The Poetics of Signal Processing

Abstract

Signal processing is one of the most important and understudied dimensions of contemporary sound cultures and of electronic media more broadly. In the sonic register, it inflects everything from music production, wired or wireless transmission, and radio broadcast to everyday conversation and listening. Because it is embedded in all stages of contemporary sound production, reproduction, and reception, it has remained an elusive subject for critique. This essay considers the poetics of audio signal processing—the figural dimensions of the technical process and the representations of this process in audio-technical discourse. The article focuses on two metaphorical frames commonly applied to signal processing in the everyday language of musicians and audio technologists: cooking and travel. Through a reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss, it suggests that metaphors of rawness and cooking elevate signal processing to a kind of culturing process by which sound is readied for consumption by listeners through specialized technologies and techniques. The argument situates the spatialization of signal flow and the design of circuit topology within long-standing ideas about travel and voyage that inflect Western epistemologies of sound. As metaphors for signal processing, cooking and travel mark cultural locations (e.g., gendered, classed, able-bodied positionalities) much as they do in broader social contexts. Not only is signal processing subject to the critique of representation, it is, more than any other technical register, directly linked to the contemporary cultural politics of perception and reception. Although this article focuses on sound technologies, a full cultural critique of signal processing would consider its central role in every sense register.

Τεχνικά Μέσα, Μνήμη Και Δικτύωση Στην Ηλεκτρονική Μουσική

“…«Εάν τα τύμπανα των αυτιών μας ήταν υψηλότερα συντονισμένα, θα ακούγαμε μόρια να συγκρούονται στον αέρα» (McLuhan 2004: 68) αναφέρει ο ΜακΛούχαν στον απόηχο των πειραματισμών του Κέιτζ με τον ανηχωικό θάλαμο, για να διανοίξει τη σχέση μεταξύ «επεξεργασίας σήματος» και «απτικού ερεθίσματος» (βλ. Sterne & Rogers 2011). Η ανάπτυξη των τεχνολογιών του ήχου έλαβε χώρα μέσα από αυτόν τον πειραματικό υπολογισμό του εύρους των συχνοτήτων που γίνονται αντιληπτοί ως ήχος, οριοθετώντας τον τελευταίο οντολογικά ως ένα ηλεκτρικό σήμα που αποκτά υπόσταση στο χρόνο και μέσω των σαρκικών απολήξεων.…”

Listening Like a Computer: Attentional Tensions and Mechanized Care in Psychiatric Digital Phenotyping

“…3 This arises from the team's commitment to a line of scientific inquiry which posits that vocal features are anchored in the biological mechanisms driving the observable symptoms of mental illness and are therefore more objective indicators than a person's self-report. The underlying premise of the team's app combines a neurobiologically essentialist model of mental illness with a model of language drawn from speech signal processing, a subfield of engineering indebted to information theory, telephone engineering, and d/ Deaf education (Sterne and Rogers 2011;Mills 2011aMills , 2011b. The team is part of a community of researchers who study the link between acoustic phonetics and mental illness (see Cummins et al 2015) and who suggest that psychological symptoms like hypoarousal and hyperarousal-associated with depression and mania, respectively-are the outcome of motor control malfunctions at the neuronal level.…”

Postdigital Aesthetics

“…In so doing, it explains in the first section the reasons for taking the position of the 'hypothetical blind', not in the conventional negative sense, as done by René Descartes or Denis Diderot in the 18th century and criticized by Georgina Kleege, a visually impaired scholar working at the Department of English at the University of California Berkeley (2005), but in the hopefully more accurate meaning of appreciating the non-visual and including the alternatives of the auditory and tactile senses into a more comprehensive approach to understand the implications of the 'New Aesthetic'. As a consequence thereof, it might be beneficial to cultivate signal processing (Sterne and Rodgers 2011) and combine this approach with the notion that 219 all media -the visual included -are mixed media (Mitchell 2010, 399). Furthermore, I propose to adopt some of the terminology used by Gilbert Simondon in his philosophy of communication (Simondon 2010).…”