Signal analysis instead of symbolic notations

After a decade of so-called analog audio media – with its corresponding sonification of memory – the symbolic regime returns within digital sound culture. The binary operation in digital sound by its very electrotechnical essence requires short-time storage of a binary state within the flip-flop unit; the algorithmicized archive is dynamic. This return of textuality into the sonosphere is actually ‘musical’ in its character.

Signal-based memory like the phonographic record was, in the past, an alternative to symbolic archival inscription; a textual record cannot sound ‘alive’. Time-based dynamic storage is sonic by nature; it is no longer subjected to the spatiality of textual arrangements. The analysis of the indexical, physical acoustic traces from the past (as opposed to the merely symbolic nature of notation and writing) provides access to the anarchive of soundscapes (including noise, not reduced to music) that is stored in technical recording.

The symbolic order and the indexical signal represent conflicting archival tempauralities. Being of the symbolic order (which according to Lacan always already implies the machinic1), archives are not time machines at all. They need external temporalization to generate a sense of history. While the traditional archive consisted of predominantly textual records providing a frozen spatial order that could only be transformed into ‘history’ by the very act of historiography, the audio record – when operated within machines – takes place in time itself, a regime much different from the scriptural.

Sonic media address humans at the existential level of affective sensation, being, which is essentially temporal. They regenerate human temporal experience by making sensory (aisthetical, physiological) experience radically present. At the same time, mental cognition translates such sensation into a ‘historical’ context: here, a dissonance takes place, a gap opens. As long as the archival records consist of strings of symbols (i.e. alphabetic writing), a cognitive distance – in spite of the auratic qualities of handwritten manuscripts or autographs – is more or less maintained because an act of decoding must take place using the cognitive apparatus. But once photography and phonography – the first media in the modern sense of this term – entered the archive, the sense-affective, presence-generating power of signal-based media cuts short this distance (which is a prerequisite for historical analysis) in favour of mnemonic immediacy – the chrono-electric ‘shock’.