Message or noise? Acoustic archaeology

As a very simple kind of psychoacoustic experiment, let us imagine an ancient phonographic recording. Whatever the song might be, one will also acoustically associate scratches in the grooves and noise from the recording device. Such phonographic crackle is an indexical trace of physical time itself (different from its symbolical coding by historiography). True media archaeology starts here: The phonograph as media artifact not only preserves the memory of cultural semantics, but also the technological knowledge of the material past. Such media knowledge is encoded in engineering and waits to be revealed by media-archaeological methods. The noise inherent in a wax cylinder is a non-discursive real event and should not be excluded from otherwise hermeneutic philological analysis of historical recordings. But it is not the only real event revealed by the examination of the phonograph:

In a truly media-archaeological analysis of sonic articulations, noise is not symbolic but something real that is inextricably linked to the operational machine. The noise from old wax cylinders is not an external accident but an inherent part of such recording media; it essentially constitutes our understanding of these media machines. ‘Listening to Technology’ firstly of all requires the close listening to the noise produced by technology itself. There is a progressive silencing of technical media; that is why an auditory icon simulates the proverbial click of a camera even in digital devices that lack a mechanical correlate. The Museum of Endangered Sounds preserves and takes care of ‘dead media’ sounds.