Tempaural memory: Phonographic recall and sonic media temporality

Music lets us experience time. Culture tries to save sound from its ephemeral temporality in favour of cultural memory. The phonographic record as media artifact not only carries cultural meanings like words and music but is itself an archive of cultural engineering. In its very material fabrication, technological knowledge is waiting to be thawed and liquefied. Digital archaeology operates below the sensual thresholds of sight and sound – a level that is not directly accessible to human senses because of its sheer electronic and calculating speed. Synaesthetically, a spectrographic image of a recording provides a straight look into sonic memory. The microphysical close reading of sound, where the materiality of the recording medium itself becomes archivally poetical, dissolves any semantically meaningful unit into discrete blocks of signals to which philosophical or musicological hermeneutics cannot be applied. The media archaeologist suppresses the passion to hallucinate live presence when listening to recorded voices, such as happened to the dog Nipper when confronted with ‘His Master's Voice’ from a gramophone funnel (an image made famous by the HMV record company). Is it the affinity between the signal-recording phonograph and the musicality of the vocal-cantered Indo-European language that seduces the dog to hallucinate the presence of his human master? In the original painting of that media-theatrical scene, the gramophonic apparatus is actually based on his master's corpse – his coffin. While a dog does not perceive a photographic portrait of his late master as alive, in the case of the phonographic replay of his voice just such a perception occurs. For humans as well, the ear is the organ that is most time-critically sensitive to physical vibrations. To a large degree it is through sonic awareness that the human is addressed by the time-varying world.

Whereas the cinematic and TV image is always perceived as framed and thus contained as a kind of quotation of reality, the acoustic signal is never minimized but addresses itself directly into the ear. The radio voice is not perceived as representation of the ‘real’ (physically present) voice but as identical with the human voice itself.