"A Compass of Extraordinary Range": The Forgotten Origins of Phonomanipulation
Patrick Feaster · Journal - Association for Recorded Sound Collections · 2011
Techniques for manipulating recorded sounds have had a profound impact on developments in auditory and musical culture over the past century, spawning new forms that range from musique concrete to the turntablism of hip-hop DJs. Their history is accordingly of considerable importance to our understanding of the genesis of modern sound art. The early application of electricity to music has been extensively investigated in this spirit, as have early efforts by recognized composers and avant-garde figures to use phonography in creative ways. (1) Nevertheless, studies formulated along these lines have failed to trace a number of key techniques back to their points of origin, including speeding sounds up, slowing them down, playing them backwards, cutting them, splicing them, superimposing them, and sampling them. The obstacle, I find, is that influential scholars have tended to assume that these techniques must have originated with electrical media, with self-consciously avant-garde artists, or ideally with both. In fact, they did not. There is nothing inherently electrical about any of these techniques, and we can find them scattered across numerous domains of activity, ranging from whimsical play to scientific experimentation and from high art to the quotidian needs of business communication. A related problem is that most past studies have labored under the misperception that the phonograph was used at first solely to reproduce preexisting sound sequences faithfully across space and time, and that transformative applications of the type described above arose only much later, between the mid-1910s and the 1940s. (2) It is true that standard secondary histories of phonography have centered on the cultural aspiration towards transparent reproduction, and commentators who rely on such accounts for their facts might understandably conclude that phonographic media were used exclusively for such purposes until well-known artistic innovators took them up and found other uses for them. However, a more holistic review of early phonographic practice through primary sources reveals the presence of intensely transformative techniques and paradigms from the very beginning. There was never a period in phonographic history that altogether predated such techniques, and avant-garde artists of the twentieth century were certainly not the first to invent them, however much they may have done to refine, codify, and aestheticize them. In the present essay, I will survey instances of one large subset of these techniques as found in non-electrical contexts prior to the 1920s. First, however, I would like to define my object of study a bit more precisely and introduce some relevant vocabulary. We readily understand terms such as photography, photograph, camera, cinema, and movie as referencing important cultural continuities that span numerous technological divides (such as analog/digital). By contrast, the terminology ordinarily applied to sound media imposes an artificial sense of fragmentation. It is challenging, for instance, to speak about the general category of objects which includes cylinder phonographs, acoustic gramophones, electric turntables, audiocassette players, CD players, and iPods without resorting to clunky and arguably misleading phrases such as devices for reproducing recorded sound. Past efforts to define sound media terminology more formally have tended to exacerbate rather than reduce these semantic obstacles. (3) For my purposes, any inscription in which one dimension represents a time base and another represents fluctuations in the amplitude of a sound wave will be a phonogram. The practice of recording and actualizing phonograms will be phonography, and any device that effects phonography will be a phonograph. I will refer collectively to the range of creative techniques available for manipulating phonograms--cutting and splicing, montage or collage, changes in speed and direction, and so forth--as phonomanipulation. …