135.2 ] theories and methodologies Aural Speed- Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks mara mills and jonathan sterne 1 MARA MILLS is associate professor in the FIG. Department of Media, Culture, and Com- Wisconsin School for the Blind, in Janesville, ca. 1953. munication at New York University, where she cofounded and codirects the Center for We write the history of aural speed- reading and time- stretching tech- Disability Studies. Her book On the Phone: nology in two tracks, taking a cue from Annemarie Mol’s The Body Hearing Loss and Communication Engineer- Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, with its “upper text” and “sub- ing is forthcoming from Duke University text” that invite readers “to invent a way of reading that works for them Press. Her Web site is maramills.org. from scratch” (ix). In the spirit of the story that opens track 1, on the JONATHAN STERNE is James McGill Profes- left, we decided to jimmy the format of the PMLA page. To differing sor of Culture and Technology at McGill degrees, each track provides context, describes events, raises questions, University. His book Diminished Faculties: and applies analytic frames. Track 1 is our narration of a series of A Political Phenomenology of Impairment is forthcoming from Duke University events recalled by Harvey Lauer to Mara Mills; the insights derive from Press. His Web site is sterneworks.org. his professional expertise and personal reading experiences. Track 2, on the right, does not benefit from the kind of omniscient sight known Together they are writing a book entitled as hindsight; it reads alongside. Think of these tracks as an animated “Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed.” The authors would like to thank and mostly asynchronous conversation among people who care about the Epistemes of Modern Acoustics group instruments of sound and reading in distinct but similarly fanatical at the Max Planck Institute for the History ways. For a cluster of historical recordings associated with this essay, of Science, the Alexander von Humboldt tune in to the Sound and Science: Digital Histories database: acoustics Foundation, Jason Camlot, Iben Have, . mpiwg - berlin .mpg .de/sets/ clusters/ aural- speed- reading. Burç Kostem, and Shafeka Hashash. © 2020 mara mills and jonathan sterne PMLA 135.2 (2020), published by the Modern Language Association of America 401 402 Aural Speed- Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks [ PMLA IN 1944, AT THE WISCONSIN SCHOOL FOR THE THIS ESSAY IS A CONTRIBUTION TO THE GROW- BLIND, IN JANESVILLE, A MIDDLE SCHOOL STU- ING TAXONOMY OF TECHNIQUES OF LISTENING. dent named Harvey Lauer and a group of Although scholars still sometimes stereotype his friends returned to the boys’ dorm after listening as passive and immersive, the last history class, scheming about ways to speed two decades of cultural and historical research through the night’s reading. Their teacher on sound have shown that like any cultural had assigned several chapters in a talking practice, listening is composed of techniques, book—Ivanhoe—as an entertaining (or so the such as directive and diagnostic listening, teacher thought) supplement to their braille sequential and mobile listening, auditory textbook. Talking books, on phonograph memory, auditory accommodation, and envi- theories and methodologies and theories discs, allowed the students to read together as ronmental sound interpretation.1 Aural speed- a group and were faster to get through than reading is a very recent technique, set against braille, but the boys were certain they could the backdrop of compulsory literacy in the hasten the task even more to minimize their United States and sound reproduction, which homework time.1 makes it possible to play back speech at a rate Before moving to the institution, Lauer beyond what any fast- talking human being lived with his extended family in Milwau- can produce. It represents one among many kee. His grandmother had a mechanical techniques of listening that were explicitly record player from the early 1920s with a theorized (sometimes invented), taught, and turntable powered by a hand- wound spring disseminated from blind schools beginning in and a sliding lever that could vary the speed the 1930s. And, most important, it legitimated up to 100 revolutions per minute (rpm). aural reading as reading, granting new tools of Talking books became available in 1934, control over pace, search, and access. around the time Lauer was born, thanks Since the invention of audio recording, to electrical recording as well as the long- auditors have noted the connection between playing records developed by the American rate of playback and pitch: accelerate the play- Foundation for the Blind (AFB), in New back and the pitch goes up, slow it and the York (Rubery; see fig. 2). When he began pitch goes down. Experiments with the play- reading these books a few years later, their back speed of turntables were crucial to the first public demonstrations of sound recording technology (Feaster, “Compass”). If the phono- graph acquired a popular reputation as a me- dium of faithful reproduction, musicians and sound artists persistently undid that conven- tion, using the machine’s affordance for vari- able speed to distort the pitch of recordings and to make new sounds. An iconic example is FIG. 2 the Grammophonmusik concert performed by Readers sharing a the composers Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch talk ing book in the in Berlin in June 1930. Hindemith tweaked the 1930s. Photo cour- playback rate of three discs with recorded vo- tesy of the National cals and instruments (xylophone and cello), Li brary Service for the Blind and Print calling these trick recordings. A teenage John Dis abled, Library Cage was in the audience; nine years later, of Congress. he composed his first electroacoustic piece— 135.2 ] Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne 403 playback machines—like most new record Imaginary Landscape No. 1, for piano, cymbal, players—included synchronous electrical two turntables, and a few Victor tone records, motors and only two or three options for which were otherwise used to calibrate instru- turntable speed.2 ments or test room acoustics. Performances In the case of the first talking books, the like these prefigure practices that manipulate rate was set to 33 and 1/3 rpm. Lauer always recorded audio in real time, like turntablism, played his books on his grandmother’s old tape manipulation, and remixing (Katz 175). phonograph instead of the AFB machine. Whereas the variable speed experiments The faster he let the spring unwind, the more of contemporary musicians (and other artists, the narrator’s voice increased in pitch. Press- like film projectionists) aimed for the overall ing his ear against the horn to hear the soft distortion of sound recordings, aural speed- sounds, he could just barely make out the reading aspired to distort a talking book in words at double the speed. This is how he time without distorting its playback in fre- liked to read. quency.2 For everyday users and other technol- At the institution in Janesville, Lauer re- ogists—for instance, communication engineers calls asking his teacher if he could borrow who wanted to speed up and slow down speech an older phonograph player, to read Ivan- to save bandwidth in transmission—the rela- hoe and other schoolbooks at higher speeds tion between speed and pitch came to be un- than the fixed- rate machine allowed. The derstood as a problem to be solved, both for answer was no. So he and his friends, hop- synchronous and asynchronous audio. It ex- ing to skim through their homework, de- isted not as a technological imperative but as cided to jimmy the classroom record player. the object of a set of audile techniques (Sterne They wrapped tape around the motor shaft 91–98). Distinct from general listening tech- to increase its circumference and thus drive niques, audile techniques foreground media- the turntable faster. They wasted some time tion and issue from “the episteme of modern coming to a consensus about just how fast acoustics” (Tkaczyk). they all could read. It turns out they could A fixed speed- pitch relation would later be not quite double the speed. One problem was erroneously described as the ontology of ana- that Ivanhoe had been recorded at the Ameri- log audio by Friedrich Kittler and other media can Printing House for the Blind (APH), in theorists, who argued that analog phonographs Louisville, Kentucky, where the studios had a somehow corresponded to the nature of sonic slight echo; the drier the recording, the more time because adjusting speed also changed the it could be sped up. Negotiations completed, pitch of playback (Kittler 15; Krämer; Ernst). the boys read together at high speed for sev- Yet it turns out that analog audio has no such eral weeks until the record player broke, its limitation. Speed and pitch can vary indepen- bearings ruined by the vibrations caused by dently, techniques now called time stretching the tape. and pitch shifting. Time stretching eventually When Lauer went to college and be- became an umbrella term to describe the ac- came active in the National Federation of celeration or deceleration of playback, also the Blind (NFB), he learned that these sorts known as time expansion, time compression, of hacks had been taking place at state in- or rate adjustment (among other names). To- stitutions across the United States, where day these techniques are everywhere, but blind students everywhere longed for the re- they first existed as a set of possibilities. We turn of variable speed turntables to control offer one time line for time- stretching, pitch- the rate of their reading. It did not yet occur shifting, and audiobook technology, building to them that one day a machine might be on Aimi Hamraie’s idea of “access- knowledge” 404 Aural Speed- Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks [ PMLA built to allow aural speed- reading without a (5; see 5–11), which privileges the knowledges coincident increase in pitch of the narrator’s developed by people with disabilities as they voice—what would later be called a “chip- use and transform technologies.