the real father is one eduard-leon scott de martinville, a parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed upon edison. yet scott’s recording device did not achieve the same thing as edison’s own. scott’s goal was not to record and reproduce sound, but rather to visually “write” sound. his device resonated when a sound was played into its bell and the vibrations were transduced by a tympanic membrane to physical energy which moved a pencil that etched upon smoked glass. the result is not a recording one can play again and again, but an accurate visualization of the sounds relative amplitude over time.
the recording, provided by the times, is of rather minimal quality. the new york time’s rosen calls the tune (a segment of au clair de la lune) a “lilting 11-note melody—a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.” to me, it sounds like just murk. the melody here is not ghostly or lilting, but rendered nearly monotonic and inert by the recording’s quality—any musical attributes are, at least to my ears, psychoacoustically imagined from a familiarity with the song heard through other means (go to the nyt article to listen!)
the quality, however, is not the issue here—what's at stake is edison’s precedence. the article is less about the recording, how it was made, and what it means, and more about this supposed challenge to edison’s legacy. an editorial response to rosen’s article in the same paper three days later highlights this challenge. in an article humorously titled “edison . . . wasn’t he the guy who invented everything?” matt ritchel here notes that “aha” moments of industrial creation are “preceded by critical moments far less heralded. behind and beside every big-name inventor are typically lots of others whom history forgot, or never knew.” ritchel believes, however, that edison deserves the credit not for being the first to invent the recording device, but rather for being the first to successfully translate it into something “usable, accessible, and commercial.”
these ideas so recently brought to national attention are the focus of jonathan sterne’s “machines to hear for them” from his book the audible past. sterne, however, is concerned not with who ought to be considered to “father” of recording or sound inventions. sterne is interested not in inventor’s landmark inventions, but rather how these inventions are “cultural artifacts in a deeper sense.” sterne believes that edison, scott, bell and others did not suddenly bring to the world things which were previously never imagined—he confesses he is sick of the “cult of edison.” sterne believes these inventors invented as they did because of widespread change in the world in which they lived. thoughts on hearing changed greatly in their lifetimes and was understood and modeled in a way never before. this change is not a “foucauldian tale of a single epistemic or historical “break” between epochs,” but rather a tale of slow changes in many aspects of mid-19th century culture.
in the case of edison v. scott, for instance, sterne writes at length over the purposes of their inventions. the idea of sound in scott and edison’s generations were quite different. early experiments like scotts worked to record sound visually, as scott and others thought the “way one gets to the truth of sound is by looking at it.” scott, in his 1878 memoir, writes that edison failed to properly reproduce sound. to scott, “writing speech” was the goal of sound reproduction, not mere aural recreation.
by 1880, much had changed. the ear had by then become an object of discrete medical study. the way in which the ear converted sound was understood and abstracted by scientist. as a result, otology became a respect field of medical science. sterne’s chapter begins with a description of a rather gruesome device, the “ear phonautograph” created by bell and clarence blake. it translated sound to etched glass by literally funneling the sound through a dismembered human ear (donated by harvard university’s medical school). it was culturally acceptable to attach this ear to a machine, argues sterne, as “ears were already being treated as mechanisms.”
before 1880, efforts to understand sound focused on a sound’s source rather than transduction. as the ear became an object of study, however, scientists realized that “whatsoever stimulated the [auditory] nerve could cause sensation.” the source was no longer deserved privileging, but the long-neglected middle-ear needed attention. for the first time, scientists dissected and learned the ear really worked.
helmholtz, the “father” of modern acoustics, theorized that sounds are constructed by adding together fundamentals and partials above, and thus any sound could be synthesized through addition of sine sources. the theory is simple but remarkable—any sound can be reproduced so long as it tickles the auditory nerve the same way as the original, regardless of whether or not the reproduction is organic or synthetic. (it was not some time later, however, until computer musicians led by jean-claude risset mathematically realized helmholtz’s ideas through destruction of sound through fast fourier transformations and sound creation through additive synthesis.)
at the same time, construction of mechanical automata changed greatly. in the late 18th-century, automata that produced sound focused on the source of sound. as sterne reports, four unrelated persons in 1770-1790 built “speaking” machines. all these devices made mechanical human organs (no dismembered tongues here) to make sound. a young bell and his brother made on such device.
years later, the focus shifted from modeling sound production organs to, as seen in the gruesome ear phonograph, to modeling sound transduction. inventors worked not to make working mouths, but rather working ears, “machines to hear for [you].” (text-to-speech synthesis of the mid-20th century, however, certainly brought sound production modeling back in a very different way.)
scott’s device is one which attempted to make sound visual.. it did not attempt to understand is transduction, but only tried to get at some truth behinds its production. edison’s work recreated sound so that it could vibrate the ear and penetrate the mind like as original event. (ironically, sterne, despite his efforts to point the narrative away from “big men” towards “big ideas” refutes scott’s usurping edison—scott wasn’t even trying to reproduce speech, which is why edison is so famous)
sterne’s efforts are laudable. just like how edison’s invention is a product of its time, sterne’s book is one of many recent cultural studies written about sound, listening, and music such as catherine cameron’s dialetics in the arts: the rise in american experimentalism (1996), carol oja’s making music modern: new york in the 1920s (2000), michael hicks' henry cowell: bohemian (2002) and rob fink’s repeating ourselves: american minimal music as cultural practice (2005) all focus not on the history of “great men” but rather of “great ideas” (or at least, sterne description of edison and bell, show where “great men” got their “great ideas”).
scholars have only recently begun to unravel centuries of “great man” historiography to reveal composers as influencing and influenced by the dynamic world they lived in. it takes a village to raise a child—likewise, musicologists now assert that it takes a civilization to compose a symphony. cultural history, however, an “old” approach. only in recent years that musicologists have finally raided the cultural historian’s tool chest. books such as johan huizinga’s the autumn of the middle ages (1919) and michael foucault’s madness and civilization (1961) are models for this recent musicological approach.
i recount these many books not to diminish sterne’s feat, but rather to do what he does with bell and edison, place them in their historical context. his work is “historical maximalism” (i stole that phrase for sterne from phil ford—apologies). sterne seems extremely opposed to “great man” causality, but rather sees nearly every aspect of listening as historically contigent. but he does this well. in other cultural histories, similar attempts often feel forced and false—sterne never goes beyond what is logical—it really is a great read.
musicology and other fields have only recently become interested in how people listen, and sterne is smart in creating a cultural history of how people have come to care about how people listen. people obviously do care quite a bit—especially as influenced by the new york times articles. a final thought there: jody rosen notes that the debate on whether edison and scott recorded first is muddled by the fact that scott did not record with intent for aural reproduction. rosen notes “listeners are now left to ponder the oddity of hearing a recording made before the idea of audio playback was ever imagined.” sterne, however, believes that we today are “in a period more similar to the 1860s than the 1800s. with computers, there is an unprecedented visualization of sound.” (i cannot help but to think he is talking specifically about lame windows media player and itunes “visualizations”)
so, perhaps it is only now, in 2008, that we care enough to want to reproduce aurally the visualized sound of scott. while scott was never as famous as edison, his sound etchings were not erased from histories, while they were restricted to its footnotes. gumby, in his production of presence, describes a desire to reperform, rerecord, and transcend time (which i posted about earlier here). the past is a place of things that have happened and are no longer present. yet, gumby believes, we desire to fill the present with “artifacts from” or “reproductions of” the past. we “cherish the illusion” of the past being present, we do not want to leave it behind.
is this article in the new york times and sterne’s book evidence of a new way of hearing and listening, to which gumby alludes? are we concerned now not with how the sound is produced or how the sound is transduced, but rather how sounds have been produced and transduced? while we might have been interested all along, it seems that only now this interest is taking center stage, both in academic tomes and the popular press. i haven’t finished book yet and perhaps sterne gets at this later chapter—regardless, i am excited to see what comes next, in the sterne and beyond.
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