UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Noise resonance Technological sound reproduction and the logic of filtering Kromhout, M.J. Publication date 2017 Document Version Other version License Other Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Kromhout, M. J. (2017). Noise resonance: Technological sound reproduction and the logic of filtering. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:30 Sep 2021 NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE 231 Epilogue: Listening for the event | on the possibility of an ‘other music’ 6.1 Locating the ‘other music’ Throughout this thesis, I wrote about phonographs and gramophones, magnetic tape recording and analogue-to-digital converters, dual-ended noise reduction and dither, sine waves and Dirac impulses; in short, about chains of recording technologies that affect the sound of their output with each irrepresentable technological filtering operation. Only toward the end, this analysis of the way technology shapes the sound of the media age and resonates with listeners returned to what got me started on these issues in the first place: music. For a thesis that started out as a project about the role of noise in recorded music, that last term has been notably scarce. Nonetheless, I am convinced that the media specific analysis of the role of noise and distortion in sound recording technology developed over the course of these five chapters establishes a theoretical point of departure on the basis of which it will be possible to further the conceptual understanding of the way technologically (re)produced music resonates with listeners in the age of technical media. This is why the final chapter concluded with Kittler's intriguing notion of the ‘other music.’ In the way I read Kittler’s work, the appearance of this concept in his early writings (most notably in “The God of Ears”) and occasionally throughout his oeuvre points to a tentative conceptualisation of the status of sound and music in relation to technical media that has been a constant, but understudied force in his thinking, which never developed into a fully formed argument. For more than 30 years, he told Frank M. Raddatz in a conversation published in 2012, Kittler planned to describe 232 NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE how modern [neuzeitliche] music, with the invention of equal temperament and the development of orchestral music, sonata and symphony with it, slowly turned into the kind of music that excited me: Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky. And how, due to technological modifications and innovations, from this ecstatic late Romantic music, there arose the British invasion—the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd and all the other Brit-groups (2012a: 62).110 Such a project, would he have ever pursuit it, might have resulted in a book on the ‘other music,’ but it was eventually abandoned when he, as he concludes these remarks, “encountered the ancient Greek” and began working on what would become his final, largely unfinished, multi-volume project: Musik und Mathematik—a tetralogy in which he set out to rewrite Heidegger’s Seinsgeschichte on the basis of the conjoined history of music and mathematics since ancient Greece. Perhaps, the final of the four planned instalments of this grandiose project (tentatively entitled Turing Zeit) would have returned to the issue of the ‘other music’; and perhaps the eventual publication in his Collected Writings of the notes, lectures and interviews currently kept at the German Literature Archive in Marbach will shed some light on this part of the project.111 In the meantime, however, the argument put forward in this thesis 110 “Mein Plan war zu erzählen, wie die neuzeitliche Musik mit der Erfindung der gleichmäßigen Temperatur und damit der Orchestermusik, der Sonate und der Sinfonie langsam bis zu den Musiken führt, die mich begeistert haben: Wagner, Mahler, Strawinsky. Und wie aus dieser ekstatisch spatromantischen̈ Musik durch technische Umstellungen und Innovationen die British Invasion hervorgegangen ist, also die Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd und all die anderen Brit-groups.” 111 According to the website of Wilhelm Fink Verlag, the notes, lectures and interviews on volume III and IV of Musik und Mathematik will be published as volume 11 of the monographs [Monographien] section of Kittler’s Collected Writings (Gesammelte Schriften) ("Friedrich Kittler. Gesammelte Schriften" 2016). NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE 233 is an attempt to turn the notion of the ‘other music’ into a conceptual tool that might help us understand how the music of our time takes shape in between the irrepresentable operations of technical media and the receptive ears of human listeners. Shaped by the filtering operations of technological sound reproduction, the output signal of the reproduction chain triggers the noise resonance between reproduced sounds and its listeners. Characterised by this noise resonance that originates in the irrepresentable moment of technological filtering, the possibility of the ‘other music’ must be understood as a musical modality that defines our contemporary musical culture. Hence, both in conclusion of this thesis and explicitly looking forward toward the possible continuation and deepening of the issues it addresses, I want to ask: what is the other music? Can we hear it? And if so, where? 6.2 Music hiding in hardware Given my strong emphasis on the friction between ideas of perfect fidelity and complete technological reproduction on the one hand and the randomness introduced by the physical cuts of technical filters on the other, one might assume that the ‘other music’ cannot be heard at all, because the irrepresentable moments of physical filtering that produce the transience of reproduced sound cannot be perceived as such. Constituting the irrepressible Real of reproduced sound, these moments only reach our conscious perception through the filtering operations of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, which, as I quoted Serres in Chapter Four, are “filtering a meaning, creating a meaning” out of the continuous fuzziness of the Real (1982b: 185). Such a fundamental impossibility to hear the ‘other music’ in itself could be a first possible answer to the question were it might be (or not be) located. If one were to pursue this suggestion, it could be argued that the ‘other music’ hides in the hardware of sound technologies, in the many transmission channels and filtering circuits in between sender and receiver where the noise of the Real interferes with the transmitted signal but disappears once it is stored in the grooves of vinyl records, pits of CDs and the magnetised surfaces of tapes or hard drives through which it becomes 234 NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE repeatable over and over and over again. Kittler might have recognised the potentiality of an ‘other music’ in the sounds of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and, above all, Pink Floyd, but he did not hear it, as the sounding music itself can only infinitely tend toward the ‘other music.’ Similarly, he might have recognised this potential in the circuitry of the synthesiser he built (or to anglicise a more suitable German word, ‘bastled’) in the late 1970's, which now rests in the archive in Marbach. Piecing together an electronic musical instrument, Kittler perhaps realised for the first time that technical media that produce, manipulate and reproduce physical sounds all by themselves introduce what he would come to call the ‘other music’ into the basic grid or mainframe of our musical culture.112 Or perhaps—a second suggestion—the ‘other music’ does not hide in the circuitry, but cannot be heard by human ears either. Maybe the sonic singularities of the ‘other music’ can only be recognised by devices that operate on the basis of the same technical filters that were applied by the machines that produced these sounds in the first place. Such is the case with popular smartphone applications like Shazam, designed to ‘recognise’ songs that users record and upload with their smartphone. As I argue more extensively elsewhere, no music or musical parameters are part of Shazam’s operations: the app processes physical sound waves that are recorded by a microphone, turned into digital data, sent to a server, compared with samples in a database, and returned to the user as an artist’s name and a song title.113 Shazam does not ‘hear’ or listen to any music, but analyses data that are fed back (via computer hardware and interface software) to the user. Turned into binary data, the music becomes coded information that can be analysed, synthesised and resynthesised like any other data set, without being dependent on any meaning beyond the logic of binary representations and digital algorithms. What Shazam deals 112 Many thanks to Moritz Hiller for suggesting this idea to me during the Princeton-Weimar Summer School for Media Studies, Princeton 2016. Significantly, in support of the argument that the ‘other music’ cannot be heard, but only hides in the circuitry of technical (sound) media, Kittler’s synthesiser currently cannot produce any sound; and it is unclear whether it ever actually did ("Apparatus Operandi1" 2012; Gringmuth 2012; Steinfeld 2011).