The Work of Reproduction in the Mechanical Aging of an Art: Listening to Noise.(Critical Essay)

For Dave Sanford, connoisseur of noise

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.

--T.S. Eliot

"Recording is dead." Paul Lansky often said this in his computer music seminars at Princeton University during the early 1990s. This was more an observation than an elegy, but it was not simply restating the idea that recorded music from, say, Pierre Schaeffer's Cinq Etudes to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band "represented" events that had never actually occurred--analogous to Benjamin's critical analysis of film versus stage acting as actually being "composed of many separate performances"(Benjamin 1992, p. 223). Paul Lansky meant that we were approaching a point where, given the identity of a digital source and its bit-perfect transfer, what remained was not "recording" as much as the pure duplication of an original. "Recording," in the sense of successive generations and progressive degeneration of transcription, was ceasing to exist. Digital media have, in that sense, outstripped even Benjamin's remarkable ability to chart the telemetry of technological transformation. While Benjamin did remark that reproduction "substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence," mechanical reproduction has transfigured itself and is no longer reproduction. Paul Lansky surmised that the state of technology demanded a fundamental conceptual change that obviated a need for the category of "recording."

At the time, I thought that this observation was valuable largely as a refinement of terms, that "recording" had come to mean something both somewhat more specific and yet considerably more general. I was wrong. But he also implied in this "death" the birth of aesthetic and compositional possibilities, and it is at this point that I maintain reservations. Technologically, we may have arrived at a "death of recording," but perhaps the value in that point is as a vista rather than a stepping stone. Free of their inevitability, we can understand more clearly the implications of reproduction. In fact, we might find reasons to embrace them. This essay explores the relevance of "reproduction" as a musical model even in the face of technology that tends to dissolve the term. The fluent advancement of technology, however, suggests to me that the relevant issues are, conversely, not technical. Indeed, much of what follows derives from consideration of technological obsolescence, and would therefore present few technical barriers to implementation. The challenge is in grasping aesthetic implications which, having uncertain teleology, can arise and be realized "out of sequence." Whatever the progress of our apparatus, therefore, we may well have some catching up to do with the advances of 1877--recording's birth.

Noise and the New Nostalgia

The umbilicus? Noise. The types of noises born with recording were both the difference and connection between an original and its reproduction. If recording disappears in the identity of original and copy, then noise constitutes the essence of recording. At the point of its virtual banishment from transduction, noise itself may be worth reconsidering. The noise of documentation and transduction is neither the Futurist's "Noise!," qualified by social and political implications, nor the "noise" of the modernist, redefined by its promotion to a new timbral and musical resource. There may be reasons for us as listeners and composers to strip from our concept of noise the sorts of historical, aesthetic, and musical extensions the term has gradually acquired through modernism and reevaluate the phenomenal state preserved by recording: signal interference, impurity, degradation, static. If the potential elimination of this phenomenal state hails the "death of recording," then a consideration of the collateral effects might be due. While transduction noise has been regarded largely in terms of its technological implications--touching aesthetics mostly when it seemed to interfere with them--there may yet be more interesting aesthetic issues involved. I find growing evidence to suggest that the concept of "noise" itself is being "denoised," so to speak--scrubbed of newer patinas to reveal its chaotic original and its own implications. In short, the richest reconceptualization of noise may now be directed towards its primal past. If so, then technological music may face a fruitful challenge to ignore its identity (literally) and devolve.