2. The Context

Upon being asked with whom from any time or place in history he would most like to jam, Daedelus, the electronic musician from LA with a name from Classical Antiquity, answered ‘perhaps Eric Satie, maybe the BBC in-house Orchestra circa 1960, gosh all of them together on a ballad, I’ve got to work on making that happen with a time machine or something’ (Gluzman Reference Gluzman2005). That is how Daedelus described his desire to make music: to do so using a time machine. Indeed, his work reaches back to the world of the 1910s and 1920s, back to the age of shellac discs and optical soundtracks, as he brings archaic sounds together on a cut-and-paste digital plane, augmented with computer-generated beats. These older recordings receive a fresh release or revisit as I hear Daedelus’s digital musical piecesFootnote ⁵ – yet they are held within a new avatar, that is, their sounds have been essentially relocated. The sound of a cylinder recording does not simply remain sound from an unheard past; the referent for interpretation is transformed, while constantly colliding with sounds emanating from the predominantly digital sources. The sound from the past, in its reconstructed form as a collection of mere samples, is employed to create different layers of sonic artefacts in the world of glitches and the beats of digital music. Daedelus’s fascination with sounds from early recordings is exemplified by his home studio collection of 8,000-odd shellac discs, mostly of film soundtracks from the 1910s and 1920s. The majority of the items in his collection have been inherited from personal archives. Daedelus does not, however, limit himself simply to collecting older recordings; he reuses these recordings in new works of music in the role of a trained classical composer-turned-electronic musician.

The strategic use of older audio materials in new works of digital music has a contextual association with the contemporary digital order of new media artistic practices. Over the past 30 years, the computer has engulfed media technology, not only as a means of distribution and exhibition but also as an all-pervasive hub of production and resourcing. In this milieu of audiovisual data, recorded sounds from older media, such as pre-electric recordings on cylinders or shellac discs find a place as digital samples in new work. Does such digitisation transform their temporal values, identities, source associations and objecthood? When we hear sound from an early recording digitised and embedded in a new context of computer-generated beats and glitches to form a work of new music, do we recognise the suggestion of nostalgia, or do we take it for granted? We need to approach this question from the perspective of media archaeology (Ernst Reference Ernst2015) and by reviewing historical developments in sound technology (Sterne Reference Sterne2003, Reference Sterne2006a, Reference Sterne2006b; Katz Reference Katz2004, Reference Katz2011) followed by a discussion of the effects of these developments.

The blending of sound elements from different historical sources is basically an extension of ‘sound collage’, a form that gained popularity as early as the 1950s, when composers were exploring possibilities of tape recording, trying to discover how tapes could be cut, pasted and glued together. Sound collage can be termed a technique or form in which a new sound work is created by juxtaposing different sound objects such as field or studio recordings, using these previously recorded materials as samples and gluing together sections of tape. Like the visual collage, the outcome of a new sound collage created from distinct parts may have a completely different effect from that of its components, even if the original parts remain distinguishable from one another.

Even if the separate parts are recognisable, a collage is essentially a synthesis of different sounds into a complete work, though one that allows the identity of the different elements to collide against one other. In the Dada movement, the anti-institutional cultural implications of collage took a serious turn towards copyright issues when borrowed sound elements were plucked out of institutional recordings to be used as sound samples. What started as experimentation with magnetic recording into musical forms has now turned into IDM (i. e. ‘Intelligent Dance Music’)Footnote ⁶ in the digital era.

The processes of digitisation have been making it easier to find older and/or archival sound materials layered upon one another, or upon digital sounds. As sound scholar and prominent historian of sound technology Jonathan Sterne suggests, ‘[D]igitization … liberates recorded music from the economics of value by enabling its free, easy and large-scale exchange’ (Sterne Reference Sterne2003: 831). When an analogue recording is layered with a digitally generated tone, there is a tonal difference. Further, in a digitised form, the assemblage has psychoacoustic connotations (Sterne Reference Sterne2003: 834) where mutual identities and temporalities of sounds constantly collide to demand new interpretation. Analogue sound recording from the pre-electric era is associated with a dissimilarly continuous order, and readily connotes, even in its digitised format, a different age of sound recording with patterns and textures that are difficult to assemble with digital tones.

Psychoacoustically, an analogue signal tends to sound warmer and more ‘organic’ than a digital one. If we wish to combine an analogue signal with a digital one, there will be a tonal mismatch between the two in the collage. That is precisely what we experience when we listen to the works of artists such as Daedelus, who gather older recordings, convert them to the digital medium, and then mix them with digital tones as samples. We hear a dichotomy of tonal imbalance from a musical point of view, but the effect is otherwise sonically interesting, resembling an intriguing hotchpotch, or heady concoction, of old and new sounds. However, the basic problem remains, of the reinterpretation or identity of a sound object from a pre-electric source that retains the texture and temporal associations of another age.

How can we locate and contextualise this specific texture within the post-digital realm of contemporary media? We can do so by disseminating samples within new music, allowing the temporal aspects of these older recordings to be engulfed by a digitalised mix in the form of mere samples effacing its source. Digitisation is thus not the only answer to accommodating older recordings within a ‘new’ media environment. There could be other ways of acknowledging the digital divide between old and new sounds and of producing a dialogue between the two in an environment of mutual identification.

Daedelus has produced a large body of musical repertoire through the simple mixing-and-matching of sounds from his shellac discs and digital beats. This proves viable, and valuable, in an era that needs no convincing of the potential of digital revolution, an era in which it is believed that all things must be digitised if we are to find meaning in them: it would seem that everything must exist in the digital format in order to be recognised. By combining in a single ballad, older forms of structured music, children’s voices, toy piano noises and the surface noise of a shellac disc, and then relocating these onto a contemporary post-digital domain that eagerly devours sounds from the 1910s and 1920s, Daedelus produces a post-modern cacophony of multiple voices. There is an intangible formlessness, contingency and indeterminacy to the passive flow of sound elements. Older sound recordings are digitised, but displaced, within the contemporary media environment.

3. The contemporary media environment

Defining ‘new media’ based on its novelty is bound to be imprecise, since ‘new’ is essentially a relative term. However, from a technologically deterministic point of view, digital technology and computers involved a paradigm shift for media users in the early 1990s, introducing new issues to existing systems of media. To name just a few instances, we can recall National Geographic’s use of a computer to digitally shift an image of a pyramid in 1982 (Messaris and Humphreys Reference Messaris and Humphryes2007). Later, Adobe Photoshop was developed for the purpose of digitally manipulating images. The use of digital computers in music was initiated early in the same period: in 1977, IRCAM (Institut de Recherché et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) was formed in Paris to undertake dedicated research into electronic and digital music. In 1983, Yamaha developed a fully digital synthesiser that would lead to MIDI standardisation by linking musical instruments to digital computers for data exchange. The games industry started as early as 1972, representing the first complete digital technique manipulator.

These technological initiatives contributed to the gathering of the larger public sphere of media practitioners and users on a new plane, hence ‘new media’ being used in a straightforwardly chronological sense. From the same perspective, media that was created and distributed in a non-interactive manner was given the nomenclature of ‘old media’. This chronological divide between different media forms can be challenged with a critique of the simple linear progression of media history. According to scholars of media archaeology, the advent of sound recording was a new phenomenon in the public sphere, and the ability of a disc to retain the ‘voices of the dead’ (Stern Reference Sterne2003) created the sense of an ideological shift in the public sensorium of the pre-world war era. The same goes for photography, as the ability for a light-sensitive plate to record an apparently objective image of reality was unimaginable to those who had thus far been exposed only to the subjective reality of painting. From this perspective, pre-electric/optical as well as tape-based sound recording and analogue photography should be called the ‘new media’ in the context of contemporaneous media practice.

There are, however, arguments about use of the term ‘digital media’ too, as the term limits a wider dispersion of ideas offered by the late emergence of media. The term ‘digital’ implies that the media in question has a digital state, composed of nothing but mere binary units: strictly speaking, all media should be ‘digitised’ in order to achieve this status. From a theoretical perspective, media described as ‘digital’ can be exclusive in the case of a larger dimension of study and practice. Simply put, if we look at the media form of ‘digital music’, we might well ask what, precisely, makes this music digital. After all, while the production of the music incorporates digital technology, such as multitrack digital recording and editing, sampling and processing, mastering and copying, to play back the music, we need speakers that cannot be digital. The signal flowing through the speaker circuit must be a continuous signal, in order to drive the speaker membrane. We can, moreover, question whether a photograph that is taken and developed in an analogue manner and is then digitised and displayed on the Internet should therefore be regarded as ‘digital media’ content? If we do this, we will neglect the phenomena of active convergence and retroactive mélange that occur regularly in the contemporary ‘post-digital’ media landscape. These phenomena suggest the end of the hysteria of the digital revolution (Negroponte Reference Negroponte1998) and predict a subsequent sense of consolidation.

In the 1990s, rhetoric concerning an imminent digital revolution included both implicit and explicit assumptions that new media would replace old media, that the Internet would take over mass communication, commerce and broadcasting. It was forecasted that old media would be absorbed and engulfed by the emerging new technologies of the digital order. After more than two decades, one can look back upon the rise and fall of the ‘dot com’ mania without necessarily understanding the transformation of the media landscape from an older one to a newer one. There have been efforts to discriminate between the old and the new by redefining the two as ‘passive old media’ and ‘interactive new media’, but these taxonomies and genealogies cannot account precisely for what divides the old from the new. In all likelihood, it is the machine called the ‘computer’ that instigated the notion of such divisive shifts, although the electrical age of computer technology and its development is relatively young compared to its precursor, the mechanical order.

However, the capacity of the computer to be assigned responsibility for all media processes, from creation to consumption, invoked the notion that the media landscape has been undergoing a paradigm shift in which experiences and practices have taken place on the same digital platform. This notion envisaged a new techno-culture based on digital technology, disregarding analogue media as obsolete and embracing the ‘new’ as a cutting edge, better, avant-garde framework – such that the new would eventually engulf the old. The difference was thus built upon a technologically deterministic point of view loosely grounded in the optimism and revolutionary prospect of media provided by digital technology.

Nonetheless, after a decade, it is evident that digital media did not entirely displace analogue media, just as photography did not replace painting, and sound recording did not replace music-making. However, forms of painting have been reorganised by the advent of photography, and painters have in the meantime (and in general) embraced elevated abstraction. Music-making, meanwhile, has turned into a two-way system of studio production and live performance, since the recording of sound became possible. This is the narrative of interaction between the old and the new. The process of convergence involves how the new reinterprets the old, over the dialectics of dialogue. It is no surprise that this dialogue intensifies in the contemporary ‘post-digital’ milieu. In the contemporary post-digital age, access to older recording has opened up, and it is now easy to implement copy-and-paste norms to any downloadable sound file, no matter how long ago it was recorded.

The essentialism in the digital revolution, which was the predominant theme of the late 1990s and the early part of this millennium, started to dissolve into an ever-growing field of intangible data and immoderate information. As Nicholas Negroponte aptly proclaimed two decades ago: ‘Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only in its absence, not by its presence. Face it – the digital revolution is over’ (Negroponte Reference Negroponte1998). Alongside this declaration of closure, came a sense of saturation that spanned the prevailing digital divide between rapidly digitised and already-digital contents such as samples, glitches and digital-acoustic artefacts. These phenomena contributed to the formulation of the speculative concepts of the ‘post-digital’, by regarding digitalised artefacts as displaced, relocated and transformed, thereby dissolving the digital divide between already digital artefacts and rapidly digitised contents from the analogue era. This brought them into interaction on the one hand, and gave rise to their reinterpretation as an elusive field of data on the other. American composer of electronic music Kim Cascone argues that once this saturation is reached in the domain of sound art and experimental music, ‘the medium of digital technology holds less fascination for composers in and of itself’ (Cascone Reference Cascone2002). In teasing out the meanings of the term ‘post-digital aesthetics’ in relation to experimental music, Cascone speaks of the ‘failure’ of digital technology and the way in which it triggers subversive practices with glitches, clippings, aliasing, distortion and so on. His formulation of the ‘post-digital’ thus accommodates the breaking down of ‘digital essentialism’ into fragments of digital sonic artefacts that can be reused and repurposed in new sound-works in a fluid, flexible and inclusive manner.

I further expand this conceived ‘failure’ into the inability of digital media technology to identify, structure and archive the transient and elusive sounds from the nameless, placeless and faceless background world of data as the derivative of the ebb and flow of digital artefacts. In this world of ‘big data’, ‘data abundance’ and ‘data flood’ (Lohr Reference Lohr2012), itinerant sound content (the digitised file or artefact) essentially eludes its locative characteristics, spatial significance, normative structure (such as digital, analogue or hybrid), ontological source identity and epistemic knowledge-based objecthood (Chattopadhyay Reference Chattopadhyay2014).

While we try to grasp the advent and potential of digital media, the saturation in the last 20 years with respect to the rapid digitisation of the media world is already clear; digital technology has stopped being an end in itself and ‘digital revolution’ is no longer a buzzword. In the world of ‘post-digital’ media (Cascone Reference Cascone2002; Bosma Reference Bosma2014; Cramer Reference Cramer2014; Chattopadhyay Reference Chattopadhyay2014, Reference Chattopadhyay2015, Reference Chattopadhyay2017) analogue recordings on shellac discs and cylinders find a place as digital samples in new sound works. Still, their identity as older sounds often tends to remain ambivalent in regards to recognition, identification and negotiation ‘marked by a limited set of variable yet generic attributes such as editability, interactivity, openness and distributedness that confer them a distinct functional profile’ (Kallinikos, Aaltonen and Marton Reference Kallinikos, Aaltonen and Marton2010). This condition creates a profound sense of formlessness and indeterminacy, in addition to instability, as evasive and fleeting object/non-specific sonic artefacts contrast with the solid and self-evident nature of older sound media, such as recordings on the pre-electric storage forms of shellac and cylinder. The fluidity and mutation of this universe of post-digital data though their diffuse movement across media make them difficult to authenticate, preserve or archive in social memory and broader knowledge base. The elusive flow of big data carrying a multitude of old and new sounds problematises their objecthood, rendering them as ephemeral, indiscrete artefacts.

As media archeologist Wolfgang Ernst (Reference Ernst2015) notes, the basic difference between digital data and analogue records is that of the format of information arrangement. Digital implies a discreet flow of data in the form of digits, whereas analogue data is continuous, taking the form of signals. If we assume a free flow of information on different media platforms, we can anticipate a free and open landscape of future media in which digital and analogue media interact with one another to augment each other in a spatiotemporal sense of mutual identification, instead of engulfing one another. If we assume that older forms of media are essentially analogue and that newer forms are basically emerging from digital domains, our anticipation of an ever-emerging ‘contemporary’ media environment will be easier to comprehend.

For instance, a sound installation might well be called, and understood as, a ‘new media art’ form of artistic production. An installation is a three-dimensional work intended to create a site-specific interactive media environment to transform the perception of a physical place. An inter-media installation is constructed from different media contents – such as recorded sound, image projection and objects – into a virtual experience in which temporal boundaries between different media contents are blurred, overlapped and augmented by means of an organic interpenetration of media objects in the virtual space. Likewise, in digital music, we have sampling, remixing, mash-ups and collages.

Virtual realities in live digital music shows are integral to the creative milieu of contemporary media art practice. Many so-called ‘new media’ artworks consist of user-generated contents, which have drawn upon the reuse of pre-existing older contents by means of innovative creations, permitting new audiences and new meanings while also raising questions about how these contents are re-interpreted within the augmented virtual media environments. Nevertheless, attempts to address these questions often end up taking the form of a simplistic overview if it is assumed that the media is best analysed using the temporal demarcation of old and new. Instead, the study of contemporaneous media requires an in-depth consideration for the flow or travel of media contents as post-digital data and information in the form of, for example, itinerant archival sound recordings from the pre-electric era within contemporary media art environments, such as inter-media installation and multi-channel sound composition.

4. The sonic artefacts: case studies

I will examine two sound-based projects and initiatives as case studies exemplifying the reuse of older sound recordings in contemporary media environment as sonic artefacts. These projects are discussed for their varied approaches in the dissemination of recorded sound contents reused and re-appropriated in new works of sound art.

5. Sounds out of place: analysis and concluding remarks

I investigate these projects, which thematise in different ways the fluid and mutable coalescing of older and newer sounds, in order to gather a comprehensive view of media convergence across temporal boundaries, and of the active interplay between ‘old’ and ‘new’ sounds operating as a specific methodology in artistic production. The practice involves spatiotemporal reordering of sound, to produce sound-based artworks that use the reinterpretation and re-identification of old sounds as a result of their interaction and coalescence with the new. These older sound recordings have been retrieved from specific sources, which were previously sited (as fixed media), but are now digitally mediated for compositional purposes or in the context of artwork exposed within the un-sited environment of the Internet or in the fluid situation of a performance venue, exhibition space of a gallery, or inside a museum.

This journey of the old sound from older recorded media to drifting artefact was made possible by the way they were ‘torn’ and ‘ruptured’ from their specific objects, sited source or media. R. Murray Schafer has stated that ‘we have split the sound from the maker of the sound’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1994: 90) and terms this separation ‘schizophonia’; this nomenclature emphasises his fear that a represented soundscape might replace the actual soundscape when it is recorded and reproduced. This fear of technological mediation and a subsequent loss of the site-specific sound resonate in some respects with Walter Benjamin’s idea of a loss of ‘aura’ as articulated in his celebrated essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Benjamin Reference Benjamin1969; first published in 1935).

Many sound studies scholars (Sterne, Sexton et al.) have critiqued Schafer’s conservative position in favour of a wider circulation and proliferation of sound via recording technologies. In a similar vein, Steven Feld in his article ‘Pygmy POP: A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis’ (1996) has sought to come to grips with new and more flexible circulations of recorded sound, and has pointed out how ‘sound recordings, split from their source through the chain of audio production, circulation, and consumption … stimulate and licence renegotiations of identity’ to ‘create new possibilities’ (Feld Reference Feld1996: 13). In line with their argument, I would like to further note that this anxiety over sound’s alleged shift from a fixed site-specific position to infinite reproductive potentials may be deemed unsubstantial given the work of many artists who use sound recording as a foundation for their works. These works often develop an ‘increased awareness’ of the site and ‘environment’ (Sexton Reference Sexton2007: 132) by reproducing a nuanced account of their specific narratives (Chattopadhyay Reference Chattopadhyay2017).

Take, for example, the case of ‘Eye Contact with the City’ – a work discussed above. The work has been widely described in reviews as ‘abstract’ and ‘immersive, meditatively palpable qualities’ (Jakimowicz Reference Jakimowicz2010), in which the very site of Bangalore has been taken as a point of departure to enter into ‘the immortal capital city of a parallel realm’ (Chuter Reference Chuter2013). The primary materials used in the work have been the digital multi-track field recordings made at various locations in Bangalore, such as the metro rail construction sites, but these sites are sonically modulated in the artwork by being juxtaposed with samples of the pre-recorded materials such as the vintage ‘room-tone’ of a colonial-era Bangalore household, as well as the surface noise and sonic textures found on the old shellac discs and the reel-to-reel tapes. The site-specificity of the field recording has been abstracted by the introduction of these historical sound recordings. Their spatiotemporal and historical identity has not been engulfed by digitisation. Instead, a free-flowing interaction between old and the new was facilitated by the artistic transformation of these sounds whereby both creatively inform each other as object-unspecific artefacts. To another reviewer, ‘this work offers a cinematic walk through the different alleys, neighbourhoods, voices and lives of Bangalore’ and ‘offers a beautiful reflection on a city that can only be imagined’ (Papadomanolaki Reference Papadomanolaki2013).

It is evident that the physical sites of Bangalore, a site that is dealing with problems of urbanisation, appears to the listener of the work as a parallel site of an imaginary and abstracted city. This impression is enhanced by the temporal ambivalence suggested by the composition of old and new sounds detached from their sited object and source (e.g. the urban locations recorded and the older sounds restored from the shellacs). This detachment from their respective objects made these sounds malleable, mutable and unfixed, while also enhancing their ‘editability, interactivity, openness and distributedness that confer [on] them a distinct functional profile’ (Kallinikos, Aaltonen and Marton Reference Kallinikos, Aaltonen and Marton2010) for the artist to intervene and create, or allowing the listener to enter and open up many interpretations, contributing to a shared knowledge, as in the case of the project Story of a Forgotten Melody mentioned earlier.

The contemporary media environment not only suggests the virtual storage, transmission and delivery of an infinite number of older sounds, but also separates sounds from their archival locations and allows them to travel across globally dispersed networks as elusive digital data and information, occurring indefinitely (Nyre Reference Nyre2008) and transcending intentionality with a lack of discrimination (Katz Reference Katz2011). A sound that is unmoored from its locational specificity experiences multiple layers of mediation across its multiple receptions and interpretations outside of place, time and context, whether this be in an audiovisual convergence on the Internet, in a digital music composition, or within the augmented space of an installation work. In an interactive new media art piece, meaning and significance of a clip from a historical recording can be understood through its interpretation as a sonic artefact by its association with difference, identification and hybridisation, over the conflict of local versus global. Sound contents such as music, voice and audio works are moving from local definitions to global interpretations, and are in the process being transformed and redefined in terms of identity and meaning. Nor is this a one-way process; interpretation also influences structure and selection, and certain older sound recordings gain greater attention, access and subsequent mobility (Sterne Reference Sterne2006a: 338).

Certain genres of music and artwork, such as digital music and sound art, are disseminated in the globally dispersed space of contemporary media. These works are drawn from a repository of sonic events recorded from specific sites with location-specific identity and objecthood. Upon being reinterpreted and appropriated as primary ingredients for artistic production, however, they are freed of their sited, spatiotemporal and ‘object’ associations (Chattopadhyay Reference Chattopadhyay2014). These artefacts are incorporated into new work of sound art using computer-based digital processing and spatialisation. These loose ‘cultural artefacts’ (Sterne Reference Sterne2003: 828) undergo post-digital mélange, intensifying spatiotemporal crossover, technological convergence, aesthetic inclusivity and artistic freedom (Chattopadhyay Reference Chattopadhyay2014, Reference Chattopadhyay2015, Reference Chattopadhyay2017). The pervasive transformation (Katz Reference Katz2011: 156) of the older, site-specific sound contents into perpetually mobile and constantly travelling data by means of digitisation, post-digital mediation and convergence transform these older sounds into object-disoriented sonic artefacts. This fluid world is conducive to the proliferation of the spatially and temporally augmented world of sound art, as an emerging practice that operates across the boundaries of spatiotemporal identities and the objects of recorded sound. Older sound recordings move from a localised state to acquire meaning in the globally dispersed media environment as object-disoriented sonic artefacts – analogous, one might say, to the fluid colours on an artist’s palette.