Noise as “sound out of place”: investigating the links between Mary Douglas’ work on dirt and sound studies research
(2017)
author(s): Hugh Pickering, Tom Rice
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
“Noise” is an important subject in sound studies research. However, due in large part to the fact that judgements about what constitutes noise are highly subjective, researchers have often struggled to define it. Where attempts have been made, many have settled on a definition of noise as “sound out of place,” a reformulation of Mary Douglas’ definition of “dirt” as “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966: 44). Beyond this, however, no effort has been directed towards exploring the link between dirt and noise or seeing how far the analogy between the two extends. This article corrects this omission by undertaking a close reading of Douglas’ writing on “dirt” and linking it to contemporary sound studies research. It argues that far more than simply giving rise to the definition “sound out of place,” Douglas’ classic anthropological work can be used as the basis for an integrated “theory of noise,” deepening our understanding of what it means when we describe a sound as “noise” and drawing attention to the ambiguous, transgressive and dangerous qualities and potentials of noise.
Record, Rewind, Rewrite. Acoustic Historiography with the Presidential Tapes
(2017)
author(s): Monika Dommann
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
A tool of audio manipulation available to all (recording, fast-forwarding and rewinding, dictating, deleting, overwriting, etc.), tape recorders became a universal feature of offices and living rooms in the 1950s. Between 1962 (when John F. Kennedy installed a secret recording system in his Oval Office) and July 1973 (when Richard Nixon’s extensive recording system was revealed in the aftermath of Watergate and switched off on 18 July) (Haldeman 1988: 86), taping was even used by American presidents as a secret memo technique. From the perspective of the history of knowledge and media studies, this article examines the explosive political force of sidestepping the ephemerality of verbal communication through the secret tape recordings, historical and archival examinations of the Presidential Tapes and their remixes in Public History and film projects, where communicative acts once concealed from the public now continue as endless media loops. A paradoxical form of acoustic nostalgia emerges here: It tackles the problem of invisible power and ritualised politics with a sensorially-accessible “presence” and acoustically-perceptible corporeality – drawing on media in the process. The plea for acoustic historiography developed in this article is an examination of the soundscapes previously neglected by historiography but augmented by media history. While historiography, up to the 20th century, could record the sounds, tones and voices of the past only through writing, the Soundscape Projects initiated by R. Murray Schafer since the 1970s used tape to store and document sound and to create acoustic archives. Since the 1990s, the digitalization of analogue magnetic tapes has facilitated previously inconceivable access to acoustic sources and contributed to the rise of Public History within general societal awareness. Acoustic historiography must therefore engage with the media characteristics of recording and playback devices; the social situations in which recordings are produced; the potential of acoustic sources for storage, manipulation and transmission and their use in art, politics and society.
Archive, Collection, Museum: On the History of the Archiving of Voices at the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University
(2017)
author(s): Britta Lange
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Available today under the name of the Berlin Sound Archive (Berliner Lautarchiv) or the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University (Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) is a collection of now largely digitalized sound storage media begun in 1915 (https://www.lautarchiv.hu-berlin.de/, all internet references retrieved 24th June 2016). The collection includes shellac records with recordings of prisoners of war (1915-1918), sound recordings of the voices of so-called famous personalities (1917-1939), speech samples of German dialects (1921-1943), and recitations of poetry and literature in German (1930s and 1940s) as well as magnetic tapes from the 1960s that have not yet been transferred to a digital format. While, since its inception, the collection has repeatedly been referred to as a sound archive, prior to the digitalization of the shellac holdings in the 1990s this term never found its way into any of its official names. Against this background, this article traces both the Sound Archive’s early institutional history (1915-1947) as well as the use of the term “sound archive.” By considering the archiving of voices in the framework of an emerging history of knowledge, it explores the disciplinary contexts (the academic sciences) and configurations of conservation, research, and presentation (collection, archive, laboratory, library, and museum) in which the preserved human voice operates as an epistemic object. On the basis of a renewed examination of a number of sound recordings of prisoners of war, it should be shown how this historical material can be made productive for current research horizons.