#jonathan sterne

[teratologique]

I'm choosing to find the "cw: phenomenology uwu" endearing instead of seeing it as a preemptive disavowal of the author's own methodology. This is growth.

[quaedam]

“You understand what I want, Grimnebulin? I do not want to have to take a potion. I do not want to have to wear a harness. I do not want to climb into a contraption. I do not want one glorious journey into the clouds, and an earthbound eternity. I want you to let me leap from earth as easily as you walk from room to room. Can you do that, Grimnebulin?”

link (say i really like this book so far; never read anything by this author before)

The analogy between artificial intelligence and artificial flight is illuminating. For one thing, it suggests that the traditional view of the goal of AI -- to create a machine that can successfully imitate human behavor -- is wrong.  ... For millenia, flying was one of humanity’s fondest dreams. The prehistory of aeronautics, both popular and scholarly, dwelled on the idea of imitating bird flight, usually by somehow attaching flapping wings to a human body or to a framework worn by a single person. ... Advocates of the possibility of flight argued that humans and birds were fundamentally similar, whereas opponents argued that such comparisons were demeaning, immoral or wrongheaded. But both groups generally assumed that flying meant imitating a bird.  ... Rather than limiting the scope of AI to the study of how to mimic human behavior, we can more usefully construe it as the study of how computational systems must be organized in order to behave intelligently. ... Our intelligent machines already surpass us in many ways. The most useful computer applications, including AI applications, are valuable exactly by virtue of their lack of humanity. A truly humanlike program would be just as useless as a truly pigeonlike aircraft.

link (well, that’s no fun)

Scott’s phonautograph built on this longer line of experimentation in acoustics; even his locution for the phonautograph built on the prior fifty years’ worth of automatic imaging technologies in acoustics. ... Like his predecessors, he hoped that the phonautograph would yield insight into a true, “natural” language of sound through its script: “to force nature to constitute herself a general language of all sounds.”  ... Scott described the function of the phonautograph almost wholly in terms of writing: “Is it possible to achieve for sound a result analogous to that attained precisely for light by photography? Can one hope that the day is near when the musical phrase escaping from the lips of the singer will come to write itself ... on an obedient page and leave an imperishable trace of those fugitive melodies that the memory no longer recalls by the time it searches for them?”  ... Scott sought to produce a “natural stenography” that would smash the distinction between orality and literacy because sound could literally write itself -- hearing and speaking would become equivalent to reading and writing. Writing was the ultimate goal for Scott. Twenty years after his work on the phonautograph, Scott would evaluate Edison’s phonograph as a failure because it “merely reproduced sound -- it was not a sound - writer.”

link (I suppose his complaint was that you couldn’t... somehow just look at a phonograph’s wax cylinder and hear music? He wanted a representation of sound, or a language of sound, not a “mere reproduction” of sound?)

[reidmay]

Sound Studies Links From J. Sterne

What is Music Technology For? http://superbon.net/?p=2592

http://www.musictechifesto.org/

Analog/Analogue: A Speculative History of the Not-Digital (DRAFT) http://culturedigitally.org/2014/05/analog-draftdigitalkeywords/#disqus_thread

http://www.english.umd.edu/SoundPlus/Program

[thenewobjective]

I was asked by a colleague who assigned some of my work to say something useful about the writing process for her grad students.  Here’s the request: my charge is to invite you to jot down in one paragraph any

The piece of writing advice I’ve found myself giving lately, more than anything else, is: “assume you’ve won.”  So much writing in the humanities and critical social sciences is defensive–making sure an argument is protected from all comers.  I understand that some aspects of both graduate school and journal reviewing lead to this way of doing things.  But it’s not generally fun to read or write and it’s an impossible task.  My teacher John Lie always said “even the best argument is full of holes.”  What is fun is learning how to think differently about an old topic, or learning to think at all about a new one.  That’s why most of us get into being academics in the first place.  Often when we are working through drafting new material we are still figuring out what we think as we are writing it (this is not true for everyone, but for a large portion of authors, including me).  But in revision we get to both commit to a line of reasoning and to building out its implications.  So at that point, I try to write pedagogically and invitationally rather than defensively.  I imagine that my audience is ready to hear what I have to say, now I have to take them through it.  Of course this presupposes that one understands writing is a process, and that revision is where the magic happens.  Revision isn’t really taught much in graduate school, but it should be.

[thenewobjective]

The Meaning of the MP3 Format: An Interview with Jonathan Sterne. A blog post at "The Signal: Digital Preservation" on 2014-04-21.

"At least since the end of World War II, English-language scholars have tended to focus on particular media, defined usually through a box or end-user technology that stands in for the whole set of institutions, technologies and practices: think of television, newspapers, radio, magazines, books as they were understood in the 1980s. These definitions and the ideas of separateness behind them are actually written into US communications law, which is why broadcasters are under such different regulations than internet services, even though the end user experience in some cases (say, watching a TV show) may be the same.

The standard tale told is one of convergence, where there were these separate things called media but now they’ve retreated inside our computers, so they no longer have their own boxes. But what if it’s the other way around? What if the separation of media we thought we saw in the mid 20th century was somewhere between an historical illusion and an exception? If that’s the case, then we need to think at different scales–above and below those end-user experiences, but also in terms of infrastructure, regulation, aesthetics, platforms, and audience/user practices all being mixed up in one another, rather than having a stable and predictable relationship amongst themselves."

[noiseidentities]

First chapter on Noise Reduction

I'm currently in the last stages of writing the first draft of my first chapter, on noise reduction. In October I will present a paper based on this chapter at "Functional Sounds," the first international conference of the European Sound Studies Association (Berlin, October 4 to 6). Here's a little taste.

"In a compelling analysis on the noise of the London stock exchange, sociologist Urs Stäheli observes that “classical communication theory always already knows where to locate noise.” [Stäheli, 246]. Consequently, it therefor also already seems to know how to reduce it fully. The noise that Sterne’s ‘domestication of noise’ rendered harmless or useful is a positivistic account of a phenomenon only negatively defined in the face of its reduction: within the framework of communication technology, noise is described, defined and problematized in order to be able to reduce its effects. The term ‘noise reduction’ presupposes something called ‘noise’ that can – and will – be reduced, without actually defining, or having to define, what this noise is. The framework itself is part of the process of reduction, as the very idea of reduction is already inscribed in the phenomenon it aims to reduce. Noise reduction only reduces the noise that it defines as noise, exactly by reducing it. By presupposing both its goal through its object and its object through its goal, it is perfectly self-affirming."

[thenewobjective]

Jonathan Sterne (@jonathansterne) reads part of the introduction to his book "MP3: The Meaning of a Format". Recorded by the author on an early brown wax cylinder c. 1900 at the Science Museum, London, on 23rd June, 2012. See http://phonographies.org for more details.

[thenewobjective]

Interview with @jonathansterne at Pitchfork

Author Jonathan Sterne discusses his new book about the history of the mp3.

By Eric Harvey , August 9, 2012

Mp3s have embedded themselves into daily musical life so thoroughly that they're taken for granted. They don't call attention to themselves as aesthetic objects like records; instead, we interact with them as files, documents, icons. They're infinitely duplicable and available in seemingly infinite numbers. At the same time, however, mp3s are intensely controversial. More than a decade after the government took down Napster, these digital objects remain at the center of intense debates about morality and musical value; they've eradicated the scarcity of music recordings, doing away with more than a century of economic and social realities about how, when, and where music can be accessed. And, if you listen to certain types of music or talk to certain people about them, mp3s sound quite horrible.

In his new book, Mp3: The Meaning of a Format, McGill University professorJonathan Sterne exhaustively and eloquently traces the history of the mp3 from the initial hearing model developed in Bell Labs to the current debates about piracy. As the author argues, each time we rip a CD to our hard drives, we're not only saving space in our living rooms or ensuring we have the appropriate gym soundtrack, but also reaffirming a fundamental idea about the limits of human perception.

"With an mp3, you're not going to have the same enjoyment that vinyl collectors talk about in terms of physicality, though, for a lot of people, that pleasure has been transferred to computer electronics."

Pitchfork: People often describe mp3s as "dematerialized" or "invisible" music. You argue that they're actually "things" comparable with CDs, though.

JS: They're just different kinds of things. You can hold an mp3 in your hand, you just need some kind of container for it; Apple developed an entire campaign about the thousands of songs you can hold in your hand. There's a materiality to them because you run out of space on your hard drive, or you can or can't stream them depending on bandwidth. But the important thing is that their materiality comes with completely different affordances than something like a CD.

With an mp3, you're obviously not going to have the same enjoyment that vinyl collectors talk about in terms of the physicality of the medium. Although for a lot of people, that pleasure has been directly transferred to computer electronics. The whole fashionable-portable-audio-player phenomena is very much of a piece with the enjoyment of records, except that it's not a subcultural phenomenon, and certainly doesn't lend itself to the same kind of aestheticism that comes with being a record collector. But the flipside, in a way, is that mp3s are closer to what I would call the social demand for music-- the desire to be with music, to move with it and share it. They're much closer to that than a record is.

Pitchfork: One of the book's best chapters is about the tests audio engineers ran in 1990 and 1991 to determine the standard for quality.

JS: Actually, the story of music testing comes from a longer history of industrial testing called hedonics, which I trace back to World War II. Hedonics was developed as a part of industrial psychology to try to measure and test pleasure and displeasure. For instance, if you're packing string beans in cans for G.I.s, how disgusting do they have to be before people won't eat them? Or on the flip side, a company like Frito Lay has chip testers at the ends of their production lines. The question isn't, "How tasty is this potato chip?" But: "How does the taste of this potato chip compare with the standard potato chip?"

This was the mode of testing that was used with the mp3. So the first question is, "What's the difference between one of several possible new coding schemes and CD-quality audio?" It's always relative to other audio. Really, it's just different flavors of processing, which is the defining characteristic of contemporary music aesthetics. So much stuff we hear now is so heavily processed. If you heard an unprocessed voice in a music recording, you would think it was wrong, because it didn't have dynamic range compression, it isn't heavily edited, there isn't any artificial reverberation added. It would sound strange to most listeners.

The MPEG listening tests used a variety of recordings: some castanets, a Suzanne Vega or Tracy Chapman tune, Ornette Coleman, a solo bass guitar piece, examples of male and female speech. The testers would listen to each of these recordings, flip back and forth between different coding schemes and the original recording without knowing which was which, trying to determine the difference. They'd do it over and over for hours-- the process is quite exhausting and unpleasant. If a tester was correct more often than they would be if they were guessing, the researchers would know there was a perceivable difference.

The question that immediately arises is: Would you get different results with different music and with different listeners? In the case of the MPEG test listeners, we're talking about professional engineers, people who work for audio companies, or people who work for radio stations. If you look at the aesthetics of the recordings, they all conform to this sanctioned radio aesthetic in terms of how recordings are made and what they sound like. I wasn't able to hear all the recordings, but if you listen to the commercial stuff, everything's recorded in exactly the way you'd expect an engineer at a radio station in 1991 to classify as "well-recorded." There isn't anything too esoteric or strange. 

So by choosing mainstream music as the tests for MPEG audio, they actually produced a format that doesn't conform to universals of human hearing, but does conform very well to the record industry. In other words, a small number of mastering engineers have determined what good recordings will sound like.

Pitchfork: In the popular history of mp3s, Suzanne Vega's a cappella version of "Tom's Diner" is situated as the key musical moment in the engineering of the format. But you dispute the validity of that argument.

JS: The Vega recording is super interesting because if you listen to the recording in headphones or at a high volume on good speakers, you can hear a massive echo in the background at certain points, especially at the ending of phrases. In the first verse, listen for the sound after "dinner," "corner," "argue," "somebody," and "in." That's because she's singing very close to the mic and they're using a lot of dynamic range compression. That goes with the aesthetics of the time. So even this a cappella recording that's talked about as "pure" and "natural" and "organic" is this highly processed artifact, and the referent of perceptually coded audio is not Suzanne Vega singing in a room, but Suzanne Vega singing on a very well produced record.

Pitchfork: A lot of people cite piracy as the reason why mp3s became the ubiquitous medium for 21st-century music. But you broaden that out and consider some other factors that contributed to the format's ubiquity.

JS: Absolutely. Obviously, filesharing and unauthorized copying is a factor-- when I say "piracy," I really mean unauthorized copying, because piracy is not a real thing. In fact, it's a crazy term because it combines people in their rooms downloading music with armed thieves in boats off the coast of eastern Africa. So really we're talking about an industry that wants to limit copying as much as possible and control the means of purchase, use, and recirculation in problematic ways.

The mp3 took off after an Australian hacker cracked a piece of encoding software that the Fraunhofer Institute, which owns a lot of the patents for the mp3, created. It gets re-released for free, and people start using the software to rip mp3s from their CDs. Within a year or two, because they're so common, companies like Microsoft and Apple are signing deals with Fraunhofer, and by the time Napster takes off, anyone with a computer could use software to rip a CD to mp3.

That's part of the story, but there's a much more important part. When we think about music piracy or unauthorized copying, we normally think about it in terms of a record industry and an end user. But I actually think there's a more important relationship involving the conduit industries, which are as much media industries as the recording industry. These people benefit tremendously from file sharing. My favorite example of this comes from 2001, when Sony Music (the record label) joins a suit against Napster put forward by the Recording Industry Association of America at the same time Sony (the consumer electronics manufacturer) releases a CD player that can play mp3s. Where do you think those mp3s come from? You could say the same thing for the initial iPod.

Maybe now that the iTunes store is old enough, there are people in the world who have bought everything natively digital and didn't rip or download anything. But for a very long time in the 2000s, the ISPs, people selling hard drives, people selling bandwidth, people selling music playback gadgets, and even people selling new computers all benefitted greatly from file sharing. They had a huge economic interest in it. This is a big debate in Silicon Valley; the Free Culture movement. Content provision is something that helps amplify search engines, ISPs, and other companies that depend on people going out and finding content to make money.

"Music piracy is not a real thing. In fact, it's a crazy term because it combines people in their rooms downloading music with armed thieves in boats off the coast of eastern Africa."

Pitchfork: What do you see as the future of the mp3, if not, as you say in your book, the end of the mp3?

JS: Well, I think it's going to be around for a while, because people have very large music collections in mp3 format that they may or may not have bought. And if they didn't buy them, are they then going to spend a lot of money to replace them the way baby boomers did with CDs and LPs? It's a much tougher sell.

There are competitors to the mp3, some of which are open source like .ogg, which is a great alternative because it is completely open, but it also means that content industries like Apple are quite hostile to it because they see it as an indirect threat. Mp3s are with us as long as we're using computers and the same kinds of music platforms we're using today. When the next telecommunications infrastructure comes along-- with new devices and new ways of engaging with music-- that's when the dominance of the mp3 and compressed audio in general will be challenged.

ARTISTS:

 Jonathan Sterne