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Room for Noise in Soviet Sound Recording
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 April 2024
Abstract
When he was nearing the end of his life, Viktor Shklovskii recorded an oral interview that was recently digitized and published by the Moscow oral history project (http://www.oralhistory.ru). During the audio encoding process, Shklovskii's voice and the contents of the interview were badly distorted. This article frames noise as an important force that impacts not only how sound documents become authoritative archival evidence, but also indexically points to the context of their creation. To do so, I compare the role that sound plays in Shklovskii's own writing with the history of the Soviet state's archival preservation of sound, a variety of amateur sound recording projects, and mainstream discussions of audio quality and sound recording in the Soviet press. Ultimately, I argue that for audio researchers, making room for noise allows us to see the emancipatory gesture embedded within amateur tape recording itself: the ambiguous noise that seemingly marred unpolished recordings can instead be heard as a sonic alternative to official narratives.
- Type
- Critical Discussion Forum: Socialist Sound Worlds
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
References
1. See Sporov, Dmitrii. “Zhivaia rech΄ ushedshei epokhi: Sobranie Viktora Duvakina,” NLO, 2005: 4, at https://magazines.gorky.media/nlo/2005/4/zhivaya-rech-ushedshej-epohi-sobranie-viktora-duvakina.html (accessed January 9, 2024). Duvakin was motivated to preserve hundreds of Soviet voices in response to a sudden change in his professional life: in the spring of 1966, he was fired from Moscow State University’s philology faculty after publicly coming to the defense of his former student, the writer Andrei Siniavskii, at a widely reported show trial. Duvakin joined forces with university students like Radzishevskii and his future wife, Marina Radzishevskaia, who helped the professor record, catalog, and transcribe some three hundred interviews. Radzishevskii’s personal account of his time spent with Duvakin can be found in his article, Vladimir Radzishevskii, “Izgoi s dopotopnym magnitofonom: Zhizn΄ posle katastrofy,” Znamia, no. 12 (2004), at https://znamlit.ru/publication.php?id=2531 (accessed January 9, 2024).
2. The Institute’s website can be accessed at http://www.oralhistory.ru; it features nearly 100 interviews conducted by Duvakin and several other notable sound recordings. Many of the site’s recordings have now been transcribed and translated into multiple language, and Shklovskii’s interviews with Duvakin and Radzishevskii (https://oralhistory.ru/talks/orh-814) were recently translated into English and annotated by the scholarly team of Slav Gratchev and Irina Evdokimova as Dialogues with Shklovsky: The Duvakin Interviews 1967–1968 (Lanham, MD, 2019).
3. There are many sources for these misconceptions. Walter Ong’s Literacy and Orality (London, 1982) is probably the most well-known work to have argued that the “liveness” of voice rivaled the powers of the “literariness” of the written text, a tendency that Mary Ann Doane identified in her essay, “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Yale French Studies 60 (January 1980): 33–50. There, Doane shows that advertisements for both cinematic sound and home stereo systems in the 1970s “aimed at diminishing the noise of the system, concealing the work of the apparatus, and thus reducing the distance perceived between the object and its representation.” In Soviet intellectual history, Lev Shilov’s books Golosa, zazvuchavshie vnov΄: Zapiski zvukoarkhivista (Moscow, 1987) and Ia slyshal po radio golos Tolstogo (Moscow, 1989) were some of the first works of literary criticism to consider what it might mean to listen critically, but they assumed that vocal recordings could stand in as nearly perfect representation of the voices of Russian authors. Oksana Bulgakowa in Golos kak kul΄turnyi fenomen, Moscow, 2015, has recently tempered this claim by naming the recorded or broadcast voice as a “media double,” thus rejecting the idea that the mediated voice is superior or at all comparable to an original. Most recently, McEnaney, Tom, “Rigoberta’s Listener: The Significance of Sound in Testimonio,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 135, no. 2 (March 2020): 393–400Google Scholar, has examined the Hoover Institute’s prized collection of Testimonio cassette tapes from Latin America and Cuba, but he critiques the institute’s blunt interpretation of these tapes as evidence for the failures of socialism, and argues instead for the value of listening closely to the texture of each recording.
4. To some degree, the blurring of this distinction has also been explored in discussions of well-known magnitizdat recordings of Soviet bard songs, which achieved a cult status though an underground distribution network. These recordings strived (but often failed) to uphold sonic clarity and intelligibility after multiple re-recordings and copies, an unintended effect that has been discussed at length in Daughtry’s, J. Martin “‘Sonic Samizdat’: Situating Unofficial Recording in the Post-Stalinist Soviet Union,” Poetics Today 30, no. 1 (2009): 27–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5. Schopenhauer’s essay “On Noise,” is more of a diatribe than a serious discussion on sense perception, but it has reached its popular culture apogee with a recent mention in Todd Fields’ film Tár; Kittler, Friedrich A., Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, 1999)Google Scholar, has influentially argued that phonography permanently introduced noise into twentieth century discourse and sense perception. Jonathan Sterne’s recent book (MP3: The Meaning of a Format, Durham, 2012) on the history of sound recording formats put Kittler’s ideas into practice by exploring the gradual habituation of listeners to damaged, diminished, or “masked” audio production that incorporates noise as a cost-saving technique.
6. On noise abatement, ideas about the potential for noise to communicate, and a variety of cultural responses to noise in the Soviet Union, see Kendall, Matthew, “Boisterous Utopia: Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm and Soviet Sonic Culture” Russian Review 81, no. 3 (July 2022): 528–48Google Scholar.
7. This fate was not unique only to private collections, but became an endemic problem for the treatment of sound recordings even in official Soviet archives. A 1975 state investigation into the central Soviet archive of sound recordings, now known as RGAFD, Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Fonodokumentov (Russian State Archive of Sound Recordings) found piles of decaying, uncategorized recordings in stairwells, and discovered that many catalogued recordings had gone missing. See GARF (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii) Fond (f.) Р8131, opis΄ (op.) 39, delo (d.) 2.
8. Radzishevskii’s interview with Shklovskii, and its accompanying transcript, can be accessed at: https://oralhistory.ru/talks/orh-814 (accessed January 23, 2024).
9. On multiple occasions while speaking with Shklovskii, Duvakin verbally references the device itself (many of these have entered the transcripts: “Well, now is the end of the tape . . .”; “Is it already recording?”), showing that sound recording yielded its own type of manufactured and premeditated verbal responses and behaviors.
10. See Thompson, Marie, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (New York, 2017), 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a similar vein, David Novak has called noise a “crucial element of communicational and cultural networks,” see Novak, “Noise” in Keywords in Sound (Durham, 2015), 125. Other notable integrations of noise with aesthetic activity and appreciation include recent works from Melillo, John, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk (New York, 2021)Google Scholar; and Chambers, Ross, An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise (New York, 2015)Google Scholar.
11. At the archive’s 1932 opening ceremony, the Soviet minister of enlightenment, Anatolii Lunacharskii, declared that sound recording could offer yet another Soviet means of triumphing over death, celebrating how “living speech recorded on the gramophone will stay with us as long as we want. “Chelovecheskoe slovo moguchee,” RGAFD, f. 193, op. 4I902–I, d. (Doc-3444)
12. RGAFD, f. 1, zapis΄ no. 138, “Deiateli nashego iskusstva i nashei literatury.”
13. RGALI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva), f. 962, op. 3, ed. khr. 1936. This aspiration for the future precision of sound recordings was likely influenced by the conversely freewheeling culture of Soviet radio, for which live events and speeches from the early 1930s were littered with errors, mishaps, and unexpected interruptions that are passed over or ignored—it is only in their recorded counterparts where the goal for sonic perfection can often be found at every turn. See Stephen Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919–1970 (Oxford, 2015).
14. RGALI f. 962, op. 3, ed. khr. 1936.
15. See Volkov-Lannit, Leonid, Iskusstvo zapechatlennogo zvuka: Ocherki po istorii grammofona (Moscow, 1964)Google Scholar. Throughout Volkov-Lannit’s narrative, he insists that “noiseless material” (bezshumnyi material) is the ideal vector for sound recording, but acknowledges that there is no such material available.
16. Ibid., 227.
17. Letter from Leonid Volkov-Lannit to Lev Kassil΄, 1952. RGALI, f. 2190, op. 2, ed. khr. 92.
18. At his most straightforward, Attali writes: “in noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among men in musical structure, and more precisely, what is elided from musical structure demonstrates the workings of culture.” Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis, 1985), 6.
19. See Drott, Eric, “Rereading Jacques Attali’s Bruits,” Critical Inquiry 41:4 (Summer 2015): 721–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20. See Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Ronald Vroon, Ann Arbor, 1977, 75.
21. Relatedly, the film director Mikhail Romm put his own oral memoirs independently to tape throughout 1966 in the spoken word record, Ustnye rasskazy. Although likely unaware of it, Romm recorded his recollections contemporaneously with Khrushschev’s own set of audio memoirs, which were clandestinely put to tape to avoid their potential, politically motivated destruction.
22. Viktor Shklovskii, Tret΄ia Fabrika (Moscow, 1926) in the essay “Ia pishu o tom, chto bytie opredeliaet soznanie, a sovest΄ ostaetsia neustroennoi” (16).
23. Shklovskii’s stenographic reliance is often noted, but it is explicitly stated in an interview with Liubov΄ Arkus, who worked as his secretary at the end of his life (at https://seance.ru/articles/shklovsky-125/).
24. See “Vechera u Brikov” (64), in Tret΄ia Fabrika.
25. See Shklovskii, “Nerazgadannyi son” (1984), in Za 60 let: Raboty o kino (Moscow, 1985), 508.
26. From “Poiavlenie slova” in Za 60 let, 162.
27. See Shklovskii, “O Zaumnom iazyke. 70 let spustia” (1984), in Shklovskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2018), 1:281.
28. See Zozulia, Efim Davidovich, “Grammofon vekov” in Masterskaia chelovekov i drugie grotesknye, fantasticheskie i satiricheskie proizvedeniia (Odessa, 2012), 170–71Google Scholar.