ryan (eds.), Data
Processing in Archaeology, Cambridge U. P. 1985, 1 f.

Archiving Presence: From Analog to Digital

- “Archiving presence”, a deliberate oxymoron; implies both storing and re-

storing, recording and regenerating presence-effects; Edison’s 1877 invention
of the phonograph enabled the acoustic recording of the dis-embodied voice;
induced a cultural shock whose impact still resonates nowadays; dissonance
between cognitive knowledge (the historicity of the recording, the knowledge
that it is already in the past) and its neuro-physiological effect (the perception
of the voice as pure presence, always in the present) = Mladen Dolar, A Voice
and Nothing More, Cambridge, Mass. / London (MIT Press) 2006 [= Eine Theorie
der Stimme, Frankfurt/M. (Suhrkamp) 2007]; there is no "past" in sonic
articulation

- Amit Pinchevski / Tamar Liebes, Severed Voices: Radio and the Mediation of
Trauma in the Eichmann Trial , in: Public Culture 22:2 (2010), 265-291, note 2:
Orson Welles’s radio dramatization of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, aired in
October 1938, caused widespread panic among audiences who thought
Martians were actually about to invade New Jersey: by the (simulated) collapse

63 Peter Price, Resonance. Philosophy for Sonic Art, New York / Dresden (Atropos
Press) 2011, 85
of the broadcasting network itself; Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. 1992. Media
events: The live broadcasting of history. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press

- Anthony Enns, Voices of the dead: Transmission / translation / transgression,

in: Culture, Theory and Critique vol. 46 (2005), 11 – 27

Techno-Trauma: From Analog to Digital

- media-archaeological shift of attention to a more fundamental level: traumatic

affects as immediate functions of the technological pre-conditions themselves.
When coupled with human perception, electronic and algorithmic media
operations result in specific irritations of the human sense of time.

- the phonographic affect; un/like photographic punctum short-circuiting

historical distance described as an affective temporal indexicality in direct
relation to photo-sensitive chemicals; Roland Barthes, La chambre claire. Notes
sur la photographie, Paris (Gallimard / Seuil) 1980 [Camera Lucida. Reflections
on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York (Hill & Wang) 1981

- cultural shock induced by the first recordings and re-playing of voices by the
Edison phonograph is yet to be digested in occidental cultural epistemology
and logocentrism. The modelling of the human unconsciousness according to
binary machine logics by Jacques Lacan has finally undermined the self-
understanding of a privileged human subjectivity - an ongoing irritation of
presence

- a special class of traumatic temporality springs from the technological re-

conditioning of temporal experience itself

- oral and sonic signal recording, signal transmission, signal processing and
signal replaying technologies as a privileged site for analyzing practices of
archiving presence and re-presencing the past as it undergoes analog-to-digital
conversion

- unarchivable presence as definition of "traumatic" memory

- in a theatre play from 1924 Katalaunische Schlacht (by Arnolt Bronnen) a

grammophone acts itself which haunts the actors by a spectral (in all senses)
repeatable voice - literally "nachgetragen" (nachträglich) <Lethen 2014: 205>

- Traumatic voice memory is not only belated but ante-cedant, already inherent
in the affective shock (the "Nipper effect", figuring as the visual icon on HMV
records), induced by the experience of the technologically dis-embodied voice

- Max Bense: cybernetic machines exhaust the smallest interval

- "out-of-sync" (the missing half-second); Herta Sturm: empty time interval vs.
Massumi: full interval

- Speech Synthesis and the Uncanny (Nikita Braguinski); Freud, Das

Unheimliche, referring to Ernst Jentsch: doubts about wax figures / automata:
(no) consciousness; boundary between human / inhuman is blurred in artificial
dolls (Edison records inside); technical embodiment of the voice; see Blanchot,
"Sirens"; resulting in the uncanny feeling about one's own partial functioning as
machine

- Norwegean composer Christian Blom creates uncanny encounters of

mechanical acoustics and electr(on)ic current, such as al Khowarizmis
Mekaniske Orkester = algorithmic orchestra (with the sequence of operations
computationally / stochastically programmed?); Shintaro Miyazaki's research on
the "algorhythmic". True media-archaeological sonicity, and recurrence of the
sirens: The Singer; https://vimeo.com/user47473836

"Prayers of a Phonographic Doll" (Anderson Blanton)

- Anderson Blanton; question of presence, especially in relation to technicity /

materiality of phonographic prayer;
http://forums.ssrc.org/ndsp/2014/01/29/prayers-of-a-phonographic-doll

- the uncanny of death (the ultimate sublime sensation of the "real" according
to Lacan) is thus dis-locafted from metaphysics to the machine

- Walter Rathenau's essay on "Resurrection Co."; telephonic connection of the

grave to the living

- with the prayer machine, the traumatic (here: death as subject of prayer) is
dislocated from the symbolic (reading) into the real of the machine itself (the
"speaking doll"), thus: really techno-traumatic (in fact, does this not challenge
"the social" as agency?). This is related to the issue of the uncanniness of
"Sirenic voices"

- "The doll's mechanical recitation marks an important technological shift in the

practice of teaching children to pray. The child's private devitions are no longer
founded upon a particular [...] practice of phonetic alphabetization and the
concomitant 'hearing' or the silently read biblical passage as a divine coice
withinthe mind." In the case of the speaking dolls, the child does not learn the
alphabet from the mother's mouth any more but from the machine; text-to-
speech program

VOICES AS PHONOGRAPHIC EVENT

Phonographic recursion of the phonetic alphabet

- 1878 Edison described in a patent one of the possible uses of the phonograph
as speech generator, "to teach the relationship between each letter of the
alphabet and its sound: a set of typrewriter keys, each labelled with a single
letter, activated the playback of individual sections of a long cylinder that
 contained the spoken forms of those particular letters"64 - a media-
archaeological (rather than "historical") recursion of a cultural technique, since
not immediately reflected in cultural terms - when the invention(s) of the
discrete alphabet (as opposed to ideographic writing systems) cut down the
human language into smallest elements which are meaningless in themselves,
from house (beta) to "B", so to say. At this moment the machines take over,
since only machines can perform symbolic operations without any semantic
referentiality (which hinders effective data processing), purely syntactically;
signal processing rather than semiotics, mediatic operativity rather then
cultural "performance"

Historical versus media-archaeological reconstruction of sonospheres

- novel from 1880, L'Eve Future, Vielliers de l'Isle-Adam: before the phonograph
any sonic expression (be it speech or music) had to be symbolically
transformed into music notation in order to survive in time; with technical
recording sound immediately becomes inscribed into a non-historical, non-
human, signal-based material medium which literally has to get in motion (like
the turning disc or the hard drive) in order to get re-presenced. By
electroacoustic recording, "the concept of a linear flow of time becomes an
anachronism"65 itself. The formerly "historic" relation between presence and
past is replaced by resonance; sonicity refers to the implicit tempor(e)ality
which is connected with vibrating, oscillatory and frequential articulation; Steve
Goodman, The Ontology of Vibrational Force, in: same author, Sonic Warfare.
Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear, Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press) 2009, 81-
84. If the signal being transmitted is continuous (“as in oral speech”) rather
than being formed of discrete symbols (“as in written speech”), this fact affects
the message (Weaver, 1963: 8)

- Marcel Proust makes the reader think of bygone times, but when hearing
Kirsten Flagstad as Isolde, with the Royal Opera House Orchestra under the
leadership of Sir Thomas Beecham, her voice is concretely present to the
perceptive mind. "The intellect tells me that the recording is 72 years old and
stems from Covent Garden, but for my senses, she is with me in space, here
and now." Jakobsen 2010: xxx

- Greek vocalization of the Phenician alphabet symbolically emulates, by

recording (grammo-phonically), the musical character of oral poetry (notably
the epics of Homer); even the phonograph reaches its limits when it comes to
record the purely physical noise: "Ansi, j`eusse blâmé, par exemple, le
Phonographe de son impuissance à reproduire, en tant que bruits, le bruit ... de
la Chute de l'Empire romain ... les bruits qui courent ... les silences
éloquents ..."66

- signal semantics in Steve Reich's minimalist composition Different Trains:

acoustic memories of former train journeys, indexical train sounds combined

64 Hugh Davies, A History of Sampling, in: Feedback Papers 40 (Juli 1994), 2-15
(4)
65Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, Norwood, N. J. (Ablex) 1984, 115
66 Edition Lausanne (L'Age d'Homme) 1979, 36
 with human testimonies (voices of train porters)

Indirect transmission of sound (the vocal alphabet)

- thesis of Barry Powell: ancient Greek modification of the Phoenician syllabic

and consonant-based alphabet by adding symbols representing spoken vowels
stemmed from the explicit "lyric" desire to record and thus transfer the
musicality of oral poetry, notably Homer's epics The Iliad and The Odyssee, in
writing - and early form of phono-graphy67

- Aristotelean correlation of time-number-movement; the over-countable in-

between (to metaxy); phonographic signal recording in privileged alliance with
the physically "real" acoustic articulation = Friedrich Kittler, Die Welt des
Symbolischen - eine Welt der Maschine, in: ders., Draculas Vermächtnis.
Technische Schriften, Leipzig (Reclam) 1991, 58-80 (68), unter Bezug auf: Jacques
Lacan, 1973-80, in: Schriften, hg. v. Norbert Haas, Olten-Freiburg/Br., Bd. I, 24

- evidence of ancient Greek musical articulation, according to xxx West,

actually preserved in the metric verses and musical notations which embody
the temporal measures, the actually articulated rhythms of poetic articulation 68

- "Chronotechnics" in adaption of Aristoxenos' term chronoi as smallest units ot

time in rhythm: long, short, intervals; extend / re-actualize to digital
computational cycling units; See introduction Lionel Pearson, to: Aristoxenus,
Elementa Rhythmica. The Fragment of Book II and the Additional Evidence for
Aristoxenian Rhythmic Theory, Oxford (Clarendon Press) 1990, xxxiv. Pearson
ergänzt: "One of the difficulties in reading Aristoxenus is to distinguish the
special or technical use of a word from its general meaning. Greeks of his time
were devising their own technical and scientific terminology. They could not
borrow unfamiliar words from Egyptian or Babylonian as we borrow them from
Greek and Latin for this purpose" <ebd., Fußnote 20>.

- close relation between the rhythms (time-measure) in the prosodic

articulation of syllable-based Indoeuropean languages, early notation of vocal
music, and dance. From this interrelation, the archaeologist of cultural
articulation indirectly deduces information on the very nature of time-based
movement from poetic verse: Indication of tempo, e. g., "can be drawn from
the relation of music to movement. We do not know how to match notes to
dance-steps"69

- audio-visual recording registers artistic expression (music, dance) "wie sie

auch mit noch so elaborierten schriftlichen Methoden nicht annähernd möglich
ist"70. At that point, recording media change from passive to active archival

67 See Barry Powell, Homer and the origin of writing, xxx 1990; W. E. / Friedrich
Kittler (eds.), Die Geburt des Vokalalphabets aus dem Geist der Poesie, Munich
(Fink) 2006
68 xxx West. >Ancient Greek Music Theory>, xxx
69 M. L. West, Ancient Greek Music, Oxford (Clarendon Press) 1994, 154
70 Dietrich Schüller, Von der Bewahrung des Trägers zur Bewahrung des Inhalts, in: Medium Nr. 4 (1994), Themenheft:
Archive - Medien als Gedächtnis, 28-32 (28)
 functions, from pure storage to genuine arché; media conditions of the
possibility of auditory reconstructions

Sound archaeology

- sampling rate of 48 kHz with quantization of 16 bit linear storage

- listen to human voices which exterminated hundred years ago, by applying

laser reading of the wax cylinders which do not destroy its source in the act of
re-play; play-back in exactly the same quality as the Indian natives could in
1907. An example of the opto-eletronic archaeology of sound can be
appropriately experienced right in the World Wide Web.71 What do we hear:
Message (the formerly recorded songs) or noise (the scratch; recording
primarily memorizes the noise of the wax cylinder itself - which is not cultural-
historical, but cultural-technological, a different kind of impression of the real.
Media archaeology opens our ears to listen to this as well, not to filter this out
against the "cocktail party effect" of hermeneutics

- by media-archaeological operation of opto-digitally reading of inscribed

traces, otherwise unaccessible sound recording becomes audible again.
Synesthetically, see a spectrographic image of sound memory; spectrogram of
a reconstructed recording of Wedda chants in Ceylon 1907 on the SpuBiTo web
page; micro-physical close reading of sound, where the materiality of the
recording medium itself becomes poetical72, dissolves any semantically
meaningful archival unit into discrete blocks of signals. Instead of musicological
hermeneutics, the media-archaeological gaze is required here - a reminder of
light-based sound inscription in early film

- noise, the scratch of the wax cylinder is the pure message of the medium;
inbetween, the human voice is literally incorporated. But what has been
continuously been preserved by analogue recording technologies, becomes
quantified in the transfer to digital recording (CDs). When sampling a
continuous wave with an analog-to-digital converter, sampling rate controls
how many samples are taken per second; the sampling precision controls how
many different gradations (quantization levels) are possible when taking the
sample

Technologies of sonic tradition: a signal-to-noise ratio

- what articulates 'it'self in human / nonhuman communication in any

transmission channel is noise, against which Shannon developed a primarily
"mathematical theory of communication" alias digital media

- extend Shannon's theorem to transmission in time as well, that is: tradition. In

71 http://www.gfai.de/projekte/spubito/index.htm; now expired: see archive.org

"Wayback Machine"
72 See Karl Sierek, Die weiße Leinwand, in: ders., Aus der Bildhaft. Filmanalyse
als Kinoästhetik, Wien (Sonderzahl) 1993, 115-130 (122), referring to: Umberto
Eco, Semiotik, 263 f.
 such noise articulates itself what baroque allegories showed as the nagging
„tooth of time“ - the articulation of physical entropy, the manifestation of the
temporal arrow; according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics each system
tends, over time, to increasing dis-order. Noise, here, is a signal of entropy.
Against this noise of the real culture (especially techno-logical, that is: „digital“
culture) poses a negentropic insistance, a negation of decay and passing
(away)

- digital copies of digital records can indeed be produced almost without loss of
data (except the quantization noise). Music on Compact Disc or a digitale video
can be reproduced frequently with stable quality which was utopean in recent
times of analoge recording on magnetic tape. The secret of this temporal
unvulnerability is that it is just (physical representations of) numbers which are
written on the Compact Disc; even after a thousand copies thus a zero stays
zero and one remains one73

- natural sound = evasive, liquid, in itself unrecordable beyond the bodily

range, but technical media (different from alphabetic phonetic writing which
"freezes" the human voice into a range of a very limited symbolic code) are
able to de-freeze recorded voices in almost all frequencies (that is, the
Lacanean "real" of the voice) by re-play. After two millennia of the phonetic
alphabet there is a new kind of cultural technology as sound recording.

Berlin Lautarchiv

- target of sonic analytics not individual speech in terms of meaningful content,

but first of all subsemantic insights which can be derived from the very
materiality of sono-cultural articulation: phoné (German "Laut").74 Very literally,
the phonographic collection of early voice recordings (Lautarchiv) based at
Humboldt University, Berlin is an ideal subject for such a sonic archaeology.
The Lautarchiv encompasses three groups: a) Famous voices (which for political
reasons were partly neutralized or even destroyed after 1945); b) truly archival
recordings of local speech dialects, based on a set of artificial word sequences
in order to achieve formal comparability (so-called Wenker-sentences) with the
speed of the recording beeing controlled by a supplementary oscillographic
time code, and c) recordings for musical ethnology (mostly Africans and Indians
from the French and British Army in the World War One Halbmond prisoner
camp at Wünsdorf south of Berlin).75

- almost complete list of the both phonographically and symbolically registered

recordings online: http://www.sammlungen.hu-berlin.de/sammlungen/78

73 Rudolf Taschner, Der Zahlen gigantische Schatten. Mathematik im Zeichen der

Zeit, Wiesbaden (Vieweg) 3. Aufl. 2005, Anm. 77
74 For several socio-linguistic and computer-based analyses in the techno-
culturally variant coding of human voice frequencies see Zakharine / Meise
(eds.) 2013
75 See Britta Lange, Ein Archiv von Stimmen. Kriegsgefangene unter
ethnografischer Beobachtung, in: Nikolaus Wegmann / Harun Maye / Cornelius
Reiber (eds.), Original / Ton. Zur Mediengeschichte des O-Tons, Konstanz
(Universitätsverlag) 2006, 317-341 (esp. 335 f.)
 - phonological target inscribed into the Lautarchiv by its promotor Wilhelm
Doegen from the beginning - notwithstanding the circumstances of its coming-
into-being with recordings in a prisoner camp. While cultural analysis
concentrates on this ambivalent historical and discursive context, with a
different epistemological vantage point media archaeology lends its ears to
knowledge which can be derived from the actual media articulation contained
in the technical archive itself

- phonographic recordings since April 1920 integrated as Department of

Phonetics (Lautabteilung) into the Prussian State Library in Berlin to be
reproduced on schellack discs and as transcription for educational
distribution76; original relation between spoken orality and its grama-phonic
derivative (the phonetic alphabet) reversed again by the intrusion of real audio
signals into the symbolical order of the librarians' Gutenberg world of letters,
resulting in a kind of animated phonetic library: "Die toten Buchstaben und
Büchertexte werden hier durch die Ergänzung der Lautplatte lebendig und
verkörpern eine wirkliche Lautbücherei" = Wilhelm Doegen, Die Lautabteilung,
in: Fünfzehn Jahre Königliche und Staatsbibliothek 1921, Berlin (Preußische
Staatsbibliothek) 1921, 253-258 (253)

- architectural front facade of German Library in Leipzig (Deutsche Bücherei),

founded in 1913, displays a monumental quote from a Schiller poem: "Körper
und Stimme leiht die Schrift dem stummen Gedanken [...]." Printed text as it
were start to speak from a gramophonic storage medium which (different from
the alphabet) does not discriminate between signal and noise any more: "In
Graphie und/oder Phonie des Titelworts `Sprache´ steckt die Lautverbindung
'ach'" = Friedrich A. Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800 / 1900, München (Fink)
1985, 48. Lautabteilung consequently accumulates natural and artificial noise
(„Geräusche natürlicher und künstlicher Art und andere“) such as the sound of
tree leaves in the wind. What had started as interlinear auditory hallucinations
in romantic literature becomes real in sub-symbolic recording media. The
gramophonic recording method for waveforms in the so-called glyphic system
on wax discs inscribes even sonic warfare into the new cultural memory as
écriture automatique: "Gewehrfeuer (gun fire) for a theory of sonic explosion,
and the sound of air planes ("Fliegergeräusche") = Doegen, op. cit.

- detect minute variances and to eliminate subjective inexactitudes in listening

to the recordings of foreign dialects and voices; limits of hand-written phonetic
transcription become obvious, leading instead to the application of visual
oscillograms and Fourier Analysis of the phonetic wave forms: Alois Brandl,
Lebendige Sprache: Beobachtungen an Lautplatten englischer Dialektsätze, mit
einem Anhang von Wilhelm Doegen, Zur Lautanalyse aus dem Klangbild des
englisches Dialektwortes "man", aus der Lautplatte gewonnen nach dem
elektro-oszillographischen Verfahren, in: Sitzungsberichte der Königlich
Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Klasse (1928), 72-84

- when explicit listening replaced by technographical measuring of sonicity, gap

between cognitive musical understanding and physical recording (the material,

76 Lautbibliothek: Phonetische Platten und Umschriften, ed. by the Lautabteilung

der Preußischen Staatsbibliothek, 1920 onwards
 tonally integrative engraving of a musical event in the phonographic groove)
opens. Just like the point of the gramophone needle can make only one
movement at one time, "the illuminated disk of the oscilloscope shows only one
line, no matter how many tones are sung into the microphone simultaneously.
[...] what the apparatus registers as one wave, we hear as multiplicity of tones
- and as a organized multiplicity. [...] mathematical analysis of the shape of the
line permits us to deduce the individual waves that are combined in it. Yet [...]
our ear accomplishes, effortlessly, continuously, and instantaneously, what
costs the skilled mathematician a considerable expenditure of time and
energy"77 - until the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm arrived in real-time digital
computing of sound. Even the much more detailled spectral voice analysis
which had just been developed in Zuckerkandl's generation subjected the
complex dynamics of sonic events once more to the visual knowledge regime
since sonagrams, though expressing delicate micro-temporal variations, tend
deciphered analog to alphabetic writing.78 But the tempor(e)ality of sonicity can
never be caught in a frozen state but always points beyond the moving still - as
has been discussed by Bergson's critique of chronophotography and the
cinematographic illusion of "movement".

- ancient phonetic oscillograms today represent the truest media-

historiography of that time - while at the same time challenging the historical
narrative of their recording context. The real archive of sonic articulation
emanating from such recordings is no longer literary stories but numerical
analysis - finally resulting in digital sampling of the analogue records which is
the transduction of ghostly voices into computability

- on the linguistic field that effective algorithms for recognition first developed -
as transformation of physically measurable wave forms of speech signals into
electric impulses; operation is based first on electronic transduction and then
the transformation of the time-signal to its frequency number = H. Schnelle,
Automatische Sprachlauterkennung, in: Kybernetische Maschinen. Prinzip und
Anwendugn der automatischen Nachrichtenverarbeitung, Frankfurt/M. (S.
Fischer) 1964, 208-219 (211). Thus, sonicity can not be reduced to the
dynamics of waveforms, but encompasses mathematical operations and
subsequently their machinic computing as well. Once a series of digits can
represent waveforms, sound is liberated from its acoustic phenomenology. The
statistic tools from corpus-based linguistics have been adopted for music
analysis: "While the basic elements and features (or tokens) over which
statistics are computed naturally differ between linguistics and musicology, the
statistical concepts that allow us to infer regularities within the specific domain
are quite similar or nearly identical. Among the chief statistical concepts that
can be derived from frequency counts of tokens / features, and that are
employed in both fields, are Markov models, entropy and mutual information,
association measures, unsupervised clustering techniques, and supervised
classifiers such as decision trees."79

77 Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol. Music and the External World, New
York (Pantheon) 1956, 333f
78 See Ralph K. Potter / George A. Kopp / Harriet C. Green, Visible Speech, New
York (Van Nostrand) 1947, and Boris Yankovsky's sound spectrography (as
mentioned above).
79 Daniel Müllensiefen / Geraint Wiggins / David Lewis, High-level feature
 - focus of sonic analysis in a Lautarchiv on the materiality of sound equally
valuable in its acoustic and its technological sense. In modern Greek radio
broadcasting is called radiophonia. Analog to telephony, not speech or music as
semantic content is named here, but the phonetic materiality (ancient Greek
phoné / German Laut) of any kind which is transmitted by a neutral medium
called radio. In terms of a (media) archaeology of acoustics, the nature of
sound is spectral, thus undermining the symbolical (Pythagorean) order of
harmonic tonal relations in integer numbers - just as the letters in an alphabet
only symbolically relate to the phyiscality of actual speech phonems which are
as "differential" (Arseny Avraamov) as the glissandi of the Theremin Vox
contructed as the first mass-reproduced electronic music instrument by Leon
Thermen in revolutionary Soviet Union.80 With sound production which is
subliminal to human perception, sonicity (different from sonority) starts.

"First Sounds" (Patrick Feaster): (Archaeo-)Phonography avant la

lettre

- the "archival" operation extends from restauration and conservation to re-

animation and thus becomes a true media-archaeological operation. In a novel
called Time Shards, the science fiction author Gregory Benford imagines a
research laboratory which reconstructs "fossil voices" out of the grooves of
mediaeval pottery

- Patrick Feaster and David Giovannoni succeeded in re-sonifying the preserved

phonautographic engravings ("Schallbilder"), beginning with Scott's recording
of a sound folk tone of 435 Hz in the year 1859. 150 years later science
realized that with optical "reading" of such acoustic signal lines sound can be
re-synthesized, and all of the sudden a children's song sounds again: Lèon-
Scott, phonautographic recording 8th April 1860, Paris: "Au clair de la lune,
Pierrot répondit"; online http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/1860-Scott-Au-
Claire-de-la-Lune-09-08.mp3

- what metaphorically looks like the pick-up of sound images by a "virtual,

digital gramophone needle"81, in fact is something media-epistemologically
different, a picking-up of a completely new kind: digital sampling

- the Edison phonograph announced in the journal Scientific American: "That

the voices of those who departed before the invention of the wonderful
apparatus <...> are for ever stilled is too obvious a truth; but whoever has
spoken or whoever may speak into the mouthpiece of the phonograph, and

descriptors and corpus-based musicology: Techniques for modelling music

cognition, in: Systematic and Comparative Musicology: Concepts, Methods,
Findings, hg. v. Albrecht Schneider, Frankfurt am Main u. a. (Peter Lang) 2008,
133-153 (140)
80 See Andrey Smirnov, Sound in Z. Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in
early 20th Century Russia, London (Koenig Books) 2013, 44
81 Harald Haack, Die erste Klangaufzeichnung. Eine Audiografie, online
http://newsbattery.blogsport.de/2008/05/07/die-erste-klangaufzeichnung-eine-
audiografie
 whose words are recorded by it, has the assurance that his speech may be
reproduced audibly in his own tones long after he himself has turned to dust.
<...> A strip of indented paper travels through a little machine, the sounds of
the latter are magnified, and our great grandchildren or posterity centuries
hence hear us as plainly as if we were present."82

- technical media (different from alphabetic phonetic writing which "freezes"

the human voice into a range of a very limited symbolic code) are able to de-
freeze recorded voices in almost all frequencies (that is, the Lacanean "real" of
the voice) by re-play.83 After two millennia of the phonetic alphabet there is a
new kind of cultural technology as sound recording

- literally retrieving signals from the past, new privileged ways of connecting to
the past via the communication channel rather than by the coded symbols (the
traditional archival record). But this signal channel is cut by the digital
sampling of such records, such as the software IRENE which reads out graphical
grooves by the „virtual stylus“ and audifies them (at the Berkeley Laboratory,
by Carl Haber) = argument in Patrick Feaster's lecture "Sound Archives avant la
lettre: Audio Collections of the Nineteenth Century (1850s-1890s)", conference
Listening to the Archive. Histories of Sound Data in the Humanities and
Sciences, 11-13 February, 2016, Berlin, Humboldt University / Max Planck
Institute for the History of Science

- performed with the free, open access software ImageToSound - which at the
same time, media-archaeologically, recalls the technical epistemology of the
sound film (Lichtton)

- inbetween the alphabetic metaphor and signal reproduction, the

"Graphophone" has been the name for play-back device for phonographic
records

- phonographic groove is a „graph of a sound over time“ (Feaster):

mathematical derivative (Ableitung) over time; a kind of analog computing

- time rate of the retrieved sound can be defined if there is recording of an

accomanying pilot tone as well, such as on Scott de Martinville's
phonautograms by means of a tuning fork

- read out from handwritten archival „manuscripts“ the modulated overtones

which vibrated (when speaking while writing aloud, like in early Greek and
Medieval times): overlay; separate by Fourier analysis

82 Anon. (The Editor), A Wonderful Invention - Speech Capable of

Indefinite Repitition from Automatic Records, in: Scientific
American, 17. November 1877, 304; see chap. 6 "A Resonant Tomb",
in: Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past. Cultural Origins of Sound
Reproduction, Durham / London (Duke University Press) 2003, 287-
334 (297 f.)
83 See John Durham Peters, Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History, in: Lauren
Rabinovitz / Abraham Geil (eds.), Memory Bytes. History, Technology, and
Digital Culture, Durham / London (Duke University Press) 2004, 177-198
 - revolving form of the Edison cylinder respectively the gramophone disc is
necessary for machine reading since a time signal unfolds, different from
human reading which can be non-linearly arranged line-wise on the geometric
writing page

- audifying very first phonographic recodings efforts by Éduouard-Léon Scott de

Martinville resulted in indiscernable noisy patterns: Message ou Bruit?84 From
what moment on can we speak of „first sound“ or „speech“ records? Here, the
media-archaeological moment starts to irritate human cognition. Media-
archaeological work which steays close to the signal is non-hermeneutic
"understanding" of cultural expression

Active media archaeology: Sonic revelation (articulation) from the

past (Au Claire de Lune)

- emphasis on "sound" memory / storage / transmission, since this has been

the most "immaterial" cultural articulation (before the electronic age) already

- historical research academically a text-based science, opposed to a science of

signals which has opened a new field of research not just as an additional
source for historical inquiry; with photography, the phonograph and with
cinematography an alternative field of agenda has been set

- so-called Humanities (as defined by Wilhelm Dilethey) not sufficiently

concerned with the physically real - due to the limits of hermeneutics as text-
oriented method, to the priligeging of narrative as dominant form of
representation and because of an essential lack of non-symbolic recording
media of the real. Battles have been described and interpreted, but the real
noise and smell of a combat could not be transmitted until the arrival of the
Edison phonograph85

- slow run time of acoustic waves even led to the reversal of the cause-effect
relation of combat noise in the age of technological warfare - reversed time.
When in Second World War a German A4-rocket hit London, the articulation of
its acoustic near-coming already lagged begind the destructive event. No
longer is a danger previously being announced

- phonography does not just help historiography to higher precision; rather

explores new forms of tempor(e)ality on the level of the physically and
mathematically real (techno/logy); get tuned to this new epistemology, not by
texts and the spoken word, but by a French childrens' song: Au Claire de Lune.
In an act of active media archaeology by the computer itself is has been

84Lecture title by Michel Foucault, read at a conference of medical research in

Paris, xxx
85 See Bernhard Siegert, Das Leben zählt nicht. Natur- und
Geisteswissenschaften bei Dilthey aus mediengschichtlicher Sicht, in: Claus
Pias (ed.), Medien. Dreizehn Vorträge zur Medienkultur, Weimar 1999, 161-182
(175), referring to: Wilhelm Dilthey, Die Abgrenzung der
Geisteswissenschaften. Zweite Fassung, in: same author, Gesammelte Schriften
VII, 311
 achieved that the graphic recording of Léon Scott's analyses of the human
voice could be re-transformed into acoustic artikulation

- Phonautogram Lèon-Scotts 8th April, 1860, Paris: song "Au clair de la lune,
Pierrot répondit"; http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/1860-Scott-Au-Claire-de-la-
Lune-09-08.mp3

- from such an operation, re-discovery of a song expected, but what primarily

acoustically emanates is noise - just like the first (archived) recording of sound
in Norway, a tinfoil flattened to a "document" and annotated by a remark by a
former collector who claims this has been the first Norwegian recording of
music on Edison cylinder; digital reading of this record (at a laboratory in
Southampton) lead to nothing but noise

- What articulates as almost Freudean "it"self is noise such as can be expected

in any transmission channel according to the theory of communication
developed by Claude Shannons - a theorem which can be extended to
transmission in time as well, that is: tradition. In such noise articulates itself
what baroque allegories showed as the nagging "tooth of time" - the
articulation of physical entropy, the manifestation of the temporal arrow;
according to the Second Law of Zweiten Thermodynamics each system tends,
over time, to increasing dis-order

- Against the noise of the really physical world, culture (especially techno-
logical, that is: "digital" culture) poses a negentropic insistance, a negation of
decay and passing (away).

- Digital copies of digital records can be produced almost without loss of data
(except the quantization noise86). Music on Compact Disc or a digitale video can
be reproduced frequently with stable quality which was utopean in recent times
of analoge recording on magnetic tape. The secret of this temporal
invulnerability is that it is just (physical representations of) numbers which are
written on the Compact Disc; even after a thousand copies thus a zero stays
zero and one remains one87

- symbolic temporal order of "history" (i. e. almost time-invariant "tradition")

differs from the entropic deterioriation of the electric charge and chemical
carrier of the magnetic tape in real physics

- Whereas an analog sound carrier, which is in-formed physical materiality, can

still be identified according to the criteria of the historical method, digital signal
transfer primarily is information in its communication engineering sense (given
by Shannon), that is: unbound from energy and matter (as Norbert Wiener in
his Cybernetics insists)

- really first recording of sound (in the media-archaeological sense) has been
preserved as relic (in Droysen's sense "Überrest"), which is as un-intentional

86 Siehe Wolfgang Hagen, Die Entropie der Photographie, in: Herta Wolf (Hg.),
xxx
87 Rudolf Taschner, Der Zahlen gigantische Schatten. Mathematik im Zeichen der
Zeit, Wiesbaden (Vieweg) 3. Aufl. 2005, Anm. 77
 tradition (a Proustean mémoire involontaire, a Bergsonean "counter-archive" as
defined by Paula Amad) originating from Léon-Scott's "Phonautograph" on a
turning cylinder (the Kymograph as universal epistemological recording
medium of 19th century), once invented not for purpose of replay or for
transmission posterity, but just for immediate phonetic analysis (techno-
linguistics)

- in media-active signal research, technological apparatus itself turns out to be

the archaologist proper. Patrick Feaster and David Giovannoni thus succeeded
in re-sonifying the preserved phonautographic engravings ("Schallbilder"),
beginning with Scott's recording of a sound folk tone of 435 Hz in the year
1859. 150 years later science realized that with optical "reading" of such
acoustic signal lines sound can be re-synthesized, and all of the sudden a
children's song sounds again. What metaphorically looks like the pick-up of
sound images by a "virtual, digital gramophone needle"88, in fact is something
media-epistemologically different, a picking-up of a completely new kind:
digital sampling.

Sonic arts / acoustic archaeology

- enunciations from an Edison wax cylinder, as once expressed by Michel

Foucault in a slightly different context: "Message or bruit?"

- opto-digital reading of early Edison cylinders allows for listenting again to

otherwise unaccessible sound recording; the opto-digital close reading of sound
as image, though, dissolves any meaningful unit into discrete blocks, which are
accessible for human analysis only by operative techno-mathematical
diagrams:

- "spectrogram of such a reconstructed acoustic recording as an analytic,

media-archaeological deciphering

- the "media-archaeological ear", as an alternative to the cultural emphasis on

musical semantics; installation by Yuri Suzuki at the Ars Electronica in Linz,
September 2009, The Physical Value of Sound, explicitely based on the electro-
mechanics of (manipulating) records (their speed) and pick-up systems (their
non-linear use); www.yurisuzuki.com; micro-physical close reading of sound;
dissolves any semantically meaningful archival unit into discrete blocks of
signals. Instead of musicological hermeneutics, the media-archaeological gaze
is required here - a reminder of light-based sound inscription in early film

- media archaeologist, without passion, does not hallucinate life when he

listens to recorded voices. To the media-archaeologically sharpened mind, an
animated figure on a computer screen will never be confused with a living
being since such a mind is conscious of the algorithms of which such an
animation is a technomathematical, processual function

88 Harald Haack, Die erste Klangaufzeichnung. Eine Audiografie, online

http://newsbattery.blogsport.de/2008/05/07/die-erste-klangaufzeichnung-eine-
audiografie
- against the scarcity of instrumental artefacts and doubtful textual evidence
from ancient music theory, anachronistic option computational re-calculation of
Aristoxenean arguments (PhD Carlé)

SPEECH SYNTHESIS / VOCODER

The Vocoder

- advanced speech security system developed by Alan Turing in the Second

World War, "Delilah"

- voice scrambling capabilities of the vocoder, better known for its role in the
history of electronic music than for its cryptologic potential

- SIGSALY 1943: matched pair of one-time-use vinyl records of random thermal

noise, played synchrounsly. Sender: wrap spoken message in noise; receiver:
filter

- Turing's Delilah for discrete voice encryption

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes his develpment of speech encipherment

(approx. 1947-50) in his novel The First Circle

- "Extended Voices": Alvin Lucier's North American Time Capsule (1967):

instructing performers of the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus to
communicate Earth's present situation to beings from a faraway space or time
by use of vocoder

- Kraftwerk's Trans Europa Express 1977 using Sennheiser VSM 201 Vocoder

- Vocoder runs the input speech through a series of bandpass filters, which
measures the amount of energy in earch band and sends them as information,
i. e. encoded; captures spectral information of the voice; receiver approximates
it to the original voice

- "Probing the Past: A Media Archaeology of Handmade Electronic Sound"

(Derek Holzer, 27.5.15, Kolloquium, Medientheater); see
http://tinyurl.com/probing-the-past-oldenburg; Holzer's installations "no re-
enactment", but from the media-archaeological point of view, there is no
historical context / distance. The coupling of the tone wheel and a photo-
electric cell actually behaves the same 1930 and 2016

Un-natural: Artificial voices

- Wolfgang von Kempoelen paradigm 1791: imitating human organs; still

extension of men (Kapp / McLuhan), epistemologically different from genuine
mathematical voice analysis / synthesis (Leonard Euler)

- 1819 Charles Cagniard de la Tour: two punched discs, one rotating; number of
 holes results in pitch; multiplied with rotation speed

- Hermann von helmholtz 1863 Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als
physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik / vocal synthesizer

- 1939 Homer Dudley, world exposition New York, for Bell Laboratories: Voder =
Voice Operation Demonstrator, manually directed, models physiological
components byelectronic units: noise generator for voiceless phonems and sine
tone generator for vowels; operator can control 10 band filters for modulation
of signals, and generate pauses; pedals allows for pitch;

generating sound / reverse: Welte-Mignon recording piano

Vocoder for multiplex telephoning and encryption = Voice Encoder / coding;

analyzes incoming sound into frequency partials (Fourier), after transmission
re-modulated by a noise signal,

Pattern Playback by Frank Cooper: synthesieses sound and speech by

spectrograms

- by technical measuring of the human voice, it turns out in-human; most

natural human articulation is revealed as completely un-naturally re-
composable as artefact

- the natural itself can be given a "voice". A high-speed playback of an

earthquake has been used by the seismological laboratory of the California
Institute of Technology "as an input for a speech sonograph. The sonograph
facilitates the study of transient effects" = Speeth: 909, note 5

- Mills 2010, 36: Built at the Bell Telephone Laboratories of American Telephone
and Telegraph (AT&T), vocoder went beyond previous experiments with graphic
inscription; revealed new ways for multiple messages to be passed down the
same telephone wire, simultaneously; indicated that certain aspects of a
vocalization could be subtracted without a listener perceiving any change.
Speech could be broken into bits, much like “the subject” — which, Lacan had
announced, “is no one. It is decomposed, in pieces. And it is jammed."89

- the act of hearing (within the human ears mechanism) is already an analysis
of the perceived sound waves into discrete impulses which become the
impression of voice only by brain action (Hermann von Helmholtz insists)

- Dudleys "vocoder" different from the simple "voder"; voice became evident
"comme diagramme du corps" (Catherine Paoletti) in the moment of
spectrographic analysis

- with phonography not only the symbolic order (music) was recordable but the
sonicity of the oral poetry event: the acoustic signal, the micro-temporal

89 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s
Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954 – 1955, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 54 (as quoted in Mills
2010: 36)
 variations

- Homer W. Dudley as electronic and acoustic engineer created the electronic

voice synthesizer for Bell Labs (mostly in Bell Labs' Telephone Transmission
Division) in the 1930s. More secretly, Dudley led the development of a method
of sending secure voice transmissions during World War Two

- the uncanny in electronic engineering is that something completely non-vocal,

concretely: a circuit of condensers and resistors, powered by electric current,
can emulate human speech - thereby, in reverse, dis-covering the artificiality of
human speech itself as spectrum event

- among Dudley's final projects: design of an electronic kit distributed by Bell

Labs for home hobbyists and students, called Speech Synthesis: an Experiment
in Electronic Speech Production; contained the components with which to
create an electronic circuit that could produce three different speech formants

- Teuvo Kohonen carried out an algorithmic experiment "with natural data"

<Kohonen 1984: 148> which were collected in speech recognition in order "to
visualize the topological or metric relations between phonemes picked up from
continuous speech. "The inputs to the processing units consisted of spectra of
natural speech, taken at 15 different frequency channels" <ibid.> - analogous
to Vocoder analysis. One resulting SOM "shows at which processing unit each
phonemic sample caused the maximum response" <ibid.>: Fig. 5.24a-b =
Kohonen 1984: 148. In the self-organizing map (SOM), the sonic
Wunderkammer returns - but in its contemporary form as an operative diagram

- processed by Markov chains, the human speech turns into similiarity-based

dis/order, as applied to Friedrich Kittler's voice itself: [Audio] kittler-kov-
Carle.mp3

- museological Wunderkammer premise allows for the indifference to the

ontologically emphatic distinction between art and nature, human and
machine, live and animation, logocentristic presence and technical re-
presencing (phonographic voices / synthesized sound)

- specific escalation of the "sonic Wunderkammer" = dichotomy between

natural and unnatural voices

- voices from tele-communication devices: irritations of "presence" / the

present as the eqivalent of the visual / material Wunderkammer in the
temporal domain of subjective time experience

- Siren ambivalence with Blanchot

- man is most human when communicating in singing and speech (as defined
by Aristotle and Wilhelm von Humboldt90). are addressed to his ear. But this
means man becomes inhuman if he can not tell the natural voice from the

90Wilhelm v. Humboldt, Über Denken und Sprechen [MS 1995/96], in: W. v. H.l,
Werke, ed. Albert Leitzmann, vol. 7,2, Berlin 1907 (reprint: Berlin (de Gruyter)
1968]
 artificial Voder or Vocoder.

- not "from" telephone (Alexander Bell 1976) "to" Vocoder (Dudley in the Bell
Laboratories, patented 1939); rather immediacy; with Vocoder, human voice is
only disembodied (the telephone, phonograph and radio experience), but by
analysis into segments of its frequencies and transcoding for transmission
becomes de-personalized (Christoph Borbach). From "he" or "she" to "it"; loss
of the "grain of the voice" (Roland Barthes)

- individuality of voice, once coded for unrecognizable transmission, eliminated

by Vocoder; noise instead

- "Dictionaries <...> may record a new item under voice: voice terminal, a
computerized telephone. No longer, then, the illusion that the instrument
transmits voice at a distance, carrying it unchanged over space and time; voice
now passes through the circuits"91 - and are therefore transduced from signals
into computable numbers. "Receiver and sender are at their terminals, voice
terminated. The end of the voice and the beginning of the terminal" <ibid.>.

Whereas analogue telephony is transduction of mechanical vibrations to

voltage variations, the Vocoder symbolically transcodes it.

Helmut Holzer's spatial installation Delilah Too Voice Encoder Project at the
"UnTune" exhibition of CTM Festival 2015 (Kunstraum Kreuzberg, February
2015) confronted the visitor with an acoustic Wunderkammer, since he
participants experienced their own voice as complete alienation.

- "Speech, to the telephone engineer, is a commodity that must be picked up in

one place and delivered promptly, cheaply, and in good condition in another" =
D. W. Farnsworth in "High-Speed Motion Pictures of the Human
Vocal Cords" (1940), as quoted in: Mara Mills, Deaf Jam. From Inscription to
Reproduction to Information , in: Social Text 102 • Vol. 28, No. 1 • Spring 2010 ,
35-58 (35)

- Mills 2010, 36, about the Vocoder: "Built at the Bell Telephone Laboratories of
American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), this machine <...> revealed new
ways for multiple messages to be passed down the same telephone wire,
simultaneously. And, it indicated that certain aspects of a vocalization could be
subtracted without a listener perceiving any change. Speech could be broken
into bits, much like “the subject” — which, Lacan had earlier
announced, “is no one. It is decomposed, in pieces. And it is jammed.”4 " Note
4 = Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s
Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954 – 1955, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991) , 54]

- once human voice itself became subject to spectrographic analysis, it turned

out machinic (van Kempelen's effort / Homer Dudleys "vocoder" different from
the simple "voder"). "Homer" Dudleys "Christian name" allows for a
combinatorial reminder: The vocal alphabet - the adding of single letters to

91 Jonathan Goldberg, Voice Terminal Echo. Postmodernism and English

Renaissance Texts, New York / London 1986, 1
 express single vowels AEIOU has been a "technological" (Ong) modification of
the Phoenecean syllable alphabet - has been invented to write down HOMER's
oral poetry in a quasi-phonographic way, to preserve the musicality of its
articulation - grammo-phonic avant la lettre in the sense of "musical" letters.
But only with phonography not only the symbolic order (music) was recordable
but the sonicity of the oral poetry event: the acoustic signal, the micro-
temporal variations

- Homer W. Dudley (1896–1987) as electronic and acoustic engineer created

the first electronic voice synthesizer for Bell Labs (mostly in Bell Labs'
Telephone Transmission Division) in the 1930s (at that time a division of
Western Electric Company

- more secretly, Dudley led the development of a method of sending secure

voice transmissions during World War Two

- Wunder in electronic engineering is that something completely non-vocal,

concretely: a circuit of condensers and resistors, powered by electric current,
can emulate human speech - thereby, in reverse, dis-covering the artificiality of
human speech itself as spectrum event.

- kit entered production in 1963 and was produced until the late 1960s; cp.
Speak-and-Spell kit

"Frozen" voices

- signal recording vs. techno-mathematical analysis / resynthesis in the media-

archaeological, thus: techno-mathematical approach. Electronic synthesis of
the human voice thus emerged: materially refined electronics (techné) and
mathematical analysis (lógos). Boris Yankovsky's method of computing the
human voice treats sound matter in a fully formal approach. A combination of a
mathematical model of the synthetic tone ("syntone") and its implementation
in a processing mechanism (Vibroexponator) turns the symbolical abstraction
into a media event in physical time. In order to get to the essence of sonic
articulation, a suspense from any imagination of sound has first to take place -
operative sonicity: "To synthesize the human voice singing a vowel, one would
need to choose several templates related to formants (drawn waveforms [...]),
to add extra templates as needed [...], to recalculate their sizes according to
the desirable frequencies and intensities of formants, and then to mix them.
The final waveform would sound like a 'frozen' vowel. This waveform could be
used to produce a temporal 'quant' of sound, physically related to one frame of
the film. To produce the sound, dynamically changing in time, one would have
to calculate the sequence of static frames, in which each frame represents the
successive state of changing timbre."92

92 Smirnov 2012: 215, referring to an unpublished manuscript by Boris

Yankovsky, teorya i praktika graficheskogo zvuka. Akusticheskiy sintez
muzikalnih krasok [The Theory and Practice of Graphical Sound. Acoustical
Syntheses of Musical Colours], Leningrad (between 1932 and 1940), in the
Archives of the Teremin Center, Moskow. See Andrey Smirnov, Synthesized
Voices of the Revolutionary Utopia, in: Dmitri Zakharine / Nils Meise (eds.),
 "Harmonizing" voices by sampling

- phonograph, gramophone and magnetic recording have been "incapable of

achieving real-time frequency shifts. For this we need rock bands with
harmonizers that are able to reverse—with considerable electronic effort - the
inevitable speed changes, at least to deceivable human ears" = Friedrich A.
Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
and Michael Wutz, Stanford (Stanford University Press, 1999, 35; pitch shifter
(Harmonizer) transposes male voices into female ones in real-time indeed, by
computationally recalculating the frequencies

"Cold" speech synthesis

- in telephony, acoustic signal "heats up" the human sensual perception

(McLuhan); its mathematical analysis cools it down; media-archaeological, that
is: techno-mathematical approach such as the electronic synthesis of the
human voice which takes place as a coupling of materially refined electronics
(techné) and mathematical analysis (lógos)

- truly techno-epistemic approach to modeling the human voice does not

imitate the organic human vocal tract by mechanical analogies but analyses
the voice as signal event and wave form itself. Once techno-mathematically
analyzed (like with von Helmholtz' "Resonators"), the complex sonic colour can
be composed from single sine waves. When Boris Yankovsky in the 1930s
founded his Syntonfilm Laboratory in Moscow it was based on his media-
operative insight into the genuinely time-critical nature of sound waveforms as
temporal transitions; detected "life inside the sound spectrum"93. The
mathematical approach and "graphic sound" of a non-metaphorical kind -
sonagrams as the diagramatic expression of dynamic development of the
sound spectrum in time - uncover the layers of sonicity. Sound could be
analysed and represented as the Fourier series of periodic functions - and
consequently be re-synthesized back with the same set of sine waves.94
Yankovsky treated the human voice in a fully formal approach.

- combination of a mathematical model of the synthetic tone ("syntone") and

its implementation in a processing mechanism (Yankovsky's "Vibroexponator")
turns the symbolical abstraction into a media operation which takes place in
actual physical time

Electrified Voices, Konstanz (V&R unipress) 2012, 163-185

93 Boris Yankovsky, Analiz i sintez tembra, unpublished article Moscow, March
1935; quote and translation: Andrey Smirnov, Sound in Z. Experiments in
Sound and Electronic Music in early 20th Century Russia, London
(Koenig Books) 2013, 209
94 Boris Yankovsky, Teorya i praktika graficheskogo zvuka. Akusticheskiy sintez
muzikalnih krasok [The Theory and Practice of Graphical Sound. Acoustical
Syntheses of Musical Colours], Leningrad (between 1932 and 1940), in the
Archives of the Teremin Center, Moskow, as quoted and translated by Smirnov
2012: 210
 - to get to the essence of sonic articulation and to synthesize the human voice
singing a vowel, a suspense from any semantically hot imagination of sound
has to take place, a cooling by analysis: "The final waveform would sound like a
'frozen' vowel"95

- Greek vocal alphabet probably has been arranged for the special purpose of
recording the musicality of poetry (cultural recording as symbolical operation);
the current digital code returns to first expressions of pre-Grecian writing which
have been invented for calculating purposes96 - now calculating on the level of
digital signal processing with a precision in reproduction which emulates the
natural signal itself (due to the Nyquist / Shannon sampling theorem). Fourier
Analysis allows for the mathematical transformation of a temporal function or
sequence of signals into a spectrogramm; Fast Fourier Transformation as
analytic operation performed by the computer itself when translating a
recorded voice event into a mathematical regime, thus allowing for a kind of
cultural analysis in ways which only computing can do. At that moment, the
machine is the better media-archaeologist than any human. Only by application
of such technological tools can we explain the micro-temporal level of such
events. Computer-based Fast Fourier Analysis gives access to another
worldliness of a cultural moment. Consequently, a book cover on the origins of
the vocal alphabet (W. E. / Friedrich Kittler (eds.), Die Geburt des
Vokalalphabets aus dem Geist der Poesie. Schrift - Ton - Zahl im
Medienverbund, Munich (Fink) 2006) shows both an image of one of the first
Greek alphabetic inscriptions (remarkably in hexametric diction) and the
spectrogram of the same verse line read and spoken by Barry Powell: see Barry
Powell, Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet, Cambridge (UP) 1991

PHONETIC "SOUND" AND THE UN-ARCHIVABLE

A different kind of recording: The phonographic un-archive

- sound and speech have been most “immaterial” cultural articulation (before
the electronic age); phonographically recorded acoustic real "forms the waste
or residue that neither the mirror of the imaginary nor the grid of the symbolic
can catch: the physiological accidents and stochastic disorder of bodies"97

- digital audio recording integrates the vibrational "calculation" of sound, close

to the Turing Machine states and chrono-photographical sequences of stills
than to analog phonography; Alan Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers"
1936 reconciliated real numbers with the symbolical machine

- BBC World Service launched the "Save our Sounds" project, may soon be lost
due to the post-industrial world. But caution, this is not an archive: As long as

95 Smirnov 2012: 215, referring to Boris Yankovsky's "Theory and Practice of

Graphical Sound"
96 See Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing, vol. I: From Counting to
Cuneiform, Austin (University of Texas Press) 1992
97Kittler 1999: 15 f.
 an algorithm is missing which rules the transition of sound provenience to
permanent storage, it is just an ideosyncratic random collection

- musical notation (developed by Greeks and Guido of Arezzo in analogy to the

alphabet) is still symbolic recording, the phonograph registers the physically
real signal. While alphabetic symbolism reduces acoustic events to the
"musical" (harmonical) order, the register of the acoustic real encompasses the
whole range of the sonic (including noise and arhythmical temporal phase
shifting such as "swing" and differing amplitudes / frequencies

- due to the limits of hermeneutics as text-oriented method, and because of an

essential lack of non-symbolic recording media of the real. Battles have been
described and interpreted, but the real noise and smell of a combat could not
be recorded for the archive and transmitted until the arrival of the Edison
phonograph98; did not just provide historical research with a new kind of source
material; it rather articulated new, rather ahistorical forms of tempor(e)ality on
the level of the physically and mathematically real (techno-logy)

- listening dependent on sound as event in matter? In the symbolic order of

score notation, "structural listening can take place in the mind through
intelligent score-reading, without the physical presence of an external sound
source."99 As once conceived by Theodor W. Adorno, "the silent, imaginative
reading of music could render actual playing as superfluous as speaking is
made by reading of written material"100

- muscial scores usually end in paper archives, not on gramophone records.

"Notation wants music to be forgotten, in order to fix it and to cast it into
identical reproduction, namely the objectivation of the gesture, which for all
music of barbarian cultures martyrs the eardrum of the listener. The
eternization of music through notation contains a deadly moment: what it
captures becomes irrevocable ... Musical notation <...> is about eternity: it kills
music as a natural phenomenon in order to conserve it — once it is broken —
as a spiritual entity: The survival of music in its persistence presupposes the
killing of its here and now [...]"101

- with the phonograph, hearing became attentive of all kinds of sounds,

regardless of their source, quality and meaning(lessness), just like the inner ear

98 See Bernhard Siegert, Das Leben zählt nicht. Natur- und

Geisteswissenschaften bei Dilthey aus mediengschichtlicher Sicht, in: Claus
Pias (ed.), Medien. Dreizehn Vorträge zur Medienkultur, Weimar 1999, 161-182
(175), referring to: Wilhelm Dilthey, Die Abgrenzung der
Geisteswissenschaften. Zweite Fassung, in: same author, Gesammelte Schriften
VII, 311
99 Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations. Music and
Reason in Western Society, Minneapolis (Univ. of Minnesota Press)
1996, chap. 3 ("Toward a Deconstruction of Structual Listenting. A
Critique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky"), 148-176 (161)
100 Subotnik 1996: 161f
101 Theodor W. Adorno, Zu einer Theorie der musikalischen Reproduktion,
Frankfurt/M. (Suhrkamp) 2001, as quoted by G. Mazzola, Musical performance.
Springer, Heidelberg 2010
 impassionately transduces vibrations analogue to electro-mechanical sound
reproduction102; listening became ahistorical, subject to the time-invariant
reproducibility of acoustic signals; a tone exists only in transience, that is: as
Husserlean "time-object"103

- archaeologists = technical media themselves - not so-called mass media, but

measuring instruments which are able to decipher physically real signals
techno-analogically, and representing them in graphic forms alternative to
alphabetic writing: „moving“ diagrams, as performed by the oscilloscope

Remembering past sonospheres by technical media

[http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/rorschach-audio/
http://rorschachaudio.wordpress.com. Trade distribution by Turnaround Art
Theory, Cultural Studies. An early MIT Press version of "Rorschach Audio" has
been published 2001]

With the refinement of the Phenician alphabet to the Greek phonetic alphabet
(which Ong actually called a "technologizing of the word"104), acoustic
articulation (speech, singing, oral poetry) became symbolically recordable for
re-play; presence-generating power of technically recorded voices differs
fundamentally from the grama-phonic notation of speech in the vocal alphabet

- "Discourse analysis cannot be applied to sound archives or towers of film

rolls"105

- "Hearing the cracks and noises of a phonograph recording may initially

enlighten their historical status as 'mechanical' instruments."106 In terms of the
mathematical theory of communication (Shannon 1948), such cracks belong to
the kind of "noise" introduced by the channel of transmission itself which is
here: the channel called time

- media archaeology starts here: The phonograph as media artefact does not
only preserve the memory of cultural semantics but "archivizes" past technical
knowledge as well, a kind of frozen media knowldege embodied in engineering
and waiting to be un-revealed by media-archaeological consciousness

- "Listening to Technology"107 really means close listening to the technological

102 Jonathan Sterne 2003: 33

103 See Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time
Consciousness, trans. James Churchill, Bloomington, Ind. (Indiana
University Press) 1964
104 Walter Ong, Oralität und Literalität. Die Technologisierung des Wortes,
Opladen (Westdt. Verl.) 1987
105 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone - Film - Typrewriter, Stanford (UP)
1999, 5
106 Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound. Technology, culture, and
Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge,
Mass. / London (The MIT Press) 2008, 26
107 See Bijsterveld 2008, chap. 1
 artefact itself. The Museum of Endangered Sounds takes care of the sound of
"dead media"108, and the Technical Committee of IASA in its recommendations
from December 2005 insists that the originally intended signal is just one part
of an archival audio record; accidental artefacts like noise and distortion are
part of it as well - be it because of faults in the recording process itself or as a
result of later damage caused in transmission; both kind of signals, the
semantic and the Proustean mémoire involontaire, message and noise, be
preserved in media-archival conservation ethics; media-archaeological listening
to the sonic past rather about listening to the technical signifier than to the
acoustic or musical content

- with digital sampling and processing of audio-signals, noise resulting from the
frictions of analog technologies is significantly filtered, thus: silenced; former
noise replaced by an even more endangering challenge: the "quantizing noise"
on the very bit-critical (technical) level of signal sampling, and the migration
problems of digitally compressed media data; physical vulnerability of
electronic storage media; not just a technical question, it has an
epistemological dimension as well109

Is there a "sound of the archive"? Listening to silence with media-

archaeological ears

- software for sound analysis Audacity actually provides an algorithm called

"Silence Finder". In the negative sound, its silence, we listen to the past in its
truest articulation

- not only implicit (sonicistic) but as well actual sound from the media-
archaeological archive. When an ancient "Datassette" is being loaded from
external tape memory into the ROM of a Commodore 64 computer, we are
actually listening to data music. What we hear is not sound as memory content
like an old persussion-assisted song, but rather the sound of computer memory
itself, that is: a software program which is "scripture" (though in the
alphanumeric mode); Ben Anderson, Recorded music and practices of
remembering, in: Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 5, No. 1, March 2004, 3-
19; listening to the data archive which is not sonic memory but sonicity

- silence re-interpreted as an enduring negation of time-based sound, as

performed in John Cage's piece 4'33.110

- Edison phonograph the first form of "memory in motion", since its "records"
(notably the early ethnographic field recordings around 1900, institutionalized
as the Vienna Phonograph Archive and the Berlin Phonogramm Archive) is
based on a continuously rotating, technically moving apparatus both in
recording and in re-play

108 See the Website „Museum of Endangered Sounds“, online

http://savethesounds.info
109 See Arild Fetveit, Medium-Specific Noise, in: Liv Hausken (ed.), 189-215
110 On the occasions which led to this composition see Seth Kim-Cohen, In the
Blink of an Ear, New York (Continuum) 2009, 160ff
 Material entropy of the signal versus symbolic (archival) endurance of
sound recording

- Bill Viola in his essay on the implicit sound of electronic images points out
"the current shift from analogue's sequential waves to digital's recombinant
codes" in technology.111 Sampling and quantizing of acoustic signals analytically
transforms the time signal into the information of frequencies which is the
condition for technical re-synthesis (Fourier transformation). Digitalization
means a radical transformation in the ontology of the sound record - from the
physical signal to a matrix (chart, list) of its numerical values. Media culture
turns from phonocentrism to mathematics

- the techno-mathematical archive; transfer techniques of audio carriers from

technically extended "writing" such as analog phonography to calculation
(digization), not just another version of the materialities of tradition, but
conceptual change; basically atemporal dimension. Against the noise of the
real culture (especially techno-logical, that is: „digital“ culture) poses a
negentropic insistance, a negation of decay and passing-away

- digital copies of digital records produced almost without loss of data (except
the quantization noise). Music on Compact Disc or a digitale video can be
reproduced frequently with stable quality which was utopean in recent times of
analoge recording on magnetic tape. The secret of this temporal
unvulnerability is that it is just (physical representations of) numbers which are
written on the Compact Disc; even after a thousand copies thus a zero stays
zero and one remains one112

- past sound should not just be "restored" by applying digital filters; it rather
wants to be remembered with all the traces of decay which has been part of its
tradition, its media-temporal (entropic) characteristics must be archivized as
well; remain close to the physical record which is achieved by over-sampling;
stay tuned to such non-archival sonicity

111 Viola 1990: 47

112 Rudolf Taschner, Der Zahlen gigantische Schatten. Mathematik im Zeichen
der Zeit, Wiesbaden (Vieweg) 3. Aufl. 2005, note 77