Phonomanipulation [1]
Patrick Feaster and the Early Manipulation of Recorded Sound
For my next few posts I want to move on to consider the development of experiments in the transformation of recorded sound in the early to mid-twentieth century. To begin with though I will briefly consider a 2011 article by Patrick Feaster that made me rethink and recalibrate what I then knew and taught about the history of phonomanipulation in this period.
Feaster’s central argument in the article ‘“A Compass of Extraordinary Range”: The Forgotten Origins of Phonomanipulation’ was that previous writing on the history of the manipulation of recorded sound had simply not gone back far enough. That is, scholars had ‘failed to trace a number of key techniques back to their points of origin, including speeding sounds up, slowing them down, playing them backwards, cutting them, splicing them, superimposing them, and sampling them.’ Feaster further explained,
The obstacle, I find, is that influential scholars have tended to assume that these techniques must have originated with electrical media, with self-consciously avant-garde artists, or ideally with both. In fact, they did not. There is nothing inherently electrical about any of these techniques, and we can find them scattered across numerous domains of activity, ranging from whimsical play to scientific experimentation and from “high art” to the quotidian needs of business communication.
Though the Song of the Atom publication primarily focuses on electronic music - that is music that deploys electronic means in tone production and composition - it is important to acknowledge historical strands of creative activity with sound that began before or outside the electronic realm, but were eventually developed further in the context of electronic music and musique concrète. The findings of Feaster’s research suggest we need to look beyond key figures in the usual histories of experimental and electronic music. In surveying early techniques of phonomanipulation that evidentially originated as soon as sound recording began, he stated
It’s often assumed that the original goal of phonography was to ‘reproduce’ recorded sounds as transparently and faithfully as possible. However, certain transformative manipulations – speed-shifting, reversing, segmenting, mixing, and sampling – were actually integral to phonographic theory and practice from the very beginning, spanning numerous spheres of application, speculation, and experience … There was never a period in phonographic history that altogether predated such techniques, and avant-garde artists of the twentieth century were certainly not the first to invent them, however much they may have done to refine, codify, and aestheticize them … Nearly all of my examples date from before the 1910s, and the few exceptions date from before the end of the First World War … all of my examples predate the pioneering phonomanipulative accomplishments of Darius Milhaud, Walter Ruttmann, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Sidney Bechet, Les Paul, and Pierre Schaeffer.
The 5 techniques Feaster identified were theoretically considered from the 1870s and practically explored in a number of ways soon after. From the 1890s the techniques of reversing and speed shifting recordings were used creatively by listeners for entertainment, by playing back voice recordings at different speeds using sliding speed controls common on phonograms of the period. At the same time scientists used similar techniques for music, sound and speech analysis. Feaster additionally indicates how experiments took place in speed changing at the recording phase, and describes segmentary recordings that captured sound incrementally, ‘allow[ing] the makers of phonograms to assemble noncontiguous snippets of aural reality into new, artfully contrived sequences’.
Perhaps one of the more surprising of Feaster’s findings is that mixing sound recordings was possible and practically achieved at this time. Put simply, sounds recorded at different times were combined and played by superimposition. It was possible to record multiple times in the same groove of a phonograph by overlaying patterns of sound vibration. The technique was used not only for dramatic or comedy recordings, but also to create multi-part musical harmonies. In 1898 a phonogram was patented with four separate tracks that could be recorded and played back simultaneously via individual speaker horns. Overdubbing from one machine to another was practiced in the early 1900s.
Finally, although it could not be achieved practically at the time, Feaster suggests that sampling as a theoretical process was examined in 1877 by Edison (for a keyboard controlled talking telegraph) and in 1891 by William M. Jewell who patented a phonographic sampling keyboard. He makes clear that all of these examples predate the later pioneering phonomanipulative work of the modernist avant-garde. Feaster concludes by suggesting the reason these earlier experiments are forgotten, and the efforts of the latter celebrated, is due to ‘the aura of artistic legitimacy’ that ‘the works and programmatic statements’ of the avant-garde ‘brought to’ their efforts.
Keeping this in mind, my following posts on this topic will trace how phonomanipulation was written about, theorised, developed and elaborated by a number of key innovators, and how and where the techniques were later developed in the context of electronic music.
However, for now I’ll be taking a break before carrying on with this topic as I currently have other pressing musical and writing commitments that need my attention for a while - looking forward to getting back to this in the near future …