Excursion: Media Archaeology of ‘Sirenic’ sound

Any media archaeology of past acoustics has to confront a dilemma: how can a sonic event that is supposed to have happened long before the age of gramophonic recording be verified? The Siren singing in Homer's Odyssey (XII, 184-191) has long been interpreted as a mere poetic invention. To test and reconstruct acoustic events such as Homer's Siren songs by mediaarchaeological means is not only an academic provocation to philological methodologies, but also leads to different understandings of cultural tempor(e)alities.

Since antiquity (as reported by Strabo the geographer), the Li Galli islands at the Amalfi coast in South Italy are supposed to have been the place where Odysseus heard the infamous voices of the Sirens. Is there something like a physically given grounding in the ‘real’ of signal processing that kept cultural memory insisting on that place? Acoustic environments in natural landscape have temporal endurance because their sonic effects can be recreated, more or less invariantly, across different time periods. Sonic memory can not be arbitrarily shifted to just any place; however it still remains unclear what Odysseus could hear. Were there specific acoustic phenomena in that region? Did he hear real sounds or was the sound sensation just an auditory hallucination? And finally, if there were voices, what is the appropriate understanding of their sonic message?

For 2500 years, tradition – like a cultural phonograph – claims to have known exactly the place where the Sirens sang. Such an insistent memory is itself indicative of acoustic evidence. But it requires special devices and methods to decode such engravings of acoustic memory: media-archaeological gramophony and an archaeology of sound. A media-archaeological research expedition by members of Humboldt University Berlin, assisted by the Centre for Media Arts and Technology Karlsruhe, in early April 2004, conducted experiments with sound propagation at the Li Galli Islands. These experiments used both human organs and technical apparatuses. Both synthetic signals (sine tones, white noise) and natural voices (chanted intervals of vowels previously recorded on tape) were tested via loudspeaker. Two trained human voices (opera singers) also sang glissandi on the spot. The signals were recorded along a line supposedly taken by Odysseus to approach the Siren Island.