You are sitting at a digital work station. You press a key and watch as the cursor moves through the waveform. You hear the sound at the same time as you see it traversed by the cursor. You decide to retrieve a sample, which you've stored in the computer. It's located way up ahead of the present waveform: in a few seconds you've scrolled forward, claimed the sample, and positioned it next to the waveform. You magnify the image, to get a better 'look' at the sound. You decide to insert the sample into the waveform, trying various positions. If you change your mind, nothing is lost: this is, after all, non-destructive editing.
'Our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts.'1 Nietzsche wrote this in 1882; as usual, his aphorism is prescient of profound developments in twentieth century culture. Nietzsche was writing -- or typing -- about the typewriter, but his idea has been tested -- and contested -- in the context of succeeding generations of mechanical and electronic technologies. That the properties of a medium can contribute at least in part to the nature of the transmitted message is a familiar idea in the late twentieth century. That the technology of that medium affects the cognitive functions of those who use it is a more radical re-voicing of the same idea, and one consequently more likely to be resisted. But the concept is explicit in Nietzsche's statement; it has been pursued in far greater detail by several theorists in the second half of the twentieth century. It has been expressed most famously in the work of McLuhan; more recently, writers such as Kittler, Ong, Meyrowitz, Virilio and Levy have elaborated this in a more scholarly fashion.
This article examines digital audio technology in the wake of this concept. Digital audio -- including sampling, editing and mixing -- is considered as an 'intellectual technology' which, in Pierre Levy's words, modifies the 'cognitive ecology' into which it is introduced.2 Digital audio shares the properties of other digital technologies: it is founded on the immaterial (information); this information is endlessly manipulable. These properties form the basis of an emerging intellectual economy, in which familiar epistemological categories -- including intellectual property and the codes of realism -- are challenged. Digital audio adds to these general properties its distinctive re-alignment of the technological reproduction of sound. The digital audio user works with sound in a specific manner, particularly with regard to time. The focus of this article is on the consequent refiguring of our conceptualisation of sound, in terms of time.
Digital audio is fundamentally a numerical technology. Unlike analogue audio, which creates an analogue of the waveform in various media (voltage control, deviations in a groove, magnetic patterns on tape), digital audio represents a sound event as a set of numerical values. This binary data is processed and stored -- as information -- to be reconverted to the original waveform at the point of output. The most cited advantages of the digital process are its lack of degradation in copying, its ability to error-correct, and its flexibility in editing. All these advantages derive from the fact that digital audio works with an immaterial stream of data -- with numbers.
Discrete time sampling has been called 'the essence of digital audio'.3 This technique encodes the analogue wave form into infinitessimal pieces of information. Each slice is discrete in time; the standard 44.1 kHz sampling rate means that 44,100 time-samples per second are taken of the waveform. An analogy used to describe this process is the technique of cinema:4 the 24 discrete frames per second of film merge to reproduce images of movement. Digital audio takes 44,100 discrete snaps per second, to reproduce variations of sound in time.
Such a description of this technology invokes Bergson's philosophical treatment of time. Writing at the beginning of the century, Bergson drew a distinction between time as constructed by the intellect, and duration as glimpsed by intuition. The former, which he variously termed scientific or mathematical time, is a succession of instants divided by the pragmatic faculty of intellect. In a famous analogy, he likened the workings of intellect -- cutting up movement into discrete moments -- to the cinema apparatus, taking 'snapshots...of the passing reality'.5 Each frame represents a static point, isolated from the flow of movement: this is the 'cinematographic illusion' perpetrated by intellect. It is only through intuition that this illusion can be overcome, that 'the infinite multiplicity of becomings'6 can be grasped.
Yet in his Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze salvages the cinema from Bergson's 'rather overhasty critique'7 appraising the twentieth century art-form in Bergsonian terms. At the same time, he deploys cinema as a mode of thought, with its own concepts. In the same way, digital audio may be approached, from a Bergsonian perspective, in more than one way. The very basis of digital audio -- its 'essence' -- is founded on the binary number system developed by Leibniz -- whose thought is a cornerstone of the 'universal mechanism' assailed by Bergson. Mechanistic science, as characterised by Bergson, took 'time as an independent variable', to be measured, to be divided into ever smaller intervals: 'as great a number of moments as we wish in the interval of time it considers'. As a result, according to Bergson, something profound is lost: 'real time, regarded as a flux...as the very mobility of being, escapes the hold of scientific knowledge'.8
Yet digital audio, despite its high-speed dissection of time into immobile cuts, need not be dismissed as the sterile operation of mechanistic intellect. Its principles are mathematical, its mode is extreme precision. But its properties offer a vast array of potentials for creative use. Time in digital editing is infinitely supple. All of the analogue audio techniques -- cutting, fading, mixing, looping, delay, reversing -- are honed with greater precision and control in the digital domain. Some techniques, such as vari-speed and delay, benefit from the greater accuracy available, affording more creative scope. Digital editing and delay permit the tiniest fraction of a sound to be repeated indefinitely, as if that sonic material is frozen in time. The digital sampler, pioneered by the Australian Fairlight company in 1979, and widely available since the mid-eighties, has added another range of manipulations of sound in time. When played on a sampler keyboard, any sound can be detuned, elongated, looped or sped up, while retaining its basic properties; that is, a sound can be reshaped in time, yet remain recognisable. The sampler plays sounds as if they were musical instruments, inserting their specific sonic profiles into the flow of music in time.
Digital audio presents us with a range of paradoxes. Its high precision encourages non-linear editing, in which material can be retrieved and assembled in any order. Its mathematical nature offers an infinite number of choices in non-destructive editing. It is based on tiny slivers of frozen time, yet it offers inexhaustible means to explore the ambiguities and flux of time. These paradoxes proceed from its central concept, which comprises the greatest paradox. Its stuff is numerical information, yet that stuff is a non-stuff, manipulable to an unprecedented degree. Its binary language is brutally simple, but the ways it invites us to think and create are unfathomably complex.
The first experience of digital editing, for those accustomed to analogue sound, has a startling effect. The sense ratios are altered: instead of the tactile/aural configuration of working with magnetic tape, there is a visual/aural alignment. You see the sound, in the form of a spectrograph, a visual representation of the waveform. Or, whole sequences of sound are displayed in visual terms as rectangular shapes, stretches of recorded time waiting to be accessed. On demand, a cursor moves through the sound-as-image: this cursor represents the 'now', the present moment of the displayed sound which we hear as we watch it move across the screen.
There are several consequences of this digital conceptualisation of time. For Bergson, the 'fundamental illusion'9 about time is to consider it in terms of space: we visualise time, most often represented by a line or an arrow in space. Digital audio, prevalent since the 1980s, has constructed a representation of time in these very terms. Sequences of recorded sound are visualised; they move from left to right across a screen occupying pictorial space within the computer monitor. Yet once again we are presented with paradoxes. Digital editing allows the user to see the whole project as it is being edited -- all components, all sequences visualised as stretches of time. Unlike a digital watch, which merely shows the viewer a numerical representation of the present moment -- a time sample -- the visual display of a digital audio system allows all items of recorded sound to be present. These sounds -- their temporal identity transposed to the spatial domain -- are situated in any order within the visual display, either behind the cursor or ahead of it. The user can see the past and the future (in relation to the cursor, which represents the present); but the positions of these sequences can be re-arranged at will. Time for the user is full of possibilities. It can be reshuffled with ease. It can be intuited in an infinite number of permutations.
R. Murray Schafer coined the term 'schizophonia' in the 1970s to describe the effect of sound recording technology in splitting a sound from its source, preserving the sound in recorded form.10 But such a technology also splits a sound from its time: it is 'schizochronic'. In recording a sound, we preserve its flow in time. The recording represents a past sequence of time, which when played, returns to occupy the present. Any recording is a past waiting to return to the present. The replayed sound is ontologically distinct from the original, since it is a recorded version displaced in both time and space. Its return at a later time is a form of difference: the sound is marked by both the technological intervention and the displacement in time. Incorporating these markings of future difference, the sound once recorded is re-constituted: it is split across time, imbued with the potential of re-emergence in time.
Digital audio technology adds a further dimension to the schizochronic aspect of recorded sound. The visualisation of sound components displays an array of recordings waiting to be retrieved, re-assembled, shuffled with others in the register of time. The cursor -- in some systems referred to as 'now-time' -- represents a mobile present; jumping forwards and backwards, bringing into the present whichever waveform it lands upon. Time becomes fluid, continually realigned by the mobile cursor. As well, the system permits a rapid shifting of the time-scale. The cursor may be observed sweeping through individual sounds, or, from a much larger perspective, the entire project may be represented on the screen. At the moment of looking, the user sees the whole time-scale of the project in question. The past and future of the project are apprehended -- or rather, a profusion of possible pasts and futures, waiting to be assembled. There is made possible an intuitive grasp of a project's shape in time.
This digital visualisation of sound takes its place in a history of such technological developments. Edison's phonograph of 1877 was intended by its inventor primarily for 'letter-writing and all kinds of dictation';11 it was, as its name suggested, designed for 'sound-writing'. Both Attali and McLuhan have commented on the birth of sound recording technology in the nineteenth century, in an age culturally dominated by the visual medium of print. Ironically, the phonograph, along with its predecessors and rivals such as the phonautograph and gramophone (gramma = letters), shared the aim of printing: 'to transform sound into writing'.12 So dominant was the concept of mechanical writing in 'the Gutenberg era with its smooth, uniform lines of type and organisation',13 that the inventors could not conceive of their sound recording devices except in terms of inscription. This predisposition to the written word was also, of course, a bias towards the visual; for McLuhan its influence was not supplanted until the 1950s with the emergence of hi-fi and the availability of the tape recorder. The emphases of this electric era were tactility and acoustic space, representatives of an episteme vastly different from that of only a half-century before, in which the 'graphophone' needle was conceptualised as a type of pen to write sound.14
The age of digital sound, commencing three decades later, problematises these relations in a new way. The binary code of digital information has been construed as 'a kind of writing',15 yet such interpretations betray a hermeneutic directive founded on the graphic -- the 'grammatological' -- as an organising and privileged metaphor. It is equally possible to undermine the metaphor of 'digital writing' by celebrating 'the loss of inscription' in the removal of 'the trace [by] acts of erasure'.16 Such debates, however, are based on the articulation of sound, in the nineteenth century manner, in terms of writing.
It is less contentious, and more fruitful, to focus on the contribution of digital audio to our conceptualisation and experience of sound. Certainly, the visual display of sound constructs the user's experience in ways absorbed from earlier media, including print. The role of vision is privileged. We read, or perhaps scan, the information from left to right (in the same way that Western music notation borrowed this convention from print). We are encouraged to consider sound items in linear terms, as stretches of time, visually represented. Yet there are complicating factors. The experience of digital audio is a visual-aural synchronisation: the visual is privileged, but not pre-eminent. The linear movement of items in the visual display is subsumed into a greater whole within digital editing; non-linear editing, as already discussed, incorporates movement from right to left, as well as the testing of unlimited versions of the edited sequence.
In addition, the visual display of multitrack mixing adds the element of vertical movement, as sections from one track may be moved up or down to another track. Digital mixing represents the multilinear in visual terms; it is a visualisation of the 'all-at-onceness' of multitrack mixing, in which complex combinations of sounds can be grasped in visual terms -- as they are heard, or, indeed, before they are heard. There is a complicated and rapid interplay between the visual and aural senses in digital editing/mixing. The visual display is not merely a representation of sound in spatial terms; it has a temporal dimension as well. It affords an intimation of elaborate sound constructions before they are heard. The eye, in combination with the ear, builds complex layers of sound in time.
The digital age of convergence renders all information -- audio, video, text -- into streams of numerical data. Multimedia formats meld previously discrete media forms into new amalgams. Technological sound now has a visual component; it is capable of both great precision and great subtlety. Digital audio incorporates contrasting facets of time. Founded on the rationalist principles of time-dissection, it nevertheless affords enormous scope for the creative manipulation of sound in time.
John Potts is an audio artist who lectures in media at Macquarie University. His digital audio works 3.27 pm, 5.06 am and Midnight Noon explore aspects of time and memory.
1 Friedrich Kittler, 'The Mechanized Philosopher', in Looking After Nietzsche, ed. Laurence A. Rickels, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. 195.
2 Pierre Levy, 'Toward Superlanguage', in ISEA 94 catalogue, Helsinki: University of Art & Design, 1994, p. 10.
3 Ken C. Pohlmann, Principles Of Digital Audio, Indiana: SAMS, 1992, p. 40.
4 ibid., p. 42.
5 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, London: MacMillan, First Edition, 1911, p. 322.
6 ibid., p. 321.
7 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. xiv.
8 Bergson, op. cit., p. 355.
9 Genevieve Lloyd, Being in Time, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 101.
10 R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980, p. 90.
11 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 93.
12 ibid., p. 91.
13 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, London: Abacus, 1974, p. 297.
14 ibid., p. 293.
15 Friedrich Kittler, 'Gramophone, Film, Typewriter', in October 41, Summer 1987, p. 117.
16 Marcos Novak, 'Liquid Architectures and The Loss of Inscription', in Non-Located On Line, Knowbotic Research, January 1995.
John Potts
You are sitting at a digital work station. You press a key and watch as the cursor moves through the waveform. You hear the sound at the same time as you see it traversed by the cursor. You decide to retrieve a sample, which you've stored in the computer. It's located way up ahead of the present waveform: in a few seconds you've scrolled forward, claimed the sample, and positioned it next to the waveform. You magnify the image, to get a better 'look' at the sound. You decide to insert the sample into the waveform, trying various positions. If you change your mind, nothing is lost: this is, after all, non-destructive editing.
'Our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts.'1 Nietzsche wrote this in 1882; as usual, his aphorism is prescient of profound developments in twentieth century culture. Nietzsche was writing -- or typing -- about the typewriter, but his idea has been tested -- and contested -- in the context of succeeding generations of mechanical and electronic technologies. That the properties of a medium can contribute at least in part to the nature of the transmitted message is a familiar idea in the late twentieth century. That the technology of that medium affects the cognitive functions of those who use it is a more radical re-voicing of the same idea, and one consequently more likely to be resisted. But the concept is explicit in Nietzsche's statement; it has been pursued in far greater detail by several theorists in the second half of the twentieth century. It has been expressed most famously in the work of McLuhan; more recently, writers such as Kittler, Ong, Meyrowitz, Virilio and Levy have elaborated this in a more scholarly fashion.
This article examines digital audio technology in the wake of this concept. Digital audio -- including sampling, editing and mixing -- is considered as an 'intellectual technology' which, in Pierre Levy's words, modifies the 'cognitive ecology' into which it is introduced.2 Digital audio shares the properties of other digital technologies: it is founded on the immaterial (information); this information is endlessly manipulable. These properties form the basis of an emerging intellectual economy, in which familiar epistemological categories -- including intellectual property and the codes of realism -- are challenged. Digital audio adds to these general properties its distinctive re-alignment of the technological reproduction of sound. The digital audio user works with sound in a specific manner, particularly with regard to time. The focus of this article is on the consequent refiguring of our conceptualisation of sound, in terms of time.
Digital audio is fundamentally a numerical technology. Unlike analogue audio, which creates an analogue of the waveform in various media (voltage control, deviations in a groove, magnetic patterns on tape), digital audio represents a sound event as a set of numerical values. This binary data is processed and stored -- as information -- to be reconverted to the original waveform at the point of output. The most cited advantages of the digital process are its lack of degradation in copying, its ability to error-correct, and its flexibility in editing. All these advantages derive from the fact that digital audio works with an immaterial stream of data -- with numbers.
Discrete time sampling has been called 'the essence of digital audio'.3 This technique encodes the analogue wave form into infinitessimal pieces of information. Each slice is discrete in time; the standard 44.1 kHz sampling rate means that 44,100 time-samples per second are taken of the waveform. An analogy used to describe this process is the technique of cinema:4 the 24 discrete frames per second of film merge to reproduce images of movement. Digital audio takes 44,100 discrete snaps per second, to reproduce variations of sound in time.
Such a description of this technology invokes Bergson's philosophical treatment of time. Writing at the beginning of the century, Bergson drew a distinction between time as constructed by the intellect, and duration as glimpsed by intuition. The former, which he variously termed scientific or mathematical time, is a succession of instants divided by the pragmatic faculty of intellect. In a famous analogy, he likened the workings of intellect -- cutting up movement into discrete moments -- to the cinema apparatus, taking 'snapshots...of the passing reality'.5 Each frame represents a static point, isolated from the flow of movement: this is the 'cinematographic illusion' perpetrated by intellect. It is only through intuition that this illusion can be overcome, that 'the infinite multiplicity of becomings'6 can be grasped.
Yet in his Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze salvages the cinema from Bergson's 'rather overhasty critique'7 appraising the twentieth century art-form in Bergsonian terms. At the same time, he deploys cinema as a mode of thought, with its own concepts. In the same way, digital audio may be approached, from a Bergsonian perspective, in more than one way. The very basis of digital audio -- its 'essence' -- is founded on the binary number system developed by Leibniz -- whose thought is a cornerstone of the 'universal mechanism' assailed by Bergson. Mechanistic science, as characterised by Bergson, took 'time as an independent variable', to be measured, to be divided into ever smaller intervals: 'as great a number of moments as we wish in the interval of time it considers'. As a result, according to Bergson, something profound is lost: 'real time, regarded as a flux...as the very mobility of being, escapes the hold of scientific knowledge'.8
Yet digital audio, despite its high-speed dissection of time into immobile cuts, need not be dismissed as the sterile operation of mechanistic intellect. Its principles are mathematical, its mode is extreme precision. But its properties offer a vast array of potentials for creative use. Time in digital editing is infinitely supple. All of the analogue audio techniques -- cutting, fading, mixing, looping, delay, reversing -- are honed with greater precision and control in the digital domain. Some techniques, such as vari-speed and delay, benefit from the greater accuracy available, affording more creative scope. Digital editing and delay permit the tiniest fraction of a sound to be repeated indefinitely, as if that sonic material is frozen in time. The digital sampler, pioneered by the Australian Fairlight company in 1979, and widely available since the mid-eighties, has added another range of manipulations of sound in time. When played on a sampler keyboard, any sound can be detuned, elongated, looped or sped up, while retaining its basic properties; that is, a sound can be reshaped in time, yet remain recognisable. The sampler plays sounds as if they were musical instruments, inserting their specific sonic profiles into the flow of music in time.
Digital audio presents us with a range of paradoxes. Its high precision encourages non-linear editing, in which material can be retrieved and assembled in any order. Its mathematical nature offers an infinite number of choices in non-destructive editing. It is based on tiny slivers of frozen time, yet it offers inexhaustible means to explore the ambiguities and flux of time. These paradoxes proceed from its central concept, which comprises the greatest paradox. Its stuff is numerical information, yet that stuff is a non-stuff, manipulable to an unprecedented degree. Its binary language is brutally simple, but the ways it invites us to think and create are unfathomably complex.
The first experience of digital editing, for those accustomed to analogue sound, has a startling effect. The sense ratios are altered: instead of the tactile/aural configuration of working with magnetic tape, there is a visual/aural alignment. You see the sound, in the form of a spectrograph, a visual representation of the waveform. Or, whole sequences of sound are displayed in visual terms as rectangular shapes, stretches of recorded time waiting to be accessed. On demand, a cursor moves through the sound-as-image: this cursor represents the 'now', the present moment of the displayed sound which we hear as we watch it move across the screen.
There are several consequences of this digital conceptualisation of time. For Bergson, the 'fundamental illusion'9 about time is to consider it in terms of space: we visualise time, most often represented by a line or an arrow in space. Digital audio, prevalent since the 1980s, has constructed a representation of time in these very terms. Sequences of recorded sound are visualised; they move from left to right across a screen occupying pictorial space within the computer monitor. Yet once again we are presented with paradoxes. Digital editing allows the user to see the whole project as it is being edited -- all components, all sequences visualised as stretches of time. Unlike a digital watch, which merely shows the viewer a numerical representation of the present moment -- a time sample -- the visual display of a digital audio system allows all items of recorded sound to be present. These sounds -- their temporal identity transposed to the spatial domain -- are situated in any order within the visual display, either behind the cursor or ahead of it. The user can see the past and the future (in relation to the cursor, which represents the present); but the positions of these sequences can be re-arranged at will. Time for the user is full of possibilities. It can be reshuffled with ease. It can be intuited in an infinite number of permutations.
R. Murray Schafer coined the term 'schizophonia' in the 1970s to describe the effect of sound recording technology in splitting a sound from its source, preserving the sound in recorded form.10 But such a technology also splits a sound from its time: it is 'schizochronic'. In recording a sound, we preserve its flow in time. The recording represents a past sequence of time, which when played, returns to occupy the present. Any recording is a past waiting to return to the present. The replayed sound is ontologically distinct from the original, since it is a recorded version displaced in both time and space. Its return at a later time is a form of difference: the sound is marked by both the technological intervention and the displacement in time. Incorporating these markings of future difference, the sound once recorded is re-constituted: it is split across time, imbued with the potential of re-emergence in time.
Digital audio technology adds a further dimension to the schizochronic aspect of recorded sound. The visualisation of sound components displays an array of recordings waiting to be retrieved, re-assembled, shuffled with others in the register of time. The cursor -- in some systems referred to as 'now-time' -- represents a mobile present; jumping forwards and backwards, bringing into the present whichever waveform it lands upon. Time becomes fluid, continually realigned by the mobile cursor. As well, the system permits a rapid shifting of the time-scale. The cursor may be observed sweeping through individual sounds, or, from a much larger perspective, the entire project may be represented on the screen. At the moment of looking, the user sees the whole time-scale of the project in question. The past and future of the project are apprehended -- or rather, a profusion of possible pasts and futures, waiting to be assembled. There is made possible an intuitive grasp of a project's shape in time.
This digital visualisation of sound takes its place in a history of such technological developments. Edison's phonograph of 1877 was intended by its inventor primarily for 'letter-writing and all kinds of dictation';11 it was, as its name suggested, designed for 'sound-writing'. Both Attali and McLuhan have commented on the birth of sound recording technology in the nineteenth century, in an age culturally dominated by the visual medium of print. Ironically, the phonograph, along with its predecessors and rivals such as the phonautograph and gramophone (gramma = letters), shared the aim of printing: 'to transform sound into writing'.12 So dominant was the concept of mechanical writing in 'the Gutenberg era with its smooth, uniform lines of type and organisation',13 that the inventors could not conceive of their sound recording devices except in terms of inscription. This predisposition to the written word was also, of course, a bias towards the visual; for McLuhan its influence was not supplanted until the 1950s with the emergence of hi-fi and the availability of the tape recorder. The emphases of this electric era were tactility and acoustic space, representatives of an episteme vastly different from that of only a half-century before, in which the 'graphophone' needle was conceptualised as a type of pen to write sound.14
The age of digital sound, commencing three decades later, problematises these relations in a new way. The binary code of digital information has been construed as 'a kind of writing',15 yet such interpretations betray a hermeneutic directive founded on the graphic -- the 'grammatological' -- as an organising and privileged metaphor. It is equally possible to undermine the metaphor of 'digital writing' by celebrating 'the loss of inscription' in the removal of 'the trace [by] acts of erasure'.16 Such debates, however, are based on the articulation of sound, in the nineteenth century manner, in terms of writing.
It is less contentious, and more fruitful, to focus on the contribution of digital audio to our conceptualisation and experience of sound. Certainly, the visual display of sound constructs the user's experience in ways absorbed from earlier media, including print. The role of vision is privileged. We read, or perhaps scan, the information from left to right (in the same way that Western music notation borrowed this convention from print). We are encouraged to consider sound items in linear terms, as stretches of time, visually represented. Yet there are complicating factors. The experience of digital audio is a visual-aural synchronisation: the visual is privileged, but not pre-eminent. The linear movement of items in the visual display is subsumed into a greater whole within digital editing; non-linear editing, as already discussed, incorporates movement from right to left, as well as the testing of unlimited versions of the edited sequence.
In addition, the visual display of multitrack mixing adds the element of vertical movement, as sections from one track may be moved up or down to another track. Digital mixing represents the multilinear in visual terms; it is a visualisation of the 'all-at-onceness' of multitrack mixing, in which complex combinations of sounds can be grasped in visual terms -- as they are heard, or, indeed, before they are heard. There is a complicated and rapid interplay between the visual and aural senses in digital editing/mixing. The visual display is not merely a representation of sound in spatial terms; it has a temporal dimension as well. It affords an intimation of elaborate sound constructions before they are heard. The eye, in combination with the ear, builds complex layers of sound in time.
The digital age of convergence renders all information -- audio, video, text -- into streams of numerical data. Multimedia formats meld previously discrete media forms into new amalgams. Technological sound now has a visual component; it is capable of both great precision and great subtlety. Digital audio incorporates contrasting facets of time. Founded on the rationalist principles of time-dissection, it nevertheless affords enormous scope for the creative manipulation of sound in time.
John Potts is an audio artist who lectures in media at Macquarie University. His digital audio works 3.27 pm, 5.06 am and Midnight Noon explore aspects of time and memory.
1 Friedrich Kittler, 'The Mechanized Philosopher', in Looking After Nietzsche, ed. Laurence A. Rickels, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. 195.
2 Pierre Levy, 'Toward Superlanguage', in ISEA 94 catalogue, Helsinki: University of Art & Design, 1994, p. 10.
3 Ken C. Pohlmann, Principles Of Digital Audio, Indiana: SAMS, 1992, p. 40.
4 ibid., p. 42.
5 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, London: MacMillan, First Edition, 1911, p. 322.
6 ibid., p. 321.
7 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. xiv.
8 Bergson, op. cit., p. 355.
9 Genevieve Lloyd, Being in Time, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 101.
10 R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980, p. 90.
11 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 93.
12 ibid., p. 91.
13 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, London: Abacus, 1974, p. 297.
14 ibid., p. 293.
15 Friedrich Kittler, 'Gramophone, Film, Typewriter', in October 41, Summer 1987, p. 117.
16 Marcos Novak, 'Liquid Architectures and The Loss of Inscription', in Non-Located On Line, Knowbotic Research, January 1995.
Référence: http://autonomous.org/soundsite/main.html