Sonification of time

There are two ways that sound is carried through time: musical memory as symbolically notated in scores (the archive) and sonic memory preserved in signal-based recording media (starting with the Edison phonograph). Digital sound processing technologies refer both to the symbolic (‘digital’) and physically real (‘analog’) regimes. But while the phonographic signal keeps an indexical relation to the waveform as acoustic event, encoded data allows for all kinds of time axis manipulation that disrupts its ‘temporal indexicality’ in favour of the mathematical archive.

Sonic eventuality is not simply time-based. In a more radical reading it leads humans to experience time as such. When effectively (i.e. physically) implemented in instruments, human voices, or operative media, music is in itself already, a priori, a sonification of time – its sonic Versinnlichung as affect. In a more advanced interpretation, sound is even a sonifiction of time in the strict Latin sense as it generates temporality.

Functional sonification (defined as the scientific or artistic use of nonspeech audio to convey information or more specifically as ‘the transformation of data relations into perceived relations in an acoustic signal for the purposes of facilitating communication or interpretation’) is different from ‘epistemological’ sonification (sonicity). The latter is the ‘acoustic’ in McLuhan's implicit audio sense, an auditory mode taken as epistemological term – just like the Pythagorean tradition that conceives sound as the internal phenomenon of numbers.

The present music field – be it experimental popular music or avant garde compositions – is characterized by an aesthetic multiplicity that extends human perception to the limits of infra- and ultra sound. This pushing of sonic limits is itself an effect of the almost infinite flexibility of digital technologies, especially in the area of micro-temporal manipulations. Thus, it makes sense to extend the term ‘sonic’ to non-acoustic time-based events as well; that is to say, to all kind of vibrations and their mathematical reversal: frequencies. Mark Hansen channels media artists like Bill Viola when he remarks that the ‘cinema-digital-video hybrid technique exposes the viewer to minute shifts in affective tonality well beyond what is visible to natural perception.’