Date: 6.14.96
From: Sean Cubitt (mccscubi@vaxa.livjm.ac.uk)
When Edison made the first recording, the deaf man reciting
Mary Had a Little Lamb for the child he could scarcely hear, he
instantly doubled the quantity of sounds in the world.
Nowadays the sound environment is almost entirely non-natural.
Making a noise is a mark of power. The legal right to use sirens
or drill holes in the road or fly Concorde over suburban sprawls
belongs to those who can afford it or who make the rules.
Making a noise is a mark of rebellion. It is a refusal of socially
conformed standards which allow only the powerful to make a din.
It is a territorial claim.
Only recording makes silence possible.
To make sense of sound, the 20th century has used two tools: information
and music.
Early sound films are information-led. They are narratives driven
by the passionate pursuit of absolute knowledge. Their vehicle
is dialogue, and music and sound FX are subordinated to the script.
Russolo's futurist noise-music (the intuonorumori) and Cage's
4 minutes 33 seconds have reinvented music as the ambition to
supercede information with experience.
The Cage experience of music is the experience of space (the sound
environment) as time (the duration of the piece).
Nowadays, the film soundtrack is becoming musical.
In new cinema, Dolby/THX and foley function as musical elements.
These films have subordinated information to the experience of
fictional worlds.
No one ever remembered the plot of a *Batman* film. Everyone
remembers Gotham City.
Fictional worlds are better business than narratives. They are
machines for generating narratives. That is why there is no *Mutiny
on the Bounty* videogame.
Film is a time-based medium. You can only explore its world
in one direction. Space is subordinated to time. This is why so
many new films are musicals, even if no one sings.
At the Kolnischer Kunstverein a few years back, for a retrospect
of video installation, visitors were given headsets which switched
from one soundtrack to another when you moved from area to area.
Most people hated it. Because the headset is a Cartesian device:
I hear, therefore I am. It invents a pure individuality listening
at a midpoint between the ears.
Installation sound is for moving through. Installation sound
is - sculptural
- architectural
- urbanist
Installation sound is spatial.
Installation sound is social. (Unless you wear a headset).
These are the domains of recorded sound: information, time
and space.
But in the year of the invention of recording, there was also
the invention of telephony. Fully implicated in the development
of radio, transmitted sound is something else.
Transmitted sound is geographical.
Transmitted sound is interruptable. (In principle: radio lost
most of its two-way capability through the exercise of telecoms
monopolies at the turn of the century).
Trasnmitted sound is (in principle) social.
What is net sound like?
I am looking for sites that might escape from the parameters
of the information/music binary to the dialectical step beyond.
Most of what I have found is informational (tunes and effects
backing up visual messages). Some is musical, encouraging a musical
form of listening to sounds as the experience of duration. Is
there such a thing, if the net is really changing things, as a
new mode of hearing emergent? Or are we still at a convergent
moment at which radio, telephony and movie soundtracks are still
shaking hands in cyberspace?
Any and all suggestions, critiques, earopeners and flames welcome.
Référence: http://www.rhizome.org/cgi-local/query.cgi?action=grab_object&kt=kt0082