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1. 1 2013-11-26T14:30:08-08:00 Jentery Sayers becbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339 Media Jentery Sayers 6 All Media for Making the Perfect Record, American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P plain 8387 2013-12-19T08:58:37-08:00 Jentery Sayers becbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339

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• 1 2013-10-11T13:34:29-07:00 The Spirit of Sound 12 The notion of the aura of immaterial sound preceding the recording process is a cultural construction plain 2013-12-12T10:56:56-08:00 Of course, the very idea of an immediate or immaterial sound somehow preceding the recording process was itself a cultural production imbricated with the popular emergence of audio technologies (including Edison's phonograph) during the 1870s and 1880s. If recording was invented, then so, too, was the spirit of sound. A speaking spool was at once aura and artifice. That said, Smith’s magnetic thread is curious neither as a vehicle for deconstructing the metaphysics of presence nor as an opportunity to interrogate copies as aberrations of their originals. As Jonathan Crary (2001, 4) asserts, critiques of presence are now well rehearsed, and perseverating on them simply ignores larger historical issues related to how the senses are enculturated, organized, and disciplined. Equally familiar to media studies is what Jonathan Sterne (2003, 286) calls the “ontological split between an original and copy,” which “only offer[s] a negative theory of sound’s reproducibility, where reproduction can reference only that which is not reproduced.” As goes the fallacious assumption, copies are always at a loss. 
  A more complex question, then, is how media and their metrics co-construct (rather than merely compensate for) human perception and memory, manufacturing faith in what eyes cannot assess and what ears cannot replay. And to push this inquiry a step further, scholars invested in the materiality of media must unravel how particular procedures of inscription, transfer, and playback facilitate particular forms of record making, including—to return for a moment to love “warranted 200 yards long”—how the physical specifications of magnetic storage shaped the processing of proof and fostered a faith in evidence.
• 1 2013-10-12T17:10:40-07:00 Offended Smith’s Ears 9 Edison’s Phonograph Is Criticized for Its Lack of Fidelity plain 2013-12-26T18:26:42-08:00 Smith was not the only one with a critique. For instance, see the Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review in 1879: “Edison’s phonograph, as now constructed, is in several important respects defective. For example, the time of recording the sound on the apparatus is proportioned to the size of the barrel. The necessity of wrapping the barrel with foil does not permit of the conservation of speech, and by reason of its flimsy character only allows of several repetitions” (“A New Phonograph”). (This note comments on the page titled, “Responding to Edison’s Noise,” as well as the attached image titled, “Edison’s 19-Century Phonograph (1888).”)
• 1 2013-10-12T17:08:24-07:00 Cylinder Phonograph 6 On Edison’s Storage Medium for the Phonograph plain 2013-12-26T18:22:01-08:00 In 1878, Edison’s cylinders were wrapped in tinfoil. Wax cylinders came shortly thereafter and were mass-marketed in the 1880s (the decade when Smith published “Some Possible Forms of Phonograph”).
  (This note comments on the page titled, “Responding to Edison’s Noise,” as well as the attached image titled, “Edison’s 19-Century Phonograph (1888).”)