Hearing pastness and presence: the myth of perfect fidelity and the temporality of recorded sound

Abstract

This article rethinks the experience of listening to technologically reproduced sound and music by dispelling the myth of perfect fidelity or the ideal of complete similitude between originals and copies. It does so, on the basis of a media archaeological analysis of the symbolic idealisations used in mathematical acoustics and the physical processes that turn these idealisations into media technological operations. Contrasting Friedrich Kittler’s media theoretical take on the idealised sonic purity of the sine wave with Jacques Derrida’s epistemological concept of the temporal “delay” that defines all mediatic operations, the article argues that the inevitable introduction of transient elements–noise, distortion and randomness–shapes the listener’s experience of the multi-layered temporality of recorded sound and music. By no longer focussing on the input and output of a recording chain but on the transmission channels in between, it is argued that recorded sound and music simultaneously marks pastness and presence. Pastness in the sense that sound recordings resonate with the transience, temporal irreversibility and finitude of all physical phenomena; and presence in the sense that they also produce the experience of the constant flow of time through the here and now.