Institutions, Industries, Technologies

Defining Phonography: An Experiment in

Theory

Eric W. Rothenbuhler and]ohn Durham Peters

... none
Gives motion to perfection more serene
Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought ...
-Wallace Stevens, "To the One of Fictive Music"

Phonography can be taken to define a period in our relation to music, a

period marked by a distinct set of attitudes, practices, and institutions
made possible by a particular technology, the phonograph.! The age of
phonography came into being with the popularization of the phonograph
as in-home entertainment, cultural medium, and educational tool. With
the popularization of digital recording and playback techniques (CD,
OAT, DeC, etc.), the end of the age of phonography is at hand.
In one of those luminous phrases more often quoted than under­
stood, Hegel said that "the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the
onset of dusk."Z By this he meant that an era or civilization can be under­
stood only as it begins to disappear from the scene of history. Death, for
Hegel, is the price of intelligibility. Hence there is always something both
mournful and belated about historical understanding. We believe that
small differences in the media of recorded music are not mere trifles for
the fetishist but have large cultural consequences. The death of the vinyl
LP is an event of potential civilizational significance and deserves to be
mourned properly. This essay is in part a meditation on those graveyards
of recorded sound that fill shelf space in our living rooms.
PreCisely how the coming and going of phonography matters is yet to be
seen, perhaps partly because the LP's death is yet incomplete. The recent "ana_
log renaissance" may mean the return of vinyl in full force;3 it may also be a
passing retro phase of the fashion cycle that only shows how dead vinyl is.
But before speculating on the nature of the age, we must define the
nature of the technique. This essay discusses phonography as a technology
and social practice in contrast to the pre-phonographic era and the post­

242
 Defining Phonography 243

phonographic era of digital recording, storage, and playback. Throughout

we explore some ideas from the audiophile culture of high fidelity.4 One
does not normally speak of originality and authenticity in the postmodern
academy without an ironic tone, but some issues cannot be avoided.
What makes a sign stick? What compels credence? The audiophile's pas­
sion for analog and distrust of digital discloses, we will argue, less a
fetishist's obsession with fine differences than an implicit answer to these
fundamental questions. What is at stake in the interpretive attitude of the
audiophile is not a rhetoric of inquiry but a hermeneutics of testimony.

1. Pre..phonography
Like most things social, it is not clear that the phonograph caused any­
thing at all. But it does appear in retrospect that it allowed a number of
interesting developments. The phonograph helped change our relation­
ship with music: music no longer required a live performer. Music took on
a life of its own, independent of composers, musicians, or audiences.
Music, in short, became an object. The record, as Adorno put it, "is the
first means of musical presentation that can be possessed as a thing."S This
is not to say that music became a text, which is something far older,
thanks to various notational systems. The phonograph inscribes not the
spirit of music but its body, its acoustic being in time. Phonography cap­
tures not the code but the act, not the script but the voice, not the score
but the performance. Phonography and film attack the monopoly once
held by printing: "the storage of serial data."6 After Scott, eros, Edison,
Bell and Tainter, and Berliner, sound no longer vanished into thin air} It
could be caught on tiny concentric grooves on cylinders or disks. As Edi­
son supposedly said, "Speech has become immortal."
Many of the implications of the phonographic transformation are
insightfully discussed in Eisenberg's The Recording Angel, and we will only
mention some here.8 The phonograph meant we could own music-not
sheet music, but music itself. Rather than going to hear music often, we could
go to buy it often-and play it at home often. The phonograph allowed
repeated listening for more people than the privileged scholar or aesthete.
Anyone who wanted to, within reasonable means, could study music in per­
formance and thus alter his or her own perceptions of it. Or, one could forget
about the music as music and rather pursue pride of ownership via extensive
collections or elaborate equipment. There is something about phonography,
as we shall see, that invites collecting---something missing in digitally
recorded music. It is no accident, Adorno noted, that stamps, photographs,
and records are all kept in those "herbaria of artificial life" called albums.9
244 The Musical Quarterly

Funher, many copies of a musical performance could be made, such

that the phonograph contributed to the development of audiences distrib­
uted in time and space and essentially unaware of each other. Indeed, com­
pared to the newspaper, the audience for music was radically distributed
and anonymous; but no more so than the audience for books. The hetero­
geneity of musical tastes proved, for example, a painful obstacle to the
BBC's dream of a national broadcasting service to include news, entenain­
ment, and music,10 The phonograph, like the radio, surely played a key
role in reinforcing the nonlocalized segmentation of musical taste cultures.
The phonograph allowed the auditor, not just the performer, to con­
trol music as an individual. The phonograph belongs to a family of tech­
niques for both telecommunication and preserving time in the late nine­
teenth century: telegraphy, telephony, standardized time zones, time and
motion studies, and split-second photography. As Perriault notes, the
phonograph sits at the confluence of the world of engineers and of poets. I I
The phonograph gave us, in our capacities as consumers, a new kind of
control over time. We could choose time's rhythms and when we entered
and left its control-and in what space we did so. As the phonograph
made more kinds of recorded music more portable, it began to move
music into the control of space as well as of time,12
The convenience of the phonograph allowed music to become a
casual thing. Pre-phonographic performance was usually bound to a public
venue (concert hall, church, dance hall, street, wedding) or a private one
(the bourgeois parlor). (Taking a longer and wider view, musical perfor­
mance was not always set apan from daily labors and rhythms, as work
songs, lullabies, and sports chants remind us.) For most people under the
sway of the phonograph, music could become both entertainment and
part of the background noise of everyday life. The culmination of "back­
ground listening" (as the BBC planners disparagingly called it) is Muzak,
designed not to be listened to. 13
As Williams argues, we should understand the rise of new forms of
portable entertainment media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries as part of a larger historical process he calls "mobile privatiza­
tion."14 With the increasing mobility of material and symbolic commodi­
ties, the walls of the home become permeable, and private reception of
drama and music (along with private ownership of media) becomes the
norm. Creation is sundered from recreation; making and enjoying· music
become increasingly remote tasks. The phonograph, in other words,
descends from a long line of pieces of "bourgeois furniture," as Weber
called the piano,15 Like the radio, it is a musical praqice designed for
interior domestic spaces, unlike, say, the organ or the orchestra. And yet
it brings a world of musical choices to the bourgeois interior.
 Defining Phonography 245

Finally, the phonograph made the very idea of "live" music think­
able, thitherto largely a redundancy. Though wind chimes and echoes are
ancient and the romantics loved the Aeolian harp for its apparently spon­
taneous music, the phonograph marks the decisive separation between
musical performance and human labor. Music became disembodied,16 The
phonograph is indifferent to the physical presence of composer, performer,
or audience. Edison boasted of its ability to reproduce sound waves "with
all their original characteristics at will, without the presence or consent of
the original source, and after the lapse of any period of time."l? It would
be hard to find a clearer statement of the founding dreams of phonogra­
phy: fidelity, manipulability, distantiation, and the overcoming of death.
There was something unsettling about the phonograph to early audi­
ences, especially its ability to capture voices and sounds no longer tied
to the human body or to the organic cycle of birth and death. Once
recorded, music belongs to a spirit world of sorts. It is fixed in a state of
suspended animation. The voices and music of the dead or distant can be
revived at will and without their presence or permission. More work needs
to be done on the strong link between spiritualism, psychical research, the
Victorian cult of mourning, and the reception of late-nineteenth-century
media technologies. Nipper, obedient to "his master's voice," was often
painted as if standing atop a coffin, clearly fitting the Victorian iconogra­
phy of the loyal dog mourning his master's death. The phonograph speaks
from "the other side," as if in a seance. Its uncanniness consists in its abil­
ity to suppress absence, to span the chasm between source and addressee
that death and distance once seemed to make impossible.l 8

2. The Contrast with Digital Recording

The crucial difference between phonographic techniques and digital
recording and playback is that the digital storage medium holds no analog
of either the original recorded signal or the resulting playback. The digital
storage medium holds numbers--data. These numbers are related to
waveforms by a convention arrived at in intercorporate negotiations and
established as an industry standard; but they could be anything.l 9 Since
the numbers, like all such data, are arbitrary-related to their referent
only by social convention-it is in principle possible for the consumer to
treat them as anything. The CDs we buy in record stores are data storage
devices and could be treated as storing data. We could read our CDs into
computers other than the CD player, manipulate the data with programs
other than those encoded in the chips of our CD player, to produce other
results: other music, graphics, mathematical equations, puzzles, artwork, or
246 The Musical Quarterly

maps of imaginary worlds. Indeed, the idea that we buy music when we
buy a CD is a holdover from phonography; actually, there is no music
there.
By contrast, the phonograph record and the analog magnetic tape do
contain physical traces of the music. At a crude level this is visible with
the naked eye in the grooves of the record and can be seen with a micro,
scope on a magnetic tape if it is treated with a special fluid. The hills and
valleys of those grooves are physical analogs of the vibrations of the
music. They were cut into the master disc and then pressed into the vinyl
under the rule of cause and effect in a physical world-not, as is the case
with digital recording and CD playback, the rule of Sony and Phillips in
an institutional world. 2o
When we buy a record we buy music, and when we buy a CD we buy
data. If that key claim is true, then the end of the age of phonography will
be marked by the spread of attitudes and practices that take advantage of
that difference. If the age of phonography began with the realization of an
unprecedented convenience of music-within economic limits, anyone
could have it at their command-it was also marked by a continued atti,
tude toward music as an object of the environment, something external to
the self and its doings (for most of us, who have learned to act as con,
sumers and not producers). We buy music, bring it home, and play it. It is
made available to us, but as a preserved object; it has a given nature, inde,
pendent of our experience of it. These ideas are encoded as value stan,
dards in the culture of high fidelity so that the goal is to reproduce the
music as it really was, unchanged by recording and playback.
Today we can spot in these value standards the historicist dream of
accurate reproduction of lost moments, the positivist (or modernist) pro'
ject of fidelity to the real, a hierarchical separation between production
and enjoyment, and the metaphysics of presence.2 1 In contrast to the high,
fidelity vision of phonography, thinking of digital recording media as stor,
ing data rather than music makes it possible to enter into the musical
process, to intervene in its playback, to participate in the creation of what
it is one has gotten when one buys a CD. So digital technology would seem
to invite a participatory stance that analog inhibits. There are some hints
that these attitudes are present and growing; some of them began to appear
prior to the ready availability of digital recording and editing systems.
The attitude that recorded music is something available to be manip,
ulated, to be used in the creation of a new text, was present in the age of
phonography in the mixing and scratching of the hip,hop DJ.22 These
techniques have been pushed to a new level, though, with digital sam,
pling technologies. Digital samplers allow one musician to control the
recorded sounds of many, or to create whole songs out of bits and pieces
 Defining Phonograph, 247

sampled from other songs and the sounds of everyday life. But even the
most dedicated samplers treat their samples most of the time as samples of
sounds, not as numeric data per se. In other words, the interpretation
scheme applied to the encoded numbers is the decoding half of the same
industry convention applied to the sounds in the encoding process. They
treat their sampling machines more or less the same way they would treat
an analog magnetic tape recorder. The sampling machine is wonderfully
more convenient and flexible, but still its basic purpose is to capture
sounds that can be played back later. (The old maxim of media history
recurs: the content of a new medium is a previous medium.) The real
breakthrough will come when the data that represent the "recorded"
sound are manipulated as data, in the numerical domain, to later produce
something else other than an analog of the original sound.
Computer-based audio editing software invites thinking that is closer
to this pOSSibility of distinctly "digital" attitudes toward recorded sound.
These programs are designed for the micromanipulation of sound, and in
addition to being miraculously quick and convenient analogs of tradi­
tional tape recording, mixing, and editing systems, they invite fiddling
with pitch, duration, amplitude, filtering, synthesis, mixing, and so on.
The software works by manipulating the digital code as data, while the
user works with visual displays of waveforms, a musical score, or conven­
tional analog recording studio equipment (such as a visual display of a
mixer). Much cheaper and more widely advertised and distributed than
only a few years ago, this type of software is no longer unfamiliar among
people working, or playing, in audio fields. Indeed, it has become a regular
tool, and toy, for radio, audio, and film students in our own university. But
this is still professional equipment, not yet a device for living-room enter­
tainment analogous to the phonograph. 23
A move in the direction of listener co-creation of music is present in
stereo components that adjust amplitude, frequency balance, and phase
relations in the digital domain. The first ones did not do much more than
could be done with the ordinary electromechanical controls common to
many other stereo components. A few more sophisticated components
allow tailoring of the frequency balance of particular speakers to particular
rooms. Designed to produce further fidelity, there were many more ways to
get these components set up wrong than right. They did not sell particu­
larly well, and few new ones are coming to market. Industrial noise con­
trol-where fidelity is an enemy rather than an aesthetic-appears to be
the profitable area of application for this type of digital audio processing.
Whether the current generation is successful or not, audio playback
equipment with digital controls provides an important example for our
argument. No matter how similar appearing, they do what they do in a
248 The Musical Quarterl,

fundamentally different way than the electrical circuitry of the last sev­
enty or so years. Electromechanical controls, such as the volume, balance,
and tone controls on ordinary stereo receivers, work by manipulating an
electrical signal that is an analog of the waveform vibrations of the music
itself. The electricity passing through an ordinary amplifier has a shape in
time that is physically similar to the movements in time of vibrating musi­
cal instruments and stereo speakers. The electromechanical controls of
analog equipment alter that wave shape. But manipulation of volume,
balance, tone, and so on in the digital domain works on data as data.
From this point we could imagine a far more radical manipulation of the
"original" data, making it more upbeat or less, transposing the song into a
minor key, pulling the pitch down so we could more comfortably sing
along, perhaps even adding some strings in the background. Certainly it
would be possible to use the data to generate accompanying graphics for
television or even to create a synesthetic surround-experience. The Wag­
nerian dream of a Gesamtkunstwerk seems not far off; imagine what poem
of ecstasy a latter-day Scriabin could write with digital technologies. 24
Another early development of digital thinking is the production of
CD-ROMs by musicians and audio artists. This depends on the same
recording and storage technology as the audio CD but uses the software
manipulability of the desktop computer rather than the dedicated func­
tioning of the living-room CD player. Though the use of CD-ROM as an
artistic medium may be increasingly common, it has not yet attracted a
large popular audience in any form other than video games.
The newest consumer digital format, DVD, just entering the market
as this article goes to press, confirms the hold of phonographic thinking
into the digital era. Using new laser technology to read data at finer levels
of resolution, the DVD features enormous storage capacity. This capacity
could be used in a variety of ways, including the encoding of software that
would allow a living-room device to operate an audio equivalent of a
hypertext CD-ROM, allow users to manipulate the sound at whim, or
produce multimedia experiences from audio data. Perhaps in the future
the technology will be used in these ways and more. But for now the DVD
will be used to fit movies onto a CD-sized disk, and the closest we come to
living-room interaction with the data of digitally recorded music is the
occasional inclusion of a hidden track on CDs by alternative-rock bands.
As yet, most people do not think of CDs as data storage devices and
are not interested in manipulating the data to produce anything other
than an analog of the original recorded sound. The social and economic
value of CDs is based on their working as if they were analogs of recorded
music. We buy them because we want to play back music, not because we
want to play with data. Audiophiles criticize CDs and CD players for
 Defining Phonograph"} 249

falling short of the perfect'analog goal of high fidelity. These phono,

graphic attitudes are likely to stick with us well into the future, perhaps
forever. The values of high fidelity would condemn anything else.

3.S~bol1nheory

In some ways the vision of "recorded" music as data is a realization of

postmodem hopes and fears. The encoding scheme is an arbitrary conven,
tion institutionally arrived at; it is widely seen as such and so denied the
power of a natural or taken for granted truth. Hence the freedom to
decode in arbitrary ways is realized, but now the choices may be individ,
ual and idiosyncratic. They will cenainly represent the greater diversity of
everyday life rather than the more narrow imaginings of the institutional
powers. Compared with the democratizing potential of digital technology,
the hopes of high fidelity-like all forms of aura,bearing art-appear
frighteningly conservative, a form of orthodoxy, even of fundamentalism.
Whether the shift to digital spells the ushering in of an electronic mil,
lennium, a new toy for the old powers, or the final dissolution of the humanist
subject remains a problem we cannot solve here.2 5 But the contrast of analog
and digital clearly has older sources. In terms of the logic of the sign,referent
relation, the difference between analog recording and digital recording is the
difference between indexes and symbols in Peirce's scheme. The analog
recording is an index of music because it is physically caused by it. The digital
recording is a symbol of music because the relation is one of convention.
Of course the world of phonography is not wholly constructed of
nature, physics, and cause,effect. A wide range of choices had to be settled
by convention or intercorporate negotiations: cylinders or disks; vertical or
lateral grooves; the early incompatibility of stereo and mono recordings and
equipment; record speed; the angle of the cutting head and the phonograph
pick,up; and others. Still, phonography is at its hean a physical process.
The angle of the cutting head and the proper setup of the phonograph to
repeat that angle and tracking is imponant not because of conventional
encoding and decoding rules, but because if the angles are not all correct
the cause,effect rules of nature will vibrate the stylus in different ways than
the cutting head first vibrated. That will produce different electrical pat,
terns that will push and pull the speakers into different vibrational patterns
than were present at the microphones of the original recording session. Pur,
suit of the goal of fidelity requires conformity with the laws of nature; pur,
suit of the goals of business requires that companies agree on a convention.
This convention narrows the range of physical constraint that must be
conformed to: of all the possible angles for a cutting head, for example, we
250 The Musical Quarter/:Y

will use this one or close approximations and no others. Business demands
social convention because it is a social practice. But setting aside the
complications of mass production for profit, phonography is a natural phe­
nomenon. Within the range of social convention, nature rules.
On the other hand, of course, digital recording is not all arbitrary
convention. The ones and zeroes are caused to be recorded by ordinary
physical means. The complex waveforms of music are first broken down
into and then rebuilt up from simpler combinations of sine waves, not
because Sony and Phillips decided it would be so but because mathemati­
cians imagined the possibility and proved within the conventions of
mathematics that it could work, because Fourier analysis and the Nyquist
sampling theorem demonstrate conformity with prevalent patterns of
nature and culture, and because engineers were able to devise circuits that
did it. But at its heart, digital recording is as fundamentally arbitrary as
analog recording is fundamentally natural. The representation of a given
complex waveform by a given set of sine waves may result because Fourier
analysis shows it to be the one and only set of sine waves that will ade­
quately do so. But the representation of those sine waves by a certain digi­
tal code is because Sony and Phillips agreed to do it that way. In this case,
within the range of natural possibility, social convention rules..It is not
nature's stylus that writes the music. The phonograph's script may be
squiggly, but it is difficult to forge. The ones and zeroes of the Phillips­
Sony convention, in contrast, are only copies without originals.
When Sony and Phillips decided to cooperate in the development of
the CD, with the plan of setting an industry standard, they had to coordi­
nate what had previously been two different sets of corporate goals. Sony
had had much success with miniaturization and enjoyed a high-tech pub­
lic image. Phillips was heavily invested in the music business as well as
hardware, and that was important for their corporate image as well as
their pocketbook. Sony wanted the CD to be small enough to fit in the
standard-sized cutout for in-dash car stereos. Phillips wanted the CD to
hold the full length of any available recording of Beethoven's Ninth-the
longest among standard-repertoire symphonies. While twenty-bit systems
were the standard for professional digital recording, the consumer CD for­
mat was set at sixteen bits. Why? So that a ninety-minute recording could
fit on a twelve-centimeter disc using then available laser technology.
This oft-repeated story may not be true in every detail, but it makes
the important point that decisions had to be made at some point about
the size of the CD, the bit rate of the format, and the music capacity of
the CD. Any two of the decisions will determine the third and any of the
three could be made by any criterion. Yet the new CD technology was
promoted a~ offering "perfect sound forever"~ven though the people
 Defining Phonograph, 251

promoting it knew that the format was not as good as that of the other
equipment they manufactured for professional audio. More insidiously,
these same companies offered a line of consumer CD players, some of
which they said sounded better than others. Better than perfect? Of
course, they were right; some of them did sound better than others
because the p~rfect-s6und-foreverline was a lie. But some magazines
picked up on the promotion and advised consumers not to buy more
expensive CD players because, they assured us without having listened to
them all, they all sound more or less alike anyway. Over the years CD
players have improved tremendously, as has engineering knowledge for
recording and mastering sound for CDs. This history of performance
improvements represents the same kind of experientialleaming that has
produced improvements in phonograph technology over the last century.
But the improvements in CD technology remain limited to the original
decisions about the format. The upper limit on improvement is not per­
fection, but maximum efficiency within the possibilities of the sixteen-bit
system.
As further evidence of the arbitrariness of digital recording and play­
back technology, consider MD and OCC, the more recent bit-reduced for­
mats. The MD, or mini-disc, is a Sony system that allows digital recording
and playback on a disc the size of small computer disks. It is a further step
in miniaturization and allows home recording, both feature~ that Sony's
experience shows are valuable to consumers. The OCC, or digital compact
cassette, is a Phillips system that allows digital recording and playback on a
cassette tape of the familiar size. This allows OCC home recording
machines to be backwards compatible, working with analog cassettes as
well. Backwards compatibility is always a good thing when selling new
technology, and Phillips, as the inventor of the compact cassette-its for­
mal name-was sensitive to just how ubiquitous that medium is. But how
do they fit digital recordings on the smaller media ofMD and OCC? By
throwing away some of the data. 26 Using psychoacoustic studies of auditory
masking, computers are programmed to decide which of the data points are
not necessary because, in the presence of the others occurring at the same
time, they represent musical frequencies that would not be audible to aver­
age listeners. Crudely put, it is sort of like deciding that since few can hear
the oboe anyway, the oboist should be left out of the orchestra. But rather
than dealing with whole instruments, these data reduction systems deal
with specific data points representing specific frequency-amplitudes that
are part of the complex synthesis that is the sound of the musical perfor­
mance.
Of course engineering and manufacturing decisions had to be made
.in the history of phonography that are in important ways similar to these
252 The Musical QuaTteTf:y

stories about the history of the CD. The size and speed of the record and
size and shape of the stylus determine the bandwidth of response and
length of recording for records just as size, bit rate, and laser technology
do for digital. The now standard RIM equalization curve is an arbi­
trary method for increasing the bandwidth capacity of the grooves-it
decreases the amplitude of bass frequencies and increases that of high fre­
quencies during record mastering to decrease the range of wiggle size in
the groove. This frequency-amplitude adjustment is then reversed in
record playback. Prior to that standardization, different companies used
different equalizations. Different companies and mastering engineers still
work for different sounds. Different media and playback systems have dif­
ferent ranges of frequency response.
But all of these issues in analog recording are matters of determining
the margins of bandwidth or of overall frequency balance within the band­
width. In no case in analog recording can we go into the signal, the way we
can with digital data, and decide that some of it is not necessary or that
some of it should be recoded to represent something it did not before. We
can filter the signal and we can shape it and it will sound like it has been
filtered and shaped. But we cannot divide it up and rearrange the bits. The
manipulability characteristic of digital recording and playback spells both
the dream of democratic co-creation and the nightmare of lost nature. As
in Benjamin's analysis of technical reproducibility, we here encounter both
new possibilities for audience engagement and the loss of an aura)?

4. Measurement and Fidelity

Analog recording has a physical relation to the sound recorded and digital
does not. Analog playback-that is, the music from the speakers driven
by a record player-thus has a continuous physical relation to the original
music recorded, while digital does not. There is an unbroken chain from
the sound in the living room to the original sound as recorded. Analog
recording is, in essence, a trace of the phenomenon such that analog play­
back can, in principle, be a reproduction. Digital recording is a measure­
ment of the phenomenon and so digital playback must be a reconstruc­
tion. This simple distinction is rich with implications.
Because analog recording is an indexical trace of a phenomenon, the
analog storage medium will contain whatever information is allowed by
the physics of the situation. Because digital recording is a measurement of
a phenomenon, the digital storage medium will only contain the informa­
tion for which the measurement conventions are designed. At the replay
end, analog reproduction can be as close to what is stored in the vinyl
 Defining Phonograph., 253

grooves as the physics of the situation allow. Digital sound is, of course,
best created by good equipment in a good room, but the first step is recon~
structing an analog signal from the digital data. This is done with hard­
ware and software circuits following the Sony-Phillips conventions and
can only do that for which the convention was designed. The upper limit
of fidelity in an analog system is perfection, while the upper limit of
fidelity in a digital system is the Sony~Phillips convention.
Whether consciously grasped or not, it is the possibility of perfection
that motivates the values of the audiophile. Since in real life it is so
improbable, and our own stereo systems are so obviously far from it,
fidelity operates as a transcendent value. In a nutshell, this is the structure
of religion: a set of practices on earth, associated with ideas about the cos­
mos, that bring us into contact with the transcendent. For the audiophile
the endless hours of listening and tweaking and comparing and talking
and worrying both prepare for and occasionally bring him or her into con~
tact with the transcendent; it is a moment of fidelity when the equipment
disappears and the pure music flows through. When evetything is right,
the hair stands on end. For those who believe, it is a religious experience.
The point is not that the religious experience of music depends on expen~
sive audio equipment, but that the audiophile's attention to equipment
has the structure of a religiOUS attitude.2S The equipment and the audio­
phile's fussing over it is to the religious experience of music as Catholic
ritual is to Christianity: not necessaty, but one of the routes.
Whether religion or not, the ideas on which the culture of fidelity is
based can only be founded logically on an indexical medium. The index
that is the record groove holds forth the possibility of oneness between
the transcription and the playback devices. What further sustains the
religious attitude is the faith that on the other side of the transcription
device is something natural, mysterious, cosmic, and beyond the control
of human devices. (Schopenhauer nominates music as our only bridge
between the worlds of noumena and phenomena.) The religious circle is
closed when the psyche of the listener and the stereo are tuned just right.
The medium disappears; so does the ego. In that moment, there is the
possibility of a communion that reaches all the way back to the music's
source of inspiration. We break through to the other side.
It is also possible, of course, for a good CD player to make listeners'
hair stand on end. Yet some of the most experienced audio critics, with
access to the finest equipment, say it has never happened for them.2 9 Of
course, it is possible to ignore, or transcend if you like, the limits of equip~
ment. Those who love music must do so if they are to think of the stereo
as worthy of music at all. But the logic of the medium is such that the CD
is not nearly so well suited to religious attitudes as the phonograph. The
254 The Musical Qw;mer1':Y

CD player depends on symbols whose relation to their referent is due to

conventions that are dressed up as neither cosmic nor natural, neither
charismatic nor traditional. They make no claims to a legitimacy that
transcends the practical affairs of humans at all. The symbol system of the
CD is defined by for-profit decisions by Sony and Phillips and the rest of
the electronics manufacturers. Even for those with no consciousness of
these facts, the difference between CDs and records is built into each one's
symbol system and media form. In the culture of high fidelity, analog
recording has an automatic advantage; digital recording has an automatic
disadvantage. If we were to pursue oneness with the original sound through
the CD, the chain would halt with a bunch of businesspeople and their
engineers-a good distance short of the angel with the stylus, Deutsche
Grammophon's logo for decades.
There are some perhaps for whom the CD can motivate a religious
attitude. For them the CD and the CD player are themselves the significant
symbols of science and progress. They are not media of music; the key sign
relations are not between the listener and the original recording event but
between a new technology and an outdated one. The holy is revealed in the
rush of time's passage, the suggestion of progress. Their apprehension of
time travels constantly in one direction, whereas the audiophile constantly
seeks to meet recorded past time. In the terms of Benjamin, the CD tech­
nocrats live in "homogeneous and empty time," in which one event relent­
lessly succeeds the next, while the audiophiles live in "revolutionary time,"
in which it is possible to make immediate links between the now and the
then, in which a historical moment can surge into the present)O
In other words, analog recording retains the otherness of past time;
digital recording fixes it in code. Experience has taught that analog and
digital media respond very differently to new developments in equipment
quality. The history of phonography is one of repeatedly discovering that
old records can sound better than anyone had realized at the time. Put an
old record on a new and better player and we discover more and better­
sounding music in those grooves that had been heard before. By signifi­
cant contrast, the short history of digital is one of discovering that earlier
digital recordings, like earlier digital playback equipment, still sound
dreadful. With analog we keep discovering buried treasures; with digital
we keep improving on a flawed but convenient medium.
There is both something simple and something profound here. Those
old records were encoded, as we now say, not by convention but by
nature. There is more information, as we now say, in those old grooves
than record players of the time could retrieve, even players that were rec­
ognized as the very best of their day. But modem record players, with their
smaller stylus tips, more finely adjusted tracking angles, more stable speed,
 Defining Phonography 255

and greater mechanical isolation and resonance control, reproduce a more

realistic, more lively listening experience with apparently greater fidelity
to the original event. As new equipment makes audible new musical
details from the same old grooves, the experiential result is one of being
brought closer to the old original, even across the greater distance of time.
Records, then, are objects that support the activity of discovery. There is
historical experience in their grooves; with the right equipment we can
recover and reexperience it. Such experiences invite the idea that there
are yet more musical details, more audible experience waiting there to be
recovered, waiting to bring us closer to that old, preserved event of the
original musical performance. This conjures a vision of the possibility of
perfect fidelity that the sixteen-bit CD does not. What is the upper limit
of possible resolution of the record? Nobody knows. What is the upper
limit of the possible resolution of the CD? Sixteen bits. Perfection or con­
vention, nature or society, the gods or the humans. If this is not mythic,
we do not know what is.
While these experiences and the thinking they produce may be com­
mon among audiophiles, they are not among the general public. To the
extent that records are different from CDs for most people-aside from
their conveniences-it is because the record has a body on which its own
history is inscribed along with the music. Because both the music and the
wear and tear of its own life are recorded on the body of the record and
the playback technology is sensitive to both, playback audibilizes two his­
tories: one of recording and one of the record. The record has a body with
a voice. The data encoded on the CD do not mix with the history of the
disk; they can be obscured by dirt and scratches, but dirt and scratches
cannot sound from a CD player. As the history of records speaks while
they are being played, they thus invite us to think about the passage of
time; by contrast, CDs obscure it. The record, then, we expect is a better
medium for both collective and personal memory. Not only does listening
to "my records" conjure personal memory more completely than listening
to a recent CD rerelease of the same music does, but listening to music of
an era on the playback medium of the time should serve better as a
medium of time travel.
For the theorist the phonograph disc works as an indexical sign of
a recorded musical performance, serving as one link in a chain of
direct connections across history and space. For the audiophile it is an
object of discovery, yielding ever more treasures to ever more careful
exploration. For most ordinary users, it is a repository of history, senti­
ment, and memory.
In sum, we have argued that the experience of audio equipment and
hence its meaning and social significance will be structured by the practical
256 The Musical Quarterly

possibilities of the medium and by the logic of the embedded sign systems.
To a large extent, the CD player continues the practical possibilities of
the phonograph. It also adds a whole family of possibilities yet to be taken
advantage of, due to the nature of the CD as a data storage device. Yet the
CD player and the phonograph diverge sharply at the level of the logics of
their sign systems. The phonograph is an indexical tracing system, hold­
ing out the hope of perfection and union with something not-here, not­
now. It has a logical correspondence with the values of high fidelity.
which aim to replicate the original musical event. The CD is a symbolic
measurement system, holding out technique, convention, and conve­
nience as its highest goals. It is logically at odds with the values of high
fidelity. The logic of engineering aside, the phonograph is as if designed
for the pursuit of transcendence; the CD is as if designed for what it was,
the pursuit of convenience and profit.

5. Indiscemibility and Incarnation

We have heard the critics roaring in our ears. Vinyl fanaticism, they say.
Totalizing longing for a natural original. Is not the degree of fidelity digital
provides to most listeners effectively indexical? Can one really distinguish
the continuity of analog from the infinitesimal discreteness of digital?
Ought we to expect implicit logics to exert much force on standards, prac­
tices. and listening habits? Do we not know that "originality" is an effect
and that sound events are always already heterogeneous, dependent both
on the material space-time setting and on the position of the auditor?31
And should not the fact that a sign is a sign stop us from thinking of one
sign as more natural than another? Is not naturalness itself an effect or
function? Do we not edge dangerously close to the precipice of ontology
in saying there is no music in a CD while there is in an LP? Are not
tropes like "nature's pencil" not only descriptively dubious, but politically
dangerous. since they induce a longing for order only one step away from
the exclusion of otherness? Is there really a difference that makes a differ­
ence between the sound and experience of the very best digital and ana­
log technology?
We conceive much of this paper as a thought experiment that tries
to unfold implications of a dying practice of musical production. Like
Adorno's essay on the radio symphony, ours is "an experiment in the­
ory."32 Adorno fights the commonsense view that radio reproduction has
nothing to do with the essence of a symphony. which for him lies in the
thematic apperception of the total relation of the parts and the wholes. a
totality that has the potential to transcend time itself. The radio sym­
 Defining Phonography 257

phony, in contrast, becomes chamber music, as dynamic range is shrunk

to fit the bourgeois interior; the "thematic interwovenness" of develop­
ment becomes a series of quotations to be sampled like hors-d'oeuvres;
and the balance of timbres and colors, once integrated into the whole,
becomes a frivolous embellishment. Radio turns the transcendent
achievement 6f Beethoven into kitsch. The key to his case is the proposi­
tion that technical minutiae have ontological consequences, that the
means or media of artworks are an essential part of their form. Adorno
remains consistently attuned to the massive alterations of aesthetic
objects wrought by seemingly fine distinctions in reproduction. We claim
him, with Walter Benjamin, a predecessor in our effort to take processes
of mediation as of profound importance to the quality and experience of
art, not just as indifferent delivery systems.
Though we would not defend all of our thought experiment's propo­
sitions with equal intensity, we do insist that there is a difference that
makes a difference between digital and analog. Even given a musically
identical output of the two kinds of systems, the social uses and experi­
ences of each will be necessarily different. We are thus taking a strong
position on the role that symbolic logics and the media forms in which
they are encoded play in shaping experience and practice.
The argument that experience depends radically upon its form of
mediation is clear in the case of the work of art, as Benjamin has so
famously shown. Imagine that some novel technical process could repli­
cate the Mona Lisa molecule for molecule, including the effects of aging
and exposure to pollution, heat, and humidity. It would be impossible to
tell copy and original apart if they were switched. And yet the two works
would not at all mean the same thing. One would invite inquiries about
the fetching smile, the other about the amazing process. One would invite
us to travel a chain of contagious magic back to Leonardo's time, the
other would leave us puzzling about the technological prowess of our own.
One would be fit for the Louvre, the other for Disneyland. Their distinct
institutional destinies suggest there is more to meaning than matter in
motion. A sense for history makes us all metaphysicians. Signs do not sig­
nify by themselves; their meaning resides in historical networks. The
embodiment of signs is crucial to our experience. There is no such thing
as what Leibniz called the "identity of indiscernibles" in cultural matters.
Some may propose that we subject the two Mona Lisas to the Turing
test: whether an uninformed party could tell the original from the copy)3
Clearly, no one could discern the difference. And yet the problem with
the Turing test is that the body is hidden, as it is in all good murder mys­
teries (Turing's victim, as Kittler argues, is the h~manist subject})4 The
problem with digital technology is that the embodied means, the mortal
258 The Musical Quarterly

mechanism, of musical production is obscured. Records bear the trace of a

body and have an erotics impossible to CDs.3 5 Eros is the relation of one
body to another, and this is what both the Turing test and digital technol~
ogy eliminate.
The analog of the Turing test in audio equipment reviewing is the
A~B~X test. It is a system designed in imitation of double~blindexperi~
ments, in which the identities of the equipment under review, two ampli~
fiers, for example, are hidden from the reviewer. The reviewer listens to
brand A and brand B until familiar with their sound qualities; then an
automated switching system presents either A or B, selected randomly, as
X for a series of identification tests. The advocates of A~B~X testing insist
that any audible difference between A and B that cannot reliably be iden~
tified in X is not real. Interestingly for our argument, whatever the merits
or flaws of A~B~X testing, it obviously cannot be used to compare things
that differ in such interesting ways as records and CDs. For it hides the
embodiment of each medium, the source of their differential pull on the
imagination. What matters in phonography is, to speak theologically, its
incarnation.

6. The Hermeneutics of Testimony

What we love about the phonograph is its power to witness to historicity.
To give testimony is not to state the essence of a situation but to com~
ment on its particular embodiment. A witness's forensic value-and credi~
bility-depends on knowledge of the accidents of an event: Did the
defendant have one or two gloves on? Was he wearing a short~ or long~
sleeved shirt? Was the traffic light yellow or red? Everything turns on
those all but inconspicuous differences. In the same way, the things we
collect and put into albums--canceled postage stamps, family photos
obscure to anyone else, and records--are all singular traces, clues of lost
time. The phonograph can serve as an archive of memory in ways impos~
sible for a CD player. Phonography preserves the trace of events: or,
rather, its testimony is given in an indexical voice. It reveals the 'impor~
tance of contiguity as well as resemblance as an axis of cognition.36
A model of such a hermeneutic is supplied by Carlo Ginzburg. He
argues that a mode of interpretation arises in late~nineteenth~century
criminology (Sherlock Holmes/Conan Doyle), psychology (Freud), and
art history (Morelli) based on the notion that the scrutiny of "infinitesi~
mal traces permit the comprehension of a deeper, otherwise unattainable
reality" such as the perpetrator of a crime, a patient's mental illness, or the
authenticity of a painting.3? Such a style of detection might be dismissed
 Defining Phonography 259

as a fetish for accidents and details--shapes of ears, slips of the tongue,

the painting of fingers-were it not so potent a forensic method. He con­
trasts this mode to the style of interpretation in literature, which generally
assumes an indifference to the embodiment of the text: we have grown
used to thinking of Hamlet as Hamlet whether it is found in twelve- or
ten-point type, handwritten or calligraphed. And yet we insist-with a
fussiness due only to sacred objects-on the integrity of a painting's or
sculpture's form in every detail. The embodiment of a text, we suppose, is
insignificant, while that of the image is all important. In analyzing the
unique status of phonography as a vehicle of musical experience, we wish
to take the notion of graphy seriously. Phonography offers something like
handwriting, with its tracing of the quirks of the author's body, rather
than typewriting, which effaces such crucial contingencies.
Phonography traces events not only in its method of recording, but
in the life of the record as well. As phonograph records age they pick up
dirt, scratches, and wear from use and handling. When an old phonograph
record is played, the sound of its age, the tale of its physical history, is
reproduced. When an old CD is played, its life history is irrelevant. The
scratches on a vinyl disk modulate the phonograph stylus in a manner
that produces a sound at the speakers that can reasonably be understood
as the sound of scratches. A scratched CD-appropriately enough for an
on-off medium--either plays or does not play; either works in spite of the
conditions of the mechanism or malfunctions.38 CD technology, being
immune to personalized inscription, cannot sustain the collector's atti­
tude, which requires the ability to discover the singularity in multiplied
objects. As Benjamin argues, the art of collection is the creation of an
ordered realm of memories.39
The aging of the body also explains the existence of a collector's
market for records and the complete lack of one for CDs. As bodies age
they become feeble and less able to do what they did before. The old
phonograph record that is as good as new is a rare item; both its age and
its rarity add to its value, making it worth more than when new. Old
records have degrees of value dependent on their condition as well as
their rarity and the market demand for their music; the range of prices is
enormous, from thirty-five cents to $350 or more. But the old CD is just a
used CD; it either works or it does not. Malfunctioning CDs are thrown
away; working ones are nearly all the same price, varying only a few dol­
lars according to the popularity of the artist. Even limited press runs, early
issues, imports, multiple versions, and misprinted labels-all things that
have produced the greatest excesses of the record-collectors' market­
have failed to produce any speculative price increases, any hoarding or
trading among CD buyers. 40
260 The Musical Quarterly

The record~collectors'market is not entirely sustained by pursuit of

the rare and the unusually well preserved. There is a thriving market for
old records that cost about the same or a little less than the same music
on new CD reissues. We do not have the audience studies that would be
necessary to speak confidently about who buys these records and how they
use them. But surely they are music lovers. Our own experience is that
when listening counts for more than convenience, old music works better
on old records. It is better to listen to Sarah Vaughan on a record printed
while she was alive than on the CDs reissued after her death. The original
seventy~eights of Billie Holiday, then, are valuable not only because they
are rare and fragile but because they are the best available medium for
time travel.
Our position is not simply that of fetishists--those who elevate a
peripheral organ to a beloved object. We are concerned about something
deeper: the securing of meaning. For it is precisely in the circumstantial
details that we can drop our anchor in the sea of signs. To favor phonogra~
phy is to favor a particular kind of hermeneutic, one attentive to condi~
tions of embodiment. Following Ricoeur, we call this a hermeneutics of
testimony.4! Witnessing is a practice based in the mortality of the witness
that aims not just for credibility but for proof, not just for lovely tropes
but for incontrovertible tokens. It depends upon singularity and unique~
ness. Perhaps there is no "there" there in any ultimate sense to be wit~
nessed. But before we abandon that claim to a kind of discourse that is
not fancy but fact, not invention but reality-however archaic or conser~
vative it may seem as a model for the social life of signs--we ought to
count the cost.
In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus tries to get home to his wife Penelope.
In one long interlude, he is detained by the goddess Calypso, and they
have a languid affair. When he finally comes to and is given a choice to
stay or leave by Calypso, he admits to her that Penelope could never com~
pare to her in grace or form, and yet he still longs for Penelope. He leaves
his immortal lover, knowing that time and aging will make Penelope lov~
able in a way impossible for Calypso. The meaning that needs mortality,
feeding off of fading things, is nourished by phonography. The music from
the phonograph is a sound from the other side; it speaks out of the grave.
We commune with the dead and dying in it and rediscover private memo~
ries in the accidents of history (which we now can understand the phono~
graph itself to be). A sign system that recognizes our links to the accidents
of our bodies and histories versus one that does not-this is what matters in
the apparently insignificant differences between phonography and digital.
 Defining Phonography 261

Notes
The first draft of this paper was written while Rothenbuhler was Scholar-in-Residence at
the Center for the Advanced Study of Telecommunication (CAST) at Ohio State Uni­
versity, January through March 1992. He thanks the codirectors of the center, Jane Fraser
and Thorn McCain, and also Bruce Gronbeck for negotiating a leave from Iowa. An ear­
lier version appears as CAST Working Paper 1992-01. A later version was presented at
the Conference on Refiguring the Human Sciences: New Practices of Inquiry, at the Uni­
versity of Iowa, June 1995, and received an illuminating response from Rick Altman.
Peters thanks Michael Raine, Mark Sandberg, and Jim Lastra for helpful suggestions.
1. We do not distinguish between Edison's phonograph (which used cylinders) and
Berliner's gramophone (which used discs). A term such as gramophony would, technically,
be more apt. We use phonography as an umbrella term for a family of historically evolving
techniques of sound recording that involve analog inscription on a mechanically rotating
medium (wax, copper, vinyl, tape, etc.).
2. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991),23.
3. "Analog Comer," Stereophile (July 1995): 45ff; and Edward Rothstein, "Past Is Pres­
ent, 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: Stereophi/e and Absolute Sound are the major journals of audiophilia.
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," Technolo~ and
Culture 33 (1992): 1-37, and Keir Keightley, "'Tum it Down!,' She Shrieked: Gender,
Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948-59," Popular Music 15 (1996): 149-77.
5. T. W. Adorno, "The Form of the Phonograph Record," trans. Thomas Y. Levin,
October 55 (Winter 1990): 56--61.
6. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks: 1800/1900, trans. M. Metteer (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1990),245.
7. On the history of phonographic technique, see Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short
History of Recording and Its Effects an Music (New York: Verso, 1995), 2~36; Andre Millard, Amer­
icaan Record: A History of Recorded Sound (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 17-36;
Walter L Welch and Leah Brodbeck Stenzel Burt, From Tmfoil to Stereo: The Acoustic Years of the
Recording Industry, 1877-1929 (Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 1994); and Jacques Perri­
ault, Memoires de l'ombre et du san: Une archeo/ogie de l'audioWuel (Paris: Aammarion, 1981).
8. Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: The Experience of Music from Aristotle to Zappa
(New York: Penguin, 1987). 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.
9. Adorno,58.
10. Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, vol. 1
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991),221.
11. Perriault, 201.
262 The Musical Quarterlj

12. These contrasts are most important for listening to orchestra, choir, and band music;
for singers and players of handheld instruments as well as body percussion, music has
always been ponable.
13. Satie and Hindemith anticipated this development. See also Joseph Lanza, ElaJator
Music: A SUlTeal History afM_, Eas,-Listening, and Ocher Moodsong (New York: St.
Manins, 1994).
14. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Fonn (New York: Schocken,
1974).
15. Max Weber, "The History of the Piano," in Max Weber: Selections in Transla£ion, ed.
W. G. Runciman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978),378-82.
16. James Lastra, "Inscriptions and Simulations: Representing Sound, 178~1900," paper
given at Sound Research Seminar, Dept. of Communication Studies, University of Iowa,
21 Apr. 1995, usefully discusses forms of "autographic" sound production before phonogra­
phy. Es War Einma! ... Spieldosen- und Drehorgelkli1nge, Claves Records, 1989, CD 50-815,
provides a variety of examples.
17. Thomas A. Edison, ''The Phonograph and Its Future," North American Review 126
(May-June 1878): 527-36, at 530.
18. Mark Bennion Sandberg, "Missing Persons: Spectacle and Nanative in Late Nine­
teenth-Century Scandinavia" (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1991).
19. The waveforms are in their tum related to the more complex waveforms constituting
music by the mathematical transformations of Fourier analysis and the engineering appli­
cation of Nyquist's theorem. For overviews of digital recording and CD technologies, see
Ken C. Pohlmann, The Compact Disc: A Handbook afTheory and Use (Madison, Wis.: A-R
Editions, 1989), and John Strawn, ed., Digital Audio Engineering: An Anthology (Los Altos,
Calif.: William Kaufmann, 1985).
20. Sony and Phillips are the two companies that independently developed much of the
technology of digital recording and compact discs and then took the lead in establishing
an industry convention for equipment compatibility. The panicipation of Matsushita was
key; the rest of the industry followed their lead.
21. The rhetoric of fidelity followed the phonograph from the beginning: see Emily
Thompson, "Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phono­
graph in America, 1877-1925," Musical Quarterb 79 (1995): 131-71. Edison, 528, pro­
vides a good example of such rhetoric.
22. A 1916 advenisement for the "AeQlian-Vocalian" phonograph boasts that it "is a
true musical instrument--an instrument to control, to play, an instrument which anyone
may use to exercise the natural instinct for musical expression with which everyone is
gifted to some degree." The basis of this claim? The volume control. Thanks to Mark
Sandberg for finding and proViding a copy of this ad.
23. For what it is wonh, our local observations are that filmmakers are freest in their
manipulation of sound, happy to tum a recording of ocean waves into a sound to accom­
pany pictures of a thunderstorm, for example. The uses of film throughout its history, of
course, have required more manipulation and been less subject to an aesthetic of fidelity
than have the uses of audio recording. Most of the students working in radio and audio use
the software as if it were a magically convenient piece of analog recording gear, capable of
instantaneous and minutely precise edits.
 Defining Phonographoy 263

24. The psychedelic light shows of the 19605 depended on either an electromechanical
system using analogs of the sound to drive the lights or a human operator using metaphor,
simile, trope, and other rhetorical devices, as well as accident and inspiration.
25. These three views are expressed, respectively, in Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital
(New York, Knopf, 1995); Herbert Schiller, Information I~quality: The Deepening Social
Crisis in America (New York: Routledge, 1996); and Friedrich A. Kittler, Grammophon,
Film, Toypewrirer (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 1985).
26. Digital code puts immensely more demands on the bandwidth of a storage medium
than do the analog waves of conventional recording, so the same music that fits on a com­
pact cassette as a recorded analog will not begin to fit on it when recorded digitally.
27. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," trans.
Harry Zohn in IUuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217-51.
28. The fundamental stance toward the sacred, said Levi-Strauss, is one of microadjust­
ment (microperhluation): everything must be just right and in place. The Savage Mind
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 10.
29. See, for example, Dearborn, and "Analog Comer." This claim is common in equip­
ment reviews and essays in Srereophile, Absolute Sound, and other such journals, though
other critics defend the quality of recent CDs and CD players. No one defends the quality
of the first couple of generations of CDs and players.
30. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," trans. Harry Zohn, in IUu­
minations (New York: Schocken, 1968),253--64.
31. James R Lastra, "Reading, Writing, and Representing Sound," in Sound Theory/Sound
Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992),65-86.
32. T. W. Adorno, "The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory," in Radio
Research, 1941, ed. Paul R Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton (New York: Duell, Sloan, and
Pearce, 1942), 110-39.
33. 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.
34. Kittler, Grammophon.
35. Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throar: Opera, Homosexuality, and Ute Moystery of
Desire (New York: Vintage, 1993).
36. Roman Jakobson, "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles," in Critical Theory Since
Plato, ed. Hazard Adams, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), 1113-16.
37. Carlo Ginzburg, "Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm," trans. John and Anne C.
Tedeschi, in Moyrhs, Emblems, Clues (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990),96-125,200-14.
38. CD players try to reread obscured data from damaged CDs. The result is either refusal
to play at all, a rapidly repeating, distorted sound, or one of a variety of unpleasant com­
puter noises.
39. Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," trans. Harry Zohn, in IUuminations (New
York: Schocken, 1968).
264 The Musical Quarterl,

40. See Goldmine, various issues. Bootleg CDs, however, do command considerably
higher than normal prices-perhaps in time their circulation will become limited and
their value will escalate.
41. Paul Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutics of Testimony," Anglican Theological Review 61, no.
4 (Oct. 1979): 435-.-Q1.