The Passing of the Circus Parade, by Len Spencer and Gilbert Girard!
Performing For and With the Machine
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Performing For and With the Machine While Williams, Eisenberg, and Kahn all argue that the “art” of phonography resides in acts of technological manipulation such as placing microphones in strategic spots or splicing together bits of tape, another school of thought locates it in the adaptation of what is being recorded. Nearly every account of early phonographic performers comments on the fact that they adapted their performance styles to suit the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of the current technology. To take a particularly elaborate example, Mark Katz suggests that violinists’ increased use of vibrato over the course of the twentieth century may have originated as a tactic for producing more satisfactory phonograms. The advantages in this case would have been both acoustic, allowing performers to “increase the effective loudness of a note without overplaying and without coming into contact with the horn,” and affective, since vibrato seems to have been regarded as a means of conveying emotion and individuality in the absence of gesture, facial expression, and presence. The adaptation of violin-playing for recording purposes, Katz’s argument goes, eventually had a reciprocal effect on live performance practice. A similar transformation seems to have affected the standard instrumentation of klezmer music: because tsimbl and double bass did not record well, they were replaced by clarinet and tuba for the phonograms that later served as a model for the klezmer revival. In general, Katz refers to this process as the “phonograph effect.”102 Some writers argue that adaptations of the kind Katz describes created a special relationship between originary events and their resulting phonograms, one for which the terms “original” and “copy” would be misleading. Drawing from work by John and Susan Harvith on recording practices of the 1910s and 1920s, James Lastra observes that Edison employed a roster of relatively unknown performers in preference to celebrity talent with a reputation earned in live performance, sometimes reacting to test phonograms by the latter with such comments as “the phonograph is not an opera house.” With the Harviths, he concludes that Edison “assumed that live performance and phonography were different enterprises altogether,” both having their distinct “techniques and standards,” so that being good at one did not necessarily translate into being good at the other.103 Specifically, the originary event in commercial phonography was judged not according to how it would be perceived immediately by a human being, as live performances were, but purely by the effectiveness of the resulting phonogram. “Edison showed that the so-called original has only a functional importance, serving simply as one step in the process of producing a satisfactory recording,” Lastra observes. “No one was ever meant to listen to Edison’s ‘originals’ nor were they designed for listening—they were designed to accomplish one stage of a multistage representational process.”104 As to the ways in which originary events could be “designed” for recordability, he writes: Performers and technicians alike learned that it might…be advantageous to change aspects of a particular musician’s performance style in order to take advantage of the machine’s peculiarities. Through repeated exposure to the most mundane and practical aspects of musical recording, both groups came to believe that sonic representation was not simply a matter of precisely transcribing completely prior and autonomous events, and to concede that a performance, for instance, might deviate from its customary presentational norms in order to achieve a particular representational effect, like intelligibility, regardless of its effect on the character of the “pro-phonographic” event [i.e., anterior to inscription]. Judging from the examples Lastra cites, the kind of adaptation he has in mind here is the practice of exploiting musical effects that the machine recorded well, such as pure tones in singing, while eschewing ones that it did not, such as tremolo. While Lastra acknowledges that the practice of early commercial phonography was predicated on the creation of “coherent but spatiotemporally nonliteral musical worlds,” rather than on merely recording preexisting subjects, he still treats the field as limited to the adaptation of musical performance.105 Jonathan Sterne presents an argument much like Lastra’s, but he expands on it in some fruitful ways. “Making sounds for the machines was always different than performing for a live audience,” he asserts. “Studio work was widely understood as a practice entirely different from live performance.”106 On the basis of this observation, he draws a conclusion similar to Eisenberg’s about the autonomous validity of the phonographic “ideal event,” except that in Sterne’s version phonography no longer requires special recording techniques or postproduction editing to be regarded as a distinctive cultural form: If its reproduction exists even as a possibility, sound production is oriented toward reproduction from the very moment a sound is created at a “source.” Sound reproduction always involves a distinct practice of sound production…. Therefore, we can no longer argue that copies are debased versions of a more authentic original that exists either outside or prior to the process of reproduction. Both copy and original are products of the process of reproducibility. The original requires as much artifice as the copy.107 To support this claim, Sterne turns not to music but to the genre of the descriptive specialty, of which The Passing of a Circus Parade with which I opened this introduction is one example. “Somewhere between a contrived re-creation of an actual event and a vaudeville sketch,” he writes, “descriptive specialties offered their listeners ‘tone pictures’ of different places and events,” ranging from the funeral of President McKinley to battle scenes of the Russo-Japanese War. Because these phonograms were studio “re-creations” rather than literal “reproductions,” Sterne supposes, “the point was not to get as close to reality as possible but rather to establish a kind of auditory realism and, through that realism, present a distinct aesthetic experience.”108 In other words, a descriptive sketch phonogram was not meant to be a transparent medium for some authentic reality transpiring in the recording studio; rather, what went on in the studio was enacted solely to produce a phonogram capable of effecting a desired aural illusion. Some of this phrasing suggests a kind of paradox—“originals” are being enacted solely for “reproduction”—but once we reformulate the process more neutrally in terms of eduction, the concept should be no more peculiar than that of “writing” being enacted to produce a particular effect during “reading,” rather than simply to document the moment of writing itself. The distinction Lastra and Sterne make with regard to certain kinds of performance—that “originals” may be enacted not for direct listening, but as one step in a larger communicative process—has especially interesting implications when applied to spoken language, as one familiar example will illustrate. The telephone answering machine and the distinctive communicative situations it embodies have, within the past few decades, become pervasive social institutions, and the nature of the language found in outgoing answering machine messages has sparked some discussion and debate in philosophy, beginning with Alan Sidelle’s formulation in 1991 of the following puzzle: Anyone who has called an absent party with an answering machine has heard the words ‘I’m not here now,’ and, save for those unpleasant occasions when the answering machine is being used as a screening device, it seems undeniable that what one hears on the other end of the phone is true. This is the answering machine paradox: the semantics for ‘I,’ ‘here,’ and ‘now’ seem to ensure the truth of any utterance of ‘I am here now,’ and consequently, the falsity of any utterance of ‘I am not here now,’ yet answering machines provide us with ‘I’m not here now’s which are true.109
When one records an answering machine message…one is not, at that time, (typically) making an utterance, or at least, making an assertion. One is not saying that one isn’t there when one is recording…—this would be pointless. One is rather arranging to make an utterance at a later time, or, if one likes, deferring an utterance. The genuine utterance(s) will occur when someone calls and hears the message.110 Thus, “here” and “now” will refer to the time and place of the “genuine utterance” even though its speaker, “I,” is legitimately elsewhere. However, Stefano Predelli argues that the context of a “genuine utterance” in this sense might not be the relevant one for evaluating its referents if it ends up occurring under circumstances unforeseen by the speaker. As an alternative, he proposes that the “utterance” itself still happens at the time and place of encoding, but that its “here” and “now” are anchored to the time and place in which the speaker intends it to be decoded and interpreted, or even to a plurality of such times and places.111 In turn, Eros Corazza, William Fish and Jonathan Gorvett counter that a speaker’s intentions cannot explain why such cases also make sense to listeners, and that their success really depends purely on convention: Our proposal is that, for any use of the personal indexical, the contextual parameter of the agent is conventionally given—given by the social or conventional setting in which the utterance takes place. For instance, with “now”, the setting or context in which it is used changes the time that the term refers to: if “now” is heard on an answering machine, we take the relevant time to be the time at which it is heard, and we arrive at the referent accordingly…. [The “I am not here now” approach] succeeds because we are aware of the conventions governing the use of answering machines and the fact that the purpose of such devices is to inform the caller of the state of affairs at the time the call is made. According to Corazza et al., we interpret the referents correctly in such cases because of a tacit mutual understanding about how “I,” “here,” and “now” should be understood in outgoing answering machine messages, even if they would mean something else when received on, say, a postcard from a friend on vacation. What is at stake here, and in similar cases, is our identification of the conventional deictic zero-point for a given type of utterance, in reference to which its indexicals are to be evaluated.112 But what happens when the relevant conventions are in flux, as in the emergence of new media? As Daniel Wojcik states, the formal features of the outgoing answering machine message have certain “similarities to traditional greeting and leave-taking formulas” but were, as of his writing in the mid-1980s, “themselves rapidly becoming traditions,”113 which we can read as implying that the process was not yet complete. Although the conventions of the form may now be widely recognized, there is still room for cognitive dissonance, such that the potential for confusion in the delivery of outgoing messages is still being tapped as a source of comedy on a regular basis. Examples may be found (1) in lists of humorous answering machine message texts posted on the Internet: I can’t come to the phone now, so if, well, actually, I CAN come to the phone now, I mean, like, I’m at the phone NOW, recording this message, but I’m doing this NOW, while you’re listening to it LATER, except for you I guess it’s NOW, like, when you’re listening to it... I mean, like, wait, gosh. This is so confusing.114 (2) in a “Frank & Ernest” comic strip of the year 2001: HELLO. THIS IS A RECORDING… THAT IS, IT ISN’T A RECORDING RIGHT NOW WHILE I’M MAKING IT, OF COURSE, BUT IT WILL BE, OR RATHER IS, A RECORDING WHEN YOU HEAR IT… OR, IN OTHER WORDS….115 and (3) on a British website that invites visitors to download sound files for use as outgoing messages on their own answering machines: Hello.
[laugh] What am I saying, there’s no-one there. Well—there is, but not as I speak, so to speak. I know—later, some time—in the indefinite future, someone will ring, someone like yourself. I shouldn’t say someone like yourself, I—I mean, in point of fact
yourself….116 What these parodies are simulating is the uncertainty that might arise if no conventions existed for the outgoing telephone answering machine message and it were, instead, subject to evaluation on the same terms as ordinary telephonic speech. In 1877, there really were no conventions for evaluating any form of phonography, whether answering machine messages or musical phonograms. Any such conventions still had to be worked out through analogy, trial, and error. The debate over the “answering machine paradox” suggests that the use of indexical language is likely to offer rich insight into how this process occurred, providing us with an empirical tool for mapping the emergent relationship between phonographic “originals” and “reproductions.” An even more fundamental point to be made, however, is that there is a conceptual unity linking modifications in performance (as in the peculiarities of “studio work”) and referential speech (as in the deixis of answering machine messages) to compensate for the fact that neither was intended for immediate apprehension. I consider these to be two mutually illuminating manifestations of a single underlying principle of adaptation, although as far as I am aware they have not been linked analytically with each other before. So far I have considered two different perspectives on what might constitute a phonographic “art.” The first is modeled after classic film theory and suggests that the “art” of phonography resides in acts of technological manipulation, such as the strategic placement of microphones and postproduction editing. The second, which I find is more relevant to analyses of early phonograms, is based on the concept of “performing for the machine,” emphasizing ways in which the recorded enactment is itself adapted to the medium. However, a third perspective worth considering locates the “art” of early phonography at a later point in the process than either of the others, namely in the act of exhibition. This position has been articulated most forcibly by Charles Musser, who is primarily a film historian and whose approach to the phonograph exhibition can be seen as an extension of his work on the origins of postproduction editing in cinema. Film theory has been deeply concerned with the editing and sequencing of shots. However, until roughly 1903 films were distributed (with rare exceptions) in the form of single, unbroken shots. Editing these shots together into coherent programs was, during that time, the responsibility of the individual exhibitor, not the production company. Initially, exhibitors chose to split up selections with similar themes—seeking variety—rather than juxtaposing them to create a sense of continuous narrative. Throughout the latter half of the 1890s, however, exhibitors came increasingly to show thematically related films in connected sequences, as production companies began producing selections more consciously in multi-part series. In the first decade of the twentieth century, production companies took over this editorial role themselves, distributing elaborate sequences ready-made—such as The Great Train Robbery. But the art of film editing had begun as the work of individual exhibitors.117 If early film exhibitors displayed creative artistry in their sequencing of separate films, then—Musser supposes—early phonograph exhibitors might have done the same thing in their sequencing of separate phonograms, even though they did not actually splice them together into larger physical units. His principal example of an exhibitor is Lyman Howe, who left behind a rich trove of scrapbooks covering his phonograph work in the early 1890s and who later gained a reputation for incorporating prerecorded sound effects into his exhibitions of moving pictures. Although Howe did use prerecorded phonograms purchased from other recordists, he also recorded many of his own and accompanied his presentations with live introductions and commentary. Musser argues that it was in exhibition, rather than in the recording studio, that the greatest creative potential of phonography lay: Howe and Haddock [his partner during the season of 1890] held the principal creative responsibility for their shows. They were not exhibitors in the modern sense: they did not simply present the works of creative artists. Rather, they functioned as directors, performers, and technicians. Their concerts can be more appropriately viewed as live performances with prerecorded components. These live theatrical presentations were built around mechanically reproducible elements but were not dominated by them.118 Although Musser’s concern may ultimately come from an interest in film editing, the creative role he assigns to Howe is not based on the “editing” of shorter phonograms into composite phonograms, but on the live juxtaposition and introduction of separate phonograms during exhibitions. Some consistent vocabulary will be helpful for referring to the events of phonography and their participants, rather than just to recording and eduction as technical processes. The most elaborate classification scheme of which I am aware is Rick Altman’s in “The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound,” which defines the sound event, such as the original plucking of a string; the sound narrative, a resultant complex of vibrations in the air capable of being heard at multiple points; the sound record, a pattern of waves “collected” at a single point in space; sound reproduction, which I am calling eduction; and the hearing event, in which an audience listens to the result. However, this classification scheme does not quite fit the needs or perspectives of the present study. Altman’s main purpose in formulating these categories is to emphasize the three-dimensionality of live sounds and its absence from phonographically educed sounds, which—with Alan Williams—he takes to be subjective representations rather than “reproductions” of their originals. His classification scheme accordingly emphasizes technological transformations of sound that can take place at various points in its mediation: “Though they may constitute distortions for the sound engineer, the marks of the sound narrative and the recording process that appear as part of the sound record constitute the very text of the sound analyst, the fundamental signs of the sound semiotician, the basic facts of the sound historian.”119 But I am concerned just as much with the contributions of the people who “perform” for the machine, and of the other people who work the eduction of phonograms into their “performances”; of the person who dictates an outgoing message into an answering machine and the callers who trigger its eduction. Finding a place for them requires a somewhat different analytical framework, one centered more on complexities of coding and decoding than on the phenomenology of sound as such. For my purposes, there will be two basic kinds of events connected with phonography: recording events, during which sounds are produced and recorded, and eduction events, in which phonograms are used to generate sound. Two principal roles are associated with the recording event. One is the recordist, the person deploying the recording equipment. The other is the source of the sounds being recorded, but it is difficult to find a word neutral enough to cover all of the possibilities, which range from operatic arias to business dictation to the sounds of nature. Subjects that produce sounds suitable for recording have been called phonogenic, which further suggests to me a corresponding noun phonogen, or “sound-producer,” for anything that produces sounds, although in practice the adjectival form actually tends to be more useful.120 This distinction is also worth expressing in the form of a verb, in order to avoid such ambiguous phrases as “John recorded a song,” which in ordinary usage could refer either to the activity of the recordist (“John Lomax recorded a song performed by a prison inmate”) or the phonogen (“John Lennon recorded a song he had just composed”). Since John Lomax is the one who most literally “recorded” something, I will say that John Lennon phonogenized his song, and that the originary production of sound for any phonogram is its phonogenization. The eduction event centers on two other roles. I will call the person for whose hearing a phonogram is educed the listener, and the person in charge of deploying the equipment the eductionist.121 Two of the aforementioned roles are equivalent to those found in “live” encounters (the phonogen and the listener), while the other two are tied to the mediation itself (the recordist and the eductionist). These roles need not always be filled by people: for example, a phonogen might just as easily be a waterfall or a bird. Alternatively, a single person might sometimes act as both phonogen and recordist, or as both listener and eductionist, or even as all four in quick succession (for instance, if I record myself speaking into a tape recorder, rewind, and then listen to hear how I sound). All four roles are also capable of being filled by more than one occupant: there might be multiple phonogens or multiple listeners, and the roles of recordist and eductionist might be divided into sub-roles such as “producer” and “recording engineer” in the first case or “lecturer” and “phonograph operator” in the second. In early phonography, meaning was potentially negotiated between phonogens, recordists, eductionists, and listeners. I do not mean to deny the possible contribution of other participants, such as those involved in the sale and marketing of phonograms or—later on—in postproduction editing. However, I have found these four roles the most analytically useful ones to distinguish in phonography alongside more widely encountered and acknowledged roles such as, say, that of addressee. Another useful concept for exploring phonograph-centered events will be that of frame. Erving Goffman borrows this term from Gregory Bateson and defines it as a basic organizing principle governing the ways in which people are subjectively involved in social events—for example, “make-believe” or “joking.” As these two examples suggest, participants may interpret what is going on in a given situation very differently depending on what frame they believe is in effect. There are, accordingly, conventionalized cues that serve to invoke or sustain particular frames, which Goffman calls keys; the act of invoking a frame using one of these conventions is known as keying it. One of the many frames Goffman discusses is the “theatrical” one, defined as “that arrangement which transforms an individual into a stage performer, the latter, in turn, being an object that can be looked at in the round and at length without offense, and looked to for engaging behavior, by persons in an ‘audience’ role.” In “ordinary” social interaction, by contrast, such intense scrutiny could be considered disrespectful and offensive. Goffman contrasts his definition with Dell Hymes’ view of performance as “an attribute of any behavior, if the doer accepts or has imputed to him responsibility for being evaluated in regard to it.”122 However, these two approaches can be viewed as complementary rather than contradictory. Richard Bauman combines them to identify performance itself, at least in terms of verbal art, as a frame in which a performer invites intense attention and promises engaging behavior (Goffman), simultaneously opening himself or herself to evaluation in terms of “competence” in the relevant performance tradition (Hymes). The formal characteristics associated with performance may vary from culture to culture, the argument goes; what unifies them is the implicit promise of aesthetic enjoyment and the concomitant invitation of attention and critical evaluation.123 Something much like a theatrical or performance frame appears to govern much of the behavior surrounding the phonograph: the phonogen is often described as a person who “performs” for the machine; the eductionist is sometimes regarded as “performing” with the machine; the listener often attends to an eduction event as “performance.” At the same time, the interposition of the phonograph also changes participants’ orientation towards what is going on. Thus, listeners who understand more or less how a phonograph works, and who know that they are listening to a phonogram of a speech, are unlikely to try to interject a question with the expectation of a reply from the “speaker” because they recognize that the medium does not provide for that kind of interaction. On the whole, the relationships found in phonography are different enough from the ones found in more traditional performance settings that I feel that referring to “performance-like phonograms” or “phonographic performances” would ultimately be more confusing than illuminating. Consequently, I have settled on an alternative—and admittedly whimsical—term for discussing phonograms associated with a performance-like response. By analogy with spectacle and spectacular (from spectare, “to look at”), I will use the words audicle and audicular (from audire, “to listen to”) for a broad category of sounds marked as affective, moving, entertaining, and aesthetically valuable, regardless of their formal characteristics.124 Along with Bauman’s definition of the performance frame, a comparable concept is Robert Plant Armstrong’s affecting things and events, an alternative to the word “art” that is supposed to be unburdened by normative formal criteria and defined purely by local sensibilities.125 The field of soundscape studies developed by R. Murray Schafer and Barry Truax recognizes a few subcategories of what I am calling audicles, but for all its jargon it seems to have no term for the concept as a whole, which is why I have felt the need to coin one.126 My interest is not so much in the audicle in general as in the audicular phonogram, i.e., a phonogram that is promoted and valued for the affective impact of the listening experience it generates. Many musical phonograms fall into this category, but so can phonograms of other potentially audicular subjects: verbal art, for instance, or the roar of a waterfall. Indeed, my only motive for advancing the audicle as a concept is that it would otherwise be difficult for me to write about these disparate aural phenomena as a unified subject without a lot of clumsy circumlocution (e.g., “entertaining, aesthetically significant, and/or emotionally moving sounds”). There is no single “opposite” to the audicular phonogram, just as there is no clear “opposite” to performance, no satisfactory way of defining “literal reality” as opposed to something else. It is certainly possible, however, to contrast the audicular category with individual non-audicular uses of phonography. For instance, there was the phonography of business dictation: since it was merely one step in the production of a typewritten document, the fact of its aurality was not valued; it did not matter how it sounded, so long as a secretary could understand it and transcribe it. On the other hand, consider the following use scenario proposed in 1893 by J. Mount Bleyer, a doctor specializing in diseases of the throat and lungs: For the more audible sounds like the whoop of the whooping cough, asthmatic breathing in all its forms, stenosis of the larynx, due to whatever form, and which is so evident in cases of cramp and diphtheria, nasal troubles, cries of babies at different periods of their growth, sneezing, normal breathing as contrasted with abnormal breathing, the phonograph is the instrument for their recording beyond all doubt. Certainly, students and members of the medical and other professions would learn more from one lecture in any branch of science aided by phonograms than from a dozen lectures of the usual sort. Cabinets can be arranged as libraries in which all kinds of records may be preserved, referring to, or representing, the different kinds of disease of the throat, nose, chest, etc., and in their different stages.127
During a recording event, the creators of a phonogram generally expect it to serve a circumscribed range of audicular and non-audicular ends, or some combination of these, and how they proceed depends largely on the sort of eduction events they expect the resulting phonogram to make possible. Like other “writings,” however, phonograms can be used for purposes other than those intended by their creators. If a listener can approach birdsong or rain pattering on a tin roof as an audicle, then it should also be possible to approach a phonogram as an audicle even when it was not created intentionally to be one. Nor is the listener the only participant in an eduction event capable of rekeying a phonogram in this way; the eductionist, if this is a separate person, might also key audicularity. One listener might listen to a commercial musical phonogram for enjoyment (audicular use), while another might use it to learn to play the music (non-audicular use, closer to “demonstration”). As we have seen, Lastra and Sterne both argue that the originary enactment of phonography is inherently different from the live communicative act, being designed not for immediate apprehension or appreciation in its own right, but to generate a record capable in turn of being educed as an “ideal event.” It is subordinate to the phonogram, not the phonogram to it. The phonogenic performer might still be thought of as “performing,” in the sense of being subject to critical evaluation, but what is being claimed and evaluated is competence specifically in the skills needed to yield a satisfactory audicular phonogram. This model fits virtually all early commercial phonography, and many other kinds too, but it should not be taken too far. Not all events recorded by the phonograph were consciously adapted to the medium or enacted in order to be recorded, the most obvious counterexamples being cases in which it has recorded incriminating remarks made by a person unaware of its presence. The value of this model is that it recognizes the existence of a relationship in phonography other than that between originals and lesser, disembodied copies, not that this alternative relationship is the only one possible between tympanically educed sounds and original sounds, or between “live” events and “reproduced” ones. Meanwhile, performance is only one sphere of activity that is susceptible to phonogenic adaptation. Recorded business dictation, for instance, will generally involve a more or less phonogenically adapted form of speaking. So, of course, does the outgoing answering machine message “I am not here now.” Despite their formal differences, all adaptations of this sort can be reasonably subsumed under the rubric of the phonogenic frame. The transformative potential of what I am calling the phonogenic frame should be old news to ethnographers. Turning on recording equipment has been credited with such effects as introducing a mechanical “third presence” alongside fieldworker and informant and inducing certain kinds of code-switching (e.g., talking self-consciously “for the record”).128 What I am proposing is simply a shift in emphasis: we should investigate phonogenic adaptation as a creative response to the communicative circumstances of phonography, and not just as material for fieldwork anecdotes. Scholars are already reluctant to accept most early phonograms as transparent windows onto “authentic” live performance practices, and by emphasizing processes of adaptation and transformation I may seem to discourage this kind of approach even further. However, if early phonograms can sometimes be regarded as conscious, intelligent adaptations of live performance genres, then they gain significance in their own right as subjective reflections on whatever it is they are seeking to represent. The Passing of a Circus Parade is probably not a very accurate record of what an early twentieth-century circus parade actually sounded like, but it does reveal what the people who produced it thought would pass for a satisfactory “circus parade” phonogram in the year 1902. As a result, we learn something about both their understanding of the circus parade and their ideas about what should go into the phonographic representation of a complex public event. Among the most revealing features of a phonogram in this respect are its metacommunative devices, such as spoken announcements. One of the only previous studies to have taken this aspect of phonography seriously is John Minton’s dissertation, Phonograph Blues (1990), in which the author analyzes the conventions by which phonogenic performers oriented themselves and their listeners to musical performances mediated via “race” and “hillbilly” records of the 1920s and 1930s. For instance, the Riley Puckett recording Darkey’s Wail (1930) opens with the statement, “Hello, folks. Now I’m with you once again. I’m gonna play for you this time a little piece which an old southern darkey I heard play coming down Decatur Street called ‘His Good Gal Throwed Him Down.’” Minton finds that such metacommunicative segments frame the content of phonograms variously as documentation of live events or as functional substitutes for them, and that they occasionally incorporate reflexive comments about the medium itself.129 In focusing on southern folksong traditions, Minton has chosen to explore a case in which the mutual influences of face-to-face and mediated forms were already problematized and recognized as a subject worthy of investigation. The phonograms themselves have been widely reissued in modern formats, and so are still readily accessible; their keying is elaborate and conspicuous. It is, therefore, not surprising that this was the first phonographic genre to be analyzed seriously in terms of its metacommunicative conventions. However, Minton suggests that other corpi of recorded sound should be open to similar kinds of interpretation. The key assumption underlying his approach is “that people learn to interact with electronic media as a cultural activity and that the nature and significance of those interactions are, as in any such exchange, mediated or otherwise, culture-specific and cross-culturally variable.”130 That is, different cultures may be expected to display different orientations towards phonography and its relationship to live performance, and these orientations might manifest themselves through distinctive formal features on the phonograms themselves, as in the “race” and “hillbilly” examples. My findings tend to confirm his suspicions, the culture in my case consisting of phonographically active individuals in the United States between 1877 and 1908. To summarize: I distinguish two kinds of event in phonography, the recording event and the eduction event. During eduction events, eductionists use phonographs to educe phonograms for listeners. When the educed phonograms receive attention from the listeners equivalent to that given by an audience to a performance, I call them “audicular.” During recording events, recordists use phonographs to record the sounds produced by phonogens. Anything that produces recordable sound can be a phonogen, and a person who is a phonogen may be unaware that he or she is being recorded, but phonogens can also tailor the sounds they make, their phonogenizations, specifically for recording and use in anticipated future eduction events, a mode of behavior I identify with the “phonogenic frame.” In particular, the “phonogenic performance” has as its goal not the engagement of an immediately present audience, but the production of an “audicular” phonogram. This classification scheme for the events and participants of phonography is not intended to be particularly interesting or insightful in and of itself. The interesting part will be seeing how, in practice, participants in early phonography actually negotiated their way through all these unfamiliar situations and relationships in an effort to put the new technology to various uses. Download 256.87 Kb. Share with your friends:
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