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Historicist Audio Forensics: The Archive of Voices as Repository of Material
and Conceptual Artefacts
Jason Camlot
e idea of a technologically realizable spoken word archive dates back
to the introduction of the tinfoil cylinder phonograph in 1877. In his rst
predictive essay on the implications of his invention, omas Edison sug-
gested that the new medium would be used to create archives of national
import for commemorative use:
It will henceforth be possible to preserve for future genera-
tions the voices as well as the words of our Washingtons, our
Lincolns, our Gladstones, etc., and to have them give us their
‘greatest eort’, in every town and hamlet in the country upon
our holidays.1
e voice archive, in this early formulation, represents a kind of Arnoldian
repository for the ubiquitous annual observance of ‘the best that has been
said’ (if not thought). ile the word ‘record’ (as noun and verb) in 1878
certainly suggested new possibilities for the nature and contents of the
public archive, and for our means of capturing historical events, Edison’s
imagined use of archived voices was still rather limited in scope.2 It was
enough for the voices to be preserved on primarily dormant artefacts and
revived to be heard on occasion for the archive to prove its value as a repos-
itory of national, communal belonging.
In a subsequent predictive essay announcing the 1888 ‘Perfected
Phonograph’, Edison likened the markings of a phonographic recording to
those found on ancient Assyrian and Babylonian clay cylinders, suggesting
the new archival medium of the phonograph cylinder as a ‘progressive’,
self-articulating version of these earlier artefacts:
It is curious to reect that the Assyrians and Babylonians,
2,500 years ago, chose baked clay cylinders inscribed with
All hyperlinks within the article text were accessed on 10 October 2015.
1 omas A. Edison, ‘e Phonograph and its Future’, North American Review,
May–June 1878, pp. 527–36 (p. 534).
2 Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 106.
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cuneiform characters, as their medium for perpetuating
records; while this recent result of modern science, the phono-
graph, uses cylinders of wax for a similar purpose, but with the
great and progressive dierence that our wax cylinders speak
for themselves, and will not have to wait dumbly for centuries
to be deciphered.3
ile I have discussed this last quotation elsewhere in the context of early
fantasies of the phonograph as a medium of discursive transparency,4 what
I would like to highlight here is the stress placed in each of these essays
upon the materiality of the audible artefact, and the event-oriented sce-
nario of its use. A consideration of these categories of artefact and event
represents a useful point of departure for a historically motivated theoriza-
tion of the voice archive.
Neither of the terms, artefact or event, is simple to dene in rela-
tion to sound phenomena. R. Murray Schafer distinguishes between the
sound object and the sound event by identifying the former with Pierre
Schaeer’s clinical denition of l’objet sonore, a specimen of recorded sound
considered ‘in physical or psychophysical terms […] without their semantic
or referential aspects’, and the latter as ‘something that occurs in a certain
place during a particular interval of time’ for which questions of ‘context’
apply. e ‘soundscape’, by extension, ‘is a eld of interactions’ consist-
ing of component sound events.5 Don Ihde, in his explorations of sound
phenomenology, observes that ‘insofar as all sounds are also “events,” all
the sounds are within the rst approximation, likely to be considered as
“moving”’. Ihde, in this instance, imagines sounds as divorced from vis-
ible objects, existing as auditory presences within the horizons of silence
that surround them.6 In both cases, one might say that the sound object
is identied with some primitive version of the audio signal itself, rather
than with a material artefact that either produces or preserves it. Historical
sound seems to present itself as a unique kind of artefact to the critic in that
its non-visual presence may make it seem more ephemeral than other kinds
of visible, material artefacts, like manuscripts, for example, and because its
presence depends upon controlled temporal movement.
is last point is at the heart of Friedrich Kittler’s insistence that
sound recording technology has had a transformative impact upon our
3 omas A. Edison, ‘e Perfected Phonograph’, North American Review, June 1888,
pp. 641–50 (p. 645).
4 Jason Camlot, ‘Early Talking Books: Spoken Recordings and Recitation Antholo-
gies, 1880–1920’, Book History, 6 (2003), 147–73.
5 R. Murray Schafer, e Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the
World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994), pp. 129–31 (rst publ. as e Tuning of
the World (New York: Knopf, 1977)).
6 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 1974), p. 53.
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relationship to the past. Stressing rst the importance of the nineteenth
century’s break with notational systems of transcription (for music, har-
mony, etc.) through its introduction of the concept of frequency — by
which ‘the measure of length is replaced by time as an independent
variable’ — Kittler goes on to state that, due to this transition from transposition
to Time Axis Manipulation (enabled by the concept of frequency), ‘the real
takes the place of the symbolic.’7 Technological media capture, preserve,
and (re)produce aspects of the temporal event that the alphabet cannot,
delivering the past without ‘the bottleneck of syntactical regimentation’
associated with symbolic language; hence, the replacement of the sym-
bolic with the real.8 As it captures and produces ‘the real’ in its capacity to
record a temporal event, the artefact that arises from technological media
is mathematically and materially intertwined with the event it preserves.
e fact that time itself becomes a variable that can be manipulated with
technological media (you can speed up, slow down, reverse the direction
of the record) suggests that our capacity to manipulate the media artefact
not only enables us to process historical ‘real time’ to be experienced as a
temporal event in the present, but to transform historical ‘real time’ into
events of alternate temporal orders as well. en we are talking about
sound recording, the intervolved relationship of artefact to event suggests
the possibilities of replaying history and of making history.
In using the term artefact I am, to begin with, aware of its primary
meaning referring to ‘an object made or modied by human workman-
ship, as opposed to one formed by natural processes’.9 e early spoken
recording sits oddly at the crossroads of art and nature as both a crafted
speech and a sound wave, an empirical phenomenon mechanically cap-
tured. Just what is the artefact of the sound archive, and how has it shaped
our ideas and expectations of what such a repository should be? ere the
early Edisonian idea of an archive of voices was selective and specic in its
imagined motivations of use, contemporary capacities for digitization and
media aggregation raise the possibility of expanding our own idea of a his-
torical archive of voices from including ‘the best that has been said’ to ‘eve-
rything said that has ever been recorded’. My exploration of the questions
posed above, in the present article, will proceed with an awareness of the
digitally mediated reception of our regular experience of the archival sig-
nal, the audio that emanates, post-media migration, as if from some notion
of an ever-expanding archive of voices. Proceeding with an awareness of
7 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. by G. Winthrop-Young
and M. Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 24.
8 Sybille Krämer, ‘e Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation: On Frie-
drich Kittler’s Conception of Media’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23.7–8 (2006),
93–109 (p. 94).
9 ‘artefact’, n. A.1.a., OED online <http://www.oed.com> [accessed 10 October 2015].
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the digital does not imply a circumvention of the original material artefacts
in question; nor does it erase a critical motivation to locate historically the
voices in this expansive archive — but it qualies both the artefacts and
our historicist motivations in signicant ways. As the concluding section
of this article will suggest, conceptual and computational manipulation of
the audio signal as divorced from the original material artefact allows us
to engage in new kinds of contextualization and expands our capacity for
philological engagement.
Still, I will begin by presenting the names of some of the artefacts in
play as if they have been arranged upon a table before you, to handle and
examine: a phonautograph sheet, or phonautogram (c. 1866), a cut from a
tinfoil audio cylinder (c. 1877), an Edison wax cylinder (c. 1888), a Berliner
at disc gramophone record (c. 1897), an aluminium instantaneous disc
(c. 1933), a reel of quarter-inch polyester audio tape (c. 1966), an audio
cassette tape (c. 1979), a compact disc (c. 1990), and an MP3 le (c. 1999).
is list presents a variety of physical substances ranging from paper,
metal, paran, to plastic, and ends in the ironic fact of the MP3 as a new
kind of entity, one that is less substantial than representational (one cannot
hold an MP3 le, but one can handle it — select it, ‘click’ it — as a digi-
tal representation presented through software, a Graphical User Interface,
and the specic hardware, computer, iPod, etc.) that delivers the GUI.
Each one of these media artefacts, whether it is substantial or not — and its
audible content — demands the practice of historicist audio forensics. at
is to say, such media artefacts demand extensive archival (and geek-ival)
research — the use of manuscript and print documents surrounding the
sound that the artefacts hold, and the extensive, obsessive knowledge of
historians and audio technology researchers about the particularities of the
media formats and technologies that preserve those sounds. Increasingly,
audio artefacts demand the use of digital tools that enable new possibilities
for navigation, manipulation, visualization, and examination of the audio
signal, and, in some cases, the sonication of visualizations derived from
the original material media formats themselves. It will be the digital side of
historicist audio forensics that I will focus on in this article, as I meditate
upon the status for historical research of the artefacts that comprise the
archive of voices at the present time.
In a recent interview in the new open access journal Amodern, and
then again in his book, A New Republic of Letters, Jerome McGann argues
that ‘what digital technology has exposed is not that we need a new pro-
gram of humanities study, a Digital Humanities, but a recovery of philo-
logical method for our changed circumstances. Philology in a New Key.’10
10 Jerome McGann, ‘Towards Philology in a New Key’, interview by Scott Pound,
Amodern, 1 <http://amodern.net/article/interview-with-jerome-mcgann/> [accessed
10 October 2015].
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By philology, McGann means a discipline of skills designed ‘to preserve,
monitor, investigate, and augment our cultural inheritance, including the
various material means by which it has been realized and transmitted’.11
Here is a longer quotation from McGann on the same point:
e need to migrate our cultural heritage to a digital condi-
tion has exposed the serious limitations in such an approach
to the study of our cultural inheritance. e historical record
is composed of a vast set of specic material objects that have
been created and passed along through an even more vast net-
work of agents and agencies. e meanings of the record —
the interpretation of those meanings — are a function of the
operations taking place in that dynamic network. Only a soci-
ology of the textual condition can oer an interpretive method
adequate to the study of this eld and its materials. (A New
Republic of Letters, p. 22)
McGann’s call for a philology in a new key entails a renewed application of
practical skills, procedural and interpretive tools that include descriptive
bibliography, scholarly editing, theory of texts, book history, and, I would
add, media history and theory, to the new kinds of databases and interfaces
we are creating. is is the big work that needs to be done, the kind of work
that has motivated initiatives like NINES, and many of the individual Web
projects that have been aggregated into that consortium. Rigorous engage-
ment with the physical materials — volumes of e Yellow Book, artworks,
ceramics, and realia on display in John Ruskin’s St George’s Museum, mul-
tiple copies of Blake’s illuminated books — that populate sites designed
for their digital presentation results in well-researched glosses adjacent to
the digital images of the materials. And quite beyond the informative gloss,
such rigorous historical engagement results in thorough metadata, and,
consequently, expands the ways in which we may remodel and investigate
our understanding of historical cultural artefacts. Online, we do not touch
paper, canvas, or clay. We organize richly prepared simulacra of the arte-
facts we imagine to be a part of our rational archive within an environment
that exposes them to transformative imagination.
In the sense I am describing it, the digital ‘archive’ is not to be
understood as a preservation medium, but as a transformation medium
that opens texts and material artefacts to new contexts, new interpreta-
tions, and new transformative uses. is work is not a replacement for more
empirical methods of writing history, but importantly makes us aware
of the signicance of media contexts for the kinds of history we wish to
11 Jerome McGann, A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digi-
tal Reproduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 37, emphasis
in original.
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pursue, and the kinds of assumptions about the status of the artefacts we
wish to contextualize. It also allows us to discover aspects of our objects
of inquiry that might not have been discoverable had they remained in a
single media format.
To approach texts and objects in the digital environment is to
encounter the destabilizing material element inherent in all cultural arte-
facts, which encourages an approach to research materials as ‘dierential
texts’, a term introduced by Marjorie Perlo to mean ‘texts that exist in dif-
ferent material forms, with no single version being the denitive one’.12 On
the cue of media theorist Darren Wershler, I transmute Perlo’s term and
support a claim for the concept of ‘dierential media’ as one that demands
our awareness of the transformative impact of media contexts as an object
of interpretation migrates across, or exists multifariously within, dierent
media platforms.13 e idea of dierential media seems particularly well
suited to a consideration of a historical sound recording that can be said to
exist, uniformly (‘that Tennyson recording’) yet dierentially, on cylinder,
LP, audio cassette tape, and as an MP3 le (not to mention as a textual
transcription or visual representation). ere are other concepts with cur-
rency that might be considered for our purposes. For example, the idea of
media specicity in the sense that Katherine Hayles has used the phrase to
delineate the characteristics of media environments in relation to the devel-
opment of digital texts — the movement ‘from the language of “text” to a
more precise vocabulary of screen and page, digital program and analogue
interface, code and ink, mutable image and durably inscribed mark, texton
and scripton, computer and book’ — while certainly useful for our thinking
about the text on page and screen, is somewhat too visual in its orientation to
serve the present meditation on the archive of voices.14 Similarly, Jay David
Bolter and Richard Grusin’s elaboration of the concept of remediation —
while extremely useful for, among other things, its observation that
12 Marjorie Perlo, ‘Screening the Page/Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the
Dierential Text’, in Contemporary Poetics, ed. by Louis Armand (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 2007), pp. 379–92 (p. 379), emphasis in original.
13 In the natural sciences, a dierential medium refers to a growth (‘culturing’) me-
dium containing compounds that work to visually distinguish microorganisms, ei-
ther by the way the colony appears, or by the colony’s contrast with the surround-
ing medium. is idea of the dierentiation of content by a medium is relevant to
the present discussion insofar as the media through which a signal may migrate will
distinguish certain of its characteristics, and erase others. For an expanded theory
of dierential media as an assemblage of materials (and their circulation) that char-
acterize a ‘single’ cultural production, see Darren Wershler, Guy Maddin’s ‘My Win-
nipeg’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 9–11.
14 N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork
Girl: e Importance of Media-Specic Analysis’, Postmodern Culture, 10.2 (2000)
<http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.100/10.2hayles.txt> [accessed
10 October 2015] (para. 3 of 58).
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‘no medium […] can now function independently and establish its own
separate and puried space of cultural meaning’ — seems similarly biased
towards the visual arts and visual media: painting, computer games, lm,
photography, television, etc.15
e idea of dierential media can better accommodate Kittler’s sense
of the continuity between technological media and digital media as dier-
ential (yet continuous) forms of data processing, so that the wax cylinder
and the MP3, the phonograph and the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation)
can be conceptualized, at one level, as engaging in the same processes of
temporal manipulation, but through dierent media formats and interfaces,
and with signicantly variable degrees of transformative impact upon the
audible temporal event. Further, the idea of dierential media is also use-
ful, I think, for considering the possibilities and implications of migrating
our own digital interventions, our digital ‘archive’ projects, maps, data-
bases, and visualizations back into print or other media formats — perhaps
even audible formats — and for imagining new forms of scholarly produc-
tion that are not exclusively concerned with designing websites.
We are all engaged in acts of digital creation and transformation on
a regular basis, although we are not always deliberately conscious of this
fact. Cultural analysis of the implications of our emailing, googling, blog-
ging, texting, word processing, and digital editing for our work as liter-
ary scholars and historical researchers is well underway. For example (one
that is specically relevant to Victorianist researchers), Catherine Robson’s
‘How We Search Now’ asks ‘what it means for our scholarship that our
two distinct modes of searching [material v. digital] link us to dierent
archives, require dierent reading and analytical practices, and produce
markedly dierent results’. Her essay proceeds to provide rich descrip-
tion and documentation of specic processes that inform the relationship
between two increasingly intertwined modes of research and discovery.16
On a broader theoretical scale, much signicant work that can help us
understand the import of how we search, write, think, and hear, etc., has
emerged from media historians like Lisa Gitelman, Jonathan Sterne, Ian
Bogost, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Jussi Parikka, and Wolfgang Ernst, who
have developed concepts of comparative ‘new’ media, ‘format studies’,
‘platform studies’, and media archaeology, respectively.17
15 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 55.
16 Catherine Robson, ‘How We Search Now: New and Old Ways of Digging Up
Wolfe’s “Sir John Moore”’, in Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies,
ed. by Veronica Alfano and Andrew Stauer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015),
pp. 11–28 (p. 14).
17 See Gitelman, Always Already New; Jonathan Sterne, MP3: e Meaning of a Format
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, Rac-
ing the Beam: e Atari Video Computer System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009);
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All of these cultural theorists and historians are working to articu-
late the presuppositions we bring to our new media environments, to have
us see the historical underpinnings of what we suppose. is is part of the
serious work that needs to be done, and can be identied as functioning
in line with McGann’s call for a ‘Philology in a New Key’. And then there
is a somewhat more ludic, experimental kind of digital engagement that I
would argue also has an important role to play in the present recalibration
of our understanding of what we, as literary and cultural historians, can
do in relation to our changing media environment. is kind of digital
engagement — let us call it ‘digitalling around’ — can function as a useful
and revealing method of experimental critical play. As Jussi Parikka has
argued:
Play is important when understood as part of didactics — the
hands-on approach that allows us to try, to have tactile con-
tact with, to touch and open media […]. Despite the fact that
technical media often work in subphenomenal ways — in other
words, their principles of operation are not directly open to
observation by the human eye — such a manner of tinkering
with media-technological eects forms a circuit with the theo-
retical work.18
Two main branches of digital work in the humanities have been those per-
taining to ‘humanities computing’ (tool building, text analysis, and encod-
ing) on the one hand, and ‘new media studies and design’ (often pursued
by theorist-practitioners interested in exploring the nature and implications
of new media) on the other. In a fairly recent and still extremely relevant
article on ‘e State of the Digital Humanities’, Alan Liu frames his analysis
of the value and potential of both branches just mentioned in terms of their
relative degrees of critical awareness. Observing, rst, that the expanding
domain of digital humanities must ‘in some manner, for better or for worse,
[…] serve the postindustrial state’, Liu ultimately decides that ‘the digital
humanities are not ready to take up their full responsibility [within the disci-
pline] because the eld does not yet possess an adequate critical awareness of
the larger social, economic, and cultural issues at stake’. 19 Historicist audio
Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008) and Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Process-
ing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, forthcoming); Jussi
Parikka, at is Media Archeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012); Wolfgang Ernst,
Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. by Jussi Parikka, Electronic Mediations, 39 (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
18 Jussi Parikka, ‘Archival Media eory: An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s Me-
dia Archaeology’, in Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, pp. 1–22 (p. 14).
19 Alan Liu, ‘e State of the Digital Humanities: A Report and a Critique’, Arts and
Humanities in Higher Education, 11 (2012), 8–41 (p. 11).
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forensics is concerned with the historical recontextualization of an analogue
signal and its related media so that we can gather the aesthetic, social, and
material relations that informed their use and meaning. As will soon become
clear, digital historicist audio forensics can be deployed to this end as well.
In what follows, I will rehearse a short series of examples that shows
how digital tools and processes can be used to amplify and transform our
historical understanding of analogue media and sounds, and how digital
processes entail a conceptual conversion of the material. In all cases, digital
historicist audio forensics entails a combination of researched (neo-philological
and documentary) contextualization, and of digital manipulation. It is through
such synthesis of ‘old’ archival research practice and ‘new’ digital design and
development-oriented experiments that the historical archive of voices is
conceptualized, designed, and realized in the present.
Tinfoil
‘A thing is when it isn’t doing’, Brian Massumi writes, in italics, as a starting maxim
for thinking the category of motion back into critical practice.20 Technically
speaking, a recorded sound, an audio record in analogue form, is always doing
something because it is always in motion. It is a concrete example of Zeno’s vir-
tual arrow in ight. Its resonance resides in its existence as a non-stop operation.
Even a piece of sound (a sound ‘bite’) must be in motion to be audibly percepti-
ble as a thing. Without motion there is no sound. As Ihde has speculated, sound
— with its intrinsic movement, and its armation of the verb over predicate,
represents a challenge to the ‘realm of mute objects’ that has functioned as ‘the
implicit standard of a visualist metaphysics’ (p. 50). at might a static sound
memento look like, and what could such a memento mean as a historical artefact?
Lisa Gitelman has pursued these questions in her account of the souvenir foils
that were cut from tinfoil recordings made at early demonstrations of omas
Edison’s 1877 tinfoil phonograph (Fig. 1). e foil cuts were handed out to those
who had ‘witnessed’ the demonstration of what Edison’s new invention could do:
Phonograph exhibitors ran through pounds of tinfoil, and
audiences scrambled for keepsakes. In their sonic ‘capture’
and later, in their mute evocation of public experience, pieces
of tinfoil in private hands formed souvenirs of immense power.
ey were belongings that vouched for belonging. ey were
artifacts that vouched for facts.21
20 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Aect, Sensation (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2002), p. 6.
21 Lisa Gitelman, ‘Souvenir Foils: On the Status of Print at the Origin of Recorded
Sound’, in New Media, 1740–1915, ed. by Lisa Gitelman and Georey B. Pingree
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 157–73 (p. 166).
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e cut of souvenir recording foil functioned as a static object standing in
(mutely and still) for a public event that inevitably escaped those who were
present at its unfolding. Sound is always, obviously, ‘tinged with event’
(Massumi, p. 11). e visible grooves and bumps of a cylinder foil (for
instance) are a static, material manifestation of a sonic event. Once cut up
into a keepsake scrap, the souvenir foil, a piece of something that once had
the potential to reproduce the eventfulness of the sound demonstration,
now took its metonymic relational position as ‘object to event/experience’,
Fig. 1: Tinfoil fragment with twenty-four grooves, produced on Edison
phonograph (c. 1877).
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to use a formulation from Susan Stewart.22 Unable, like an object in an
Anglo-Saxon artefact riddle, to speak for itself, the object that stands (still)
in relation to an event/experience is static, incomplete, and secondary. As
Stewart explains, ‘the souvenir must remain impoverished and partial so
that it can be supplemented by a narrative discourse, a narrative discourse
which articulates the play of desire’ (p. 136).
But something happens when the analogue artefact is approached
with a digital process. Here is a fragment of phonographic tinfoil captured
by the University of Southampton’s Sound Archive Project researchers as a
high-resolution 3D digital scan, performed for preservation purposes, and
ultimately for digitally generated replay by a virtual stylus (Fig. 2). ey
use a process that performs a precise coordinate mapping (including the
22 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 136.
Fig. 2: Digital surface measure image of Edison tinfoil fragment.
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calculation of depth) of the cylinder’s surface, from which they can gener-
ate a quantitative analysis of signal reproduction.
e digital process works to render the material fragment event-
ful and potentially whole again. Assuming the possibility of artefacts as
abstract, non-material entities — for example, the way a thesis exists as a
necessary, universalizing artefact for philosophical discourse and the pro-
duction of certain kinds and movements of knowledge — I would suggest
that the analogue sound recording, when approached through digital pro-
cesses, moves from a delimited, manifest material thing, to an eventful per-
formance of the abstract ideal of that material thing.
Phonautogram
Stewart’s metonymic image of how object relates to event, and its binary
conception of silence as static and sound as kinetic, is reversed when we
move from analogue models of sonication to digital ones. is is most dra-
matically apparent in my second example, the recent sonication through
digital scanning of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph
transcripts (Fig. 3).23 Scott’s phonautograph was introduced in the 1860s
as a way of writing sound, rendering it visible, and (ideally) legible. It
was not designed for sound reproduction. us, from Scott’s perspective,
a phonautogram was not a sound recording in the way we understand
that category today. Rather, it was a graphically captured sound inscrip-
tion; a machine-generated audio fossil — a static artefact bearing materi-
ally the trace of a once living sound event. e First Sounds researchers
have reanimated these artefacts into actual sound events again by taking
high-resolution digital scans of the phonautograms and playing them back
(with a lot of adjustment and preconception) via digital sonication.24 One
example of this work is the sonication of Scott’s voice singing the chil-
dren’s song ‘Au clair de la lune’. e process used to generate such a record-
ing represents an audible rendering, through new media, of a visual script
of voice that was never intended to be heard and is, in eect, a digital rever-
sal of Scott’s intention. ere he wanted to turn sound into a visual form
of data, the First Sounds researchers have turned Scott’s visual data back
23 e image in Fig. 3 depicting a phonautogram of the human voice from a dis-
tance (‘phonautographie de la voix humaine à distance’) is reproduced from Serge
Benoit, Daniel Blouin, Jean-Yves Dupont, et Gérard Emptoz, ‘Chronique d’une in-
vention: le phonautographe d’Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (1817–1879) et les
cercles parisiens de la science et la technique’, Documents pour l’histoire des techniques,
17 (2009), 69–89 (p. 74) <http://dht.revues.org/502> [accessed 10 October 2015].
24 e First Sound researchers include David Giovannoni, Patrick Feaster, Richard
Martin, and Meagan Hennessey. eir work focuses on identifying, understanding,
and playing very early sound recordings.
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into sound. And thus, the potential for a new historical sound archive of
phonautograms is born, where once there were only silent sheets of smoke-
blackened paper.
e process that allows for such a creation is an innovative form of
digital historicist audio forensics that Patrick Feaster, folklorist and First
Sounds researcher, calls paleospectrophony, the goal of which is to use dig-
ital tools to convert waveform images of dierent kinds into playable fre-
quency and amplitude values, and then to play those values for us to hear
in the present.25 As Feaster describes the process on his Phonozoic website
that is ‘dedicated to the history of the phonograph and related media’:
Paleospectrophony is the name I’ve given to a distinctive
application for reverse Fourier analysis software such as
Coagula, AudioPaint and MetaSynth’s Image Synth. Each
of these programs can ‘play’ any digital image as though it
were a spectrogram: one axis is time, the other is frequency,
and the intensity of individual pixels corresponds to ampli-
tude.Paleospectrophony is the use of this type of software to
‘play’ old inscriptions of sound.26
25 For a useful description of Scott’s phonautograph, and a ‘discography’ of the
phonautograms Scott produced, see Patrick Feaster, ‘Édouard-Léon Scott de Mar-
tinville: An Annotated Discography’, ARSC Journal, 41 (2010), 43–81.
26 Patrick Feaster, ‘Paleospectrophony’, <http://www.phonozoic.net/paleospec
trophony.html>. See also Patrick Feaster, ‘What is Paleospectrophony?’,
<https://grionagedotcom.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/what-is-paleospectrophony/>
[both accessed 10 October 2015].
Fig. 3: Phonautogram of the human voice from a distance.
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e procedure works to convert waveform images into playable time, fre-
quency, and amplitude values and represents a creative form of Time Axis
Manipulation as Kittler has described it. ile originating from a material
visual object, the audio artefacts generated from this technique are born
digital and thus represent a digital realization of the abstract idea of the
phonautogram as an audible artefact. en we listen to such a sonied
recording, one might say, we are listening to the sound of a conceptual
artefact.
Flat disc
A variation on the two examples of digital processes applied to material
artefacts that I have just described — those of digital restoration and soni-
cation — proposes the possibility of playing the preserved, analogue sound
artefact digitally, without ever playing it acoustically. I am referring to
Alfred Clark’s early twentieth-century voice archive project, referred to as
the ‘Museum of Voices’ — a collection of arias sung by ‘the voices of the
greatest singers’ of the day, and then preserved beneath the Paris Opera in
a time capsule with instructions for future use. As this procedure of preser-
vation and use was reported in the Literary Digest of 1906:
e records themselves, which have been made on specially
prepared plates, have been enclosed in hermetically sealed
metal boxes containing a chemical compound to protect them
for future years. ese boxes have been engraved with the date
upon which they are to be opened — one in fty years, another
in one hundred years, and so on, the dates having been chosen
to conform with the musical festivities which will undoubtedly
take place at that time.27
One hundred years later, EMI, heir to the Gramophone Company that
made the recordings, reissued a three-CD set of the buried operatic voices
called Les Urnes de l’Opéra (Treasures from the Paris Opera Vaults). at is
interesting about this digital reissue of once entombed analogue artefacts
is that the audio les delivered on the CDs have not, in fact, come from the
at disc records that were stored in asbestos-covered cloth and long-since
shattered glass plates, but from the Bibliothèque nationale’s extensive pre-
1938 collection of recordings. (Note that at discs, unlike cylinders, were
particularly useful for reproduction from a master.) e reasons for not
using the Clark-stored recordings have to do with more than just the dan-
gers of handling asbestos and broken glass. It was discovered, upon open-
ing the vault in 2007, that about twenty-four of the recordings had already
27 ‘A Museum of Voices’, Literary Digest, 15 September 1906, pp. 347–48.
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disappeared (stolen, apparently). And then it was decided by the project
leader, Elizabeth Giuliani, that it would be better to use ‘identical’ surro-
gate recordings from the national library even for the recordings that they
did have from the vault, so as not to compromise the material integrity of
the discs that Clark stored over a century ago. As Giuliani explained, ‘even
if these old records are played once, they are slightly damaged by the nee-
dle. We decided to await new optical technologies that can read them with-
out touching them.’28 e digital reissue of voices from Les Urnes de l’Opéra
does not actually provide voices captured on the exact material artefacts
from the Opera’s vaults.
is digital version of Clark’s time capsule is part surrogate and part
digital stand-in for twenty-four phantom recordings of the Opera that once
were materially lodged in a tomb. us, the digital process, in this instance,
simultaneously reinforces the idea of the material repository of sound and
the sacred nature of its artefacts, even as it works quickly to lock them back
up in the vault again so it can disseminate and play those sacred artefacts’
audible content without the fear of their actual, material destruction, and,
ultimately, without the necessity of their physical presence.
Wax cylinder
Many (I would say, most) early analogue sound recordings are only avail-
able to us to listen to today because they have been digitized. e audible
signals we come to know have been processed through an analogue-to-
digital converter. is is the rst step in any exploration of how other digital
tools may be used to assist in a historical and formal analysis of early sound
recordings. Very often, this is not the rst media migration that the original
acoustic cylinder audio signal has gone through. Numerous early cylinder
recordings were reissued on at disc, then, over time, have been preserved
(usually in material archives) through migration to magnetic tape, then to
any number of possible digital le formats. e arrival into digital does not
end the migration process, as hardware and le format conversions are an
ongoing reality for any fugitive acoustic cylinder or early at disc recording
signal. Ten years ago, archives would preserve digitized audio on archival
quality CDs, usually in WAV format. Today, they tend to keep them on
larger storage drives, often in both WAV and MP3 formats. And since hard
drives do not live forever, the migration will continue so long as we care
about these semi-tangible artefacts of cultural heritage.
28 Alan Riding, ‘From a Vault in Paris, Sounds of Opera 1907’, New York Times,
16 February 2009, section C, p. 3 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/arts/
music/17vaul.html> [accessed 10 October 2015].
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A key point to keep in mind in the course of making such seemingly
obvious observations is that ‘format’ as a concept represents a useful, even
crucial, historicist preoccupation. As Jonathan Sterne argues:
Most crucial dimensions of format are codied in some way—
sometimes through policy, sometimes through the technol-
ogy’s construction, and sometimes through sedimented habit.
ey have a contractual and conventional nature. e format
is what species the protocols by which a medium will oper-
ate. (p. 8)
e codication of formats inform use and, consequently, social, cul-
tural, and aesthetic meaning. In considering the audio signal, format (and
our historical understanding of formats) may help us to understand just
what, exactly, we are listening to, what we are dealing with, and what we
might want to pursue in terms of research, interpretation, and critical
methodology.
Take the simple example of the dierences in frequency range asso-
ciated with early acoustic cylinder recordings and early electrical record-
ings (recordings that transduce the acoustic signal into electrical pulses
and then reconvert them into acoustic sound waves on output). Below is
a quickly generated frequency analysis (using the open source software
Audacity) of a very early acoustic sound recording (Fig. 4):
Fig. 4: Summarizing frequency analysis of ‘e Phonograph’s Salutation’ as
visualized in Audacity.
e sound of this recording and the results of the frequency analysis match
the audio characteristics associated with this early recording format. e
majority of its frequency response is right up the middle at about 1000Hz
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(so not much of a dynamic range — little bass and treble, just mid-range
frequencies). It has a relatively low amplitude, overall, and an audibly poor
signal-to-noise ratio.
Another recording, allegedly from the same period, Walt itman
reading the poem ‘America’, shows dierent results in this basic frequency
analysis (Fig. 5). is ‘itman’ recording was apparently rst played on
an NBC radio show in 1951 (so, if authentic, may have been captured from
the air with an aluminium instantaneous disc recorder, or an early reel-to-
reel tape machine). It then showed up on a tape of early spoken recordings
issued in 1974 and was ‘rediscovered’ as a cultural object of interest by
Larry Don Grin when he mentioned it in an article about itman and
‘voice’, published in the itman Quarterly Review.29
itman scholar Ed Folsom, editor of the itman Quarterly Review,
wishes to believe the recording is authentic (who doesn’t, really) and has
focused on the signal-to-noise ratio of the recording to support the claim
for its authenticity. Audio technicians at the Library of Congress have
argued that the recording is too well equalized, and presents too great a
separation of the voice signal from the surface noise of the cylinder that
would have formed a part of the overall signal, the surface noise in this case
sounding like it ‘is pretty much in the background’.30 Folsom cites the opin-
ion of Dave Beauvais, an expert on 1890s sound recording technologies,
to rebut the argument of the Library of Congress technicians, noting that
vertically cut Edison cylinder recordings ‘exhibit this superlative richness,
balance, and freedom from distortion in the lower and middle portions of
the audible spectrum’ and consequently present ‘near-perfect equalization’
in their delivery of an audio signal. erefore, according to Beauvais, the
known frequency range capacity of certain ‘vertical-cut artifacts’ supports
the argument for this recording’s authenticity (cited in Folsom, p. 215).
Digital frequency analysis may suggest otherwise — since the fre-
quency range shown even in my fast (and inconclusive) Audacity analysis
indicates the likelihood that a condenser microphone, used in electrical
recording processes, may have been deployed in capturing this speech. But
even recognition of the overly wide frequency range found in the itman
recording is complicated by the possible migration history of the recording
itself (possibly, from cylinder to instantaneous disc or reel-to-reel tape, to
cassette tape, to WAV and MP3 les). We simply do not know what kinds
of audio enhancement may have been performed to boost or transform the
signal during the process of migration. ile the ndings of a thorough
29 William Grimes, ‘Poem is itman’s: Is the Voice?’, New York Times, 16 March
1992, section B, pp. 1–2 <http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/16/books/poem-is-
whitman-s-is-the-voice.html> [accessed 10 October 2015].
30 Ed Folsom, ‘e itman Recording’, itman Quarterly Review, 9 (1994), 214–16
(p. 215).
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frequency analysis of the itman recording — should someone perform
one — may never be completely reliable for deciding upon the recording’s
authenticity, such digital analysis does reliably lead us to face and consider
questions of media migration and interface, and that, I am suggesting, is
a very useful thing. In the meantime, the audio signal of what may or may
not be Walt itman’s voice is included in the audio domain of the Walt
itman Archive.31 e 36-second recording does not exist to our knowl-
edge in its original wax cylinder format. at we have is a signal that may,
or may not, have been preserved through media migration, and the ability
to speculate about the status of this signal as an actual archival artefact—
perhaps an Edison vertical-cut cylinder — that has been divorced from its
original, material medium. Digital visualizations of audible frequencies
paint a picture of our desire to substantiate the fugitive signal as materially
artefactual and historically authentic.
31 ‘Pictures & Sound: Audio’, Walt itman Archive <http://www.whitmanarchive.
org/multimedia/audio.html> [accessed 10 October 2015].
Fig. 5: Summarizing frequency analysis of ‘Walt itman’ reading the poem
‘America’ in Audacity.
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The signal
Visualizations generated from the digitized audio signal can be used in a
great variety of ways, beyond the need for preservation or authentication.
I will close this exploration of the status of the artefact we identify with
an archive of voices with a few examples from a larger set of experiments
I have been performing on early acoustic and electrically recorded perfor-
mances of Alfred Tennyson’s ‘e Charge of the Light Brigade’: namely,
recordings of the poem made by Victorian actors and elocutionists Canon
Fleming, Lewis Waller, and Henry Ainley.32
Some overarching questions in this case ask: at might we (literary
and cultural historians) do with such recordings? How might we visualize
and describe the prosody of literary performance? How can digital tools
help us understand Victorian elocutionary practice? Like Patrick Feaster,
sonifying previously unheard visualizations of sound, we can experiment
with software to explore the possibilities of sound visualization for new
kinds of engagement with historical spoken recordings.
As we know, modes of recitation that combined prescribed vocal
actions with gesture and facial expression were once an important part of
the experience and study of literature. Elocution as a prescriptive, perform-
ative practice developed in the eighteenth century as a method for a public
reader (other than the author) to convey to the hearer the meaning of the
writer. Elocution was, in the words of John Rice, as he put it in his work
An Introduction to the Art of Reading (1765), a method for ‘converting Writing
into Speech’.33 e process of this conversion involved a self-conscious per-
formance of natural expression. As Jacqueline George has put it, in elocu-
tion, ‘the reader must be at once self-consciously constructed and perfectly
natural, adhering to the proper rules for reading — pronunciation, pitch,
pauses, gestures — without revealing his reading to be a performance, as
such’ (p. 374). e reader, in short, attempts to function as a good (that is to
say, natural, immediate) vehicle of delivery between text and audience.
In this sense elocution is all about enacting a sound interface. It seems
counter-intuitive to us today, when we examine the pages of elocution manuals,
with their extensive categories and instructions for vocal manipulation,
bodily gesture, facial expression, and symbolic systems of annotating texts
for performance, to think of them as handbooks for the naturalization of
print. We are estranged in signicant ways from understanding what an
32 Lewis Waller, ‘Recitation — Mr. Lewis Waller — Charge of the Light Brigade’
(Gramophone Company, 1907); Canon Fleming, ‘e Charge of the Light Brigade’
(Gramophone and Typewriter Company, 1906); Henry Ainley, ‘e Charge of the
Light Brigade (Tennyson)’ (HMV, 1915).
33 Cited in Jacqueline George, ‘Public Reading and Lyric Pleasure: Eighteenth
Century Elocutionary Debates and Poetic Practices’, ELH, 76 (2009), 371–97 (p. 375).
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elocutionary model of reading meant in the nineteenth century: what it
meant in relation to print media and written composition, social decorum,
and the faculty psychology that informed the particular kind of communi-
cation circuit it entailed.
ile Victorian elocutionary actions may no longer have the desired
emotional eects upon us now (instead of awe we feel either embarrassed
or amused when we hear them), a mapping of such performed speech
eects as visualized in a sound recording, in relation to the psychologi-
cal attributes commonly associated with them in elocution manuals, can
help us decipher, to some extent, what a Victorian elocutionary perfor-
mance was attempting to achieve. is kind of visual mapping may not
help us immerse ourselves in the reciter’s aective motives — even with the
most extreme attempts at achieving the kind of ‘critical sympathy’ Jerome
McGann calls for in books like e Beauty of Inections and e Poetics of
Sensibility — but it may help us to understand how we were supposed to feel
and respond to the inections that we hear.34 In eect, a highly mediated
engagement with the audible signal, freed from its original material format
and consequently rendered immeasurably transformable, may allow us to
experience and comprehend the artefacts of the Victorian archive of voices
with greater depth and contextual specicity.
e exploration process I am describing is highly mediated in terms
of format, tools, interface, and disciplinary methodology (among other
mediating factors). With this set of explorations, I am proceeding from
the assumption that linguistics as a discipline, and some of the digital
tools used by linguists for phonetic analysis, can help literary scholars
develop methods for approaching literary recordings. One tool I have been
experimenting with is called Praat, an open source speech analysis soft-
ware designed by linguists to ‘do phonetics by computer’. Praat provides
a means of visualizing and analysing a variety of properties of speech, at
various granularities, with highly accurate results.
e Praat software is not a solution for all forms of literary analysis
unto itself as it has some signicant shortcomings — the need for extensive
familiarity with the details of acoustic analysis, an interface that cannot
provide ‘distance’ views of the audio signal but is restricted to the analysis
of short audio segments, to name just two. Praat is a tool that evokes pos-
sibilities of how we might immerse ourselves in the signal of the historical
archive of voices in order to nd new formal and prosodic properties, but
it is specialized and ponderous enough to inhibit any sense of transparency
in the pursuit of such immersion.
34 Jerome McGann, e Beauty of Inections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method
and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 202; The Poetics of Sensibility:
A Revolution in Poetic Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 136.
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In using Praat as a way into thinking about historical recordings, I
am using a tool from a discipline other than my own (a tool that embodies
the assumptions and ideology of that discipline) against the grain of its own
design. But I am also taking advantage of the descriptive vocabulary for
speech prosody that the discipline of linguistics has developed. Linguistic
information such as intonation, stress, phonemes, words, and phrases are
not directly measurable in the acoustic signal. ese are abstract concepts
from linguistics that have to be found there. So, in using software like Praat,
we are looking for acoustic correlates (dened by an academic discipline)
in a digital visual representation of the sound wave. ese are abstract con-
cepts from linguistics (imposed by the listener) that we use to annotate
(mark up) the waveform representing the audio signal, and then attempt
to compute and render visually for the purpose of analysis. Speech analysis
software can tell us about the measurable, acoustic properties of a speech
signal, but can only give us clues about linguistic or expressive informa-
tion conveyed by the signal. So, in saying I am interested in examining an
elocutionist’s pitch contours, for example, I am actually saying that I am
interested in discovering what a computer rendering of an isolated linguis-
tic concept like ‘pitch’ might reveal about how Victorian trained elocution-
ists chose to read Tennyson’s poetry out loud.
e annotation approach I have taken with these early recordings of
‘e Charge’ has been to work quite directly from categories of vocal action as
described in a large sampling of elocution manuals published between 1800
and 1922, and then to apply certain ubiquitous categories to speech eects
heard in the recordings themselves. My analysis of these poems using Praat
has thus far been limited to some basic prosodic details, roughly divided
into the three overarching categories of Pitch, Duration, and Amplitude (Fig.
6). Again, such categories are ultimately abstractions of far more complex
phenomena. Being quite aware that these are abstractions, Praat is built in
a way that such qualities can be tracked in isolation from each other, using
Interval Tiers. Each phrase and the spaces between phrases constitute an
interval. e rst tier displays the text of the poem, and the subsequent
tiers are used to annotate phrases that demonstrate speech eects identied
with the categories of Pitch, Duration, and Amplitude.
Tremor
Take, for example, the prevalent use of a combination of tremor (vibrato)
and prolongation (holding or extending a uniform vocal sound) in Waller’s
delivery of the lines ‘Cannon to right of them’. We can see the vibrato very
clearly in Waller’s pristinely squiggly blue pitch contours (Fig. 7). Waller
delivers the vocal action here as if to represent the fury of the cannons
as they are ring. But, in fact, Waller deploys vibrato almost all the way
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through his reading, giving the entire performance a frantic and relent-
less feeling of distress. is is an unorthodox use of the eect (accord-
ing to Victorian elocution manuals), where vocal tremor is meant to be
used sparingly to express ‘the condition of suering, grief, tenderness, and
supplication’.35 Fleming and Ainley, on the other hand, in accordance with
the advice of the manuals, use vocal tremor very sparingly, in fact, only
at what is arguably the nal and penultimate stanza for the expression of
35 James Rush, e Philosophy of the Human Voice (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1867),
p. 447.
Fig. 7: Lewis Waller, tremor and prolongation pitch contours in Praat.
Fig. 6: Praat interval annotation tiers.
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tenderness and grief, that asks when the soldiers’ glory shall fade and then
apostrophizes the charge, before demanding that the noble six hundred be
honoured:
en can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the light brigade,
Noble six hundred!36
Note how the line in bold, above, is performed by Fleming and Ainley
(Figs. 8, 9). In each case, the technique of vocal tremor (or vibrato) is imple-
mented uniquely at this important moment in the poem.
Force
Vocal force, apparent most obviously in the peak amplitudes of the wave-
form itself, is a rich and complex category to which Victorian elocution
manuals give a great amount of attention. In one sense this category of
vocal action pertains directly to the contextual factors of audience and
venue. It is a scaled property to be applied in proportion to the size of the
auditorium (50, 500, 5000 people), as Robert Fulton, author of Practical
Elements of Elocution, explains (Figs. 10a, 10b).37
Fulton develops numerous categories to describe the qualities and
gradations of the many possible degrees of force. I will not pretend to
understand all of the hairs the elocution manuals are attempting to split
with their dierent qualications of force, but what seems clear in Fulton,
and in quite a few other elocution manuals, is that a sharp command, such
as that in the line ‘Charge for the guns! he said’ demands loud or explo-
sive force from the reader.38 I have annotated the words that are spoken,
proportionately, the loudest, in each of the recordings, simply, with the tag
‘Force’, and each of our three readers (Waller, Fleming, and Ainley) fullls
the mandate of the elocution manuals, as far as the prescription of substan-
tial force for a sharp command goes (Figs. 11, 12, 13).
One thing worth noting in the delivery of this command, and most
prominently evident in the performances of Fleming and, especially, Ainley,
36 ‘e Charge of the Light Brigade’, in Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. by Christo-
pher Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 511.
37 Robert I. Fulton and omas C. Trueblood, Practical Elements of Elocution (Bos-
ton: Ginn, 1893), pp. 151, 153.
38 See, for example, S. S. Hamill, New Science of Elocution (New York: Philips &
Hunt, 1886); and George Lansing Raymond, e Orator’s Manual (London: Put-
nam’s Sons, 1910).
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is the dierence in quality between the explosive command and the narra-
tor’s attribution of that demand with the words ‘he said’ (Fig. 14). Canon
Fleming’s idea, articulated in e Art of Reading and Speaking (1896), that
‘the standard of good speaking is to express one’s self, just as one would in
earnest conversation’, that is to say, his idea of reading naturally, entails a
Fig. 9: Henry Ainley, tremor and prolongation pitch contours in Praat.
Fig. 8: Canon Fleming, tremor and prolongation pitch contours in Praat.
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Fig. 12: Canon Fleming, ‘Force’ in Praat.
Fig. 13: Henry Ainley, ‘Force’ in Praat.
recognition in performance of the distinction between the voice of the nar-
rator and the voice of the speaker within the poem.39
en Fleming and Ainley read the line, ‘Charge for the guns! he
said’, we do hear such a distinction very clearly. ile we do not see many
broken pitch curves of the kind I have isolated here in Victorian elocution-
ary recordings, when they do appear we know we are looking at the com-
plexities of pitch variation linguists identify with natural or conversational
39 James [Canon] Fleming, e Art of Reading and Speaking, 2nd edn (London: Edwin
Arnold, 1904), p. 53.
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speech intonation.40 Natural speech intonation appears as broken lines and
uctuating frequency patterns because conversational, semantic-oriented
speech is typically characterized by dramatic changes in pitch, enacted on
a constant basis for the purpose of semantic and emotional intelligibility.
e deeper we immerse ourselves in such highly mediated represen-
tations of the signal — of Victorian voices — the more familiar we become
with the elaborate, conceptual properties of the artefacts of the historical
voice archive. In a paradoxical way, the further we move from the material
40 For a discussion of intonation in conversation within the context of the Spoken
English Corpus (SEC) consisting of a range of speech styles, mostly scripted and/
or read, see Anne Wichmann, Intonation in Text and Discourse: Beginnings, Middles,
Ends (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 123–47.
Fig. 14: Henry Ainley, detail of ‘he said’ in Praat.
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artefact itself, the closer we come to touching its seemingly intangible, his-
torically entrenched features. I will close my discussion on this important
point as it highlights, again, the capacity of digital media to render our
abstract concepts artefactual, even as they remediate material artefacts into
sample bits.
is paradox of proximity allows us to imagine other possible modes
of engagement with the historical corpus of literary readings (digitally sam-
pled from all possible previous sound media platforms), for example, one
that allows new media technology to exercise its own agency of discov-
ery, or what is known as unsupervised learning processes. Unsupervised
learning seeks to nd hidden structures within data (in our case, digitized
audio) that has not been marked up for the detection of particular prop-
erties (in the manner that I have annotated my tiny data set of Victorian
elocutionary recordings for specic manifestations of pitch, duration, and
amplitude). is conception of critical ‘listening’ (in quotation marks)
moves away from discursive contextualization, historical narrative, and
even traditional metadata, into an algorithmic reading of the sound signal
itself. It is a vision that has been articulated elegantly by the media theorist
Wolfgang Ernst who argues that the archive ‘is no longer simply a passive
storage space but becomes generative itself in algorithmically ruled proces-
suality’ (p. 29).
Such a ‘cool’ conception of media, and the anti-discursive,
anti-narrative model of historical description and archival structure that
it supports, is one among several that I am interested in exploring in
relation to the conception and organization of audio poetry archives. It
is important, I think, to locate the history of voice recordings within the
discursive protocols that informed those historical voices, but it will also
prove to be illuminating to explore the resemblances, connections, and
reorganizations of the audible archive that digital media enable, that, in
Ernst’s parlance, are ‘media inherent’ (p. 29). By engaging in both narra-
tive and discursive as well as ‘media inherent’ methods of engagement, and
by articulating the appositions we, as historical scholars, perceive between
them, we can benet signicantly from the dierential media structures
that inform and will increasingly shape our attempts to understand the
archive of historical voices.
