The Sound Studies Reader by Jonathan Sterne

Author:Jonathan Sterne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Keyword: Record

Although the exhibitions of 1878 were short-lived, Redpath quickly went on to fresh projects, and souvenir sheets of tinfoil were soon forgotten, the medium of sound recording had forever questioned the relative meanings of writing, print, and public speech. Other versions of related questions soon captured public attention as, for example, when the shooting and eventual death of President James Garfield in 1881 tested the incipient liveness of U.S. media, challenging the press to keep its bulletins up to date via telegraph communications while it followed the hapless use of Bell telephone technology to detect the assassin’s bullet inside the president’s body.35

Whether it worked well now or later, recorded sound had disparaged print by implication, helping to suggest the artificiality of writing in comparison to speech. At the same time, the evident inadequacies of tinfoil records as permanent or indelible inscriptions helped to raise emphatic questions of loss within which the meanings of writing and print had long been enrolled. These questions of loss were narrowly a matter of words written down, printed up, and saved. But they were further suggestive of much broader matters of public memory, self-identification and corresponding exclusion, “our Washingtons” and “our Lincolns” saved against “our” uncertain future, for example, and Onondaga and Tuscarora “accents” “preserved” against “their” imminent demise. If their immediate subjects were the local and the semicarnivalesque, the first phonographs were more broadly the instruments of middle-class hegemony, of an Arnoldian “Culture” with its sacralizing functions directed at “our” traditions and its salvage mentality directed at “theirs.”36

I am suggesting that the phonograph exhibitions formed vernacular experiences of the relationship between speech and writing—a relationship theorized only later by linguists and philosophers—and that such experiences had broad, if unexamined, consequences for cultural formations.37 These experiences were certainly not unique to the phonograph exhibitions or 1878. They had been and continued to be habitual accessories to print. For instance, in 1869 a congressional committee investigated the treatment of Union prisoners held in the South during the Civil War. The committee canvased the North for testimony, oral and written, with the immediate aim to render those “transient and somewhat fugitive histories based on personal experiences and observations” into “an enduring record, truthful and authentic and stamped with the national authority.” Oral and personal histories were captured and redeemed by the authoritative, textual operations of the incipient welfare state.38 Diction makes this a particularly tidy example, but so too did the collectors of song, authors of regionalism, critics of idiom, and reporters of news seek to render personal and aural encounters into material, public records. Wherever it appeared, “speaking” on paper was party to precisely the tangle of concerns that Edison’s phonograph newly helped adumbrate.

Edison boasted to the newspapers that his invention would ruin the market for books, reasoning that recordings were created naturally at no expense, by sound waves impinging on foil, rather than laboriously set in type by wage-hungry compositors. Authors and their audiences would win, even if printers and compositors would lose. But

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