Let me begin with an allegory. In Malcolm Bull’s wonderful essay, “Where Is the Anti-Nietzsche?” he proposes that a properly radical reading of The Genealogy of Morals would refuse the text’s preferred modes of identification.

Through the act of reading, Nietzsche flatteringly offers identification with the masters to anyone, but not to everyone. Identification with the masters means imaginative liberation from all the social, moral and economic constraints within which individuals are usually confined; identification with ‘the rest’ involves reading one’s way through many pages of abuse directed at people like oneself. Unsurprisingly, people of all political persuasions and social positions have more readily discovered themselves to belong to the former category. For who, in the privacy of a reading, can fail to find within themselves some of those qualities of honesty and courage and loftiness of soul that Nietzsche describes?

To find the anti-Nietzsche, he suggests that readers identify with the losers, the subhuman and the philistines in his texts. We should identify with the lambs instead of with the birds of prey.

In this column, I want to suggest an analogous strategy for thinking through the politics of activity and passivity in television and new media. For however much television has been legitimated in the last decades, new media savants still regularly hold it up as an icon of mass stupefaction, conformity, and passivity. I don’t think I’ve ever read an issue of Wired without a potshot at passive consumption, with old-style television as the ideal-type. Or consider the ad copy for Peter Lunenfeld’s new book The Secret War Between Uploading and Downloading.

In The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, Lunenfeld makes his case for using digital technologies to shift us from a consumption to a production model. He describes television as “the high fructose corn syrup of the imagination” and worries that it can cause “cultural diabetes”; prescribes mindful downloading, meaningful uploading, and “info-triage” as cures; [...] After half a century of television-conditioned consumption/downloading, Lunenfeld tells us, we now find ourselves with a vast new infrastructure for uploading. We simply need to find the will to make the best of it.

While it’s bad scholarship to argue against blurbs, and while I actually agree with the participatory spirit behind Lunenfeld’s point, please allow me this one excess, and I’ll try to stick to his words between the inverted commas and not those of MIT’s copyeditor.

Leaving aside decades of debate within studies of television and mass culture2, the blurb proposes that downloading—and television—embody a passive, ideological form of consumption, whereas uploading is presented act of participation and production (even though it, too, is often a form of consumption). And therein lies the problem.3

Some of my favorite social thought from the 1970s and 1980s emphasizes a point analogous to Lunenfeld’s: activity, participation, interaction, interconnection—these will be the solutions to the alienation of the modern world. In writing on music, especially, the language turns utopian. Charles Keil (1994) argued persuasively that musical meaning is formed through participation in musical events, and not in the text or score. Christopher Small (1977) waxed poetic about a world where the distinction between musician and non-musician no longer existed, and Jacques Attali imagined a world of “composition”—expanded out from avant-garde jazz—where the means of creativity inhered in each person (1985, 135).

Yet that same rhetoric works differently today.4 Active participation is now a privileged mode of consumerism. As Jodi Dean has written, “our deepest commitments—to inclusion, equality and participation within a public—bind us to practices whereby we submit to global capital” (Dean 2002, 151). Contemporary media beg for and sometimes demand active participation. They ask their users to intertwine them with as many parts of their lives as possible. It is not just so-called social media (a misnomer if there ever was one—since all media are by definition social). Magazines and newspapers implore us to write back and explore on multiple platforms. TV shows ask us to go online and participate in discussions and games, books get their own Facebook pages where readers are asked to “like” them, software companies put together “street teams” of users willing to promote them in a manner analogous to what concert promoters used to do.

There are some great things to be found in a more apparently participatory culture, and certainly there are even more great things in cheap access to the means of dissemination. This is a point long repeated in studies of radio and cassettes, and much of the current excitement about the political promise of Twitter, for instance, follows on this model. A mobile phone and a little know-how gets you access to a potential world of auditors. Writers like Henry Jenkins (2006) have eloquently shown the ways in which platforms for online participation can make media more responsive to fans, audiences, and users. Though to be clear, for Jenkins this participatory culture is an amplified version of participatory cultures that emerged around radio and television, not a development in opposition to supposedly pacifying media.

But we need to ask after another issue. At least in for-profit sectors, the goal of most institutions during the broadcast era was to produce measurable audiences for sale to advertisers. It was to attract attention. In that sense, there is a smooth continuity with the internet era, where media organizations also hope to produce attention that can then be parlayed into one or another form of market value. When people’s participation becomes someone else’s business—and here I mean business in the market-share and moneymaking sense of the term—the social goods that are supposed to come with it can be compromised. If you want democratic participation, you also need a reflective populace. If you’re going to break the fourth wall in your theater production or installation piece, the participants have to be able to take on some kind of critical perspective on the work in order for it to have any avant-garde potential.

The demand to participate can become coercive, exhausting the very collective faculties it officially celebrates. While interactivity can be imagined as the “like” or “retweet,” it also encompasses the “agree to terms” button. The supposedly democratic call to dialogue and participation can turn sour when people have good reasons and desires to retreat. In his discussion of Melville’s famous story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” John Durham Peters calls this the “cold righteousness of dialogism,” a “moral tyranny” of the call to the other to interact on a subject’s pregiven terms. “Dialogue’s supposed moral nobility can suffocate those who prefer not to play along” (Peters 1999, 159).

The issue here isn’t that we need a pure space from which to critique capitalism—for you as reader and I as writer are always already compromised. It is that we need some occasions for reflection that aren’t simply subsumed under the sign of participation. My colleague Darin Barney has written beautifully on this subject, arguing that any kind of meaningful political—and I would add cultural—judgment requires some assertion of distance, some strategic and temporary disengagement on people’s own terms. This is not to say all participation is bad, any more than it is to say that all consumption was bad in the golden age of mass culture criticism. Neither activity nor passivity are goods in themselves; both have roles to play in culture, politics and personal life.

What if all the bad things that media critics have been said about passivity for the past century or two are now equally applicable to all the demands to interact, to participate? What if interactivity is now one of the central hinges through which power works? In many moments today, the most compliant gesture we can make is to consent to interact on the terms presented to us by our software and machines. This pull is especially strong in those commercial platforms that celebrate their own difference from the so-called passive media of previous decades, and in the process monetize their users’ participation either directly or indirectly. What if—from time to time—we chose not to identify with the interactive promise of new media platforms or for that matter new media art? What if, when the new media savants lambast so-called old media audiences as denizens of passivity and ideology, we say, “yes, that’s me”?

Please feel free to comment.

Image Credits:
1. grantneufeld via Flickr
2. jeremywilburn via Flickr
3. RMM’s IRIS
4. Adbusters, 3 April 2012

Offline sources:

Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cooley, Charles H. 1909. Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Dean, Jodi. 2002. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
Keil, Charles. 1994. “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music.” In Music Grooves, 96-108. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Peters, John Durham. 1999. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rosenberg, Bernard, and David M. White, eds. 1957. Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. New York: The Free Press.
Small, Christopher. 1977. Music-Society-Education. London: John Calder.

1. I am certain I heard this phrase from someone else, but a Google search didn’t reveal my source. For now, its provenance remains a mystery. Also, my copious thanks to William Moner and the Flow crew for their help getting my pieces online this year, and to Paul Gansky for the invitation to write. It’s been fun! Thanks also to Carrie Rentschler and Dylan Mulvin for comments on drafts of pieces.
2. The locus classicus for my generation was the turn to audience studies in the 1980s and the so-called “active audience” position advanced by people like David Morley and Ien Ang, who studied people watching television and showed that they were not simply passive consumers. This was an important move in the history of cultural studies, because it short-circuited claims that ideology could simply have a textual effect by being there. Of course, this is a very old debate that predates cultural studies and even television. At the beginning of the 20th century, sociologist Charles Cooley wrote that modern media would “enlarge” modern consciousness and facilitate democracy, as well as allow people to find others of like minds (Cooley 1909). Similarly, the range of debate in Rosenberg and White’s classic 1957 Mass Culture collection should be familiar to modern readers, with Henry Rabassiere defending what we’d now call an active audience model against Gunther Anders’ critique of television as a “phantom world” (1957, 158–74).
3. There’s a third issue as well. The high-fructose-corn-syrup-causes-diabetes-metaphor moralizes illness as it metaphorizes it. This is a classic American and Protestant trope. It condescends adult-onset diabetics (since the noted evil ingredient has no causal relevance to type I, I must assume this is a dig at type II diabetics—indeed this is a classically Nietzschean scenario where we are asked to identify with people who are clearly not stupefied enough to get diabetes in either its real or cultural form). It ignores scores of epidemiological studies and thereby does no favor in characterizing the social problems it metaphorizes.
4. The term “prosumer” is widely used in industries that produce software and hardware for video and audio production, where a large portion of sales goes not to professionals, but to consumers who also want to produce. The term is read differently by different populations—as pretenders to professionalism, as a grade of equipment quality between “professional” and “consumer” and as a name for amateur producers. Paul Théberge brilliantly argued in 1997 that making music—especially electronic music—had increasingly become a form of technological consumption. We could say that for many other kinds of cultural production today. In a way, even though it’s an early example, Microsoft Word is the apotheosis of a prosumer application. It is sold to a broad swath of people who write, whether amateurs, students, or professionals. Indeed, as a writer I have often wished for word processing software better geared to the needs to the academic and book writer, so in my own professional role I guess I also turn my nose up at prosumer applications.

From time to time, I find myself having a bizarre genre of conversation with colleagues in other fields—usually from those untouched by Anglophone media and cultural studies traditions. When television comes up, my interlocutors declare “I don’t watch television. I don’t even have a television.” This would seem like standard-issue distinction behavior (cue the Bourdieu 1984), except what comes next undermines that reading. Invariably, my interlocutors begin to catalogue all the shows they like and watch on other platforms, usually involving a computer (since this conversation happens often with administrators, The West Wing is frequently mentioned). For most of the medium’s history, watching television meant watching a television, a sensibility still well-established in practical reason and everyday conversation. But of course, this is no longer the case. We now live in an in-between moment, when it is possible for educated and thoughtful people to spend many hours of their lives watching television shows and yet not think of themselves as watching television.

While it is tempting to consider this a problem of self-assertion and taste on the part of the person making the “I don’t watch television” claim, the ambiguous semantic space between watching television and watching a television gestures back to a long and fruitful line of inquiry for television scholars. For that space gets at the problem of defining television. The productive confusion over the conditions under which one watch television would seem to emanate from the ambiguous status of the medium at this moment in its development, or more accurately, its dilution, as has been well-documented by many other Flow writers.

I use the term diluted deliberately. For most of its history, television has been thought of as a medium. For most of the 20th century, the word media has been the preeminent technological figure for thinking about communication. But today, other technological forms of communication may matter more in many contexts. I just finished a book on a format, the mp3, that I argue matters much more than a “new medium” of sound reproduction at this particular moment. We can put our ideas about television through a similar filter. It is not that television is no longer a medium, it is that its status as a medium has lost density and gravity—in a word, its status as a medium is diluted. This is why we can read announcements in the paper that YouTube is trying to be “more like television” when it already contains television.1 Today, television’s relationship to various infrastructures, formats, platforms and protocols may matter more than its relationship to itself as a coherent medium.

Although I’m putting a presentist spin on the question, the problem of defining television has dogged its intellectual history, from Leo Bogart (1956) and Raymond Williams (1992) on down to Anna McCarthy (2001). As James Hay has argued, there is a dual tendency in academic television criticism to treat television as a medium like any other, or a medium like no other; one instrumentalizes television as anything; the other deifies it as everything (2001, 205). Riffing on Williams, he writes that we should consider television

as an assemblage of practices, as a social technology dependent on and instrumentalized through a broad array of practices and technologies. Within the interplay of exchanges, the televisual refers to mechanisms linked by/to particular sites and by/to other mechanisms at these sites, and it refers to mechanisms adapted to particular tasks of linking/delinking subjects and places. Thinking about the televisual in this way requires not only a different logic of mediation but a different understanding of TV as site. TV criticism’s focus on the internal properties of texts and of their subjects, TV studies’ preoccupation with the distinctive features of the medium or its audience, generalize the site of television or dwell on TV’s separateness as both identity and sphere/site. They have tended to see the site of TV as language and the psyche or to ascribe it to culture as a distinct and separate sphere in social relations and history. Television, I propose, matters or matters differently at different sites (211).

Reading back eleven years, this passage looks positively prophetic against the profusion of platforms, protocols, technologies and sites through which one might engage with television today.
Another set of issues arises if we set Hay’s definition of television next to Lisa Gitelman’s definition of media. For her, media are:

socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associate protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collection of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation [….] If media include what I am calling protocols, they include a vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions, which gather and adhere like a nebulous array around a technological nucleus […] so telephony includes the salutation “Hello?” (for English speakers, at least), the monthly billing cycle, and the wires and cables that materially connect our phones. E-mail includes all of the elaborate layered technical protocols and interconnected service providers that constitute the Internet, but it also includes both the QWERTY keyboards on which e-mail gets “typed” [again, for English speakers] and the shared sense people have of what the e-mail genre is (Gitelman 2006, 7–8).

Gitelman goes on to qualify her definition further, pointing out that the technological nuclei of media are not permanent or stable over time, and neither are the protocols or practices associated with media: “it is better to specify telephones in 1890 in the rural United States, broadcast telephones in Budapest in the 1920s, or cellular, satellite, corded and cordless landline telephones in North America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Specificity is the key” (8). As far as I can see, Hay and Gitelman are singing the same tune, and by this measure, they have given us a more nuanced definition of television and of medium.

A careful reading shows that the definition of medium is itself historically specific. E-mail works as a medium in Gitelman’s definition from a contemporary perspective, but in 1974, it would likely have been subsumed under computers or some other hardware-based definition, despite the fact that mechanical and electronic media have always existed somewhat independently of their technological forms: sound recording and sound film both existed in several technological forms at once throughout their histories (this is well-understood in sound studies, but is only beginning to be accounted for in cinema studies; see, e.g., Acland and Wasson 2011).

The connotative shadow of hardware looms large over any definition of media today, even though media forms, like e-mail, seem ever less attached to any specific form of hardware (since you can do your e-mail on a computer, PDA, mobile phone, kiosk, or for that matter print it out and treat it like regular mail—and may in fact do all these things in the same day). Looking back historically, writers tend to associate telephony with telephones, radio with radios, film sound with cameras and movie projectors, sound recording with phonographs, tape recorders, CD players, and portable stereos. This is why television can be conflated with a television set in everyday conversation. Yet the mediality of the medium lies not simply in the hardware, but in its articulation with particular practices, ways of doing things, institutions and even in some cases belief systems.

So what binds together television on a TV set, a game system, a laptop, a smartphone and a tablet? The institutional and technological weight we normally associate with the idea of television as a medium seems too heavy to sit comfortably in all this different hardware, especially as the hardware becomes more and more of a variable. The ideal of television as a kind of text is equally unsatisfying if we think about textuality purely interpretively (rather than also considering its conditions of production and circulation), for what inside the text ontologically separates shorts made for YouTube from television shorts on YouTube?

We will need a handful of middle-range concepts to navigate this space, and I will offer but one in conclusion: format. Like media, the term is certainly baggy. It can designate a file format (.wmv, .doc, .mov); it can designate the sensual characteristics of what is seen (color; high-definition; stereo or 5.1); and in television, it can also describe programming trends and practices (”presented in a talk-show format”). But the form offers a way into thinking about the combination of standards, technical routines and sensual characteristics of those things we call television. Writers have often collapsed discussions of format into our analyses of what is important about a given medium. McLuhan’s claims about “coolness” and TV came from descriptions of screen size and color (McLuhan 1964, 22), which today seem less like fixed aspects of a medium and more like hardware variables (though we should give him credit for using “definition” to talk about the sensory dimensions of TV already in 1964). I am suggesting that an emphasis on format helps us separate our conceptions of media from their manifestations as (what we now call) consumer electronics. Format points us back to the conditions under which mediality occurs.

To take an obvious example from the present moment, consider the digital spectrum and high-definition broadcast. Since the 1940s, North American analog television has been filmed and broadcast with a 4:3 horizontal / vertical aspect ratio. A 1936 report by the U.S. Radio Manufacturers’ Association Television Committee first suggested the 4:3 aspect ratio, which was then set in U.S. Policy by the National Television Standards Committee in 1941. 4:3 was chosen because that was the aspect ratio for Hollywood films. In part as an attempt to compete with television, Hollywood stepped up ongoing efforts to adopt wider screens (Boddy 1990, 34–35; Gomery 1992, 238–46). Thus, to this day North American analog televisions have a 4:3 aspect ratio, and audiovisual content from other media (such as film which is often 1.85:1) or formats (such as high definition, which is 16:9) is reformatted to fit the 4:3 TV screen when we watch it on analog TVs—either through “letterboxing” or through re-editing. Cue the McLuhan (1964) and Bolter and Grusin (1999) about media containing their predecessors.

This disclaimer, once ubiquitous on videotapes of Hollywood films released to VCR, is miraculous for the layers of meaning it contains. It is meant to signify editing to change the proportions of the image. But in fact by definition anything that appears on television screens has been “formatted to fit your screen”—it has been subject to a host of data processing routines and is presented in a particular sensuous form. If the image was not formatted to fit your screen, you wouldn’t see it on your screen. You may not like how it fits on your screen, but that is a separate matter of playing with the aspect ratio on your remote control. Thus, format is a place where aesthetics and storage and transmission come together, as anyone who watches HD content and reruns of shows made for what we now call standard definition (that used to be just television) can attest.

When it goes the other way, television’s formatting and formatted qualities are actually more pronounced. HD shows are compressed and chopped up to be seeded over torrents. They are recoded to appear in variously-shaped video windows in VLC player, Quicktime or Windows Media Player, or transcoded to be streamed off YouTube, Vimeo, or Critical Commons. But because of their combined institutional and aesthetic histories, they are still somehow television. I am not proposing format as a replacement for medium. But I believe it is one of a handful of words—infrastructures, platforms and standards are a few of the other places we need to be poking around—useful for thinking through television in its condition as a diluted medium, and in turn diluting the concept of medium as a central touchstone of how we imagine the technological dimensions of communication. In this sense television remains a typical medium, for while TV retains its specific cultural, technological and institutional histories and trajectories, all media today are more or less diluted.

Image Credits:
1. Josh Bancroft via Flickr
2. Screen capture from http://youtube.com/shows, 1/23/2012
3. franciscominciotti via Flickr
4. Screen capture from YouTube, “Opening to Space Jam (1996) VHS,” provided by author

Please feel free to comment.

Sources Cited

Acland, Charles, and Haidee Wasson, eds. 2011. Useful Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press.

Boddy, William. 1990. Fifties Television: The Industry and its Critics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bogart, Leo. 1956. The Age of Television: A Study of Viewing Habits and the Impact of Television on American Life. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Gitelman, Lisa. 2006. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Gomery, Douglas. 1992. Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. London: BFI.

Hay, James. 2001. “Locating the Televisual.” Television and New Media 2 (3): 205-234.

McCarthy, Anna. 2001. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham: Duke University Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Williams, Raymond. 1992. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.

1. The “more like” in this case has to do with keeping people on the site for the purposes of raising advertising revenue.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Does the World Wide Web have a soundtrack?

On its face, the question is silly: of course it doesn’t, at least not in the same way that cinema and television are said to have soundtracks (pace Michel Chion, 1994). But anyone inquiring into the aesthetics and phenomenology of the web ought to spend some time ruminating on the status of sound online.

In its many manifestations, the web is a sometimes-synchronous medium (which also undermines the still-too-frequent and gratuitous claim that the web somehow descended from cinema or television).2 Whereas in television, the soundtrack comes to you and must be muted if you want quiet, online the relationship is inverted.3 By default, the web is quiet—or expected to be quiet anyway—and sound is supposed to be something to which the browser actively transitions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One interesting effect of this arrangement is that the ambiance function usually attributed to film and TV soundtracks operates instead the visual register through the use of backgrounds, animations in sidebars, and header images, more along the lines of newspapers and magazines. Or if we want to stretch the cinema-and-TV metaphor close to breaking, we could say that the mise-en-scene of webpages has to do twice the work. But more importantly, given that the web is fundamentally audiovisual (if sometimes clumsily so), a set of techniques and conventions have emerged to allow users to transition from a silent to a sounded web, most often through pressing “play” on an audio player, with its ubiquitous right-facing triangle “play” button (which often turns into the parallel lines “pause” button).

The play button’s history has yet to be fully traced, but the existing conventional wisdom has it emerging with the audio tape deck. While most consumer cassettes spooled from left to right, this is not universally the case in tape machines more generally, and certainly other devices, from video cassette recorders to projectors, spool their filament in a variety of configurations. Today, these symbols are among the “best understood” in the world (Brigham 2001, 118), due in part to a thoroughly globalized consumer electronics industry.4

As Bill DeRouchey has pointed out, these “buttons” aren’t buttons at all, but rather actionable items on a screen, which used to require the mouse button as an adjunct, but with touchscreens no longer even require that. The play or pause “button” is therefore a sign which refers to a sign, which itself may or may not have referred to the likeness of a process (depending on which direction the tape was going). My Peirce is a little rusty, but the play button looks like an “argument” to me, the most abstract of signs.

And yet it does suggest some things about directionality. The left-to-right movement is not an accident, given the supremacy of English on the Internet and the general left-to-right movement implied by reading in English online. But as a metaphor, the left to right progress of time become considerably more weighted when we consider the companion of play, the progress bar.

In the progress bar, songs, TV clips, movie shorts and animal videos share the temporal arc of the novel. True, if you let your buffer do its work, you can scrub your content, but then, you could also skip around The Great Gatsby or Gravity’s Rainbow simply by flipping through pages. Random access is not natively digital. It is not that the linear time is imposed from without (after all, every band I’ve been in has played songs from beginning to end and not some other way). The problem is that the progress bar represents but one dimension of the temporality of the content.

As John Durham Peters has argued, one of the fundamental insights of media studies is that “texts cannot be interpreted apart from the processes that produced them.” And in online players, we find processes that attempt to interpret themselves for us.

This is particularly the case for the SoundCloud player. In addition to the play/pause nexus and the progress bar, the SoundCloud player adds another dimension: the amplitude waveform, which is meant as an indicator of relative loudness. The quieter parts of the recording hew closer to the center, the louder parts reach out toward the edges. It also does other things. It can offer a sense of parts of the song, such as the difference between verse and chorus, or when it really kicks in after a quieter intro. Combined with the timeline, SoundCloud has cleverly provided a way for artists and listeners to add time-stamped commentary on the recording.

Here a recording where the amplitude information in the SoundCloud waveform might be somewhat useful:

‘Sketch 5′ by Tim Hecker

And here’s one where the visual logic of the player gives little clue as to changes in what is heard:5

Woodcarver by A Tribe Called Red

(Beatport has also adoped the waveform, but I couldn’t figure out a way to embed their waveform representation in this article, since it’s not posted on Facebook.)

But all of this suggests a transparency that’s not really there. All three examples sound totally different, and yet the waveform gives no indication of timbre. Further, the measure of relative volume is pretty crude. No serious psychoacoustician or psychologist of music would argue that perception of loudness neatly correlates to these kinds of machine measurements. In fact, whole fields of technology have been developed on the basis of the difference between what machines measure and what people actually hear (for more discussion of the cultural politics of psychoacoustics, see Sterne 2012). But the waveform is a standard signifier for “sound” inside a computer or sound editing program. It is most often taken as an indexical representation of what comes out of the speakers.

This is choice is not automatic. The history of visual interfaces for sound on computers also needs to be written, but in lieu of history, let us go with a little speculation: the waveform appears to have descended from oscilloscope, which showed the shape and intensity of signals passed through it. This is an interesting choice, since theoretically sound software could work with sound spectrograms, which present frequency and intensity, and therefore a different kind of (and potentially more useful) visual information at a glance. If that’s not enough, they are also more colorful, and more important for the history of twentieth century communication technologies (Mills 2010).

Below is a spectrogram of the footnotes, although it’s very small so it can fit into this column. Even without any training, you can still see that the frequency content of the recording (and therefore what’s on it) changes over time.

In addition to the spectrogram, there are many other possibilities for representing sound online. For instance, could imaging all sorts of spinning, turning icons, which might get at some of the other temporalities so central to sonic experience (like rhythm). But for now let us close with an actually existing example: Erik Loyer’s waveform “bodies” designed for Sharon Daniel’s Blood Sugar (attn. Jobs hagiographers: Flash still required). In this piece, we see what looks like standard waveform representations of audio recordings, but as Loyer explains, “the amplitude of these visual waveforms are determined not by the volume of the audio for each interview, but instead by the density of Sharon’s annotations at any given time.” In other words, they reflect a conscious decision regarding what is visually important to emphasize in the audio. While we might not aspire for every EDM nerd’s latest SoundCloud mix to undergo an elaborate process of theorization before it gets uploaded, large swaths of the web rely on a few extremely limited techniques for the visual representation of audio online. Understanding those techniques, studying their history, and developing a critical vocabulary will be important first steps in taking greater advantage of the medium’s vast and plastic potential.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Image Credits:
Images provided by the author.

Notes:

Altman, Rick. 1986. Television/Sound. In Studies in Entertainment, 39-54. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Brigham, Fred. 2001. “Graphical symbols for consumer products in an international context.” Information Design Journal 10 (2): 115-123.
Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-Vision. New York: Columbia University Press.
Downey, Gregory John. 2008. Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Eisenstein, Sergei. 1969. Film Form. New York: Harvest Books.
Eisler, Hanns. 1947. Composing for the films. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
McCarthy, Anna. 2001. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press.
Mills, Mara. 2010. “Deaf Jam: From Inscription to Reproduction to Information.” Social Text 28 (1): 35-58.
Mowitt, John. 1992. Text: the Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rodowick, David. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambrdige: Harvard University Press.
Sconce, Jeffrey. 2004. What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries. In Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, 93-112. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press.

Please feel free to comment.

1. All footnotes are provided in audio format.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.