Reanimating Audio Art: The Archive as Network and Community

What is an audio archive? At first glance, this seems like a straightforward question. Our minds turn to collections of recorded sounds of historical or documentary relevance, perhaps tapes or vinyl records, kept and managed by libraries and used for historical research. This traditional notion of the archive still informs much of the thinking behind how audio archives are constituted, maintained, and used. Notions of heritage and cultural preservation are often the rationale that underpins the existence and operational philosophy of many contemporary sound archives. Of pressing concern for such archives today is how to preserve and make available the analogue recordings of the past given a rapidly changing digital and networked technological environment. A second, related issue is the preservation of the actual analogue technologies themselves, as this is what facilitates access to the recorded media.

While no doubt important concerns, implicit in this approach to audio archiving is the treatment of technology as a value-neutral, discrete, and ancillary element there to support the process of archival research. In other words, audio recording, reproduction, and diffusion technologies exist as things apart from the sound itself; it is the sound alone that is of primary concern. What goes unconsidered in this view is that technological systems used to record, store, and reproduce sound are inevitably implicated in the experience of the recorded sound. This omission allows assumptions of fidelity — the idea that recorded and reproduced sound should strive to match, as closely as possible, the original sound — to dominate technical debates over audio archiving, thus limiting the consideration of technology to its role of adding or reducing noise. This desire for fidelity, and the subsequent abstraction of technology and denial of the spatiotemporal context of listening, is a belief forcefully countered by sound studies scholars such as Jonathan Sterne (2003) and Aden Evens (2006). Nevertheless, it is a tendency that, while problematic, is not terribly surprising given the documentary and preservationist thrust of much archival work. It belies a bias towards what McLuhan might call the “figure” of the recording — the texts, words, songs, or objects being recorded — whereas the argument here is that attention must also be paid to the formative “ground” of media technology itself, and how such ground refigures the text.