A D V E N T U R E S   in   C Y B E R S O U N D

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Hullo!, Edison screamed into the telephone mouthpiece. The vibrating diaphragm set in motion an attached point that wrote onto a moving strip of paraffin paper. In July 1877, eighty-one years before Turing's moving paper strip, the recording was still analog. Upon replaying the strip and its vibrations which, in turn, set in motion the diaphragm, a barely audible "Hullo!" could be heard. [1]

Edison understood. A month later he coined a new term for his telephone addition: phonograph. [2] On the basis of this experiment, the mechanic Kruesi was given the assignment to build an apparatus that would etch acoustic vibrations onto a rotating cylinder covered with tin foil. While he or Kruesi was turning the handle, Edison once again screamed into the mouthpiece , this time the nursery rhyme Mary Had A Little Lamb. Then they moved the needle back, let the cylinder run a second time, and the first phonograph replayed the screams. The exhausted genius, in whose phrase genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, slumped back. Mechanical sound recording had been invented. "Speech has become, as it were, immortal." [3]

It was December 6, 1877. Eight months earlier, Charles Cros, a Parisian writer, bohemian, inventor, and absinthe drinker had deposited a sealed envelope with the Academy of Sciences. It contained an essay on the...

Procedure for the recording and reproduction of phenomena of acoustic perception

Procédé d'enregistrement et de reproduction des phénomènes perçus par l'ouie

But once he had been preceded by Edison, who was aware of rumours of the invention, things sounded differently. Inscription is the title of the poem with which Cros erected a belated monument to honor his inventions, which included an automatic telephone, color photography and, above all, the phonograph:

Comme les traits dans les camées
J'ai voulu que les voix aimées
Soient un bien qu'on garde à jamais,
Et puissent répeter le rêve
Musical de l'heure trop brève;
Le temps veut fuir, je le soumets.

Like the faces in cameos
I wanted beloved voices
To be a fortune which one keeps forever,
And which can repeat the musical
Dream of the too short hour;
Time would flee, I subdue it. [5]

Hence, it was not coincidental that Edison, not Cros, actually built the phonograph. His "Hullo!" was no beloved voice and Mary Had a Little Lamb no musical revery. And he did not only scream into the bell-mouth because phonographs have no amplifiers, but also because Edison [following an youthful adventure involving some conductor's fists] was half deaf. A physical impairment was at the beginning of mechanical sound recording, just as the first typewriters had been made by the blind for the blind and Charles Cros had taught at a school for the deaf and mute. [6]

[INSERT illustration p. 39 with caption: The first talking machine built by Kruesi]

While [according to Derrida] it is characteristic of so-called man and his consciousness to hear himself speak [7] and see himself write, media dissolve such feedback loops. They await inventors like Edison whom chance has equipped with a similar dissolution. Handicaps isolate and thematize sensory data streams. The phonograph does not hear the way ears do that have been trained to immediately filter voices, words and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such. Articulateness becomes a second-order exception in a spectrum of noise. In the first phonograph letter of postal history, Edison wrote that "the articulation" of his baby "was loud enough, just a bit indistinct", "not bad for a first experiment." [8]

Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, that monomaniacal anticipation of modern media technologies, [9] had already transgressed the traditional boundaries of words and music to do justice to the unarticulated. In Tristan, Brangaine was allowed to utter a scream whose notation cut straight through the score. [10] Not to mention Parsifal's Kundry, who suffered from a hysterical speech impairment such as those which were soon to occupy the psychoanalyst Freud: she "gives a loud wail of misery, that sinks gradually into low accents of fear," "utters a dreadful cry" and is reduced to "hoarse and broken," though nonetheless fully composed, garbling. [11] This labored inception of language has nothing to do with operas and dramas that take it for granted that their figures can speak. Composers of 1880, however, are allied with engineers. The undermining of articulation becomes the order of the day.

In Wagner's case this applies to both text and music. The Rhinegold prelude, with its infinite swelling of a single chord, dissolves the E flat major triad in the first horn melody as if it were not a matter of musical harmony but of demonstrating the physical overtone series. All the harmonics of E flat appear one after the other, as if in a Fourier analysis; only the seventh is missing, because it cannot be played by European instruments. [12] Of course, each of the horn sounds is an unavoidable overtone mixture of the kind only the sinus tones of contemporary synthesizers can avoid. Nevertheless, Wagner's musico-physiological dream [13] at the outset of the tetralogy sounds like a historical transition from intervals to frequencies, from a logic to a physics of sound. By the time Schönberg, in 1910, produced the last analysis of harmony in the history of music, chords had turned into pure acoustics: "For Schönberg as well as for science, the physical basis in which he is trying to ground all phenomena is the overtone series." [14]

[INSERT picture of gramophone p. 41]

Overtones are frequencies, that is, vibrations per second; and the grooves of Edison's phonograph recorded nothing but vibrations. Intervals and chords, on the other hand, were ratios, that is, fractions made up of integers. The length of a string [especially on a monochord] was subdivided, and the fractions, to which Pythagoras gave the proud name logoi, resulted in octaves, quints, fourths, and so on. Such was the logic upon which everything was founded that, in Old Europe, went by the name of music: first, there was a notation system which enabled the transcription of clear sounds separated from the world's noise, and second, a harmony of the spheres which established that the ratios between planetary orbits [later human souls] equalled those between sounds.

The nineteenth century's concept of frequency breaks with all this. [14b] The measure of length is replaced by time as an independent variable. It is a physical time removed from the metres and rhythms of music. It quantifies movements that are too fast for the human eye, ranging from 20 to 16,000 vibrations per second. The real takes the place of the symbolic. Certainly, references can also be established to link musical intervals and acoustic frequencies, but they only testify to the alienation between two discourses. In frequency curves the simple proportions of Pythagorean music turn into irrational, that is, logarithmic functions. Conversely, overtone series, which in frequency curves are simply integral multiples of vibrations and the determining elements of each sound, soon explode the diatonic music system. That is the extent of the gulf separating Old European alphabetism from mathematical-physical notation.

Which is why the first frequency notations were developed outside of music. First noise itself had to become an object of scientific research, and discourses "a privileged category of noises." [15] A competition sponsored by the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1780 made voiced sounds, and vowels in particular, an object of research, [16] and inaugurated not only speech physiology, but also all the experiments involving mechanical language reproduction. Inventors like Kempelen, Maelzel, or Mical built the first automata which by way of stimulation and filtering of certain frequency bands could simulate the very sounds which, at the same time, Romanticism was celebrating as the language of the soul: their dolls said "Mama" and "Papa" or "Oh", like Hoffmann's beloved automaton Olympia. Even Edison's 1878 article on phonography intended such toy mouths voicing the parents' names as Christmas presents. [17] Removed from all romanticism a practical knowledge of vowel frequencies emerged.

[INSERT illustration of artificial mouths on p. 43]

Continuing these experiments, Willis made a decisive discovery in 1829. He connected elastic tongues to a cogwheel whose cogs set them vibrating. According to the speed of its rotation, high or low sounds were produced which sounded like the different vowels, thus proving their frequency. For the first time pitch no longer depended on the length of a string; it became a variable dependent on speed and, therefore, time. Willis had invented the prototype of all square curve generators ranging from the bold verse-rhythm experiments of the turn of the century [18] to Kontakte, Stockhausen's first electronic composition.

Synthetic production of frequencies is followed by their analysis. Fourier had already provided the mathematical theory, but that theory had yet to be implemented technologically. In 1830, Wilhelm Weber in Göttingen had a tuning fork record its own vibrations. He attached a pig's bristle to one of the tongues which etched its frequency curves into sooty glass. Such were the humble or animal origins of our gramophone needles.

From Weber's writing tuning fork Edouard Léon Scott, a Parisian printer and therefore not coincidentally an inhabitant of the Gutenberg Galaxy, developed his phon-autograph, patented in 1857. A bell-mouth amplified incoming sounds and transmitted them onto a membrane which, in turn, used a coarse bristle to transcribe them onto a soot-covered cylinder. In this way autographs or handwritings of a data stream came into being which prior to that had not ceased not to write itself. [Instead, there was handwriting.] Scott's phon-autograph, however, made visible what, up to this point, had only been audible and much too fast for ill-equipped human eyes: hundreds of vibrations per second. A triumph of the concept of frequency: all the whispered or screamed noises people emitted from their larynxes with or without dialects, appeared on paper. Phonetics and speech physiology became a reality. [19]

They were especially real in the case of Henry Sweet, whose perfect English made him the prototype of all experimental phonetics as well as the hero of a play. Recorded by Professor F.C. Donders of Utrecht, [ 20] Sweet was also dramatized by George Bernhard Shaw, who turned him into a modern Pygmalion out to conquer all mouths that, however beautiful, were marred by dialect. To record and discipline the dreadful dialect of the flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, "Higgins' laboratory" boasts "a phonograph, a laryngoscope, [and] a row of tiny organ pipes with a bellows." [21] In the world of the modern Pygmalion mirrors and statues are unnecessary; sound storage makes it possible "to inspect one's own speech or discourse as in a mirror, thus enabling us to adopt a critical stance toward our products." [22] To the great delight of Shaw, who saw his medium or his readability technologically guaranteed to all English speakers, [23] machines easily solve a problem which literature had not been able to tackle on its own, or only through the mediation of pedagogy [24] : they drill people in general and flower girls in particular to adopt a pronunciation purified by written language.

It comes as no surprise that Eliza Doolittle, notwithstanding all of her love, abandons her Pygmalion Sweet aka Higgins at the end of the play in order to learn "book-keeping and typewriting" at "shorthand schools and polytechnic classes". [25] Women who have been subjected to phonographs and typewriters are souls no longer. They can only end in musicals. Renaming it My Fair Lady, Rogers and Hammerstein will throw Shaw's Pygmalion drama among Broadway tourists and record labels. "On The Street Where You Live" is sound.

In any case, Edison, ancestor of the record industry, only needed to combine, as is so often the case with inventions. A Willis-type machine gave him the idea for the phonograph, a Scott-type machine pushed him toward its realization. Synthetic production of frequencies combined with their analyis resulted in the new medium.

Edison's phonograph was a by-product of the attempt to optimize telephony and telegraphy by saving expensive copper cables. First, Menlo Park developed a telegraph that indented a paraffin paper strip with Morse signs, thus allowing them to be replayed faster than they had been transmitted by human hands. The effect was exactly the same as in Willis's case: pitch became a variable dependent on speed. Second, Menlo Park developed a telephone receiver with a needle attached to the diaphragm. By touching it, the needle enabled the hearing-impaired Edison to check the amplitude of the telephone signal. Legend has it that one day the needle drew blood, and Edison "recognized how the force of a membrane moved by a magnetic system could be put to work." "In effect, he had found a way to transfer the functions of his ear to his sense of touch." [26]

A telegraph as an artificial mouth, a telephone as an artificial ear, the stage was set for the phonograph. Functions of the central nervous system had been technologically implemented. When, after a 72-hour shift early in the morning of 16 July 1888, Edison had finally completed a talking machine ready for serial production, he posed for the hastily summoned photographer in the pose of his great idol. The French Emperor, after all, is said to have observed that the

[INSERT illustration of Edison p. 47]

progress of national welfare [or military technology] can be measured by transportation costs. [27] And no means of transportation are more economical than those which convey information rather than goods and people. Artificial mouths and ears as technological implementations of the central nervous system cut down on mailmen and concert halls. What Ong calls our secondary orality has the elegance of brain functions. Technological sound storage provides a first model for data streams which, at the same time, are becoming an object of neurophysiological research. Helmholtz completing vowel theory is allied with Edison completing measuring instruments. Which is why sound storage, initially a mechanically primitive affair on the level of Weber's pork bristle, could not be invented until the soul fell prey to science. "O my head, my head, my head," groans the phonograph in the prose poem Alfred Jarry dedicated to it. "All white underneath the silk sky:, They have taken my head, my head, and put me into a tea tin!" [28]

Which is why Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, the symbolist poet and author of the first of many Edison novels, is mistaken when he has the great inventor ponder his delay in Tomorrow's Eve.

What is most surprising in history, almost unimaginable, is that among all the great inventors across the centuries, not one thought of the Phonograph! And yet most of them invented machines a thousand times more complicated. The Phonograph is so simple that its construction owes nothing to materials of scientific composition. Abraham might have built it, and made a recording of his calling from on high. A steel stylus, a leaf of silver foil or something like it, a cylinder of copper, and one could fill a storehouse with all the voices of Heaven and Earth. [29]

This certainly applies to materials and their processing, but misses the historical apriori of sound recording. There are also immaterials of scientific origin, which are not so cheap to come by and have to be supplied by a science of the soul. They cannot be delivered by any of the post-Abraham candidates whom Villiers de l'Isle-Adam suspects of being able to invent the phonograph: neither Aristotle, Euclid nor Archimedes could have underwritten the statement that "the soul is a notebook of phonographic recordings" [but rather, if at all, a tabula rasa for written signs, which in turn signify acts of the soul]. Only when the soul has become the nervous system, and the nervous system [according to the Sigmund Exner, the great Viennese neurophysiologist] so many facilitations [Bahnungen], can Delboeuf's statement no longer be scandalous. In 1880, the philosopher Guyau devoted a commentary to it. And this first theory of the phonograph attests like no other to the interactions between science and technology. Precisely those theories, which were the historic apriori of the phonograph, can now, thanks to its invention, optimize their analogous models of the brain.

MEMORY AND PHONOGRAPH

Jean Marie Guyau, 1880

Reasoning by analogy is of considerable importance to science; indeed, in as far as it is the principle of induction it may well form the basis of all physical and psychophysical sciences. Discoveries frequently start with metaphors. The light of thinking could hardly fall in a new direction and illuminate dark corners were it not reflected by spaces already illuminated. Only that which reminds of us something else makes an impression, although and precisely because it differs from it. To understand is to remember, at least in part.

Many similes and metaphors have been used in the attempt to understand mental abilities or functions. Here, in the as yet imperfect state of science, metaphors are absolutely necessary: before we know we have to start by imagining something. Thus, the human brain has been compared to all kinds of objects. According to Spencer it shows a certain analogy to those mechanical pianos which can reproduce an infinite number of melodies. Taine makes of the brain a kind of print shop which incessantly produces and stores innumerable clichés. Yet all these similes appear somewhat sketchy. One normally deals with the brain at rest; its images are perceived to be fixed; stereotyped; and that is imprecise. There is nothing finished in the brain, no real images; instead, we see only virtual, potential images waiting for a sign to be transformed into actuality. How this transformation into reality is really achieved is a matter of speculation. The greatest mystery of brain mechanics has to do with dynamics, not with statics. We are in need of a comparative term that will allow us to see not only how an object receives and stores an imprint, but also how this imprint at a given time is reactivated and produces new vibrations within the object. With this in mind, the most refined instrument [both receiver and motor in one] with which the human brain may be compared is perhaps Edison's recently invented phonograph. For some time now I have been wanting to draw attention to this comparison, ever since I came across a casual observation in Delboeuf's last article on memory which confirmed my intentions: "The soul is a notebook of phonographic recordings."

Upon speaking into a phonograph the vibrations of one's voice are transferred to a point which engraves lines onto a metal plate that correspond to the uttered sounds, uneven furrows, more or less deep, depending on the nature of the sounds. It is quite probable that, in analogous ways, invisible lines are incessantly carved into the brain cells which provide a channel for nerve streams. If after some time the stream encounters a channel it has already passed through, it will once again proceed along the same path. The cells vibrate in the same way they vibrated the first time; psychologically, these similar vibrations correspond to an emotion or a thought analogous to the forgotten emotion or thought.

This is precisely the phenomenon which occurs when the phonograph's small copper disk, held against the point which runs through the grooves it has etched, starts to reproduce the vibrations: to our ears, these vibrations turn back into a voice, into words, sounds and melodies.

If the phonographic disk had self-consciousness, it could while replaying a song point out that it remembers this particular song; and what, to us, appears as the effect of a rather simple mechanism would, quite probably, strike the disk as a miraculous ability: memory.

Let us add that it could distinguish new songs from those already played as well as new impressions from simple memories. Indeed, a certain effort is necessary for first impressions to etch themselves into metal or brain; they encounter more resistance and, correspondingly, have to exert more force; and when they reappear, they vibrate all the stronger. But when the point traces already existing grooves instead of making new ones, it will do so with greater ease and glide along without applying any pressure. Memory or reveries have been thought of in terms of inclination; indeed, to pursue a memory: to smoothly glide down a slope, to wait for a certain number of complete memories which appear one after the other, all in a row and without shock. There is, therefore, a significant difference between impressions in the real sense and memory. Impressions tend to belong to either of two classes: they either possess greater intensity, a unique sharpness of outline and fixity of line; or they are weaker, more blurred and imprecise, but nevertheless arranged in a certain order which imposes itself on us. To recognize an image means to assign it to the second class. One feels in a less forceful way and is aware of this emotion. A memory consists of the awareness, first, the diminished intensity of an impression, second, its increased ease, and third, the connections which it entertains with other impressions. Just as a trained eye can see the difference between a copy and the original, we learn to distinguish memories from impressions and are thus able to recognize a memory even before it has been located in time and space. We project this or that impression back into the past without knowing which part of the past it belongs to. This is because a memory retains a unique and distinguishing character, much like a sensation coming from the stomach differs from an acoustic or visual impression. In a similar manner, the phonograph is incapable of reproducing the human voice in all its strength and warmth. The voice of the apparatus will remain shrill and cold; it has something imperfect and abstract about it which sets it apart. If the phonograph could hear itself, it would learn to recognize the difference between the voice which came from the outside and forced itself onto it and the voice which it itself is broadcasting and which is a simple echo of the first, following an already grooved way.

A further analogy between the phonograph and our brain exists in that the speed of the vibrations which have been impressed on the apparatus can noticeably change the character of the reproduced sounds or recalled images. Depending on whether you increase or decrease the rotation of the phonographic disk, a melody will be transposed from one octave to another. If you turn the handle faster, a song will rise from the deepest and most indistinct notes to the highest and most piercing. Does not a similar effect occur in the brain when we focus our attention on an initially blurred image, increasing its clarity step by step, thereby moving it, as it were, up the scale? And could this phenomenon not be explained by the increased or decreased speed and strength of the vibrations of our cells? We have within us a kind of scale of images along which the images we conjure up and dismiss incessantly rise and fall. At times they vibrate in the depths of our being like a blurred "pedal", at times their fullness of sound radiates above all others. As they dominate or recede, they appear to be closer or farther away from us, and sometimes the length of time which separates them from the present moment seems to be waning or waxing. I know of impressions I received ten years ago which, under the influence of an association of ideas or simply due to my attention or some change of emotion, suddenly seem to date from yesterday. In the same way singers create the impression of distance by lowering their voice; and they merely need to raise it again to suggest the impression of approaching.

These analogies could be multiplied. The principal difference between the brain and the phonograph is that the metal disk of Edison's still rather primitive machine remains deaf to itself; there is no transition from movement to consciousness. It is precisely this wondrous transition which keeps occurring in the brain. It remains an eternal mystery which, however, is less astonishing than it appears. If the phonograph were able to hear itself, that, in the final analysis, would be far less mystifying than the idea of our hearing it. But indeed we do: its vibrations really turn into impressions and thoughts. We therefore have to concede the always possible transformation of movement into thought, one which appears more likely when it is a matter of internal brain movement rather than one coming from the outside. From this point of view it would be neither very imprecise nor very disconcerting to define the brain as an infinitely perfected phonograph, a conscious phonograph.

Which is why all concepts of trace, up to and including Derrida's grammatological ur-writing, are based on Edison's simple idea. The trace preceding all writing, the trace of pure difference still open to reading and writing, is simply a gramophone needle. Paving a way and retracing a path coincide. Guyau understood that the phonograph implements memory and thereby makes it unconscious.

[INSERT Trademark "Wrinting Angel" on p. 55]

It is only because a philosopher, even if he has abandoned philosophy for psychophysics, cannot rid himself of his professional delusions that Guyau, at the end of his essay, attempts to crown or surpass the unconscious mnemonic capabilities of the phonograph by contrasting them with our conscious human abilities. But consciousness, that quality which Guyau ascribes to the brain in order to celebrate it as an infinitely perfected phonograph, would result in an infinitely inferior one. Rather than hearing the random acoustic events forcing their way into the bell-mouth in all their real-time entropy, Guyau's conscious phonograph would attempt to understand [31] and thus corrupt them. Once again, alleged identities or meaning or even functions of consciousness would come into play. Phonographs do not think, therefore they are possible.

Guyau's own, possibly unconscious example had alluded to the imputation of consciousness and inner life: if a phonograph really possessed the consciousness attributed to it and were able to point out that it remembers a song, it would consider this a miraculous ability. But impartial and external observers would continue to see it as the result of a fairly simple mechanism. By turning his experimental gaze, which had observed the brain simply as a technical apparatus, into introspection, Guyau falls short of his own standards. It was, after all, an external gaze which had suggested the beautiful comparison between attention and playback speed. If the focusing of blurred mental images by way of attention amounts to nothing more or less than changing the time axis of acoustic events by increasing playback speed or indulging in time axis manipulation [TAM], then there is no reason to celebrate attention or memory as miraculous abilities. Neither gramophone needles nor brain neurons need any self-consciousness to retrace a groove faster than it was engraved. In both cases it boils down to programming. For that reason alone the diligent hand of the phonograph user, who in Edison's time had difficulties sticking to the correct time while turning the handle, could be replaced by clockworks and electronic motors with adjustable speed. The sales catalogues of American record companies warned their customers of the friend who "comes to you and claims that your machine is too slow or too fast. Don't listen to him! He doesn't know what he is talking about." [32]

But standardization is always upper management's escape from technological possibilities. In case of serious matters such as test procedures or mass entertainment, TAM remains triumphant. The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, founded two months after Edison's primitive prototype of December 1877, made its first business with time axis manipulation: with his own hand the inventor turned the handle faster than he had during the recording in order to treat New York to the sensational pleasure of frequency-modulated musical pieces. Even the modest cornet of a certain Levy acquired brilliance and temperament. [33] Had he been among the delighted New Yorkers, Guyau would have found empirical proof that frequency modulation is indeed the technological correlative of attention.

Of course Europe's written music had already been able to move tones upwards or downwards, as the term scale itself implies. But transposition doesn't equal TAM. If the phonographic playback speed differs from its recording speed, there is a shift not only of clear sounds but of whole noise spectra. What is manipulated is the real instead of the symbolic. Acoustic long-term events such as metre and word length are affected as well. This is precisely what Hornbostel, albeit without recognizing what distinguished it from transposition, praised as the "special advantage" of the phonograph: "It can be played at faster and slower speeds, allowing us to listen to musical pieces, whose original speed was too fast, at a more settled pace, and accordingly transposed, in order to analyse them." [34]

The phonograph is thus incapable of achieving real-time frequency shifts. For this we need rock bands with harmonizers that, with considerable electronic effort, are able to reverse the inevitable speed changes, at least to deceivable human ears. Only then are people able to return simultaneously and in real time from their breaking voices, and women can be men and men can be women again. .

The time-axis reversal made possible by the phonograph allows ears to listen to the unheard-of: the steep transient phenomenon of instrumental sounds or spoken syllables moves to the end while the much slower fade-out time moves to the front. The Beatles are said to have used this trick on Revolution 9 to whisper the secret of their global success to the tape freaks among their fans: [35] that Paul McCartney had been dead for a long time, replaced on covers, stage and songs by a multi-media double. As the Columbia Phonograph Company recognized in 1890, the phonograph can be used as machine for composing music simply by allowing consumers to play their favourite songs backwards: "A musician could get one popular melody every day by experimenting in that way." [36]

TAM as poetry, but one which transgresses its customary boundaries. The phonograph cannot deny its telegraphic origin. Technological media turn magic into a daily routine. Voices that start to migrate through frequency spectra and time axes do not simply continue old literary word game techniques such as palindromes or anagrams. This letter-bending had become possible only once the primary code, the alphabet itself, had taken effect. Time axis manipulation, however, affects the raw material of poetry where manipulation had hitherto been impossible. Hegel had called "the sound" "a disappearing of being in the act of being," subsequently celebrating it as a "saturated expression of the manifestation of inwardness." [37] That which was impossible to store could not be manipulated. Ridding itself of its materiality or clothes, it disappeared and presented inwardness as a seal of authenticity.

But once storage and manipulation coincide in principle, Guyau's thesis linking phonography and memory may be insufficient. Storage facilities, which according to his own insight are capable of altering the character of the replayed sounds [thanks to time manipulation], shatter the very concept of memory. Reproduction is demoted once the past in all its sensuous detail is transmitted by technical devices. Certainly, HiFi means High Fidelity and is supposed to convince consumers that record companies remain loyal to musical deities. But it is a term of appeasement. More precise than the poetic imagination of around 1800, whose alphabetism or creativity confronted an exclusively reproductive memory, technology literally makes the unheard-of possible. An old Pink Floyd song spells it out:

When that old fat sun in the sky 's falling
Summer ev'ning birds are calling
Summer Sunday and a year
The sound of music in my ear.

Distant bells
New mown grass smells
Songs sweet
By the river holding hands.

And if you see, don't make a sound
Pick your feet up off the ground
And if you hear as the wall night falls
The silver and of a tongue so strange
Sing to me sing to me. [38]

And what transpires then is indeed a strange and unheard-of silver noise. Nobody knows who is singing, the voice called Gilmour which sings the song, the voice referred to by the song, or maybe the voice of the listener who makes no sound and is nonetheless supposed to sing once all the conditions of magic have been met. An unimaginable closeness of sound technology and self-awareness, simulacrum of a feedback relaying sender and receiver. A song sings to a listening ear telling it to sing. As if the music were originating in the brain itself, rather than emanating from stereo speakers or head phones.

That is the whole difference between arts and media. Songs, arias and operas do not rely on neurophysiology. Voices hardly implode in our ears, not even under the technical conditions of a concert hall when singers are visible and therefore discernible. Their voices are trained to overcome distances and spaces. "Sound of music in my ear" can exist only once mouthpieces and microphones are capable of recording any whisper. As if there were no distance between recorded voice and listening ears, as if voices traveled along the transmitting bones of acoustic self-perception directly from the mouth into the ear's labyrinth, hallucinations become real.

And even the distant bells the song listens to are not merely signifiers or referents of some speech. Literature had been able to provide that. Countless verses used words to conjure up acoustic events as lyrical as they were indescribable. Rock lyrics can add the bells themselves in order to fill attentive brains with something that, as long as it had been confined to words, had remained a mere promise.

In 1898, the Columbia Phonograph Company Orchestra offered the song Down on the Swanee River as one of its 80 cylinders. Advertisements promised Negro songs and dances as well as the song's location and subject: pulling in the gang plank, the sounds of the steam engine and, eighty years before Pink Floyd, the chiming of a steamboat bell [39] , all for 50 cents. Songs become part of their acoustic environment. And poetry fulfills what psychoanalysis, originating not coincidentally at the same time, saw as the essence of desire: hallucinatory wish fulfilment.

Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology of 1895 saw "[the state of] being hallucinated in a backward flow of Q to N and also to T". [40] In other words: impermeable brain neurons occupied by memory traces rid themselves of their charge or quantity by transferring them onto permeable neurons designed for sensory perception. As a result, data already stored appears as fresh input and the psychic apparatus becomes its own simulacrum. Backflow or feedback come as close to perfect hallucinatory wish fulfilment as does Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology to technological media. "The intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction." [41] That is psychophysics at its best. All of Freud's elaborations on neurons and their cathexes and on facilitations and their resistance are based on the "views on localization held by [the] cerebral anatomy" [42] of his time. That the psychic apparatus [already technified by its name] can transmit and store data, while remaining both permeable and impermeable, would remain an insoluble paradox were its analogy modelled upon writing. [At best, Freud's famous "Wondrous Writing-Pad," commented upon by Derrida, [43] might be able to carry out both functions.] Following Broca and Wernicke's subdivision of discourse into numerous subroutines, a brain physiology which locates speaking, hearing, writing and reading in various parts of the brain [because it exclusively focuses on the states of specifiable material particles] had to model itself on the phonograph, an insight anticipated by Guyau. It comes as no surprise, then, that Sigmund Exner, whose research formed the basis for Freud's notion of facilitation in the Project, also "provided the basis for the construction of a scientific phonographic museum" at the University of Vienna. [44]

"When it comes to molecules and cranial pathways, we",that is, the brain researchers and art physiologists of the turn of the century, "automatically think of a process similar to that of Edison's phonograph." [45] These are the words of Georg Hirth, author of the first German treatise on art physiology. Twenty years later, they are written into art itself. In 1919, Rilke completes a prose "essay" which, using the modest means of bricolage or literature, translates all the discoveries of brain physiology into modern poetry.

PRIMAL SOUND

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1919

It must have been when I was a boy at school that the phonograph was invented. At any rate it was at that time a chief object of public wonder; this was probably the reason why our science master, a man given to busying himself with all kinds of handiwork, encouraged us to try our skill in making one of these instruments from the material that lay nearest to hand. Nothing more was needed than a piece of pliable cardboard bent to the shape of a funnel, on the narrower orifice of which was stuck a piece of impermeable paper of the kind used to bottle fruit. This provided a vibrating membrane, in the middle of which we stuck a bristle from a coarse clothes brush at right angels to its surface. With these few things one part of the mysterious machine was made, receiver and reproducer were complete. It now only remained to construct the receiving cylinder, which could be moved close to the needle marking the sounds by means of a small rotating handle. I do not remember what we made it of; there was some kind of cylinder which we covered with a thin coating of candle-wax to the best of our ability. Our impatience, brought to a pitch by the excitement of sticking and fitting the parts, as we jostled one another over it, was such that the wax had scarcely cooled and hardened before we put our work to the test.

How now this was done can easily be imagined. When someone spoke or sang into the funnel, the needle in the parchment transferred the sound-waves to the receptive surface of the roll slowly turning beneath it, and then, when the moving needle was made to retrace its path [which had been fixed in the meantime with a coat of varnish], the sound which had been ours came back to us tremblingly, haltingly from the paper funnel, uncertain, infinitely soft and hesitating and fading out altogether in places. Each time the effect was complete. Our class was not exactly one of the quietest, and there can have been few moments in its history when it had been able as a body to achieve such a degree of silence. The phenomenon, on every reception of it, remained astonishing, indeed positively staggering. We were confronting, as it were, a new and infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality, from which something far greater than ourselves, yet indescribably immature, seemed to be appealing to us as if seeking help. At the time and all through the intervening years I believed that that independent sound, taken from us and preserved outside of us, would be unforgettable. That it turned out otherwise is the cause of my writing the present account. As will be seen, what impressed itself on my memory most deeply was not the sound from the funnel but the markings traced on the cylinder; these made a most definite impression.

I first became aware of this some fourteen of fifteen years after my school-days were past. It was during my first stay in Paris. At that time I was attending the anatomy lectures in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with considerable enthusiasm. It was not so much the manifold interlacing of the muscles and sinews nor the complete inner agreement of the inner organs with another that appealed to me, but rather the bare skeleton, the restrained energy and elasticity of which I had already noticed when studying the drawings of Leonardo. However much I puzzled over the structure of the whole, it was more than I could deal with; my attention always reverted to the study of the skull, which seemed to me to constitute the utmost achievement, as it were, of which this chalky element was capable; it was as if it had been persuaded to make just in this part a special effort to render a decisive service by providing a most solid protection for the most daring feature of all, for something which, though itself narrowly confined, had a field of activity which was boundless. The fascination which this particular structure had for me reached such a pitch finally, that I procured a skull in order to spend many hours of the night with it; and, as always happens with me and things, it was not only the moments of deliberate attention which made this ambiguous object really mine: I owe my familiarity with it, beyond doubt, in part to that passing glance, with which we involuntarily examine and perceive our daily environment, when there exists any relationship at all between it and us. It was a passing glance of this kind which I suddenly checked in its course, making it exact and attentive. By candlelight, which is often so peculiarly alive and challenging, the coronal suture had become strikingly visible, and I knew at once what it reminded me of: one of those unforgotten grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax cylinder by the point of a bristle!

And now I do not know: is it due to a rhythmic peculiarity of my imagination, that ever since, often after the lapse of years, I repeatedly feel the impulse to make that spontaneously perceived similarity the starting point for a whole series of unheard of experiments? I frankly confess that I have always treated this desire, whenever it made itself felt, with the most unrelenting mistrust, if proof be needed, let it be found in the fact that only now, after more than a decade and a half, have I resolved to make a cautious statement concerning it. Furthermore, there is nothing I can cite in favour of my idea beyond its obstinate recurrence, a recurrence which has taken me by surprise in all sorts of places, divorced from any connection with what I might be doing.

What is it that repeatedly presents itself to my mind? It is this:

The coronal suture of the skull [this would first have to be investigated] has, let us assume, a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of sound, but existed of itself naturally, well, to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen? A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music...

Feelings, which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe, which of all feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world...

Leaving that side for the moment: what variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense.

At one period, when I began to interest myself in Arabic poems, which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five senses, it struck me for the first time, that the modern European poet makes use of these five contributors singly and in very varying degree, only one of them, sight overladen with the world, seeming to dominate him constantly; how slight, by contrast, is the contribution he receives from inattentive hearing, not to speak of the indifference of other senses, which are active only on the periphery of consciousness and with many interruptions within the limited sphere of their practical activity. And yet the perfect poem can only materialize on condition that this world, acted upon by all five levers simultaneously, is seen, under a definite aspect, on the supernatural plane, which is, in fact, the plane of the poem.

A lady, to whom this was mentioned in conversation, exclaimed that this wonderful and simultaneous capacity and achievement of all the senses was surely nothing but the presence of mind and grace of love, incidentally she thereby bore her own witness to the sublime reality of the poem. But the lover is in such splendid danger just because he must depend on the co-ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky centre, in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence.

As I write this, I have before me the diagram which I have always used as a ready help whenever ideas of this kind have demanded attention. If the world's whole field of experience, including those spheres which are beyond our knowledge, be represented in a complete circle, it will be immediately evident that, when the black sectors, denoting that which we are incapable of experiencing, are measured gainst the lesser, light sections, corresponding to that which is illuminated by the senses, the former are very much greater.

Now the position of the lover is this, that he feels himself unexpectedly placed in the centre of the circle, that is to say, at the point where the known and the incomprehensible, coming forcibly together at one single point, become complete and simply a possession, losing thereby, it is true, all individual character. This position would not serve for the poet, for individual variety must be constantly present for him, he is compelled to use the sense sectors to their full extent, as it must also be in his aim to extend each of them as far as possible, so that his lively delight, girt for the attempt, may be able to pass through the five gardens in one leap.

As the lover's danger consists in the non-spatial character of his standpoint, so the poet's lies in his awareness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other: in truth they are sufficiently wide and engulfing to sweep away from before us the greater part of the world, who knows how many worlds?

The question arises here, as to whether the extent of these sectors on the plane assumed by us can be enlarged to any vital degree by the work of research. The achievements of the microscope, of the telescope, and of so many devices which increase the range of the senses upwards and downwards, do they not lie in another sphere altogether, since most of the increase thus achieved cannot be interpreted by the senses, cannot be "experienced" in any real sense? It is, perhaps, not premature to suppose that the artist, who develops the five-fingered hand of his senses [if one may put it so] to ever more active and more spiritual capacity, contributes more decisively than anyone else to an extension of the several sense fields, only the achievement which gives proof of this does not permit of his entering his personal extension of territory in the general map before us, since it is only possible, in the last resort, by a miracle.

But if we are looking for a way by which to establish the connection so urgently needed between the different provinces now so strangely separated from one another, what could be more promising than the experiment suggested earlier in this record? If the writer ends by recommending it once again, he may be given a certain amount of credit for withstanding the temptation to give free reign to his fancy in imagining the results of the assumptions which he has suggested.

Soglio. On the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, 1919.

And yet the "unforgettable" [in the word's double meaning] phonographic sound recording is not at the centre of Rilke's profane illumination. In the founding age of media, the author is captivated more by the technological revolutions of reading than of writing. The "markings traced on the cylinder" are physiological traces whose strangeness transcends all human voices.

Certainly, the writer is no brain physiologist. His amateur status at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts enables him to become acquainted with the vicissitudes of the skeletal structure, but not with the facilitations on which Exner or Freud based their new sciences. But when it comes to mounted and exhibited skeletons, Rilke is fascinated by that "utmost achievement" known as the skull, because "it was as if it had been persuaded to make just in this part a special effort to render a decisive service by providing a most solid protection for the most daring feature of all." During his Parisian nights, Rilkes reduces the skull sitting in front of him to a cerebral container. Describing it as "this particular structure" with a "boundless field of activity," he merely repeats the physiological insight that, for our central nervous system, "our own body is the outside world." [47] Nobody less than Flechsig, Schreber's famous psychiatrist, had proven that the cerebral cortex contains a "sphere of physical perception" which neurologically reproduces all parts of the body, distorted according to their importance. [48] Rilke's belief in later years that it was the task of poetry to transfer all given data into an "inner world space" is based on such insights. [Even though literary scholars, still believing in the omnipotence of philosophers, choose to relate Rilke's inner world space to Husserl. [49] ]

Primal Sound leaves no doubt whatsoever which developments of the time are of main importance to literature in 1900. Instead of lapsing into the usual melancholic associations of Shakespeare's Hamlet or Keller's Green Henry, the sight of a human skull in candle light induces phonographic grooves in the writer's mind.

A trace or path or groove appears where the frontal and parietal bones of the "suckling infant" [50] , to use Rilke's anatomically correct term, have grown together. As if the facilitations of Freud and Exner had been projected out of the brain onto its enclosure, the naked eye is now able to read the coronal suture as a writing of the real. A technologically up-to-date author follows in the wake of brain physiologists, who since the days of Guyau and Hirth automatically think of Edison's phonograph when dealing with nerve pathways. Moreover, he draws conclusions more radical than all scientific boldness. Before Rilke nobody had ever suggested to decode a trace which nobody had encoded and which encoded nothing.

[INSERT side illustration p. 71 with caption: Coronal suture from stp to stp]

Ever since the invention of the phonograph, there is writing without a subject. It is no longer necessary to assign an author to every trace, not even God. The Project for a Scientific Psychology centred on facilitations inscribed by acts of perception, but there is no reason not to set the gramophone needle to random anatomic features. A transgression in the literal sense of the word which shakes the very words used to phrase it. Acoustics arises from physiology, technology from nature. In Rilke's time, skulls were measured in search of all possible features: intelligence and idiocy, masculinity and femininity, genius and racial characteristics. But their media transposition into the acoustic remained a challenge which forced dots and question marks onto the hand that wrote it.

What the coronal suture yields upon replay is a primal sound without a name, a music without notation, a sound even more strange than any incantation of the dead for which the skull could have been used. Deprived of its shellac, the duped needle produces sounds which "are not the result of a graphic transposition of a note" but an absolute transfer, that is, a metaphor. Thus a writer celebrates the very opposite of his own medium, the white noise no writing can store. Because their data travel along physical channels, technological media operate against a background of noise which determines the signal-noise-ratio, as does blurring in the case of film or the sound of the needle in the case of the gramophone. That is [according to Arnheim] the price they pay for delivering reproductions which are at the same time effects of the reproduced. Noise is emitted by the channels media have to cross.

In 1924, five years after Rilke's Primal Sound, Rudolph Lothar writes his Technical-aesthetic essay on The Talking Machine. Based on the not very informed premise that "philosophers and psychologists have hitherto written about the arts" and "neglected" phonography, [50] Lothar draws up a new aesthetic. Its key propositions centre exclusively on the relationship between noise and signals.

The talking machine occupies a special position in aesthetics and music. It demands a twofold capacity for illusion, an illusion working in two directions. On the one hand it demands that we ignore and overlook its mechanical features. As we know, every record comes with interference. As connoisseurs we are not allowed to hear this interference; just as in a theatre we are obliged to ignore both the line that sets off the stage and the frame surrounding the scene. We have to forget we are witnessing actors in costumes and make-up who are not really experiencing what they are performing. They are merely playing parts. We, however, pretend to take their appearance for reality. Only if we forget that we are inside a theatre can we really enjoy dramatic art. This "as if" is generated by our capacity for illusion. Only when we forget that the voice of the singer is coming from a wooden box, when we no longer hear any interference, when we can suspend it the way we are able to suspend a stage, only then will the talking machine come into its artistic own.

But on the other hand, the machine demands that we give bodies to the sounds emanating from it. For example, while playing an aria sung by a famous singer we see the stage he stands on, we see him dressed in an appropriate costume. The more it is linked to our memories, the stronger the record's effect will be. Nothing excites memory more strongly than the human voice, maybe because nothing is forgotten as quickly as a voice. Our memory of it, however, does not die, its timbre and character sink into our subconscious where they await their revival. What has been said about the voice naturally also applies to instruments. We see Nikisch conduct the C-minor symphony, we see Kreisler with the violin at his chin, we see trumpets flashing in the sun when listening to military marches. But the capacity for illusion which enables us to ignore boxes and interference and furnishes tones with a visible background requires musical sensitivity. This is the most important point of phonographic aesthetics: the talking machine can only grant artistic satisfaction to musical people. For only musicians possess the capacity for illusion necessary for every enjoyment of art. [52]

Maybe Rilke, who loved the gong with its resounding mixture of frequencies above all other instruments, was no musical person. [53] His aesthetic, Primal Sound is Rilke's only text about art and the beautiful in general, subverts the two illusions to which Lothar wants to commit readers or gramophone listeners. From the fact that "every record comes with interferences" he draws opposite conclusions. Replaying the skull's coronary suture yields nothing but noise. And there is no need to add some hallucinated body when listening to signs which are not the result of the graphic translation of a note, but rather random anatomical lines. Bodies themselves generate noise. And the impossible real transpires.

Of course, the entertainment industry is all on Lothar's side. But there have been and there still are experiments which pursue Rilke's primal sound with technologically more sophisticated means. In the wake of Mondrian and the Bruitists, who wanted to introduce noise into literature and music, Moholy-Nagy already suggested in 1923 "to turn the gramophone from an instrument of reproduction into a productive one, generating acoustic phenomena without any previous acoustic existence by scratching the necessary marks onto the record." [54] An obvious analogy to Rilke's suggestion to elicit sounds from the skull that were not the result of a prior graphic transformation. A triumph for the concept of frequency, unlike the "narrowness" of a"scale" that is "possibly a thousand years old" and which we therefore no longer have to adhere to, [55] Moholy-Nagy's etchings allow for the unlimited transposition from medium to medium. Any graphism, including those, not coincidentally, dominating Mondrian's paintings, results in a sound. Which is why the experimenter asks for the "study of graphic signs of the most diverse [simultaneous and isolated] acoustic phenomena", and the "use of projection machines" or "film." [56]

Engineers and the avantgarde think alike. At the same time as Moholy-Nagy's etching, the first plans were made for sound film, one of the first industrially connected media systems. "The invention of Messrs. Vogt, Dr. Engel and Masolle, the speaking Tri-Ergon-film," is based on a "highly complicated process" of medial transformations which could only be financed with the help of million-dollar investments from the C. Lorenz AG. [57] The inventors say of it: "Acoustic waves emanating from the scene are converted into electricity, electricity is turned into light, light into the silver colouring of the positive and negative, the coloring of the film back into light, which is then converted back into electricity before, the seventh and final transformation turns electricity into the mechanical operation of a weak membrane giving off sounds ." [58]

[NSERT illustration p. 75 with caption: gramophone record [Photo: Moholy Nagy]]

Frequencies remain frequencies regardless of their respective carrier medium. The symbolic correlation of sound intervals and planetary orbits, which since Scipio's Dream made up the harmony of the spheres, is replaced by correspondences in the real. In order to synchronize, store and reproduce acoustic events and image sequences, sound films can let them wander seven times from one carrier to the next. In his own words, Moholy-Nagy's record etchings are capable of generating a "new mechanical harmony": "The individual graphic signs are examined and their proportions are formulated as a law. [Here we may point out a consideration which is at present still utopian: based on strict proportional laws graphic signs can be transposed into music.]" [59]

[INSERT illustration p. 76 with caption: Fourier synthesis of a rectangular wave]

This idea had lost its utopian character long before it was written down. Fourier's solution of all continuous functions [including musical notes] into sums of pure sine harmonics was achieved before Helmholtz and Edison. Walsh's equally mathematical proof that square-wave vibrations may also serve as summands of the Fourier analysis was roughly contemporaneous with Moholy-Nagy. As a result, in 1964 Robert A. Moog with his electronic talents and the "American vice of modular repetition" [60] was able to equip all the sound studios and rock bands of this world with synthesizers. A subtractive sound analysis, that is, one controlled by frequency filters, transfers the proportional relationships of graphic depictions [rectangles, saw tooth curves, triangles, trapezoids and maybe even sine curves] into the music envisioned by Mondrian and Moholy-Nagy. [61]

[ILLUSTRATION ND TEXT p. 77:]

Block schematic of an analog vocoder. The synthesis component is in the lower signal path, the analysis component in the upper signal path. The latter's low- and high-pass filters limit the input, e.g. of "speech", while its band-pass filters break down the audible range into several component frequency channels. Following their coordination as envelope curves, the analysis output, using a switching matrix with arbitrarily chosen correspondences between the signal paths, controls the voltage-controlled amplifiers [VCAs], whose band-pass filters have also broken down the "input" or carrier into several component frequency channels. The sum signal at the exit [of the vocoder] appears as an instrumental sound encoded by a voice [vox].

Rilke's urgent demand to put under the needle and try out a "variety of lines, occurring anywhere", to "complete [it] in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense": it is realized every night in the combination of amplifier and oscillographic display.

But there is more to it. Between 1942 and 1945, while working for Bell laboratories and the British Secret Service, respectively, Shannon and Turing developed the vocoder, a wunderwaffe which was to make the transatlantic telephone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt safe from interception by Canaris and the German Abwehr, [62] and which, like so many electronic achievements of the Second World War, is now indispensable to popular music. It lives up to its name: it encodes any given data stream A with the envelope curves of another sound sequence B, for example the voice of a singer, after a switching matrix has by way of free permutation changed the frequency of the envelope curves. In the case of Laurie Anderson's electronic violin, the third-octave band between 440 and 550 hertz follows in absolute synchronicity the volume which her voice happens to have in the third-octave band between 1760 and 2200 hertz, while a third third-octave band of her songs controls a fourth of her violin, and so on and so forth. Primal sounds do not correspond to anatomical features and sounds do not follow Mondrian's graphics; rather, the paradoxical result is that one and the same controls one and the same: one acoustics controls the other.

In order to test his vocoder, by the way, Turing first played a record of Winston Churchill's belligerent voice, whose discreet or cut-up sampled values he then mixed with a noise generator using modular addition. Whereupon British officers heard the voice of their prime minister and commander-in-chief contaminate the speakers as just so much white noise [not to say, primal sound]. Appropriately, Turing's vocoder was named after Delila, who in the Book of Judges tricked another warrior, the Danaite Samson, out of the secret of his strength. Turing's skill as a tinkerer, however, revealed the secret of modern political discourse to be something far worse than weakness: "a perfectly even and uninformative hiss" [63] which offered no regularities and, therefore, nothing intelligible to the ears of British officers or those of German eavesdroppers. And yet, sent through the vocoder a second time, Churchill's original voice emerged from the receiving end.

That is what has become of the "abysses" which, according to Rilke's ingenious formula, "divide the one order of sense experience from the other." In today's media networks algorithmically formalized data streams can traverse them all. Media facilitate all possible manipulations: acoustic signals control the optical signals of light consoles, electronic language controls the acoustic output of computer music, and in the case of the vocoder one set of acoustic signals controls another. Finally, New York disc jockeys turn the esoteric graphisms of Moholy-Nagy into the everyday experience of Scratch Music.

But Rilke's astute diagnosis only applies to the founding age when the three ur-media phonograph, film, and typewriter first differentiated acoustics, optics and writing. Nevertheless, as if anticipating today's media systems, he searched "for a way by which to establish the connection so urgently needed between the different provinces now so strangely separated from one another." Which is why he fell back on "Arabic poems, which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five senses," and which let eyes trained in the art of calligraphy enjoy the very materiality of letters. This explains the, historically, extremely accurate criticism of literary epochs such as the Age of Goethe, in which "sight" alone seems to dominate authors and readers, because correct reading involves a hallucinatory process turning words into a real and visible world. This explains as well the proposition for an equally lyrical and scientific coronal suture phonography, which would increase the "contribution" of "inattentive hearing" from authors of the Age of Goethe.

But before Rilke writes down his proposal on the Day of Assumption in the alpine solitude of the Bergell, he relates it to a woman. Synchronicity of the asynchronic: on the one hand a writer whose "extension" or combination of sensory media goes beyond "the work of research"; on the other a woman who mistakes coronal suture phonography for "love," and love, as involuntary evidence for "the sublime reality of the poem", with poems. Only as long as the unchallenged and unrivalled medium book was able to simulate the storage of all possible data streams did love remain literature and literature love; the ascension of female readers.

But a writer whose school teaches physics instead of philosophy objects. The combination of sensory data streams achieved by love is devoid of "permanence." It can not stored by any medium. Moreover, it loses "all individual character". That is to say, no real can pass through the filter of love. Which is why love does "not serve" for the poet: "individual variety must be constantly present for him, he is compelled to use the sense sectors to their full extent," or, simply, to become a media technician among media technicians.

Marinetti's Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature of 1912 proclaimed that crowds of massed molecules and whirling electrons are more exciting than the smiles or tears of a woman [di una donna]. [64] In other words: literature defects from erotics to stochastics, from red lips to white noise. Marinetti's molecular swarms and whirling electrons are merely instances of that Brownian motion human eyes can only perceive in the shape of dancing sun particles, but which in the real are the noise on all channels. According to Rilke, the "abysses" dividing the orders of sense experience are "sufficiently wide and engulfing to sweep away from before us the greater part of the world, who knows how many worlds?" Which is why love is no longer sufficient for authors who, like himself, transcribe all the details of sensory perception into an inner world space known as brain or literature, and, subsequently, phonographically trace the facilitations of this unique container as primal sound itself.

Phonography, notation, and a new eroticism, this is precisely the constellation described by Maurice Renard in a short story of 1907, ten years prior to Rilke's essay. What Rilke saw in the coronal suture, Renard's fictitious composer Nerval encounters in a roaring sea shell, which, like Rilke's skull, is a physiological supplement for Edison's apparatus. Thirty years later Paul Valéry used almost the same title to celebrate shells as architectural works of an artistic nature, [65] but Renard focuses on the central nervous system, on the labyrinth of shells, auricles, and sound. Since machines have taken over the functions the central nervous system, nobody can say whether the roaring comes from the blood or from the sirens, from the ears or from the sea goddess Amphitrite.

continues...

Source: http://www.leland.stanford.edu/class/history204i/Kittler/GramFilmTypwriter/Kittler_Gramophone.html#fn0

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