Sonic Mediations Body, Sound, Technology. Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns

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1 Sonic Mediations

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3 Sonic Mediations Body, Sound, Technology Edited by Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns Cambridge Scholars Publishing

4 Sonic Mediations: Body, Sound, Technology, Edited by Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns This book first published 2008 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright 2008 by Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): , ISBN (13):

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations...vii Introduction Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns...1 Part I: Mediating Perception The Phonographic Body: Phreno-Mesmerism, Brain Mapping and Embodied Recording Anthony Enns...13 Audio Virology: On the Sonic Mnemonics of Preemptive Power Steve Goodman...27 Quick and Dirty : Sonic Mediations and Affect Bruce Johnson...43 Touched by Music: The Sonic Strokes of Sur Incises Vincent Meelberg...61 Part II: Mediating Performance Delegating the Live: Musicians, Machines and the Practice of Looping Jeremy Wade Morris...77 Oh Baby, I Like It Raw : Engineering Truth Jan Hein Hoogstad...93 Voice or Ear? The Female Voice and the Listener s Position in Paul Lansky s as it grew dark Hannah Bosma The Pianist s Body at Work: Mediating Sound and Meaning in Frederic Rzewski s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues Kathryn Woodard...127

6 vi Table of Contents Part III: Mediating Space Producing Microscopic Embodied Spaces: The Flautist s Mouth, Reverberation Effects and Kaija Saariaho s Lichtbogen Taina Riikonen Atmospherics Steven Connor Another Interactivity in Pneumatic Sound Field: On Interactive Sound Art and Digital Audio Technology Ruth Benschop Hearing History: Storytelling and Collective Subjectivity in Cardiff and Miller s Pandemonium Adair Rounthwaite Part IV: Mediating Audiovision Towards Intensive Audiovisual Encounters: Interactions of Opera and Cinema Milla Tiainen Do You Want to Be Absorbed? The Knotty Acts of Mediation in Rosa: A Horse Drama Tereza Havelková Auditory Imagination and Narrativisation in Béla Bartók s Bluebeard s Castle Pieter Verstraete Sound Bites! Dissonant Audiovisions as Historiophony in Hitler s Hit Parade Carolyn Birdsall Contributors Index...281

7 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 5.1: Front panel of the Line 6 DL Line 6 Used with Permission of Line 6 Figure 9.1: Bars 338-end (flautist s score). From Lichtbogen Kaaija Saariaho Used with Permission of Edition Wilhelm Hansen Figure 11.1: Pneumatic Sound Field Edwin van der Heide Used with Permission of Edwin van der Heide Figure 12.1: View from the catwalk of Cell Block Seven. From Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Pandemonium, Sean Kelley Used with Permission of the artists, Luhring Augustine (New York) and Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site (Philadelphia) Figure 12.2: Beater attached to a cabinet in a cell. From Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Pandemonium, Sean Kelley Used with Permission of the artists, Luhring Augustine (New York) and Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site (Philadelphia) Figure 14.1: Multiple projection screens layering representations in different media. From Rosa: A Horse Drama Deen van Meer Figure 14.2: Madame de Vries addressing the audience. From Rosa: A Horse Drama Deen van Meer Figure 14.3: Rosa s aria Music for each leg of the horse. From Rosa: A Horse Drama Deen van Meer

8 viii List of Illustrations Figure 15.1: Bluebeard with screen projections in background. From Blauwbaards Burcht Peter Missotten Used with Permission of Peter Missotten Figure 16.1: Collage of film stills from Hitler s Hit Parade (colour and black-and-white in original) C. Cay Wesnigk Produktion Used with Permission of C. Cay Wesnigk Produktion

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11 INTRODUCTION CAROLYN BIRDSALL AND ANTHONY ENNS It is no longer necessary to make the common claim that sound is underappreciated in theory and academic research. In recent years there has been a tremendous number of conferences, art exhibitions and books on sound technologies and auditory culture. 1 In the field of film studies, Michel Chion, Rick Altman and James Lastra worked to shift the attention of film scholars away from their exclusive focus on the visual towards the sonic dimension of cinema. 2 Scholars such as Douglas Kahn, Friedrich Kittler, Steven Connor, Emily Thompson, Michael Bull and Jonathan Sterne have also provided comprehensive accounts of the complex role that sound played in the history of social thought and the transformation of sound following the advent of modern media technologies. 3 While some of these critics have been hailed as pioneers, they frequently note that there is a much longer theoretical interest in concerns with voice, sound, music, noise, orality and literacy, as can be found in the work of German critical theory, Canadian media and soundscape studies and French poststructuralist theory. 4 In addition, there has been a renewed 1 Some recent conferences include Sonic Interventions in Amsterdam, Kunst- Stimmen and Hörstürze in Germany and the London School of Sound seminar series, to name only a few. Major art exhibitions like Sonic Boom in London, Phonorama in Karlsruhe and Sons et lumières in Paris suggest that sound also plays an increasingly significant role in contemporary art. 2 Chion, Audio-Vision; Altman, Sound Theory, Sound Practice and The State of Sound Studies ; Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema. 3 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat; Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter; Connor, Dumbstruck; Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity; Bull, Sounding out the City; Sterne, The Audible Past. 4 See, for instance, Adorno, Essays on Music; Ong, Orality and Literacy; McLuhan, Understanding Media; Schafer, The Tuning of the World; Barthes, Image Music Text; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Attali, Noise; Schaeffer, Traite des objets musicaux.

12 2 Sonic Mediations appreciation for the importance of sound in the twentieth-century avant garde. 5 Within this flurry of activity many of the scholars working in sound studies are trying to address the questions raised when the study of sound crosses disciplinary boundaries to encompass such disparate fields as music, literature, film and art as well as theatre and performance studies. 6 Due to its inherently interdisciplinary nature, however, it remains difficult to identify sound studies as a discipline. The problem is not a lack of existing scholarship, as Sterne points out in The Audible Past, but rather the absence of commonly shared assumptions and theoretical models: We have histories of concert audiences, telephones, speeches, sound films, soundscapes, and theories of hearing. But only rarely do the writers of histories of sound suggest how their work connects with other, related work or with larger intellectual domains.the challenge, then, is to imagine sound as a problem that moves beyond its immediate empirical context. The history of sound is already connected to the larger projects of the human sciences; it is up to us to flesh out the connections. 7 According to Sterne, therefore, the goal for scholars in sound studies is to seek out common areas of concern and to fully apprehend how their objects of analysis can be brought to bear on more fundamental philosophical questions. This volume identifies mediation as one of the core concerns for scholars working in sound studies, not least because sound is a spatial and temporal phenomenon that always relies on a medium to make itself heard. Some conceptual ground work has been laid in media studies, where scholars have variously tried to address the issue of mediation with terminology as varied as the medium, mediatisation and remediation. 8 That said, much of this work has occurred within a limited realm of disciplinary-specific concerns. Nonetheless, mediation is a useful metaconcept for interdisciplinary sound studies because it touches on the 5 For more on sound and the avant garde, see Kahn and Whitehead, Wireless Imagination; Weiss, Phantasmatic Radio; Campbell, Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi. 6 For recent essay collections emphasising the interdisciplinary nature of sound studies, see Bull and Back, The Auditory Culture Reader; Cox and Warner, Audio Culture. 7 Sterne, The Audible Past, 5. 8 See, for instance, McLuhan, Understanding Media; Auslander, Liveness; Bolter and Grusin, Remediation.

13 Introduction 3 most basic questions concerning the relations between the body, sound and technology. All of these three concepts have been dealt with in existing scholarship, but too often one is attributed undue agency at the expense of the others. On the one hand, there has been a tendency to fetishise the powers of technology in relation to (listening) subjects. 9 On the other hand, the corporeal turn in the humanities has sometimes been charged with overprivileging the agency of the body and perception. 10 As a consequence, investigations into auditory perception and sound technologies have sometimes led to theories that posit sound as a passive in-between or having a bridging function. 11 By working with an overarching concept of mediation, such tendencies are forestalled, as scholars are encouraged to avoid technological determinism or overgeneralise the phenomenal body. Lastly, the attention to mediation may also allow scholars to recognise sound as a co-participating agent in cultural practices and performance. Rather than taking mediation itself as self-evident, the chapters collected in this volume therefore invite readers to rethink this concept in terms of the interactions between body, sound and technology. This volume provides a series of detailed and focused case studies involving different sound and music technologies, performances and installations. Each of these case studies focuses on a set of highly specific questions: How are audio performances mediated by sound technologies as well as the performer s body? In which ways is the immediacy of live performance influenced by sound technologies? How do bodies and technologies mediate the experience of auditory perception? What is the role of the listener in audio-based performances? How does sound mediate the experience of viewing optical media and how does this complicate vision-oriented theories of spectatorship? Our aim is not to establish a particular canon or promote a particular theoretical project, but to allow for potential overlappings in the approach to mediation by scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. The contributions to this volume comprise scholars from disciplinary backgrounds as diverse as musicology, film and media studies, art history, comparative literature, philosophy, theatre studies and science and technology studies. Rather than setting out the four sections in terms of disciplines or objects, however, the chapters are organised in terms of the functions and conceptualisations of sound. While each of these sections 9 See, for example, Williams, Television. 10 For a critical overview of the corporeal turn in the humanities, see Shilling, The Body in Culture, Technology and Society. 11 See, for example, Truax, Acoustic Communication, 11.

14 4 Sonic Mediations focuses on a specific aspect of sonic mediation, many of the individual essays also deal with themes of affect, memory, voice, musical gesture, gender, liveness, sampling, narrative, interactivity and intermediality. Indeed, these concepts are often appropriated in different ways from one disciplinary field to another. For example, the narrative concept of focalisation can be fruitfully adapted for the analysis of sonic elements in radio plays, music theatre and opera, while the concepts of absorption and immersion similarly appear in discussions of opera, cinema and sound installations. Such examples are a testament to the self-reflexive and rich conceptual crosspollination occurring in interdisciplinary inquiry. Section I, Mediating Perception, examines the body as a mediator between sonic events and technologies. Anthony Enns The Phonographic Body: Phreno-Mesmerism, Brain Mapping and Embodied Recording and Steve Goodman s Audio Virology: On the Sonic Mnemonics of Preemptive Power both explore the relationship between sound technologies, auditory perception and memory. Enns takes several case studies that challenge the common claim that there was a gradual shift towards disembodiment with the development of sound recording technologies. By investigating instances of what he calls embodied recording, in which the body itself functions as a sound recording device, Enns argues that the body continues to occupy a central position in the production and reception of sound. While Enns chapter highlights issues of control in concepts of embodied recording, Goodman extends this insight to examine how contemporary capitalism also exercises control over the body through the deployment of sound. He introduces the concept of audio virology to trace the ways in which sonic branding strategies like jingles and Muzak function as agents for manipulating consumers. Bruce Johnson s Quick and Dirty : Sonic Mediations and Affect approaches the issue of sonic control by examining how responses to certain sounds have a physiological basis, thereby revealing the precultural factors determining sonic affects, such as anxiety. Vincent Meelberg s Touched by Music: The Sonic Strokes of Sur Incises also addresses the relationship between sound and affect by examining the physical role of the body in the act of listening. Using the concept of sonic strokes, Meelberg develops a theory of how bodies mediate the experience and meaning of musical listening, which reverses conventional assumptions about atonal music composition. Like the other chapters in this section, Meelberg is interested in the extent to which the body acts as an agent in the act of listening. The essays in section II, Mediating Performance, emphasise the status of the technological apparatus as mediator by examining the

15 Introduction 5 intersections between performers and machines. Jeremy Wade Morris Delegating the Live: Musicians, Machines and the Practice of Looping and Jan Hein Hoogstad s Oh Baby, I Like It Raw : Engineering Truth explore the role of digital sound technologies in contemporary music production. Drawing on Bruno Latour s notion of technologies as nonhuman social actors, Morris examines how the DL4 loop sampler functions as an active participant in musical practice. By delegating the live to the DL4, musicians using the pedal foreground the importance of repetition and invite a reconsideration of the relationship between live performance and recorded mediation. Rather than presenting technology itself as an active agent in music production, Hoogstad focuses instead on the role of the sound engineer. He examines the sonic interventions performed by hip-hop DJs like RZA, who employ digital technologies to create noise and vocal distortion in ways that subvert subjectivity as well as musical and linguistic conventions. Hannah Bosma s Voice or Ear? The Female Voice and the Listener s Position in Paul Lansky s as it grew dark focuses on the ways in which sound technologies mediate the voice in electrovocal acoustic music, which potentially destabilise authorial control and gender identities. In her reading of Paul Lansky s as it grew dark, for example, Bosma shows how the structure, objectification and distantiation of the acousmatic medium undermine the hegemony of language without attributing these vocals to a disempowered female figure. Finally, Kathryn Woodard s The Pianist s Body at Work: Mediating Sound and Meaning in Frederic Rzewski s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues investigates the specific functions of corporeality in the composition, performance and perception of Frederic Rzewski s piano piece. Woodard suggests that the intersection between bodily perception and knowledge serves to enact and comment upon the power structures underlying musical traditions, by ascribing different subject positions to the pianist, who embodies the struggle between genres defined along lines of race and class. While the other contributions to this section focus on electronic and electroacoustic means of sonic mediation, Woodard argues that the pianist s body also functions as a sound technology in performance. Section III, Mediating Space, establishes how sound technologies and installations offer new ways of thinking about how sound mediates between listeners and the spatial environment. Rather than focusing on the interactions between musicians and machines, Taina Riikonen s Producing Microscopic Embodied Spaces: The Flautist s Mouth, Reverberation Effects and Kaija Saariaho s Lichtbogen examines how the space of the performer s mouth is mediated during electronic music

16 6 Sonic Mediations performances. By adapting Henri Lefebvre s concepts of social space, Riikonen investigates how the embodied flautist s identity is constructed through the interactions between the instrumentalist, the microphone and the sound director. The sense of physical intimacy produced in performance is negotiated precisely through these interactions, as it depends on the sonic reverberations created with the technology under the sound director s control. Steven Connor s Atmospherics also addresses the issue of intimacy and distance by examining how early historical responses to the atmospheric noise received by electronic sound technologies inspired new ways of thinking about the relationship between people and their spatial environment. With the rise of static interference, the atmosphere was often perceived as a threatening and chaotic force but was gradually treated as potentially productive, with instruments like the theremin introducing the body directly into the circuits of sonic transmissions. The theremin thus represents an early example of interactive media and a possible precursor to the use of sensory triggers and gestural controls within contemporary experimental and sound installation art. Ruth Benschop s Another Interactivity in Pneumatic Sound Field: On Interactive Sound Art and Digital Audio Technology examines the potential interaction between sound, technology and audience occurring in sound installation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, Benschop redefines the concept of interactivity in installation art as the creative engagement of the participants and their awareness of the sonic environment. Adair Rounthwaite s Hearing History: Storytelling and Collective Subjectivity in Cardiff and Miller s Pandemonium focuses on the ways in which sound installation can also be employed to convey a sense of history that is dependent on the listener s embodied experience and participation. For Rounthwaite, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller s site-specific installation work creates a collectively shared event, allowing participants to imaginatively engage with the space and integrate it into their own present experience. As with the other chapters in this section, Rounthwaite highlights how noise or other forms of interference can mediate the relationship between listeners and the spatial environment. The final section, Mediating Audiovision, addresses the role of both image and sound in mediating the experience of theatrical and cinematic events. Milla Tiainen s Towards Intensive Audiovisual Encounters: Interactions of Opera and Cinema employs Gilles Deleuze s notion of intensities a theoretical concept that does not privilege either optics or acoustics in order to discuss the mediation that occurs when opera is incorporated into cinema. In her reading of Luc Besson s The Fifth

17 Introduction 7 Element, Tiainen argues that an intensive approach is necessary for explaining how the visual action on-screen and the operatic elements in the soundtrack are mutually co-creative. Tereza Havelková s Do You Want to Be Absorbed? The Knotty Acts of Mediation in Rosa: A Horse Drama takes the opposite approach by examining the use of cinema in contemporary opera. Havelková argues that Peter Greenaway s Rosa: A Horse Drama alternates between operatic and filmic music in order to oscillate between theatricality and absorption. Havelková applies the concept of focalisation from narratology to describe these different musical registers and the way they mediate the audience s relationship to the action on stage. Rather than treating the theatre as a transparent medium, in other words, Havelková approaches opera itself as a medium that foregrounds its own acts of mediation. Pieter Verstraete s Auditory Imagination and Narrativisation in Béla Bartók s Bluebeard s Castle similarly examines how the interactions between the visual and acoustic elements in contemporary musical theatre create a critical distance that allows audiences to reflect on the effects of theatre itself as a medium. Verstraete extends the existing concept of auditory imagination to show how the use of minimalist settings and contrasting juxtapositions between textual and visual elements can draw the audience s attention to their own interpretative acts of listening and reveal how theatrical events actually occur within the mind of the spectator-auditor. Carolyn Birdsall s Sound Bites! Dissonant Audiovisions as Historiophony in Hitler s Hit Parade analyses how the interaction between visual and acoustic elements in Oliver Axer s Hitler s Hit Parade create a critical relationship to the medium as well as towards fixed historical narratives about the Nazi era. By using popular music to recontextualise and undercut found footage from Nazi Germany, Birdsall argues that this film disrupts the listening conventions, the narrative structure and the emotional registers traditionally employed in documentary films. The chapters in this section thus employ a wide range of disciplinary approaches and concepts in order to discuss the same fundamental issue: how the relationship between sound and image can potentially create a sense of critical distance or medial awareness. In conclusion, the concept of sonic mediation is broad enough to extend the limitations of existing disciplinary frameworks and musiccentred models, but specific enough to elucidate a finite set of fundamental concerns that are relevant to scholars working on sound. The first part of this concept, the sonic, encompasses a broader understanding of categories such as the voice, music, noise and silence, while the attention to mediation sharpens sound scholars awareness of the specific

18 8 Sonic Mediations contributions of the sonic event, corporeality and the technological apparatus. By creating a forum for scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, this collection represents a model for sound studies: not as a homogenous field but rather a mosaic of innovative approaches. Rather than attempting to consolidate these approaches or privilege any single one, the particular benefit of sound studies lies in the fact that it allows scholars from such varied fields to enter into a productive dialogue around shared theoretical concerns. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music. Edited by Richard Leppert. Berkeley: University of California Press, Altman, Rick, ed. Sound Theory/Sound Practice. London: Routledge, ed. The State of Sound Studies. Iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound 27 (Spring 1999). Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge, Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Bull, Michael. Sounding out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, Bull, Michael, and Les Back, eds. The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg, Campbell, Timothy. Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Cox, Christoph, and Daniel Warner, eds. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum, Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 1987.

19 Introduction 9 Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Kahn, Douglas, and Gregory Whitehead, eds. Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, Lastra, James. Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, McLuhan. Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, Schaeffer, Pierre. Traité des objets musicaux: essai interdisciplines. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, Schafer, R. Murray. The Tuning of the World. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, Shilling, Chris. The Body in Culture, Technology and Society. London: Sage, Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Truax, Barry. Acoustic Communication. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing, Weiss, Allen S. Phantasmatic Radio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1975.

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21 PART I: MEDIATING PERCEPTION

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23 THE PHONOGRAPHIC BODY: PHRENO-MESMERISM, BRAIN MAPPING AND EMBODIED RECORDING ANTHONY ENNS As historians frequently point out, the development of modern sound technologies was largely motivated by a desire to isolate and simulate human auditory functions by mechanical means. Inventions like the telephone and the phonograph were inspired by devices like Faber s talking automaton, Johann Philipp Reis mechanical ear and Alexander Graham Bell s phonautograph, which effectively replaced bodily organs with technological prostheses that were capable of perceiving and producing sounds in the absence of a speaking or listening body. The notion that these new technologies transform the body into a prosthetic god was most famously articulated by Sigmund Freud in his 1930 book Civilization and Its Discontents, where he claims that when a human being puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent. 1 Freud s ambivalence concerning media technologies becomes clearer, however, when he adds that those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. 2 Contemporary critics are even more emphatic in their criticism of this history, as they often characterise the technological simulation of auditory functions as a gradual process of disembodiment that threatens to displace the traditional notion of the liberal humanist subject by severing the link between voice and presence. Charles Grivel argues, for example, that phonograph recordings reveal a shocking absence of subjectivity by separating the voice from the body and giving it a presence independent of the speaker, which disrupts any equation of the voice with individual experience and identity. 3 Douglas Kahn similarly points out that this separation of voice and body supports 1 Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Ibid. 3 Grivel, The Phonograph s Horned Mouth, 35.

24 14 Sonic Mediations Jacques Derrida s claim that the temporalisation of speech disrupts the notion of the individual subject as a being that is present to itself because it can hear itself speak: The voice no longer occupied its own space and time. It was removed from the body where, following Derrida, it entered the realm of writing and the realm of the social, where one loses control of the voice because it no longer disappears. 4 As a result of sound recording technology, therefore, the voice assumes many of the same qualities as writing, as it becomes capable of being separated from the subject and sent out into the world, where it becomes available for appropriation (or misappropriation) by others. If voice is a marker of identity and agency, in other words, sound technologies threaten the autonomy and integrity of the individual subject. Historians also point out that at the same time sound technologies were made to simulate human auditory functions, these same functions were gradually understood in machinic terms. Michel Foucault argues, for example, that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the body became an object and target of power that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces. 5 Tim Armstrong supports this claim by examining how the rise of electrical science introduced the notion of the nervous system as a reservoir of energy that could be disciplined through electro-shock therapy and the electric chair. 6 The notion that new media technologies are closely related to new conceptions of the body has been taken up most recently by Laura Otis, who discusses how the nervous system was understood in terms of telegraph networks in the nineteenth century: Images of bodily communications nets have inspired us to build technological ones, and images of technological ones have inspired us to see them in the body. 7 This understanding of the body in terms of technology thus represents a precursor to the twentieth-century science of cybernetics and contemporary speculations about the possibility of plugging media technologies directly into the brain. Rather than examining how sound technologies displaced the body and transformed the reception and production of sound into a purely technological process, the following chapter will pursue this second line of 4 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 8. 5 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, Otis, Networking, 2.

25 The Phonographic Body 15 inquiry by examining how the body itself has historically been understood as a sound recording device. This chapter will thus attempt to reverse Marshall McLuhan s famous description of media technologies as extensions of the nervous system by looking at the ways in which the body itself was conceived as a technological apparatus. 8 This notion offers an alternative approach to the question of sonic mediation, as it suggests that sound technologies did not simply simulate and displace human auditory functions, but rather the body also seemed capable of simulating the functions of sound technologies. Beginning with the nineteenth-century practice of phreno-mesmerism, for example, scientists began to conceive of the brain as a device for storing and reproducing sounds. The invention of the phonograph and the discovery that sounds could be recorded in grooves also seemed to offer an apt metaphor for understanding how memories could be stored in the folds of the brain. Experiments involving electrical stimulation of the cortex in the 1950s and 1960s further reinforced this notion of the body as a sound recording device, which encouraged scientists to speculate about the possibility of a direct interface between media technologies and the brain. Although these examples are taken from completely different historical periods and they are based on completely different understandings of neurological functions, they all share a common conception of the body as a device for storing acoustic information. My purpose is thus to present these instances of embodied recording not as empirical descriptions of how the brain actually functions, but rather as cultural evidence of a desire that was projected onto the body. Steven Connor has discussed similar phenomena, such as the nineteenth-century practice of direct voice mediumship, which supposedly enabled the voices of the dead to be channeled through spiritual mediums during séances. Connor argues that this practice represents a form of resistance against the disembodying effects of new sound technologies, as it gives voice back to the body and the body back to the voice. 9 The ambiguity of such practices, however, is that they give the body back to the voice while simultaneously depriving the body of any control over the voice. The notion of the body as a sound technology thus emphasises the embodied nature of perception, while at the same time threatening the equation of speaking or hearing with individual agency or identity, and my primary argument is that this discourse continues to privilege the body as the site where acoustic information is received, 8 See McLuhan, Understanding Media. 9 Connor, Dumbstruck, 392.

26 16 Sonic Mediations stored and transmitted, while simultaneously revealing the absence of individual subjectivity. The history of embodied recording suggests that the body and technology remain inseparable, and similar conceptions of the body continue to inform contemporary theories of cyborg or posthuman subjectivity. Phreno-Mesmerism Mesmerism was an eighteenth-century science that posited the existence of an invisible fluid that permeated the universe and manifested itself in the motions of the planets, tides and atmospheric changes. According to Robert Fuller, this fluid was seen as the fundamental substance of the universe, and it constituted the etheric medium through which sensations of every kind light, heat, magnetism, electricity were able to pass from one physical object to another. 10 The movement s founder, Franz Anton Mesmer, claimed that all illnesses could be explained as imbalances of this invisible fluid in the body, and these imbalances could be corrected through the magnetic fields that emanated from a mesmerist s hands. Over time, however, studies of mesmerism began to focus more on the rapport between the patient and the mesmerist, who was shown to be capable of exercising a tremendous degree of control and influence. 11 After attending a demonstration given by one of Mesmer s disciples in 1829, John Elliotson, a professor of medicine at the University of London, began to conduct research into mesmerism at the newly established University College Hospital. Elliotson first invited Baron Dupotet to demonstrate mesmeric treatments at the hospital in 1837, and these public performances primarily focused on the mesmerist s ability to manipulate his patients auditory senses: [H]e would open one sense while the others remained shut. He placed his finger in one of [his patient s] ears and she heard slightly at first; she then began to hear better, and gradually got to the full sense of her hearing Fuller, Mesmerism and the Birth of Psychology, For more on mesmerism, see Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France; Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious; Richards, Mental Machinery; Gauld, A History of Hypnotism; Winter, Mesmerized. 12 Abstract of a Clinical Lecture, 872.

27 The Phonographic Body 17 Dupotet s experiments thus depicted the mesmeric trance as a state in which the channels of auditory perception could be isolated and manipulated by external forces. In the 1840s mesmerism gradually merged with the science of phrenology to form phreno-mesmerism. Phrenology itself had been embraced by the scientific community in the 1820s, and it was widely accepted even among many of the scientists who rejected mesmerism. When Elliotson started The Zoist in 1843, a journal dedicated to the study of mesmerism, he attempted to capitalise on the success of phrenology by arguing that the two sciences were essentially the same, as they both revealed an inherent connection between consciousness and the body. Elliotson claimed that a mesmerist could activate or deactivate the phrenological organs on the human skull using magnetic influence, as illustrated in the following account: I demagnetised Hearing.We then spoke to her, but she could hear no one but the operator.i proceeded to excite Self-Esteem by contact; when she immediately raised herself in her chair, tossed her head with much dignity, and informed me, that she thought herself much too good to associate with me. Moving my finger to Adhesiveness, she clung to me, and exclaimed, You will not leave me; you shall stop with me. On my finger being applied to Philoprogenitiveness, she talked of children, and of young animals, sometimes nursing the former, and calling the latter. Conscientiousness being excited, led to a sense of duty. She must attend to her master s business, she said, or it would be defrauding him of her time. Veneration being touched, she rose from her chair and said, Well, I must go to church.benevolence excited, produced generosity; Acquisitiveness, an inclination to get hold of what she could, and keep what she had; Ideality, to talk about the moon, groves, and poetry; Wit, to laugh and say funny things; Firmness, to refuse to do anything when she had made up her mind and Secretiveness, to refuse to tell me anything I asked her, remarking, that she kept her own secrets. 13 In other words, mesmerists claimed to activate particular characteristics or sentiments simply by touching the appropriate phrenological organ. Phreno-mesmerism thus treated the body as an information storage device whose contents could be accessed like a phonograph recording or, as Alison Winter argues, it likened the mind and brain to an electric machine Brindley, Phreno-Magnetic Cases, Winter, Mesmerized, 117.

28 18 Sonic Mediations The connection between mesmerism and sound recording was made particularly explicit when the practice was employed in musical performances. During one of James Braid s demonstrations in 1847, for example, a mesmeric rapport was established between a somnambulist and the singer Jenny Lind, which enabled the somnambulist to emulate Lind s unique vocal style: [I]n the sleep [the somnambulist] would prove herself competent to accompany anyone in the room in singing songs in any language, giving both notes and words correctly.[t]he queen of song, the far-famed Jenny Lind, sat down to the instrument, and played and sang most beautifully a slow air, with Swedish words, which the somnambulist accompanied her in, in the most perfect manner, both as regarded words and music. Jenny now seemed resolved to test the powers of the somnambulist to the utmost, by a continued strain of the most difficult roulades and cadenzas, for which she is so famous; including some of her extraordinary sostenuto notes, with all their inflections from pianissimo to forte crescendo, and again diminished to thread-like pianissimo: but in all these fantastic tricks and displays of genius by the Swedish nightingale she was so closely and accurately tracked by the somnambulist, that several in the room occasionally could not have told, merely by hearing, that there were two individuals singing so instantaneously did she catch the notes, and so perfectly did their voices blend and accord. 15 Such demonstrations represent an alternative version of Thomas Alva Edison s famous tone tests, in which audiences were invited to compare the live performances of singers like Maggie Teyte with their phonographic recordings; according to Edison s promotional material, these tests were designed to show that there was no difference between [the singer s] voice and the New Edison RE-CREATION of it. 16 The practice of phreno-mesmerism was similarly designed to prove that there was no difference between the singer s voice and the somnambulist s recreation of it, yet the transmitted voice still retained a living, embodied presence. Mesmerism s potential to transform the body into a machine for receiving, storing and transmitting acoustic information thus prefigured the phonograph s ability to preserve and replay vocal recordings. The concept of the mesmerised subject as a sound technology is perhaps most vividly illustrated in George DuMaurier s 1894 novel Trilby, 15 Jenny Lind, Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 193. For more on Edison s tone tests, see Thompson, Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity.

29 The Phonographic Body 19 which recounts the story of a Parisian laundress who is mesmerised by a sinister Jewish musician named Svengali. Trilby suffers from recurring headaches, which only Svengali s mesmeric treatments are capable of curing, yet her friends recognise the danger of these treatments, as Svengali gradually asserts his control over her body. Although she is tone deaf, Trilby possesses an excellent singing voice, and when placed in a mesmeric trance Svengali is able to manipulate her vocal chords in such a way as to make her sing beautifully. Trilby eventually becomes famous for these performances, but she is never consciously aware of what is happening on stage: [Svengali] had but to say Dors! and she suddenly became an unconscious Trilby of marble, who could produce wonderful sounds just the sounds he wanted, and nothing else. 17 As Lisa Gitelman points out, Trilby is effectively transformed into an automaton or singing machine, as she is neither the author of her self or of her voice. 18 Gitelman adds that this lack of individual agency and autonomy is also the reason why audiences are so fascinated by her performances: [I]t is partly her lack of intention, the invisibility of authorial agency, that captivates her audience. Listeners witness a spectacle of origination within which origination itself is elusive. 19 Like early phonograph listeners, therefore, audiences perceive Trilby s voice as unreal and otherworldly precisely because it does not represent the expression of her own individual identity. In this way, Trilby s performances closely resembled public demonstrations of phrenomesmerism, which similarly illustrated the ways in which the identity of the singer s voice was distinctly separated from the identity of the singer herself. The phreno-mesmerist s ability to activate various parts of the brain was also explicitly described as the act of playing a piano: [M]esmerizing a particular key would make the brain sound the appropriate psychological note. 20 Because of their ability to direct and manipulate musicians, orchestra conductors were also frequently compared to mesmerists. Like the mesmerist, the conductor radiated an influence that coordinated and transformed a group of individuals into a performing body. 21 By conducting the orchestra during Trilby s performances, Svengali radiates an influence that not only metaphorically transforms the musicians into a single performing body, but also literally mesmerises the singer as well. 17 DuMaurier, Trilby, Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, Ibid., Winter, Mesmerized, Ibid., 312.

30 20 Sonic Mediations The science of phreno-mesmerism was thus frequently associated with the production and reception of sound. On the one hand, the ability of the mesmerist to isolate and manipulate the sensory channels of the mesmerised subject showed how auditory perception could be operated without the conscious mediation of the listening body, which paved the way for the technological simulation of auditory perception. On the other hand, the bodies of mesmerised patients were also capable of recording and reproducing the sounds of voices that seemed to possess a sense of presence that did not originate from within the individual subject. This practice thus clearly illustrates the notion of the body as a media technology capable of receiving, storing and transmitting acoustic information. Electrical Stimulation of the Brain This notion of the body as a media technology was corroborated by nineteenth-century physiologists like Paul Broca and Karl Wernicke, who also employed the phonograph as a model in their attempts to chart neural pathways. As Friedrich Kittler points out, the use of such metaphors was practically unavoidable: A brain physiology that followed Broca and Wernicke s subdivision of discourse into numerous subroutines and located speaking, hearing, writing, and reading in various parts of the brain (because it exclusively focused on the states of specifiable material particles) had to model itself on the phonograph. 22 Broca and Wernicke s attempts to isolate the sensory channels in the brain were thus directly inspired by new sound technologies, and their conception of the brain as a media technology bears a striking resemblance to earlier practices like phreno-mesmerism, which similarly conceived of the brain as a device for receiving, storing and transmitting information. Kittler adds that the physiological contours of the skull also seemed to resemble the grooves of phonograph cylinders. In Primal Sound, for example, Rainer Maria Rilke writes: The coronal suture of the skull has let us assume a certain similarity to the close wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a 22 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 38.