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

Publication: Computer Music Journal

Publication Date: 22-MAR-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 MIT Press Journals

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.

That challenge receives its clearest presentation in the arena of popular music, where several products of that industry suggest that noise qua noise is currently fashionable. For example, while reviewing Tom Waits' recent album, Mule Variations (1999), for the March 13, 1999 issue of Rolling Stone, Ben Ratliff implicates "experiments in artfully scuffed sound" while suggesting that "what Tom Waits does to the blues is something like what newspapers do to bright colors--in the way that a picture of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling ends up looking like roast beef in the morning edition." Mr. Waits' "sonic doghouses," as Ratliff calls them, include the "scratches, hiss, and gabbling field recordings" on tracks like "Lowside of the Road," "What's He Building in There?," and "Black Market Baby." In fact, if consistency of use over an extended period of time is any indication, such artful scuffing is becoming a stylistically common and coherent practice. Quite a number of releases within the past ten years by some major recording artists have emphatically featured similar technological noise artifacts. The "lo-fi" introduction to "When I grow up" on Garbage's Version 2.0 (1998) applies a dynamic range and frequency response reminiscent of 78 RPM records along with that medium's inevitable clicks and pops. The group's "Dumb" begins with the hum and static of radio signals. On Frizzle Fry (1990), Primus uses the sound of a stylus dropping onto a vinyl LP as the opening gesture. Crash Test Dummies incorporate the repetitive rhythm of a stylus reaching the end of a record into the beat of "God Shuffled His Feet" (1993). Alanis Morisette's 1998 album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, includes several instances of medium-associated noise, including what sounds like the hum of a tube amp underneath "I Would Be Good" and varying levels of vinyl hiss and pops in "Can't Not," "I Was Hoping," and "So Pure." Sonic doghouses are everywhere--noise is "in."

Given the current state of technology, the significance of such noise increases in direct proportion to its avertability. Indeed, technology itself is now ready and willing to aid in this purposeful non-avoidance of noise. Digidesign, for example, offers a "D-Fi Plug-Ins Package" which it describes as "specifically designed for creating grungy, warped, and other weird sounds." Opcode similarly offered "fusion: Vinyl." According to the company, this software "applies flawlessly realistic DSP models of turntable characteristics like platter motor rumble, fidelity and speed (33/45/78), vinyl record surface properties like wear, dust, static, warp, and dirt, and other vintage audio playback system artifacts to individual tracks or entire mixes." We now have some very high-tech means to achieve "lo-fi" ends.

In the June 1999 issue of Gentleman's Quarterly, Gucci's Tom Ford suggested that

Retro is just a part of our lives, and it is not something new to fashion. It is in music, architecture, interior design. It's happening culturally.

Indeed, our first impulse might easily be to order ersatz clicks and pops among the other recent tokens of retro fashion such as the resurrection of swing dancing, iMacs in the image of the "modern" televisions of the 1950s and 1960s, and the reappearance of the Volkswagen "Beetle." There is an obvious nostalgic component to all of these, "D-Fi" and "fusion: Vinyl" included. Opcode and Digidesign have, in some sense, simply provided ways of dressing music up in Nehru jackets, saddle shoes, and horn-rimmed glasses. The sonic doghouse is a roller drive-in.

But is that all? I feel we would be missing a great deal by listening to these noises exclusively as retro mode. In terms of technological progress, of course, noise is clearly "backwards." Much noise has been obviated by technological change, and retro filtering harkens back to an earlier time in a way that is obviously critical as well as functional. There is in that sense, I believe, also an attempt by some popular music to reclaim and document an important aspect of its own history by transcribing it directly into its products. We are hearing not only noisy recordings, but recordings of noise.

I don't think, however, that the significance of this trend is entirely antiquarian. As a surface, fashion can both point to and define the circumstances of its creation along with the needs that motivate it. This seems particularly true of "retro" (or neo-classicism for that matter), as the past inherently requires excavation and cannot, therefore, be entirely superficial. As with Citizen Kane's "Rosebud": the trip back has a directed urgency about it that makes progress appear to be a comparatively inchoate groping. In resurrecting transduction noises, popular music has cut cleanly and deftly to the center of an issue of...

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