Sterne, Jonathan (Author)
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews
Volume: 31, no. 4
Issue: 4
Pages: 338-348
Description 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. (Abstract from: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/isr/2006/00000031/00000004/art00005)
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