Reading group: Unpacking two grand narratives

By Olivia Lucas

Last Tuesday, the reading group held its first official meeting of the academic year, in the run-up to the first seminar on Monday. (The reading group will be meeting every other Tuesday – please let us know if you’d like to join! We will be reading previous work by the seminar speakers.) This discussion covered Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: Meaning of a Format, and Veit Erlmann’s Reason and Resonance.

Here are some notes from our discussion:

Sterne, MP3

1. Contingent histories: In many ways, MP3 builds on Sterne’s The Audible Past, extensively unpacking the development of a particular sound technology through interwoven social and political histories. The approach to history here is never teleological; instead, it emphasizes the contingency of all events and artifacts. The book addresses the fact that the mp3 could have been invented thirty years earlier than it was, and uses this fact to interrogate the assumption that technological capability alone leads to invention. The emergence of the mp3 in 1993 was the result of a long history of people, institutions and technologies.

2. Format theory: MP3 also introduces the the possibility of “format theory.” With the number of media formats available today, it is often uselessly imprecise to refer to them as simply “audio,” or “video.” Format theory introduces a new conversation to the expanding world of sound studies: the unpacking of how media formats emerge, how they rise to the level of a standard format or fall by the wayside, how they are surpassed by newer formats and how the competing drives for compression and definition are balanced against each other.

3. Music as a thing: The ascendance of the MP3 has meant a change in the practice of collecting and curating music. With digital storage, the collector no longer amasses physical objects, and the labor (and sometimes the cost) of collection is greatly reduced. The emphasis in music ownership shifts from collecting toward arranging and curating, as seen in the creation of playlists, Pandora stations. (This curation trend is not limited to music; Pinterest offers a visual parallel.) The exponential increase in access to nearly unlimited amounts of music via download or streaming continues to shape the process of choice, as choices become more valuable in the presence of more options.

Erlmann, Reason and Resonance

1. A history of otology: This expansive work undertakes the task of providing a history of the study of the ear and hearing. Like Sterne, Erlmann works to destabilize the overwrought alignment of sight with rationality (and the corresponding alignment of hearing with faith), but unlike Sterne, he focuses on drawing out the nature of the listener, rather than on how technologies have shaped listeners over time. This intense focus on the ear provides a counterpoint to the soundscape studies we will be reading in the coming weeks.

2. Failed otological ideas: Most of the ideas about hearing presented in the text are ones that were subsequently proven to be incorrect, providing an opportunity to question the ideas we have inherited about the connection between hearing and reason. The largely forgotten philosophical texts presented here tell a story of the struggle to reconcile the oscillations of sound with the oscillations of the rational self. In telling this story, Erlmann rejects the metaphor of the mirror – that rational thought is reflection – and proposes a new one, the flow of water.