[For whatever reason, this post has become a magnet for comment spam and I have had to turn off the comments function. Sorry–MGK]
Hi everyone,
Here are a few links to various advertisements for “talking machines” that I will use to frame our discussion on Tuesday. Check them out when you have a chance and feel free to comment on anything you notice.
http://www.clpgs.org.uk/advertising_page.htm
http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/images4/14120101-034-0201a.jpg
http://www.worldofgramophones.com/ads/gramophone_ads.jpg
http://www.worldofgramophones.com/ads/brunswick_ads.jpg
http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/images4/14120101-034-0201b.jpg
http://www.worldofgramophones.com/ads/talking_machine_ad.jpg
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=berl&fileName=10010126//
berl10010126.db&recNum=0&itemLink=D?berl:1:./temp/~ammem_UKAr::&linkText=0
Something to think about…
Lisa Gitelman notes in “Souvenir Foils” that “audiences greeted the phonograph with both enthusiasm and skepticism” (157), and in the advent of this “excitingly modern connection between aural experience and inscribed evidence” (157)–it seems only natural that such a mixed response would result. In the course of my reading, what struck me most was the way in which sound recording was subsequently presented to and received by the public –through various advertisements, “scientific” articles, and exhibitions that explained and demonstrated how to replicate the basic mechanical process. Certain words appear again and again, emphasizing reliability, indestructibility, quality, and affordability. What does it mean that newly founded gramophone/ record companies all describe the new media in this manner? Particuarly in light of the Kittler and Gitelman readings, what does this martketing approach suggest about the implications of recorded sound?
Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
~Adriene
The hard zinc disc “becomes a picture of sound waves which, though slumbering in a bed of hard metal, is ready at any time, even centuries hence, to burst forth into the soft cadenzas of word and song, the ripple of laughter, the strains of martial music, as well as the melancholy and imploring drag of the organ grinder’s tuneful melody.”—Emile Berliner on the visual aspects of recordings (1890)
“I am carrying on a vocal correspondence with my friends in Europe, by means of small gramophone discs, which can be mailed in a good sized envelopes…I could cite a number of instances where persons have been made happy by hearing and recognizing the voices of loved ones whom they had not seen in years, and the owners of which were thousands of miles away.”—Berliner (1890)
“…you can’t write literature with it, because it hasn’t any ideas & it hasn’t any gift for elaboration, or smartness of talk, or ivior of action, or felicity of expression, but is just matter-of-fact, compressive, unornamental, & as grave & unsmiling as the devil. I filled four dozen cylinders in two settings, then found I could have said about as much with the pen & said it a deal better.”—letter to William Dean Howells, April 4, 1891
“I don’t mind them away back two or three rooms, but I don’t like to be close beside them when they’re talking through their teeth. They never really represent the human voice, and for that reason I’ve always declined to talk a record into one.”—quoted in The New York Times, June 30, 1907, “Mark Twain’s Experiences in the Hands of British Interviewers”
“The Machine Age can affect music only in its distribution. Composers must compose in the same way the old composers did. No one has found a new method in which to write music. We still use the old signatures, the old symbols…Handiwork can never be replaced in the composition of music. If music ever became machine-made in that sense, it would cease to be art.”—George Gershwin on the photograph
“That leads to the whole question of what you are aiming to produce when you make a record…one argument that is frequently leveled at me is: “You’re not being very honest.” I say, to hell with that. We have a different art form here.”—Beatles producer George Martin
“The recording industry has lived mainly by what might be called the transparency perspective, according to which a sound recording is understood on the model of a transparent windowpane through which we can see things undistorted…The rhetoric of the recording industry has tended to suggest its recordings were transparent in virtue of the mere fact that they were documentary…A blurred photograph could hardly be regarded as transparent, even if it is essentially documentary in function. However, the recording industry has not been quick to acknowledge the analogous fact about sound recordings…Each of its technical breakthroughs, from acoustic to electric, from shellac to vinyl, from monophonic to stereophonic, and from analogue to digital, was described in the same glowing terms as the one that came before. The cliché image of Nipper mistaking a recording playback for his master is only the best-known piece of hype the industry has always used to sell the idea that its transparency is a realized fact.” —Lee B. Brown Phonography, Rock Records, and the Ontology of Recorded Music
“Although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object…Neither is it a question of primary concern for the masses, nor of the techniques of communication as such, but of the spirit which sufflates them, their master’s voice.”
—Theodor Adorno The Culture Industry p. 99
Works Cited and Consulted:
Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry. J.M. Bernstein, ed. London & NY: 1991.
Berliner, Emile. “The improved gramophone.” (Paper read at the 52nd Meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, New York, 16 December 1890). Quoted in: Susan G. Sterrett, “Pictures of sounds: Wittgenstein on gramophone records and the logic of depiction.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. 36:2, June 2005 (351-362).
Brown, Lee B. “Phonography, Rock Records, and the Ontology of Recorded Music.” The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 58:4, Fall 2000 (361-372).
Gracyk, Theodore. Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock. Duke UP, 1996.
Twain, Mark. Quotes from:
http://www.twainquotes.com/Gramophones.html
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