Issue 102 tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2009-11-10:/journal/issue102/43 2010-06-13T23:48:02Z Spring 2010 Movable Type Pro 4.31-en Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2010:/journal/issue102//43.621 2010-05-06T02:16:19Z 2010-06-13T23:48:02Z This essay examines the sonic archive of tape recording artist Tony Schwartz, in particular his 1955 Folkways album Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers. Working from assumptions located in sound studies, I argue that Schwartz's recordings are essential listening for two reasons. One, Schwartz's meticulous attention to what he called the "sounds of [his] times"--and, I would add, of his place--helps scholars reconstruct the 1950s from a new vantage point: the ear. Two, Schwartz understood something that sound studies scholars are only beginning to tease out. Sound is not merely a scientific phenomenon--vibrations passing through matter at particular frequencies--it is also a set of social relations. "Splicing the Sonic Color-Line" begins by theorizing the mutually constitutive relationship I find between sound, listening, and race as the "sonic color-line." Next, original archival material is used to reconstruct the historical soundscape of Tony Schwartz's street recordings and reveal the sonic color-line as the aggregated racialized constraints and protocols regarding sound that Nueva York is both embedded in and struggles against. Finally, I trace the way in which Schwartz's "sono-montage" in Nueva York splices the sonic color-line, translating mainstream representations of the so-called homogenous noise of Puerto Rican life into textured, meaningful sound to assimilated (white) Americans. Nueva York is symptomatic of the ways in which listening experiences reflect and generate ideas about racial difference and its historical connection to American citizenship. Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=43&id=166 figure2-600x500.jpg

Friend Tony Schwartz on Facebook
 
Tony Schwartz's Personal Page: http://www.tonyschwartz.org/

Stream of NPR Audio Story on Tony Schwartz by the Kitchen Sisters

WNYC "From the Archives" Stream of one of Tony Schwartz's Radio Shows

Emusic Feature on Tony Schwartz


Samples from Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers,  released by Folkways Records in 1955:

A young woman describes her experience with housing discrimination in New York

A Puerto Rican woman describes the horrible living conditions in her New York apartment building. 

Teenaged boys playing music on the street in midtown Manhattan.



Download liner notes in pdf format notes from Smithsonian Folkways here.


]]> Introduction: Breaking Sound Barriers tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2010:/journal/issue102//43.618 2010-03-15T01:58:14Z 2010-03-14T21:51:30Z The introduction to "The Politics of Recorded Sound," this special issue of Social Text, lays out the unifying mission of the diverse essays: to study sound recording within a wide-ranging, historicized understanding of mediation as a process embedded within networks of power. A significant objective is to bring attention to the ways modalities of social difference, such as race, gender, class, and ability, structure the practices of making and listening to recordings as well as the manners in which we think about those practices. Another purpose is to implode the ultimately ahistorical narrative of sound-recording technology as driven by ever-improving "fidelity" in the reproduction of music. The introduction also explores the diverse ways in which sound recording plays a part in contemporary life and argues that each of these is centrally shaped by politics of corporeality, economics, or culture. Gustavus Stadler http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=43&id=72 Sound, Knowledge, and the "Immanence of Human Failure": Rethinking Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano, and the Piano tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2010:/journal/issue102//43.619 2010-03-14T03:10:41Z 2010-03-21T01:17:40Z This article reframes the history of recorded sound to take phonographs and player-pianos into account on more or less equal terms. It argues that the two technologies developed in complementary, dialectical relation to each other: one analog, storing and conveying an acoustic event (i.e., sound-in-time); the other, digital, storing and conveying in binary form information for (re)producing sound (i.e., sound-in-knowledge). Analyzing the production of sound along the same lines as Harry Braverman's analysis of manufacturing and automation, the article treats the phonograph and the player-piano as aspects of musical mechanization, which had expanded dramatically through the piano in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both the phonograph and player-piano technologies reverberated in the formation of modern society, the phonograph exemplifying the phenomenological rupture of time and space, the player-piano embodying the epistemological shift marked by machines storing and executing growing amounts of human knowledge, from automated industrial manufacturing to computers. The final section of the article considers the malign and utopian symbolism of the player-piano in the work of William Gaddis and Conlon Nancarrow, among other other writers and composers. David Suisman http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=43&id=167 In the article, I lay considerable stress on the importance of the reproducing player-piano. Unlike "straight" player-pianos, whose rolls recorded and played back only the notes the instrument was to play, the reproducing player-piano recorded all aspects of piano playing, including dynamics, pedaling, and tempo.
Here is a recording of Igor Stravinsky, one of the earliest composers to explore the possibilities of the player-piano, playing his own Piano Sonata, No. 2, recorded on and for a Duo-Art reproducing player-piano and issued commercially by the Aeolian Company in 1926.




These and other reproducing player-piano recordings of Stravinsky, as well as recordings of Debussy, Scriabin, Mahler, Saint Saëns, and others (that is, of these composers themselves at the keyboard), are available on CD from the Dal Segno label.

Although many decades have passed since the player-piano's heyday in the 1920s, my article contends that the player-piano remains more present and more relevant to today's culture than is commonly realized. Most people will likely be surprised that player-pianos and piano rolls were still being manufactured into the twenty-first century. QRS Music Technologies, founded in 1900, produced its last piano roll on Dec. 31, 2008. The company continues to exist, however, as a manufacturer of MIDI-assisted automated pianos. 
Here's a story the Buffalo News, from Jan. 3, 2009, about the end of piano roll production at QRS:

The day the music died: QRS has ended production of player-piano rolls
By Mark Sommer 

The remark scribbled at the end of the production sheet said simply, "End of era."
It was written shortly after the last piano roll came off the assembly line at QRS Music Technologies, 1026 Niagara St., at noon Wednesday.
The halt in production comes 108 years after the company was founded in Chicago, and 42 years since it moved to Buffalo. Rolls used in player pianos reached their peak in popularity in the early 20th century, when a roll of paper was able to reproduce music through perforations signifying notes played on the piano.
The company is now a leading manufacturer of digitized and computerized player-piano technology that runs on CDs.
"The roll market has continued to decline, which is no surprise," said Bob Berkman, the company's music director and manager of the Buffalo office. "It no longer is, nor has it been for some time, the central part of our business.
"We're still doing what we always did, which is to provide software for pianos that play themselves. It's just the technology that has changed. But I would be lying to say [the halting of production] doesn't sadden me."
Bill Chapman, membership secretary of the Automatic Musical Instrument Collectors' Association, expressed disappointment at hearing that production of piano rolls had stopped.
"QRS has greatly facilitated getting new rolls and new music, and it's going to be very sad and a great loss that they are not able to sustain their operation," Chapman said.
Until Thursday, QRS was the only continuously operating mass producer of piano rolls in the world. The only other company, in Australia, stopped earlier this decade. Sales dropped about 80 percent from 15 years ago to around 50,000 annually, Berkman estimated.
Five of the 10 employees in Buffalo have been laid off because of the piano roll shutdown. The remaining employees will produce all the music for its high-tech Pianomation system for now.
But that operation ultimately will be absorbed into QRS's Seneca, Pa., plant.
The piano-roll manufacturing equipment also is being sent there.
Berkman said the company eventually hopes to resume production in Seneca, Pa. The piano rolls were at full production in 2008, building up a stockpile of one to two years, he said.
"Production shouldn't be interrupted in any huge way. No one wants to see an end to it, and I think the numbers are favorable for resuming production," Berkman said.
However, QRS stopped making player pianos earlier this decade. The company had bought the sole manufacturer of player pianos, Classic Player Piano, in 1993 with the express purpose of providing a continuing source of pianos to play its rolls.
Berkman said reassembling the piano roll factory elsewhere will be difficult.
One machine dates back to the 1880s when it was used to make shoes, and for the past 100 years has made the tabs with brass eyelets used to hook the roll into a piano.
There are also aging machines to perforate and punch the holes, to cut the stencils to print the lyrics, to spool the rolls and to glue the roll boxes together.
"There are so many facets of it. The perforating machines are old and cantankerous, and they're one star in a constellation of machines that all have to be functioning," Berkman said.
The company's fortunes in recent years have been tied to Pianomation, the digitized player- piano system that can be retrofitted on most acoustic pianos. QRS also pre-installs the system on some of its own Story and Clark grand pianos.
The Pianomation systems sell for between $6,000 and $8,000, not including the piano.
"After a home and car, pianos might be the next big purchase a family would contemplate," Berkman said. "But grand pianos are still regarded as an elegant piece of furniture, and if you're part of contemporary culture, you want it to have all the bells and whistles it can possibly have."
The company also makes the "Virtuoso Violin," which plays by itself and in tandem with the piano.
QRS dates back to 1900. Melville Clark, a Chicago piano designer and inventor, created a subsidiary of the Melville Clark Piano Co. based on the 88-note standard piano roll he developed.
The company changed names and hands several times -- even locating for a time in New York City -- before Ramsi Tick, manager of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, bought it in 1966. Richard A. Dolan, the current chairman of the board, bought QRS in 1987.
The QRS Marking Piano, a boxlike device Clark invented in 1912 that enabled a master roll to be recorded of a live performance, was designated a National Historical Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1992. The original machine is under consideration for acquisition by the Smithsonian Institution, Berkman said.
The last new-issue piano roll that went off the assembly line Dec. 31 was the company's 11,060th. The song was "Spring is Here," by Rodgers and Hart, recorded by Buffalo-based pianist Michael T. Jones.
"The last roll goes against the grain," Berkman said, since the company had been mostly making pop songs. "We looked through our list [of songs] and said, 'There's a great American song we had never issued.' "


Here's a great video about the production of piano rolls. Shot in the 1980s, it shows how the use of computers (Apple II's) brought together old and new digital technology--echoing a point I make in my article. The narration also makes an important observation about the longevity and persistence of piano rolls: "The piano roll as lasted longer than any other standard for recording and reproducing music."




A few links:
 
For more information on player-pianos one valuable resource is The Pianola Institute, whose website also sells  back issues of The Pianola Journal 

A good resource for mechanical music more generally is Mechanical Music Digest. 

A few years ago, I put together a collection of music made either entirely or partially by automated instruments. You can listen or download it here.

For a more "organic" take on mechanical music, check out this video by (and of) Bryce Kretchmann. (One of my favorite videos of all time!)

If you are interested in contemporary experimental mechanical music, you might be interested the Logos Foundation's M&M Orchestra ("M&M" stand for men and machines). Here's information on one CD and here's info on another. 
]]> Deaf Jam: From Inscription to Reproduction to Information tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2010:/journal/issue102//43.620 2010-03-13T03:15:14Z 2010-03-31T01:42:15Z This article traces the history of speech wave visualization and the longstanding relationship between phonetics, communication engineering, and deaf oral education. American telephone engineers drew on this history to build the sound spectrograph in the 1940s, a machine that transformed the representation of sounds by considering speech not in terms of meaning nor in terms of airborne waveforms but in terms of the characteristics of its perception and the minimum features by which it could be reconstructed. The sound spectrograph was designed to make telephone transmission more efficient and to support deaf oral communication; the ability of deaf subjects to read spectrograms was, moreover, the best evidence for the identification of information-bearing features in a complex speech wave. The sound spectrograph directly influenced information theory, which gave mathematical instructions for the efficient digital encoding of audio and visual signals. Spectrograms suggested that much of the content of speech was redundant or irrelevant and could be discarded without a listener perceiving any difference. It will be argued that deafness ultimately served as an "assistive pretext" for nineteenth-century phoneticians and twentieth-century engineers, who quickly turned to more profitable applications for their devices. Mara Mills http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=43&id=164

The sound spectrograph and the industrialization of speech, in the film Phantom of the Operator (Caroline Martel/Artifact Productions, 2004).
Many thanks to Caroline Martel for permitting me to use this clip

The following images are taken from the Harriet Green-Kopp papers at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Shortly before she died in 2007, I interviewed Green about her wartime work at Bell Laboratories and her postwar work at various deaf schools. With a grant from the American Institute of Physics, the generosity of Green's family members, and the assistance of Nance Briscoe and Bailey Ball, I was able to collect her papers for the Smithsonian.

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Links:




The Harriet Green-Kopp Papers at the Smithsonian (NMAH AC#1130)

]]> Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2010:/journal/issue102//43.633 2010-03-11T22:51:39Z 2010-03-14T22:12:36Z This essay examines 1890s commercial audio recordings--none of which is known to exist today--that reenacted lynchings of African Americans,in particular, the mass spectacle lynching of Henry Smith of Paris, Texas, in 1893. Despite rumors that the recordings were made live, they were in fact examples of an early, nonmusical genre in commercial phonography known as the "descriptive specialty," which often involved studio reenactments of current events. Like other descriptive specialties, these recordings were meant to exhibit the phonographic medium to capture audience attention. Using descriptions of the recordings from period documents, the essay argues that there was a specific confluence between lynching reenactments and the notion of a "phonographic voice," between sounds elicited from persons on the edge of "the human" and the sound imagined to come from the machine itself. It places the recordings in the context of contemporary representations of blackness in phonography and ponders their place in the longer history of recorded sounds of blackness. It also argues against the fixation on disembodiment among some media historians and theorists who work on phonography and contemporaneous technologies. Gustavus Stadler http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=43&id=72

One of J. M. Mertins' images of the lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas on February 1, 1893. Smith's murder is considered the first "mass spectacle" lynching and was the subject of re-enactment on early phonograph recordings. Collection of the Library of Congress.

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Featured on the front page of New York Times.

The lynching recordings were part of an early phonographic genre called the "descriptive specialty." To hear an example of the genre cited in the essay, "The Charge of Roosevelt's Rough Riders (1898)," click here.

To hear a descriptive specialty representing the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, listen to this 2006 NPR story.

To hear "The Laughing Song" by George Washington Johnson, the first well-known African American recording artist, click here.

The Johnson recording is online in the excellent "Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project" at the Donald C. Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which currently has over 8000 early phonographic cylinders in its digital collection.
]]> Can You Feel the Beat?: Freestyle's Systems of Living, Loving, and Recording tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2010:/journal/issue102//43.622 2010-03-10T03:17:13Z 2010-03-14T21:18:25Z Freestyle is both a musical genre and, as a multitude of fanzines will tell you, a lifestyle. The playwright Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas evoked our teenage surround when he called it a "system of living." Described as "android descarga" by music critic Peter Shapiro and "a soap opera set to music" by the vocalist Judy Torres, there is general agreement that freestyle is constituted by a nebulous Latin feel that is spoken about but not necessarily accounted for. This essay enters the scene of freestyle with the assumption that it is both tinge and fringe--and by that I mean both marginal part and decorative border. To do so means to surrender the accolade of theorist for stylist, to harbor the hard work of listening from scholarly convention. To try and tell freestyle's story is to say a great deal about a moment when large numbers of young women found themselves on the inside of recording studios. The story bears its own annals of the uncredited, adding volumes of names to those who have lent their uncompensated talents to the advent of studio-based recording. With a focus on freestyle's women vocalists from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, this essay picks up on a legacy of techniques developed to navigate the procedures of recording, including but not limited to those that go down in studios. The essay also suggests how freestyle's audiences have taken up such techniques from the back then and have extended them into the beats thereafter. Alexandra T. Vazquez http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=43&id=168 ]]> Buzz and Rumble: Global Pop Music and Utopian Impulse tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2010:/journal/issue102//43.623 2010-03-09T03:18:18Z 2010-03-14T22:19:45Z This essay argues for the concept of a utopian impulse, a liberating power possible in music and dance. With a focus on African music, the essay argues against conventional Eurocentric world-music commodification and points instead to new music movements from Congo and from Angola that, engaging new forms of technology, do not require the practices of European curatorship. Jayna Brown http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=43&id=165 Buraka Som Sistema and M.I.A., "Sounds of Kuduro"



"Liberia -- The Cannibals' War," a film by Mark Stucke, Journeyman Pictures, 1 August 1996, reference no. 229, www.journeyman.tv/?lid=9809.



Banning Eyre, "The Congotronics Story," interview with Vincent Kenis and Mawangu Mingiedi, October 2005.


"Afropop Worldwide Travels to Seville, Spain, for WOMEX 2007" (audio file) 
Afropop Worldwide.

"Interview: DJ Riot of Buraka Som Sistema" 
About.com: Alternative Music, 25 November 2008.


Kuduro videos from Luanda include:

Rei Helder, "Os Marteleiros." See also canalangola.net.



"Qui na Mata."



Costuletas's party hit "Tchiriri."
 


Dj Nays and Custuleta's "Mama Kudi."
 


MC Andrezinho, "Novo sucesso."



Les Princes du Kuduro, Tsunami Télécommande.




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