Defining phonography: An experiment in theory

Musical Quarterly

Volumn 81, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 242-264

  Rothenbuhler, Eric W ^a   Peters, John Durham ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949830629     PISSN: 00274631     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/mq/81.2.242     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23
2. "Analog Corner," Stereophile (July 1995): 45ff
3. and Edward Rothstein, "Past Is Present, and the Sound Is Classic," New York Times, 22 Oct. 1995, sec. 2, pp. 1, 40
4. Laura Dearborn, The Good Sound (New York: William Morrow, 1987), is a good source and example: Stereophile and Absolute Sound are the major journals of audiophilia
5. Relevant historical analysis is provided by Joseph O'Connell, "The Fine-Tuning of a Golden-Ear: High-End Audio and the Evolutionary Model of Technology," Technology and Culture 33 (1992): 1-37
6. and Keir Keightley, "'Turn it Down!,' She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948-59," Popular Music 15 (1996): 149-77
7. T. W. Adorno, "The Form of the Phonograph Record," trans. Thomas Y. Levin, October 55 (Winter 1990): 56-61
8. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks: 1800/1900, trans. M. Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 245
9. On the history of phonographic technique, see Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music (New York: Verso, 1995), 23-36
10. Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 17-36
11. Walter L. Welch and Leah Brodbeck Stenzel Burt, From Tinfoil to Stereo: The Acoustic Years of the Recording Industry, 1877-1929 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994)
12. and Jacques Perriault, Mémoires de l'ombre et du son: Une archéologie de l'audiovisuel (Paris: Flammarion, 1981)
13. Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: The Experience of Music from Aristotle to Zappa (New York: Penguin, 1987)
14. See also Chanan, and Dave Laing, "A Voice without a Face: Popular Music and the Phonograph in the 1890's," Popular Music 10 (1991): 1-9
15. Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, vol. 1 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 221
16. Satie and Hindemith anticipated this development. See also Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong (New York: St. Martins, 1994)
17. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken, 1974)
18. Max Weber, "The History of the Piano," in Max Weber: Selections in Translation, ed. W. G. Runciman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 378-82
19. Thomas A. Edison, "The Phonograph and Its Future," North American Review 126 (May-June 1878): 527-36, at 530
20. Mark Bennion Sandberg, "Missing Persons: Spectacle and Narrative in Late Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia" (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1991)
21. The waveforms are in their turn related to the more complex waveforms constituting music by the mathematical transformations of Fourier analysis and the engineering application of Nyquist's theorem. For overviews of digital recording and CD technologies, see Ken C. Pohlmann, The Compact Disc: A Handbook of Theory and Use (Madison, Wis.: A-R Editions, 1989)
22. and John Strawn, ed., Digital Audio Engineering: An Anthology (Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufmann, 1985)
23. The rhetoric of fidelity followed the phonograph from the beginning: see Emily Thompson, "Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877-1925," Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): 131-71
24. Herbert Schiller, Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America (New York: Routledge, 1996)
25. and Friedrich A. Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 1985)
26. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," trans. Harry Zohn in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217-51
27. James F. Lastra, "Reading, Writing, and Representing Sound," in Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 65-86
28. T. W. Adorno, "The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory," in Radio Research, 1941, ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1942), 110-39
29. Alan M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind 59 (Oct. 1950): 433-60. Though this test was developed to discern the difference between artificial and human intelligence, a precursor is the Edison-sponsored "tone tests" inviting auditors to discern human from phonographic vocalists; see Thompson
30. Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Vintage, 1993)
31. Roman Jakobson, "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles," in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), 1113-16
32. Carlo Ginzburg, "Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm," trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi, in Myths, Emblems, Clues (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990), 96-125, 200-14
33. Paul Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutics of Testimony," Anglican Theological Review 61, no. 4 (Oct. 1979): 435-61