The maniac-making machine a media history of delayed auditory feedback

Abstract

Historians have shown how categories of unwanted sound—that is noise—have been subject to projects of technological abatement and domestication. Less has been written on how noise relates to the production of new categories of personhood. This article traces how military, medical, and scholarly speech-hearing researchers developed “delayed auditory feed-back” (DAF), a disruptive and initially unwanted echo effect produced via magnetic tape recording, since the late 1940s. It argues that the emotional, spatial, and temporal ambiguities raised by DAF offered key perceptual resources for constructing modern speech-hearing science as a discipline and for reimagining the technologically mediated speaking-hearing human sub-ject. By prying open the interval between vocalization and self-hearing, DAF afforded researchers a new domain of experimentally performable auditory subjectivity, one in which they could more readily distinguish clients from research subjects, auditory malingerers from the “organically” deaf, and cybernetic “closed-loop” from stimulus-response “open-loop” audiological models.