The death and life of digital audio

Abstract

For many years now, critics have written of digital audio recording -in its myriad formats -as less 'live' or less 'natural' than analogue recording. By implication, these critics suggest that digital audio is closer to death. Taking the metaphysical assumptions behind such claims as its starting point, this essay analyses three key elements of digital audio: temporality, definition and mobility. By troubling the notion of time as a continuous linear flow, and by troubling the idea that all analogue media share this continuity with 'natural' time, it is argued that digital recordings have as legitimate a claim on sonic experience as their analogue counterparts. The argument about experience extends into a consideration of the problem of sonic 'definition': the range of possible pitches and volumes in a given recording. Higher definition does not necessarily make a recording more lifelike. Finally, the contexts in which recordings are generally heard today mitigate against the idea that they must aim to perfectly reproduce a live performance. Rather, their liveliness should be judged by the degree to and manner in which the recordings themselves circulate. Judged by their social lives, rather than by a dubious metaphysics, digital recordings are at least as lively as analogue recordings ever were.

Imperfect sound forever: loudness wars, listening formations and the history of sound reproduction

“…From this perspective, the category of fidelity is a kind of technical-aesthetic ideal that changes over time – a point which Jonathan Sterne (2003, p. 222) sums up well when he says that ‘every age has its own perfect fidelity’. In his more recent work, Sterne (2006, p. 345) reiterates this idea (‘The history of sound reproduction in the twentieth century is not, as sales literature might suggest, a story of ever increasing fidelity’) but also takes it a step further, noting that the story of sound reproduction ‘may very well also not be a history of audiences who really care about greater fidelity’. This is the point I'm making here, although I want to expand Sterne's suggestion in two ways 4 .…”

To Know Beyond Listening

“…Jonathan Sterne (2006) used waveform analysis to explain the "loudness wars." This controversy among audio professionals has to do with dynamic compression, or raising the average volume of a recording, which makes the music seem better when briefly compared to a track of lower average volume, but, because com pression reduces fluctuations of amplitude, such music loses dynamic expressiveness.…”

Decomposed: a political ecology of music

“…Benjamin 1968). Indeed, the rest of this article could be devoted to unpicking what Sterne (2006, p. 338) would call the ‘dubious metaphysics’ of Smith's grievance. But such critiques are established.…”