Encountering the Sonic Artifact in the Digital Archive

to 1962 (the year Jones’s monograph on Breuer HUMA GUPTA Historians are thus more likely to deal with was published), the intermittently told history the digital archive and not its analog antérieur. of the Heinersdorff multi-lens window speaks But how does this shift affect the method of detachment and assimilation between image Encountering by which a historian can know the past through and material. It also records the channels sound?2 It raises a number of questions, such and influences that modern architecture the Sonic Artifact in as what types of critical listening apparatus does followed in its path toward institutionalization: the Digital Archive one need to encounter the sonic artifact in the multiplication of myths, metaphors, and the digital archive? How does one deal with the misunderstandings traveled alongside images inaccessibility and flattening of the sonic whose visual impact facilitated material and So when we imagine we are hearing the past, past? How should one interrogate the colonial 27 aesthetic evolution in postwar modernism. we are always only listening to the archive. context of an archive’s production and its Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00679/1611607/thld_a_00679.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 The Heinersdorff window acted as a postwar Caroline A. Jones, “The Mediated Sensorium” 1 underlying claims to facticity? This article will rhetorical apparatus, an ersatz of an original address these questions through the author’s that never existed. As such, the glass panel INTRODUCTION own experience of historicizing a digital was born and disseminated as a reproduction version of a rare, century-old sonic artifact without a proper original—it was never The technological apparatus of the post- that promised insights into a nearly extinct an acting window in the Heinersdorff house— 1895 shellac gramophone record facilitated tradition of performative storytelling selectively circulating in black-and-white the creation of modern sonic archives. in the Indian subcontinent.3 copies in the US through publications and These archives contained comparable sets exhibitions. Its presentation in Sun and Shadow of ethnolinguistic and musical recordings 1. THE ‘LAST GREATEST was an unacknowledged tribute to the or “data” inscribed onto 78-rpm records. STORYTELLER’ OF DILLI intersection between movement, light, and They were seven, ten, or twelve inches architecture. Eventually, we find the window wide, single- or double-sided, with recording The Dilli, or Delhi, that Sir Syed Ahmad Khan performing, literally, as a visual narrator lengths that varied from two to four (1817–1898) described in his 1847 Asar-al-Sanadid documenting an historical development in minutes. Today, the decreasing cost of (The Remnant Signs of Ancient Heroes) the complex relationships between objects, digitization has resulted in unprecedented was populated by storytellers sitting on a reed materials, images, and architecture. The access to older sonic archives, a process stool on the steps outside the northern gate fascination with the image of the multi-lens spearheaded by central institutions of the of the Jama Mosque, narrating tales from window diminishes as soon as the history knowledge economy, such as the Bibliothèque the Hamzanameh that included fantastic and of its materialization and circulation begins nationale de France (BnF), the British often ribald tales of jinns, sorceresses, mythical to play. The image changed in every historical Library, the Library of Congress, and The creatures, and heroes.4 A storyteller in this iteration, invoking the past only to resonate Internet Archive. tradition was called a dastango, and the dastans with contemporary and future expressions in Breuer’s work (figs. 10, 11). The reemergence HUMA GUPTA is a PhD candidate in For instance, see Mark M. Smith, ed., Experience, Science, and Art. The set of the image in different locations and via History, Theory, and Criticism in the Hearing History (Athens, GA: University of of questions this article raises extensively different media deserves our attention, as the Department of Architecture at MIT. She is Georgia Press, 2004); Mark M. Smith, builds on the questions previously a fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Listening to Nineteenth-Century America raised in their own scholarship. reinterpretation of his past works underpins Islamic Architecture. Her dissertation is (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of 4. C. M. Naim, “Syed Ahmad and His Two the relation between Breuer’s changing tentatively titled “The State Between North Carolina Press, 2001); Shane White Books Called ‘Asar-al-Sanadid’,” Modern Dwelling & Building: Sarifa Settlements and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Asian Studies 45, no. 3 (May 2011): 5; aesthetic subjectivity and a renewed postwar and the Formation of Iraq” Discovering African American History Pasha Mohamad Khan, “The Broken modern materiality. through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston: Spell: The Romance Genre in Late 1. Caroline A. Jones, “The Mediated Beacon, 2005); and Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Mughal India.” PhD diss., Columbia Sensorium,” in Sensorium: Embodied The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural University, 2013. Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Politics of Listening (New York: New York 7. Delhi, Lucknow, Hyderabad, and Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones (Cambridge, University Press, 2016). See also Emily Rampur were considered key centers, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 22. Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: where dastangos could rely on different 2. This is a question that has been Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of forms of patronage from princely increasingly addressed over the past two Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, courts, landed gentry, and the growing decades by aural historians, who have MA: MIT Press, 2002); and Hillel middle class, to popular attendance. examined sound recordings, speeches, Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the See Ghaus Ansari, “Lucknow: The blueprints, and personal memories Big Bang and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: City of Palace Culture” in Urban to enrich and complicate histories of, for Zone Books, 2011). Symbolism, ed. Peter J.M. Nas (Leiden: 27. Not even in art historian Giulio Carlo at this late date as part of the interior example, race, place, architecture, 3. This article owes a tremendous intellectual E.J. Brill, 1993): 329–44. Argan’s 1957 book on Breuer was there a decoration of the Berlin villa, a house not and modernity. This article builds on this debt to Caroline A. Jones and reference to the actual origins of the demolished until 1972. recent scholarship and tries to pose Stefan Helmreich, who supervised and multi-lens glass, despite the fact that an new methodological questions given the encouraged this research during image of the window appeared in its pages proliferation of digital sonic archives. a 2014 seminar titled Resonance: Sonic

118 (epics) that s/he narrated were drawn from paradoxical configuration, the orality that is born in a new imperial capitalist economy or what Mark Katz terms the “unique what is broadly referred to as the qissah (romance) lost can only be communicated by the very that instilled both fear and awe in its listeners.10 spatial and temporal identity” of an art form.13 genre.5 In the public sphere, this Indo-Islamic technologies that stand accused for its decline. Shellac records were composed of lac, Moreover, if we are to follow Benjamin’s performative art of storytelling, or dastangoi, was There are actually two recordings of which is an organic insect resin scraped from insistence that the storyteller submerges the performed for a wide variety of audiences Baqir Ali from 1920. One is the recording of tree bark and considered a natural form of story or event into the life of the storyteller, then in cafés, bazaars, streets, opium dens, gardens, his dastangoi that garners the attention of plastic that is susceptible to decay. In the early each iteration of Baqir Ali’s narration would and princely courts. Each site would add its revivalists, and the second is a Hindustani twentieth century, British India was the be linked not only to the tradition of dastangoi, particular acoustical signature to the performance version of the parable of the prodigal son. While largest producer of lac in the world, and it but to his very being. Or in the vein of Alvin as the voice of the dastango reverberated the physical records are fragile and somewhat supplied the raw material for the gramophone Lucier, the resonant frequencies of the person within and through the space. inaccessible, both artifacts are available to be industry in Germany, Great Britain, and are articulated through their narration.

Mir Baqir Ali is remembered as the “last streamed on the BnF website, where the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00679/1611607/thld_a_00679.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 the United States. Although shellac came from Roland Barthes’s conceptualization of listening greatest storyteller” of Delhi. His death in 1928 is streaming story is accompanied by a photograph India, records were generally manufactured to the grain of a voice as “the materiality of also considered the symbolic death of dastangoi.6 of a 78-rpm record (fig. 1).8 However, there is abroad and then exported back to the Indian the body speaking its mother tongue” is similarly I first encountered this “lost” art form at a nothing in this cropped and manipulated image market where they were sold at a premium. apt here.14 However, these early recordings performance by dastangoi revivalists at the Indian that would immediately identify it as the analog The circulation and production of records could not capture the reverberations and gestural Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2012. housing of a Baqir Ali recording. It is only the thus followed the routine logic of colonial dynamics between audience feedback The performers cast a long shadow of melancholy web page’s metadata that confirms that this is economics applied to other consumer and artist improvisation that were integral back in time to the decline of dastangoi, which indeed that prized and rare sonic artifact. Based goods like textiles. to live performance. they linked to the proliferation of new aural and on such scant information, what method does This period was also known as “the acoustical While some dastangos recited directly ocular technologies like the gramophone and the one use to historicize this artifact? era” of sound recording since solely non- from texts, others like Baqir Ali memorized bioscope, with their concomitant economies of electric or mechanical means were used for both episodes from the Hamzanameh that pleasure. Some revivalists have claimed, however, 2. FROM VOICE recording and playback. The vocalist, Baqir were performed with improvisation or, at that a three-minute recording of Baqir Ali is TO ARCHIVAL TEXT Ali, in this case, would have directly projected other times, with little variation from their “only living source to an oral heritage that his voice into a horn. The expulsion of air print versions.15 For instance, in “The Broken stretched back for centuries,” one that “gives First, a historian has to understand how a digital vibrations would be emitted with trace amounts Spell: The Romance Genre in Late Mughal us clues to the diction, tone, delivery, pitch and version of a gramophone recording is subject of saliva that were somewhat parsed as they India,” Pasha M. Khan relates how Shahid tonality of the dastangoi form.”7 to multiple displacements and distortions as it moved downward into the horn. The vibrations Ali Dihlawi, a popular musician and editor of In this particular formulation, while Baqir travels across different modes of reception, were then transformed into an analog signal the literary journal Saqi, remembered Baqir Ali’s death embodies the demise of dastangoi, splitting sound from source, as well as translating inscribed on the thick wax coating of the record. Ali’s performance: the recording of his voice embodies a living voice and noise into reproducible vibrations, The grooves in the record would be analogous source of a dead art form. “Oral heritage” is electronic signals, and digitally compressed bits to the frequency and amplitude of the vibrations, Mīr . Sahib [Mir Baqir Ali] would describe deployed here as synonymous with an “authentic” of data.9 While the digitized sonic artifact and hence this type of recording was called an battles and courtly gatherings in such premodern culture that was not yet corrupted remains enmeshed in a utopian imagination of analog sound-storage medium.11 However, a manner that the entire image would by new technologies of recording. Yet, it is the internet as a purportedly “frictionless” the cutting stylus would also capture extraneous be drawn before one’s eyes. While only through sound reproduction that the voice space of commodity and knowledge exchange, vibrations of air from human and other he went on telling the story, he would of Baqir Ali has survived in the analog and, during the early twentieth century, the shellac environmental sources, which could contribute go on acting from time to time, and now, digital sonic archive for us to hear. In this gramophone record was a global commodity to noise or distortion in the record. an effect would also be produced by the Each recording had the potential to capture tones and modulations of his voice.16

5. The majority of famed dastangos were men, by mid-twentieth-century scholars (who Son [en langue ourdou],” in Collecte the particular “acoustic signature” of the space but there was a tradition of upper-class had internalized nineteenth-century ethnolinguistique, 1914–1922, Grierson, of recording and the resonance of the vocalist’s Though Khan notes how important the women employing female dastangos— criticism of the romance genre) as Bibliothèque nationale de France. body.12 Even the use of the term “talking “oral, physical, and visual” aspects of storytelling “well-bred but impoverished ladies”—who populated by the remnants of a bygone Available online: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ would perform for them in private spaces. era and of interest to antiquarians. Pasha ark:/12148/bpt6k129955j.r=baqir%20 machine” indicates a sense of embodiment. were, his explication of dastangoi is limited These women were often referred to Mohamad Khan, “The Broken Spell,” 9. ali?rk=42918;4. Perhaps this is partially what was meant to inferences drawn from textual sources and as mughlani or ustani. Mirza Jafar Husain, 7. Quoted in Sohini Chattopadhyay, 9. R. Murray Schafer first defined Qadim Lakhnavi ki akhiri bahar (New Delhi: “Voices from Colonial India,” Open: schizophonia as “the split between an by Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura,” eyewitness accounts. This again instantiates Taraqqi Urdu Bureau, 1981), 168, 434, 453. The Magazine, February 26, 2011, original sound and its electroacoustical This is cited in Frances W. Pritchett, http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/ transmission or reproduction.” The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures arts-letters/voices-from-colonial-india. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment 10. For a history of the gramophone, see 12. Ibid., 118–119. Thompson offers a definition 13. Mark Katz, Capturing Sound, 14. from the Dastan of Amir Hamza (New York: 8. Baqir Ali, “Récit en hindoustani [ourdou],” and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, of acoustic signature as “reverberation, 14. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” Columbia University Press, 1991). recorded in April 1920, in Collecte VT: Destiny Books, 2011), 91; see also Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop- [arguing that] the lingering over time in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen 6. Some scholars disagree with the ethnolinguistique, 1914–1922, ed. George Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: of residual sound in a space . . . had always Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 182. characterization of the late nineteenth Abraham Grierson, Bibliothèque nationale Technology has Changed Music (Berkeley: Stanford University Press, 1999). been a direct result of the architecture 15. Pasha Mohamad Khan, “The Broken and twentieth century as a period de France. Available online: https://gallica. University of California Press, 2010). 11. Emily Thompson refers to this as the that created it, a function of both the size Spell,” 69–70. of decline for the romance genre and bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k129956x.media; moment “when sounds become signals.” of the room and the materials that 16. Ibid., 67. consider it wrongfully characterized Baqir Ali, “Parable of the Prodigal Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, 118. constituted its surfaces.”

120 121 (epics) that s/he narrated were drawn from paradoxical configuration, the orality that is born in a new imperial capitalist economy or what Mark Katz terms the “unique what is broadly referred to as the qissah (romance) lost can only be communicated by the very that instilled both fear and awe in its listeners.10 spatial and temporal identity” of an art form.13 genre.5 In the public sphere, this Indo-Islamic technologies that stand accused for its decline. Shellac records were composed of lac, Moreover, if we are to follow Benjamin’s performative art of storytelling, or dastangoi, was There are actually two recordings of which is an organic insect resin scraped from insistence that the storyteller submerges the performed for a wide variety of audiences Baqir Ali from 1920. One is the recording of tree bark and considered a natural form of story or event into the life of the storyteller, then in cafés, bazaars, streets, opium dens, gardens, his dastangoi that garners the attention of plastic that is susceptible to decay. In the early each iteration of Baqir Ali’s narration would and princely courts. Each site would add its revivalists, and the second is a Hindustani twentieth century, British India was the be linked not only to the tradition of dastangoi, particular acoustical signature to the performance version of the parable of the prodigal son. While largest producer of lac in the world, and it but to his very being. Or in the vein of Alvin as the voice of the dastango reverberated the physical records are fragile and somewhat supplied the raw material for the gramophone Lucier, the resonant frequencies of the person within and through the space. inaccessible, both artifacts are available to be industry in Germany, Great Britain, and are articulated through their narration.

Mir Baqir Ali is remembered as the “last streamed on the BnF website, where the the United States. Although shellac came from Roland Barthes’s conceptualization of listening Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00679/1611607/thld_a_00679.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 greatest storyteller” of Delhi. His death in 1928 is streaming story is accompanied by a photograph India, records were generally manufactured to the grain of a voice as “the materiality of also considered the symbolic death of dastangoi.6 of a 78-rpm record (fig. 1).8 However, there is abroad and then exported back to the Indian the body speaking its mother tongue” is similarly I first encountered this “lost” art form at a nothing in this cropped and manipulated image market where they were sold at a premium. apt here.14 However, these early recordings performance by dastangoi revivalists at the Indian that would immediately identify it as the analog The circulation and production of records could not capture the reverberations and gestural Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2012. housing of a Baqir Ali recording. It is only the thus followed the routine logic of colonial dynamics between audience feedback The performers cast a long shadow of melancholy web page’s metadata that confirms that this is economics applied to other consumer and artist improvisation that were integral back in time to the decline of dastangoi, which indeed that prized and rare sonic artifact. Based goods like textiles. to live performance. they linked to the proliferation of new aural and on such scant information, what method does This period was also known as “the acoustical While some dastangos recited directly ocular technologies like the gramophone and the one use to historicize this artifact? era” of sound recording since solely non- from texts, others like Baqir Ali memorized bioscope, with their concomitant economies of electric or mechanical means were used for both episodes from the Hamzanameh that pleasure. Some revivalists have claimed, however, 2. FROM VOICE recording and playback. The vocalist, Baqir were performed with improvisation or, at that a three-minute recording of Baqir Ali is TO ARCHIVAL TEXT Ali, in this case, would have directly projected other times, with little variation from their “only living source to an oral heritage that his voice into a horn. The expulsion of air print versions.15 For instance, in “The Broken stretched back for centuries,” one that “gives First, a historian has to understand how a digital vibrations would be emitted with trace amounts Spell: The Romance Genre in Late Mughal us clues to the diction, tone, delivery, pitch and version of a gramophone recording is subject of saliva that were somewhat parsed as they India,” Pasha M. Khan relates how Shahid tonality of the dastangoi form.”7 to multiple displacements and distortions as it moved downward into the horn. The vibrations Ali Dihlawi, a popular musician and editor of In this particular formulation, while Baqir travels across different modes of reception, were then transformed into an analog signal the literary journal Saqi, remembered Baqir Ali’s death embodies the demise of dastangoi, splitting sound from source, as well as translating inscribed on the thick wax coating of the record. Ali’s performance: the recording of his voice embodies a living voice and noise into reproducible vibrations, The grooves in the record would be analogous source of a dead art form. “Oral heritage” is electronic signals, and digitally compressed bits to the frequency and amplitude of the vibrations, Mīr . Sahib [Mir Baqir Ali] would describe deployed here as synonymous with an “authentic” of data.9 While the digitized sonic artifact and hence this type of recording was called an battles and courtly gatherings in such premodern culture that was not yet corrupted remains enmeshed in a utopian imagination of analog sound-storage medium.11 However, a manner that the entire image would by new technologies of recording. Yet, it is the internet as a purportedly “frictionless” the cutting stylus would also capture extraneous be drawn before one’s eyes. While only through sound reproduction that the voice space of commodity and knowledge exchange, vibrations of air from human and other he went on telling the story, he would of Baqir Ali has survived in the analog and, during the early twentieth century, the shellac environmental sources, which could contribute go on acting from time to time, and now, digital sonic archive for us to hear. In this gramophone record was a global commodity to noise or distortion in the record. an effect would also be produced by the Each recording had the potential to capture tones and modulations of his voice.16

120 121 the cultural significance ascribed to Baqir Ali’s one to possess sound, as a way to liberate recording today. Although, scholars at the music from notation and become itself a time were not similarly taken by the promise type of writing etched on the tablet-like surface of sound reproduction. of the record. In his 1909 article “Gramophones—and why Adorno’s particular attention to the history not?” cultural theorist Ananda Coomaraswamy of the gramophone can be considered a bemoans the colonial Indian project “genealogy of the indexical inscription of of transforming local arts and crafts into an the acoustic.”20 If the record is understood in acultural industry producing commodities these terms, then music, like language and for a wide, undifferentiated audience across philosophy, which were already elevated to

a vast geographic span. “Culture,” for the realm of the divine above the extraneous Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00679/1611607/thld_a_00679.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 Coomaraswamy, implies a localized ecology “optical stimuli” for Adorno, is objectified of musicians, instruments, and voices that as a text that can be heard-read repeatedly are valued for their aesthetic dimensions and and critically interrogated independent their function as mediums that carry and of the ephemeral, subjective experience of shape tradition for future generations. a live performance.21 Adorno thus increasingly While the gramophone was understood as thought of sound recording as a rational, a mimicking machine that could reproduce archival text. However, if the record is the effect of the voice (a simulacrum), understood as an archival text, then it is Coomaraswamy paints it as a dangerous necessary to contextualize the construction amusement with wide-reaching economic of the archive where it resides. and social effects: “Every time you accept a gramophone in place of man, you degrade 3. HOW SONOROUS OBJECTS TRAVEL the musician, take from him his living, BETWEEN SONIC ARCHIVES and injure the group-soul of your people. So it appears that your amusement is An historian has to consider the birth of not quite so innocent as it appeared.”17 the analog sonic archive before scrutinizing its In subsequent decades, theorists would also digital counterpart. As discussed above, the struggle with questions of authenticity—like disruptive force of recording technologies not Theodor Adorno in his 1927 “The Curves of the only split sound from source but also enabled Needle”—pointing to the embedded nature the material preservation or “stockpiling” of of aural and visual art in a particular social and sound.22 While this last material property cultural milieu.18 In his 1934 essay “The Form made the creation of the sonic archive possible, of the Phonograph Record,” however, Adorno it is important to ask what were the economic, shed some of his aesthetic anxieties to intellectual, and political circumstances driving acknowledge the benefits of stockpiling.19 these archival projects? Who was recording First, he compared the two-dimensional spiral- whom? And why? inscribed surface of records to the flatness Additionally, these early-twentieth-century of photographs, which can be traded as archival projects often assumed an instrumental commodities and displaced both temporally notion of material culture that did not consider and physically. Second, he justified the that future listeners could have different existence of the phonograph, which enabled subjectivities and epistemologies that would

17. Ananda Coomaraswamy, “Gramophones 19. Thomas Y. Levin, “For the Record: as Bruits: essay sur l’économie politique de —and why not?” in Essays in National Adorno on Music in the Age of la musique (Paris: Presses universities Idealism (Madras: G.A. Natesan and Co., Its Technological Reproducibility,” de France, 1977). 1909), 209, 211. Coomaraswamy was October 55 (Winter, 1990): 23–47. especially interested in the ideas of John 20. Ibid., 33. Ruskin, quoting phrases like 21. Ibid., 43–44. “Industry without art is Brutality.” 22. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political 18. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Curves Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi fig. 1 Baqir Ali, “Story in Hindustani,” 1920. of the Needle,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Linguistic Survey of India, ed. Sir George Grierson. October 55 (Winter 1990): 48–55. Press, 2009), 101. Originally published Bibliothèque nationale de France.

122 123 the cultural significance ascribed to Baqir Ali’s one to possess sound, as a way to liberate recording today. Although, scholars at the music from notation and become itself a time were not similarly taken by the promise type of writing etched on the tablet-like surface of sound reproduction. of the record. In his 1909 article “Gramophones—and why Adorno’s particular attention to the history not?” cultural theorist Ananda Coomaraswamy of the gramophone can be considered a bemoans the colonial Indian project “genealogy of the indexical inscription of of transforming local arts and crafts into an the acoustic.”20 If the record is understood in acultural industry producing commodities these terms, then music, like language and for a wide, undifferentiated audience across philosophy, which were already elevated to

122 123 inhibit an abstract or empirical hearing of a Baqir Ali. However, beyond the scant textual or when some Indian Teucer, greatly understand him, and that it is from past artifact. Just as a photograph was seen as description accompanying the collection, there is daring, led his compatriots across mutual understanding alone that true a “snapshot in time,” the sound recording insufficient context to describe how, by whom, the ingens aequor of the Bengal fellowship is born, then I shall feel was heard as an “utterance in time.” In this under what circumstances, for which audience, Bay to people in distant Indo-China, that our labour has not been in vain.29 framework, a sonic artifact recorded in and for what purpose these recordings were and thence to wander almost as a particular moment had the potential to travel originally collected. They were neither created far as America across the islands of Grierson’s work was mediated by a sense of duty through time as an objective re-presentation for the purposes of the Paris Colonial the wide Pacific.27 and responsibility to reproduce an authentic of an original moment of recording and its Exposition, nor for Pernot’s museum. Instead, survey that would foster mutual understanding associated social environment. However, the archive was a result of a British imperial Grierson heard “inarticulate murmurs through mutual listening. It was as if until this article resists this instrumental notion project to aurally map, record, and comprehend from the past” that unraveled notions of that moment it was only the natives who had

of material culture in regards to Baqir the linguistic and vernacular diversity Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00679/1611607/thld_a_00679.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 Chinese-ness, Indian-ness, or British-ness heard the empire, but the empire had not Ali’s recording in order to offer alternative of the Indian colonial subject culminating in through his implication of a complex yet heard the natives. And the imperial act of methods of listening to this sonic artifact Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. genealogy and proto-history that was not “listening” took place through the construction as a “sonorous object” that has traveled across This twelve-volume survey contained predicated on contemporary notions of of a sonic archive. However, if the sonic archive media, archives, and modes of reception.23 descriptions of 364 Indian languages and dialects identity. The past offered both the “wild and is predicated on an imperial act of listening, Sometime between 1924 and 1930, an archive accompanied by roughly 200 recordings.26 the civilized” in the “savage dialect” and the then it is necessary to examine how one listens was curated by Hubert Pernot, director After completing the survey in 1928 (the same “splendid modern literatures” of the “plains to this archive with the ears of an epistemic of the Musée de la parole et du geste (Museum of year that Baqir Ali died), Grierson spoke of India,” such as the romance dastan genre. community of historians. the Word and Gesture) at the Institute of before the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain He retained a didactic scholarly attitude Phonetics at the University of Paris.24 It contained and Ireland at Criterion, a Piccadilly Circus that advanced certain binary formations of 4. LISTENING FIELD NOTES recordings that were presented at l’Exposition restaurant, in a hall lined with glistening wild|civilized, savage dialect|modern WITH BAQIR ALI coloniale internationale de Paris (Paris Colonial gold mosaics. As his peers toasted his service literature, governed|natural in his speech. Exposition) in 1931. On December 19, 1928, to the empire, they compared his monumental Grierson presented himself as an explorer An historian has to contend with the inter- Pernot wrote to Léon Cayla, the secretary general work to Edward Gibbon’s The History of leading an expedition through the acoustic subjective nature of listening. They have to of the exposition, and described his project the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and “past” and “present,” describing his sonic make sense of past and present worlds as follows: “d’entreprendre, en même temps qu’une to Scottish lexicographer James Murray’s discoveries as “an enchanted garden” whose through a “mediated sensorium.”30 Hearing œuvre scientifique, une œuvre de large first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary. “paths [were] almost untrodden by in the archive is an embodied experience, propagande française.”25 For Pernot, the museum Grierson’s own comments that day, as explorers from the West.”28 much like being, seeing, and reading. This takes was a scientific endeavor that was advancing reported in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic He also viewed this as an act of us into the domain of what Steven Feld the French national project by displaying the Society, described this lifelong endeavor as reconciliation between the empire and India terms “acoustemology,” defined as a scholarly diversity and resources of France’s colonial “one long romance”: after the 1857 Rebellion. In his own words: intervention of the acoustic into questions holdings and spheres of influence. of epistemology.31 However, in the writing of This exposition also marked the inception It is true that we have endeavored So we all did our best, and if the Survey history, the aural has been significantly of the Audiovisual Department of the BnF. It is to record facts, and facts alone. help [sic] ever so little to bring the India undertheorized with respect to the ocular. due to Pernot’s effort to collect these disparate But what facts! At every stage of that I love nearer to the England How does one position oneself as a historical recordings and curate them in a French imperial our work we heard inarticulate that sent me to her, if it suggests to the subject/being in time in order to examine the idiom that the BnF website presents to the murmurs from the past—of days Englishman something of the amazing history of listening as also a history of contemporary listener a series of digitized MP3 when China was pre-Chinese, complexity of at least one phase of subjectivity? In order to think through this files of gramophone recordings from the Musée when our own ancestors herded their Indian life, and if it suggests to the question, I have looked at attempts to theorize de la parole et du geste, among them a recording of flocks on the borders of the Caspian, Indian that England does try to a sounded anthropology.32 I experimented

23. The alternative way of listening to an Darpana of Nandikesvara in 1917. It was a 26. In 2010, the Digital South Asia Library at 27. “Sir George Grierson and the Linguistic Duke University Press, 2012), 314. See 329–45; Veit Erlmann, ed., Hearing artifact as a “sonorous object” was posed translation of the Telugu edition of the the University of Chicago announced that Survey of India,” Journal of the Royal also Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening by Stefan Helmreich in a meeting at second century treatise by Nandikesvara it was in the process of digitizing and Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 3 A History of Modern Aurality (New York: and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004). the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on stagecraft. The sanskrit word Abhinaya uploading the gramophone recordings (July 1928): 712–13. Zone Books, 2004); and Franz Boas, on November 25, 2014. is translated into English as “gesture,” of the Linguistic Survey of India on its 28. Ibid. “On Alternating Sounds” American 24. In the early twentieth century, geste (as in which can include gestures of the body, website, but this process was not yet 29. Ibid., 714. Anthropologist 2, no. 1 (1889): 47–54. gesture, sign or motion) had emerged as an voice, or ornament. complete when this article was published 30. The use of “mediated sensorium” here 32. Steven Feld and Donald Brenneis, “Doing important anthropological category, which 25. Quoted by Pascal Cordereix in “Les in 2019. The British Library also has follows Caroline A. Jones’s insight that Anthropology in Sound,” American called for the documentation and enregistrements du musée de la parole these recordings in their holdings, but the embodied human experience through Ethnologist 31, no. 4 (November 2004): preservation of performance-based art et du geste à l’exposition coloniale: entre their sound collections can only be the senses is how humans think, and 461–74; David W. Samuels, Louise forms that were perceived to be declining. science, propagande et commerce,” streamed by users who are physically by extension, how we know. See Jones, Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and Thomas For example, the art critic and theorist Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire 92 (2006), present in the library. “The Mediated Sensorium.” Porcello, “Soundscapes: Toward Ananda Coomaraswamy published http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ 31. Steven Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: a Sounded Anthropology,” Annual The Mirror of Gesture, Being the Abhinaya ARTICLE=VING_092_0047. Five Musical Years in Ghana (Durham, NC: Review of Anthropology 39 (October 2010):

124 125 inhibit an abstract or empirical hearing of a Baqir Ali. However, beyond the scant textual or when some Indian Teucer, greatly understand him, and that it is from past artifact. Just as a photograph was seen as description accompanying the collection, there is daring, led his compatriots across mutual understanding alone that true a “snapshot in time,” the sound recording insufficient context to describe how, by whom, the ingens aequor of the Bengal fellowship is born, then I shall feel was heard as an “utterance in time.” In this under what circumstances, for which audience, Bay to people in distant Indo-China, that our labour has not been in vain.29 framework, a sonic artifact recorded in and for what purpose these recordings were and thence to wander almost as a particular moment had the potential to travel originally collected. They were neither created far as America across the islands of Grierson’s work was mediated by a sense of duty through time as an objective re-presentation for the purposes of the Paris Colonial the wide Pacific.27 and responsibility to reproduce an authentic of an original moment of recording and its Exposition, nor for Pernot’s museum. Instead, survey that would foster mutual understanding associated social environment. However, the archive was a result of a British imperial Grierson heard “inarticulate murmurs through mutual listening. It was as if until this article resists this instrumental notion project to aurally map, record, and comprehend from the past” that unraveled notions of that moment it was only the natives who had

of material culture in regards to Baqir the linguistic and vernacular diversity Chinese-ness, Indian-ness, or British-ness heard the empire, but the empire had not Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00679/1611607/thld_a_00679.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 Ali’s recording in order to offer alternative of the Indian colonial subject culminating in through his implication of a complex yet heard the natives. And the imperial act of methods of listening to this sonic artifact Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. genealogy and proto-history that was not “listening” took place through the construction as a “sonorous object” that has traveled across This twelve-volume survey contained predicated on contemporary notions of of a sonic archive. However, if the sonic archive media, archives, and modes of reception.23 descriptions of 364 Indian languages and dialects identity. The past offered both the “wild and is predicated on an imperial act of listening, Sometime between 1924 and 1930, an archive accompanied by roughly 200 recordings.26 the civilized” in the “savage dialect” and the then it is necessary to examine how one listens was curated by Hubert Pernot, director After completing the survey in 1928 (the same “splendid modern literatures” of the “plains to this archive with the ears of an epistemic of the Musée de la parole et du geste (Museum of year that Baqir Ali died), Grierson spoke of India,” such as the romance dastan genre. community of historians. the Word and Gesture) at the Institute of before the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain He retained a didactic scholarly attitude Phonetics at the University of Paris.24 It contained and Ireland at Criterion, a Piccadilly Circus that advanced certain binary formations of 4. LISTENING FIELD NOTES recordings that were presented at l’Exposition restaurant, in a hall lined with glistening wild|civilized, savage dialect|modern WITH BAQIR ALI coloniale internationale de Paris (Paris Colonial gold mosaics. As his peers toasted his service literature, governed|natural in his speech. Exposition) in 1931. On December 19, 1928, to the empire, they compared his monumental Grierson presented himself as an explorer An historian has to contend with the inter- Pernot wrote to Léon Cayla, the secretary general work to Edward Gibbon’s The History of leading an expedition through the acoustic subjective nature of listening. They have to of the exposition, and described his project the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and “past” and “present,” describing his sonic make sense of past and present worlds as follows: “d’entreprendre, en même temps qu’une to Scottish lexicographer James Murray’s discoveries as “an enchanted garden” whose through a “mediated sensorium.”30 Hearing œuvre scientifique, une œuvre de large first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary. “paths [were] almost untrodden by in the archive is an embodied experience, propagande française.”25 For Pernot, the museum Grierson’s own comments that day, as explorers from the West.”28 much like being, seeing, and reading. This takes was a scientific endeavor that was advancing reported in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic He also viewed this as an act of us into the domain of what Steven Feld the French national project by displaying the Society, described this lifelong endeavor as reconciliation between the empire and India terms “acoustemology,” defined as a scholarly diversity and resources of France’s colonial “one long romance”: after the 1857 Rebellion. In his own words: intervention of the acoustic into questions holdings and spheres of influence. of epistemology.31 However, in the writing of This exposition also marked the inception It is true that we have endeavored So we all did our best, and if the Survey history, the aural has been significantly of the Audiovisual Department of the BnF. It is to record facts, and facts alone. help [sic] ever so little to bring the India undertheorized with respect to the ocular. due to Pernot’s effort to collect these disparate But what facts! At every stage of that I love nearer to the England How does one position oneself as a historical recordings and curate them in a French imperial our work we heard inarticulate that sent me to her, if it suggests to the subject/being in time in order to examine the idiom that the BnF website presents to the murmurs from the past—of days Englishman something of the amazing history of listening as also a history of contemporary listener a series of digitized MP3 when China was pre-Chinese, complexity of at least one phase of subjectivity? In order to think through this files of gramophone recordings from the Musée when our own ancestors herded their Indian life, and if it suggests to the question, I have looked at attempts to theorize de la parole et du geste, among them a recording of flocks on the borders of the Caspian, Indian that England does try to a sounded anthropology.32 I experimented

124 125 with certain techniques developed by cultural for transcription. I scrubbed the sonic artifact provide alternative technologies of sensory comparative grammatical and linguistic data. anthropologists to document my particular for noise (“apply noise reduction”), magnified experience?35 The short answer would be “no, The recorded voices did not represent their listening of this rare sonic artifact. it (“amplify” [default settings]) and finally, it is not possible.” At this juncture, a critical languages as spoken, but represented the The first time I played the recording slowed it down (“change speed,” affecting both voice could ask: why is it important to attend instructions given to repeat a translated of Baqir Ali, all I heard was tempo, fragments, tempo and pitch). to such acoustemological challenges? parable for the benefit of a British listener. and the disembodied voice of an old man. The sense of rhythm was maintained even The artifact that was heard resonated The parable was selected due to its At times, his voice seemed unpleasant and as the recording was slowed down. The temporal on my tympanic membrane and elicited specific grammatical structure, because it contained pedestrian. Other times, it evoked the image markers that signified cadence at the end of responses, which revealed more about my own past, present, and future tenses of a verb of a street hawker yelling like a fast-paced each phrase also remained. But, as the voice was cultural, temporal, and social subjectivities than and the three personal pronouns. Despite auctioneer. The language was not sophisticated altered, it became clear that this WAV media a previous mode of listening. Each instance its purported lexical genius, one cannot help

when compared to the more literary form file had shifted between several digital and Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00679/1611607/thld_a_00679.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 of listening had evoked ocular references in the but wonder how the subjects that were of Urdu I had imagined would be used. I had physical mediums. In order to serve the forms of personal memories, films, images, selected to speak the tale felt while reciting not anticipated that he would be speaking historian’s task of transcription and translation, and lived experiences that were cataloged this Christian tale of an errant, disobedient the popular Hindustani dialect of a century I had to alter the clues of “diction, tone, in my listening field notes. The assumed act son (hear: colonial subject), who would earlier. His rhythm, however, was enthralling, delivery, pitch, and tonality” that had piqued the of listening with the ears of an epistemic finally realize the error of his ways in and it seemed that I could partially understand interest of dastangoi revivalists. What was community of historians led to the creation of demanding independence and his share of and perceive the ebbs and flows of the tale particularly illuminating in this process was a parallel and interpretive textual artifact property (hear: Rebellion of 1857) from without fully grasping the narrative. Dozens that I was performing “modernity” in scrubbing that modified the sonic one. It did not seem like the father (hear: the British Empire) who had of listenings later, an attempt was made to sit what I deemed “noise.”33 an objective, empirical, or abstract listening showered him with money and love (hear: firmly, comprehend, transcribe, and translate However, even after several digital of a past oral/aural tradition was possible given economic, educational, legal, and physical the recording to English, the language of modifications, the process of transcription that the encounter of the sonic artifact infrastructure) and awaited with open scholarship most frequently adopted by British proved difficult. At each moment, I questioned in the digital archive revealed more about arms full of forgiveness for the return of colonial subjects. where to place commas and periods. Should my own subjectivity. his prodigal son (hear: India, “jewel in the During this exercise, I experienced anxiety certain letters be capitalized, lines be indented, Perhaps what I was hearing was not a living crown” of the British Empire). over the fidelity of the recording, emerging and the text reorganized into verses following source of a past “oral tradition,” but actually from a desire to be able to hear the best version some form of poetic meter? Conventions the archive itself. The intellectual labor of CONCLUSION: THE UNFINISHED of the original recording, the resonant of textual language were imposed on the oral historically contextualizing the production and PROJECT OF ‘ENSONIMENT’ frequencies of Baqir Ali, and the acoustical recording, and though the recording itself life of the artifact had inadvertently positioned signature of the space of recording. However, was produced within the context of a British Baqir Ali’s recording not as an artifact of This article has tried to attend to some of the 1920 recording was riddled with noise colonial sociolinguistic study, it is unclear dastangoi, but a cipher to decode and deconstruct the methodological challenges of encountering and distortion due to the fragile and organic whether it came with instructions for the creation of the digital sonic archive. a digital sonic artifact, specifically the inter- character of shellac, and each previous play transcription. The transcription of translated One key aspect of the critical listening subjective nature of listening, historicizing the would have worn down the surface of the record. recitations of the parable of the prodigal apparatus necessary to encounter the digital sonic artifact as a “sonorous object” that Regarding the BnF archive, it is unclear son may ostensibly have been easier, sonic artifact is attending to the silences has traveled across different media, archives, whether the original record was damaged at the but unscripted extempore recordings posed elicited by the archive. Namely, scholars and modes of reception, and interrogating time of digitization, especially after decades additional challenges. and revivalists of dastangoi have been captivated the birth of the sonic archive as an imperial collecting dust in storage. As such, I assumed After each instance of listening, new questions by Baqir Ali’s first recording but have project. I hope sharing my experience of the position of a scientist listening to an would emerge. As Caroline A. Jones asks, neglected his second recording, Parable of the listening to Baqir Ali offers scholars additional historical manifestation of a nearly extinct is it possible to “recreate the technological Prodigal Son. It reveals a lack of scholarly methods to encounter their own artifacts oral tradition. However, due to the low quality innocence of the original audience?”34 Or, attention to the colonial context of the and write more noisy histories. Jonathan Sterne of the digital reproduction, the only way in this case, is it possible to recreate the archive’s production and its underlying claims notes, “As there was an Enlightenment, so for me to hear Baqir Ali was to use Audacity historical sensory experience of participating to authenticity, facticity, and a hierarchical too was there an ‘Ensoniment’.”36 So, it turns software to modify the recording and in a dastangoi mehfil in an age when the ordering of the world along a continuum out that what I heard was not a lost orality, render each syllable audible and then legible bioscope and gramophone began to compete and of economic and social development that just the reverberations of the unfinished project elevates and preserves cultural forms in the of ensoniment. moment of their decline. Grierson selected 33. Thompson talks about acoustical 34. Caroline A. Jones, “Resonance” (Lecture, the parable as a standard text for translation modernity as an aesthetic of efficiency, MIT, October 23, 2014). which she demonstrates, for example, 35. Mehfil is an Urdu word for an evening in each dialect in order to produce a set of through the introduction of acoustical gathering, which is often structured around ceiling tiles that are meant to diminish music, poetry, dance, and storytelling. undesired sound signals. Thompson, 36. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past (Durham, Soundscape of Modernity, 119. NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 2.

126 127 with certain techniques developed by cultural for transcription. I scrubbed the sonic artifact provide alternative technologies of sensory comparative grammatical and linguistic data. anthropologists to document my particular for noise (“apply noise reduction”), magnified experience?35 The short answer would be “no, The recorded voices did not represent their listening of this rare sonic artifact. it (“amplify” [default settings]) and finally, it is not possible.” At this juncture, a critical languages as spoken, but represented the The first time I played the recording slowed it down (“change speed,” affecting both voice could ask: why is it important to attend instructions given to repeat a translated of Baqir Ali, all I heard was tempo, fragments, tempo and pitch). to such acoustemological challenges? parable for the benefit of a British listener. and the disembodied voice of an old man. The sense of rhythm was maintained even The artifact that was heard resonated The parable was selected due to its At times, his voice seemed unpleasant and as the recording was slowed down. The temporal on my tympanic membrane and elicited specific grammatical structure, because it contained pedestrian. Other times, it evoked the image markers that signified cadence at the end of responses, which revealed more about my own past, present, and future tenses of a verb of a street hawker yelling like a fast-paced each phrase also remained. But, as the voice was cultural, temporal, and social subjectivities than and the three personal pronouns. Despite auctioneer. The language was not sophisticated altered, it became clear that this WAV media a previous mode of listening. Each instance its purported lexical genius, one cannot help

when compared to the more literary form file had shifted between several digital and of listening had evoked ocular references in the but wonder how the subjects that were Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00679/1611607/thld_a_00679.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 of Urdu I had imagined would be used. I had physical mediums. In order to serve the forms of personal memories, films, images, selected to speak the tale felt while reciting not anticipated that he would be speaking historian’s task of transcription and translation, and lived experiences that were cataloged this Christian tale of an errant, disobedient the popular Hindustani dialect of a century I had to alter the clues of “diction, tone, in my listening field notes. The assumed act son (hear: colonial subject), who would earlier. His rhythm, however, was enthralling, delivery, pitch, and tonality” that had piqued the of listening with the ears of an epistemic finally realize the error of his ways in and it seemed that I could partially understand interest of dastangoi revivalists. What was community of historians led to the creation of demanding independence and his share of and perceive the ebbs and flows of the tale particularly illuminating in this process was a parallel and interpretive textual artifact property (hear: Rebellion of 1857) from without fully grasping the narrative. Dozens that I was performing “modernity” in scrubbing that modified the sonic one. It did not seem like the father (hear: the British Empire) who had of listenings later, an attempt was made to sit what I deemed “noise.”33 an objective, empirical, or abstract listening showered him with money and love (hear: firmly, comprehend, transcribe, and translate However, even after several digital of a past oral/aural tradition was possible given economic, educational, legal, and physical the recording to English, the language of modifications, the process of transcription that the encounter of the sonic artifact infrastructure) and awaited with open scholarship most frequently adopted by British proved difficult. At each moment, I questioned in the digital archive revealed more about arms full of forgiveness for the return of colonial subjects. where to place commas and periods. Should my own subjectivity. his prodigal son (hear: India, “jewel in the During this exercise, I experienced anxiety certain letters be capitalized, lines be indented, Perhaps what I was hearing was not a living crown” of the British Empire). over the fidelity of the recording, emerging and the text reorganized into verses following source of a past “oral tradition,” but actually from a desire to be able to hear the best version some form of poetic meter? Conventions the archive itself. The intellectual labor of CONCLUSION: THE UNFINISHED of the original recording, the resonant of textual language were imposed on the oral historically contextualizing the production and PROJECT OF ‘ENSONIMENT’ frequencies of Baqir Ali, and the acoustical recording, and though the recording itself life of the artifact had inadvertently positioned signature of the space of recording. However, was produced within the context of a British Baqir Ali’s recording not as an artifact of This article has tried to attend to some of the 1920 recording was riddled with noise colonial sociolinguistic study, it is unclear dastangoi, but a cipher to decode and deconstruct the methodological challenges of encountering and distortion due to the fragile and organic whether it came with instructions for the creation of the digital sonic archive. a digital sonic artifact, specifically the inter- character of shellac, and each previous play transcription. The transcription of translated One key aspect of the critical listening subjective nature of listening, historicizing the would have worn down the surface of the record. recitations of the parable of the prodigal apparatus necessary to encounter the digital sonic artifact as a “sonorous object” that Regarding the BnF archive, it is unclear son may ostensibly have been easier, sonic artifact is attending to the silences has traveled across different media, archives, whether the original record was damaged at the but unscripted extempore recordings posed elicited by the archive. Namely, scholars and modes of reception, and interrogating time of digitization, especially after decades additional challenges. and revivalists of dastangoi have been captivated the birth of the sonic archive as an imperial collecting dust in storage. As such, I assumed After each instance of listening, new questions by Baqir Ali’s first recording but have project. I hope sharing my experience of the position of a scientist listening to an would emerge. As Caroline A. Jones asks, neglected his second recording, Parable of the listening to Baqir Ali offers scholars additional historical manifestation of a nearly extinct is it possible to “recreate the technological Prodigal Son. It reveals a lack of scholarly methods to encounter their own artifacts oral tradition. However, due to the low quality innocence of the original audience?”34 Or, attention to the colonial context of the and write more noisy histories. Jonathan Sterne of the digital reproduction, the only way in this case, is it possible to recreate the archive’s production and its underlying claims notes, “As there was an Enlightenment, so for me to hear Baqir Ali was to use Audacity historical sensory experience of participating to authenticity, facticity, and a hierarchical too was there an ‘Ensoniment’.”36 So, it turns software to modify the recording and in a dastangoi mehfil in an age when the ordering of the world along a continuum out that what I heard was not a lost orality, render each syllable audible and then legible bioscope and gramophone began to compete and of economic and social development that just the reverberations of the unfinished project elevates and preserves cultural forms in the of ensoniment. moment of their decline. Grierson selected 33. Thompson talks about acoustical 34. Caroline A. Jones, “Resonance” (Lecture, the parable as a standard text for translation modernity as an aesthetic of efficiency, MIT, October 23, 2014). which she demonstrates, for example, 35. Mehfil is an Urdu word for an evening in each dialect in order to produce a set of through the introduction of acoustical gathering, which is often structured around ceiling tiles that are meant to diminish music, poetry, dance, and storytelling. undesired sound signals. Thompson, 36. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past (Durham, Soundscape of Modernity, 119. NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 2.

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