The Passing of the Circus Parade, by Len Spencer and Gilbert Girard!

Cohen on the Telephone: A History of Jewish Recorded Humor and Popular Music, 1892-1942 (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Yesterday’s Memories, 1984).

59 Found respectively at http://www.collectionscanada.ca/gramophone and http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu. Various commercial “reissues” have been available as well on LP (e.g., Mark56), cassette tape (e.g., American Gramophone and Wireless), and compact disc (e.g., Glenn Sage at www.tinfoil.com and Archeophone Records), but the combination of scale and accuracy of documentation associated with the two online projects is unprecedented. Furthermore, much other material “reissued” commercially or online has undergone processes considerably more intrusive than the colorization of black-and-white films, including aggressive reequalization and noise reduction.

60 The Library of Congress has commissioned a study of this issue, but the results have not yet been published. In the meantime, see Tim Brooks, “How Copyright Law Affects Reissues of Historic Recordings: A New Study,” ARSC Journal 36 (Fall 2005), 183-203; “Piracy on Records,” Stanford Law Review 5 (Apr. 1953), 433-58.

61 John Letzing, “Changing History,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 15, 2006, p. R10. For Altman’s earlier take on Hunting’s work, see Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 149.

62 Daniel Wojcik, “‘At the Sound of the Beep’: An Analysis of the Structure and Traditional Speech Forms of Answering Machine Greetings,” Folklore and Mythology Studies 11/12 (1987-88), 80-103; Ruby Gold, “Answering Machine Talk,” Discourse Processes 14 (1991), 243-60; Silvia Dingwall, “Leaving telephone answering messages: Who’s afraid of speaking to machines?,” Text 12 (1992), 81-101; Celso Alvarez-Caccamo and Hubert Knoblauch, “‘I was calling you’: Communicative patterns in leaving a message on an answering machine,” Text 12 (1992), 473-505; Kristyan Spelman Miller, “A new mode of spoken interaction? The case of the telephone answer-machine,” in Writing vs Speaking: Language, Text, Discourse, Communication, edited by Světla Čmejrková, František Daneš, and Eva Havlová (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1994), 267-73; Silvia Dingwall, “‘Hello. This is Sally’s answering machine:’ Deixis in answerphone messages,” Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée 62 (1995), 129-153.

63 Greetings Dec. 20 1948, eight-inch “Aim” disc, 78 rpm §.

64 On the “home mode,” see Richard Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Sate University Popular Press, 1987), 8.

65 Cogswell, Jokes in Blackface, 33-4.

66 Morton, Off the Record, 5.

67 Morton, Off the Record, 14.

68 Kenney, Recorded Music, especially xvi-xix. This is all the more notable because Kenney also cites Ong’s work on orality in connection with verbal poetics—as an argument in favor of the significance of “familiar musical and lyric patterns” (!)—and pages 32-43 describe the content of various spoken-word sketches.

69 Pekka Gronow, “The record industry: the growth of a mass medium,” Popular Music 3 (1983), 53.

70 V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (New York: Penguin Books, 1972) 16-17.

71 John Philip Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” Appleton’s Magazine 8 (1906), 278-84.

72 Marsha Siefert, “Aesthetics, Technology, and the Capitalization of Culture: How the Talking Machine Became a Musical Instrument,” Science in Context 8 (1995) 417-449; Emily Thompson, “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877-1925,” The Musical Quarterly 79 (Spring, 1995) 131-171.

73 Alan Williams, “Is Sound Recording Like a Language?” Yale French Studies 60 (1980), 61.

74 Williams, “Is Sound Recording Like a Language?,” 60.

75 Williams, “Is Sound Recording Like a Language?,” 64.

76 Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography (New York: McGraw Hill, 1987), 105.

77 Eisenberg, Recording Angel, 109.

78 Eisenberg, Recording Angel, 110, 114, 116.

79 Eisenberg, Recording Angel, 50-1.

80 Eisenberg, Recording Angel, 116-7.

81 Peter Doyle, Echo & Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900-1960 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 57.

82 Douglas Kahn, “Audio Art in the Deaf Century,” online version, http://www.soundculture.org/words/kahn_deaf_century.html, accessed Aug. 14, 2002. See also his Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999).

83 Victor Emerson, in Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Convention of the National Phonograph Association of the United States, Held at Chicago, Sept. 20, 21, and 22, 1893 (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Houtkamp & Cannon, [1893]), 54; name given incorrectly as “W. V. Emerson.”

84 Edison Phonographic News, 1 (Mar.-Apr. 1895), 86.

85 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 136.

86 For instance, Susan Rodgers applies the concept to her work on the Batak tape-cassette dramas of Indonesia: “The tape-cassette dramas represent a stage of secondary orality in which a literate culture with new mass media technology rediscovers and revises its oral traditions and its printed world. The dramas frame edited renditions of ‘traditional’ village oratory within a theatrical art form. In so doing they help create ‘traditional’ Angkola Batak culture in the first place” (Susan Rodgers, “Batak tape cassette kinship: constructing kinship through the Indonesian national mass media,” American Ethnologist 13 [1986], 29).

87 Alan Durant, “The Concept of Secondary Orality: Observations About Speech and Text in Modern Communications Media,” Dalhousie Review 64 (1984), 332-53.

88 Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, tr. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, tr. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), especially 21-114.

89 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins university Press, 1976), passim. From this perspective, Ivan Kreilkamp finds interesting parallels between the rhetoric surrounding phonographically disembodied voices and the treatment of the voice in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Ivan Kreilkamp, “A Voice Without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of Heart of Darkness,” Victorian Studies 40 [Winter 1997], 211-44). William Pietz develops an argument about the status of phonocentrism under capitalism by analyzing a New York Times article of 1885 that imagines the scheme of taking a phonograph to Africa, recording a local King as he makes particular commands in the native language, and then using his recorded voice to control the populace (William Pietz, “The phonograph in Africa: international phonocentrism from Stanley to Sarnoff,” in Post-structuralism and the question of history, edited by Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 263-85).

90 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1994), 273.

91 Schafer, Soundscape, 90.

92 Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988, 176.

93 Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, 160.

94 Sterne, Audible Past, 22.

95 J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, ed. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 5:75.

96 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, transl. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 220.

97 Notebook entry, July 17, 1877, Document 969, TAEB 3:440-1, an earlier page of which appears to be lost; and notebook entry, July 18, 1877, Document 972, TAEB 3:444.

98 Notebook entry, May 26, 1877, Document 921, TAEB 3:360; facsimile at TAEM 3:981. A separate device for recording telephonic speech on paper, also dated May 26, 1877, is Document 921, TAEB 3:361; facsimile at TAEM 3:980.

99 “Speaking Telegraph,” notebook entry, July 11, 1877, Document 964, TAEB 3:430-1.

100 Document 973, TAEB 3: 447. Since this document was filed in London on July 30, 1877, the editors note that it had probably been mailed before July 20.

101 This development is alluded to in a number of accounts, but the most explicit is the following Edison quotation drawn from a tinfoil-era interview: “It is a mechanical invention, begotten out of an attempt to emboss an alphabet for telegraphy. I found that repeating the letter ‘A’ many times produced an ever varying puncture, all of unlike depth or size under the microscope. Then it was plain that the voice was its own recorder and measurer. The phonographic alphabet was impossible, but articulation was easy” (Gath, “A Visit to Edison,” Philadelphia Weekly Times, Apr. 27, 1878 [TAEM 25:189]).

102 Mark Katz, The Phonograph Effect: The Influence of Recording on Listener, Performer, Composer (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1999); on violin vibrato, see especially 130-37; on klezmer, 91. These ideas are also advanced in his more recent Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2004).

103 James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 86; 241, n. 71; John Harvith and Susan Edwards Harvith, Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph: A Century in Retrospect (New York; Westport, Connecticut; London: Greenwood Press, 1987), 1-23.

104 Lastra, Sound Technology, 128.

105 Lastra, Sound Technology, 86-8. He defines the pro-phonographic as “encompassing all manipulations of a sound that occur anterior to the processes of technological inscription” (241, n. 70).

106 Sterne, Audible Past, 235, 237.

107 Sterne, Audible Past, 241.

108 Sterne, Audible Past, 243-4.

109 Alan Sidelle, “The Answering Machine Paradox,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1991), 526.

110 Sidelle, “Answering Machine Paradox,” 535.

111 Stefano Predelli, “Utterance, Interpretation and the Logic of Indexicals,” Mind & Language 13 (Sept. 1998), 400-14; “I Am Not Here Now,” Analysis 58 (Apr. 1998), 107-115.

112 Eros Corazza, William Fish and Jonathan Gorvett, “Who is I?,” Philosophical Studies 107 (2002), 1-21, quotation on 11, 13.

113 Wojcik, “At the Sound of the Beep,” 80, italics added.

114 This example appears on many different websites (Google reports over six hundred hits); one, however, is “The Canonical List of Answering Machine Messages,” http://quasisemi.com/humor/ind.php?id=190, accessed Jan. 6, 2005.

115 Bob Thaves, “Frank & Ernest” comic strip, June 5, 2001, archived at www.frankandernest.com, accessed Mar. 29, 2006.

116 Transcribed excerpt from hesitant.wav, in the “comedy” section of www.answeringmachine.co.uk, accessed Sept. 15, 1999 §.

117 Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 179-81, 232, 258-61.

118 Charles Musser, High Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880-1920. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991), 28.

119 Rick Altman, “The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound,” in Sound Theory Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 15-31.

120 My usage differs from the norm mainly in that I do not imply any positive value judgment. The word phonogenic has been defined as “with pleasing voice qualities; well suited to mechanical reproduction of sound; of or pertaining to pleasing recorded sound” (Simpson and Weiner, Oxford English Dictionary, 11:702). Film sound theorist Michel Chion defines phonogeny as “the rather mysterious propensity of certain voices to sound good when recorded and played over loudspeakers, to inscribe themselves in the record grooves better than other voices, in short to make up for the absence of the sound’s real source by means of another kind of presence specific to the medium” (Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, transl. and ed. by Claudia Gorbman [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], 101). Phonogen, with a capital P, has been used as a band name, as the title of a CD, as the name of a Swiss music collective (www.phonogen.com, accessed Sept. 30, 2003; they define phonogen as an adjective, “angenehm anzuhören,” or “pleasant to listen to”), as an audio equipment brand name, and as the name of an experimental musical instrument consisting of a keyboard-controlled variable-speed tape recorder. All of these instances do involve phonogens according to my definition.

121 The relationship between the cinema terms projector : projection : projectionist suggests to me the analogous pattern educer : eduction : eductionist.

122 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London: Harper Colophon Books, 1974), 124.

123 Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1984).

124 A spectacle (from spectare, “to look at”) is a sight associated with the promise of an emotional impact, such as aesthetic enjoyment, enhanced experience, entertainment, amusement, affect, or being “moved.” It might be defined as something that appeals to the spectator’s eye, except that this attributes agency either to the thing being seen or to its creator, which becomes problematic when applied to such cases as a tree or a natural landscape. Instead, it would appear that the spectacle must be determined fundamentally from the point of view of the spectator, not the thing seen, even if many things and events are also produced with the intention of being received as spectacles. An informal online search reveals a few previous uses of the word audicle or audacle in English. On January 21, 2003, Kate Marianchild wrote to the Peregrine Audubon Society describing the sights and sounds of robins at Lake Mendocino: “I went to see [sic] this spectacle and ‘audacle’ and it was truly wonderful” (http://www.pacificsites.com/~chaniot/peregrine/archive.html). On Apr. 29, 2002, someone identified as Curt C. wrote of “an amazing spectacle (audicle??),” which suggests that he was struggling to express the same concept I am (http://www.cm.nu/~shane/lists/happytown/2002-04/0342.html). Finally, Steve Williams has contributed the word audacular to the www.pseudodictionary.com website with the definition: “Spectacular for the ears instead of the eyes,” e.g. “The new Cher album is an audacular experience.” There have been some similar coinages in other languages, too: I find auditacle (used by the composer Luc Ferrari in his Allo, ici la terre), Audakel (in the title “Babylon—Ein Audakel,” a 1992 interactive presentation of the Bonner Entwicklungswerkstatt für Computermedien) and Auditakel (in the course description for “Quick Start: Aufbau des Internet-Radios,” offered at the Fachhochschule Köln during the winter semester 1999/2000). All relevant websites were accessed on Oct. 2, 2003.

125 Robert Plant Armstrong, The Affecting Presence: An Essay in Humanistic Anthropology (Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 3-23.

126 The sound romance is defined by “a romantic or nostalgic quality,” such as the wail of the steam locomotive whistle now associated fondly with a past era. Schafer also refers to certain sounds with “richer connotations” as symbols, interpreting these—sea, wind, bells—in terms of primordial Jungian archetypes. Apart from nostalgia or archetypal significance, however, soundscape studies tends to attribute the affective value of sound to formal characteristics such as richness and fullness, in connection with the terms sonority, sonorous, and the soniferous garden. Practitioners in this field have conducted surveys of the opinions different communities have of particular sounds—whether they like them or dislike them—but whether these communities consciously mark a given sound as affective is a secondary concern. For instance, the soundmark is defined as a unique or characteristic community sound, but according to Schafer the community itself may not even be aware of it. The audicle, by contrast, is an audicle specifically because it is marked as special. See Barry Truax, ed., The World Soundscape Project’s Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (Vancouver, Canada: A. R. C. Publications, 1978) 114 (soniferous garden, sonority, sonorous), 119 (soundmark), 126 (sound romance). This use of soundmark, modeled after “landmark,” should not be confused with another usage, based on “trademark,” referring to intellectual property rights in sounds such as the NBC chimes. See also Schafer, Soundscape, 169-80 (symbolism), 246-52 (soniferous garden). “Often it will take the visitor to point out the value or originality of a soundmark to a community,” he writes (240); “for local inhabitants it may be an inconspicuous keynote.”

127 Spencer H. Coon, “The Phonograph,” Advertiser ([…], Massachusetts), Dec. 11, 1893 (TAEM 146:877).

128 Brady, Spiral Way, 7; Bruce Jackson, Fieldwork (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 88-90.

129 John Stephen Minton, Phonograph Blues: Folksong and Media in the Southern United States Before the Second World War (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1990), especially 74-173; Richard Bauman, “American Folklore Studies and Social Transformation: A Performance-Centered Perspective,” Text and Performance Quarterly 9 (July 1989), 180-1.

130 John Minton, “The Reverend Lamar Roberts and the Mediation of Oral Tradition,” Journal of American Folklore 108 (Winter 1995), 10.

131 “How the Noise of the G[reat?] City was Felt on the Top of a Silk Hat,” Washington Star, May 7, 1878 (TAEM 25:189). A French author of 1878 claimed that Edison had himself been inspired to invent the phonograph by an observation of this kind; see René Rondeau, Tinfoil Phonographs: The Dawn of Recorded Sound (Corte Madeira, California: René Rondeau, 2001), 11.

132 “Edison’s Phonomotor,” Scientific American 39 (July 27, 1878), 51. The “talking a hole through a board” story is reported in various sources, including: “Washington… Wonders of Edison’s Inventions,” New York Herald, Apr. 24, 1878 (TAEM 25:171); “The Morning’s News: Edison’s Laboratory,” Boston Evening Transcript, May 23, 1878 (TAEM 25:208); “Edison and His Inventions,” Boston Journal, May 25, 1878 (TAEM 94:212). The idea seemed to have some promise in the realm of playthings: “Toys, such as dolls which bow their acknowledgments when spoken to, paper figures which commence work at the word of command, etc., will soon be upon the market” (George Bliss, “Thomas A. Edison,” Chicago Tribune, May 4, 1878, p. 12).

133 W. H. Preece, “The Phonograph,” Journal of the Society of Arts, May 10, 1878 (reproduced in TAEM 25:204-6), 537.

134 “The Microphone,” lecture given before Society of Telegraph Engineers, May 23, [1878], by W. H. Preece, unidentified clipping (TAEM 94:261).

135 “The ‘S’ Sound,” from New York Commercial, in Edison Phonograph Monthly 5:9 (Nov. 1907), 15.

136 “The Wizard’s Chat,” Dispatch (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), May 23, 1889 (TAEM 146:452).

137 Leonard W. Lillingston, quoted in FPRA Nov. 1944, 28.

138 F. W. Gaisberg, The Music Goes Round (New York: Macmillan, 1942), 9, n.

139 “The story goes that Caruso arrived late for the session in which he and Miss Farrar were to record the love duet in Act I of the Puccini opera. Caruso had stopped on the way for some refreshment, and as soon as they started to sing, Miss Farrar smelled the liquor on his breath. She said nothing, but at one of the climaxes of the duet, on the phrase ‘Si, Per la Vita,’ she sang instead, ‘He had a highball.’ The original of that record comands premium prices among collectors” (Harold C. Schonberg, “Link With Golden Age,” New York Times, Mar. 12, 1967, p. 86). The same writer expands on the story: “On the relatively primitive recording equipment of the day, her interpolation passed unnoticed. At best the words are not easy to hear, and many believe the story is apocryphal.” He had recently listened to the record again and concluded, based on his listening, that it was true, although another part of the story was not: “Caruso, according to legend, is supposed to have sung, immediately after, ‘I had two.’ He didn’t. But Geraldine now stands vindicated” (Harold C. Schonberg, “The Goddess That Was Geraldine Farrar,” New York Times, Mar. 19, 1967, p. D21). See also Gary A. Galo, “Did He Have a Highball? The Caruso-Farrar Butterfly Duet,” Antique Phonograph Monthly 9:1 (1989), 13-14; “Off the Record,” New Amberola Graphic 31 (Winter 1980), 16.

140 The interpretation of the announcement I find most probable is: “In Dezember achtzehnhundertneunundachtzig. Haus von Herrn Dr. Fellinger. Bei Herrn Dr. Brahms, Johannes Brahms” (“In December Eighteen Hundred and Eighty Nine. House of Doctor Fellinger. With Doctor Brahms, Johannes Brahms”; Gert-Jan C. Lokhorst, “Johannes Brahms’ 1889 Wax-Cylinder Recording,” http://www.eur.nl/fw/staff/lokhorst/brahms.html, accessed Feb. 18, 2004). As an example of a radically different hearing of the same announcement, however, compare: “At the beginning of Brahms’s cylinder, he greets Thomas Edison in German and English: ‘Grüss an Herr Doktor Edison. I am Johannes Brahms, Doktor Brahms.’ Why would Brahms, a somewhat shy man, have thus greeted Edison?” (Robert Matthew Walker, “The Recording of Johannes Brahms,” International Classical Record Collector 2 [Summer 1997], 26).

141 Fagan and R. Moran, Encyclopedic Discography, Matrix Series, 320. Based on my own copy of this record, I am strongly inclined to agree with the latter interpretation.

142 Cogswell, Jokes in Blackface, 33.

143 Martin Bryan, “Songs of the 1900 Election,” New Amberola Graphic 50 (Autumn 1984) 12-3, at 13.

144 New Amberola Graphic 51 (Winter 1985), 9.

145 E. G. H. to William Hooley, July 4, 1899, in Phonoscope 3 (June 1899), 13.

146 David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 121.

147 Morton, Off the Record, 17.

148 George Gouraud to Edison, Aug. 11, 1888 (TAEM 124:735).

149 George Gouraud to Edison, undated (TAEM 124:754). Based on context and experience with hard-to-decipher phonograms, I suspect the underlined words should be “late” and “transit.”

150 Durant, “Concept of Secondary Orality,” 340-1.

151 “The Phonograph,” unidentified clipping labeled “Jan [18]79” (TAEM 25:293).

152 Letter from Wadena Phono Co., Wadena, Minn., Edison Phonograph Monthly 6 (Apr. 1908), 1.

153 “‘Gee!’ Exclaimed Brenner,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Apr. 8, 1902, p. 3.

154 “The Speaking Telephone,” New York Times, May 19, 1877, p. 2.

155 Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1973), 181-2.

156 Haydn Quartette, Steamboat Leaving the Wharf at New Orleans (7” shield Zonophone 1621-2) §.

157 Simpson and Weiner, Oxford English Dictionary, 11:61.

158 The Passing of the Circus Parade (Columbia A277, mx. 746-9) §.

159 Sterne, Audible Past, 287.

160 Cogswell, Jokes in Blackface, 59.

161 Cogswell, Jokes in Blackface, 59.

162 David A. Banks, “Texts for Early Speech Recordings,” Victrola & 78 Journal 2 (Fall 1994), 14-5.

163 Tedlock, Finding the Center, xix.

164 E.g., Musser, Emergence of Cinema.