Outline for a Theory of Recording Practice  With Reference to the Mix for Pink Floyd’s “Speak To Me” (1973)   

  Sculptures  

  For the purposes of this outline, “music” is sculpted matter. Making and hearing  “music,” no matter how variously done, is always, at base, sculpting matter and hearing  sculpted matter. That is, sculpting matter and hearing sculpted matter is the substantive basis     of all musical practice — the very same thing that people who make and hear “music” do, no  matter how variously they do so.  
  To sculpt matter into “music,” or, to make “music,” one must have recourse to either  their bodies (as vocalists do) or certain “tools” which they consider to be, or which they think  might be, appropriate for making music (these “tools” are often referred to as “musical  instruments”). To note a “musical” sculpture, or, to hear “music,” one must physically situate  oneself within earshot of a “musical” sculpture. “Music,” as a genre of human communications,  is a product of these two related, seemingly simple acts.  
  Until June of 1877, when Thomas Alva Edison finished work on his prototype for the  phonograph, there was only one kind of matter sculpted into “music,” namely, sonic  phenomenon, or, acoustic energy. Before the phonograph, “musicians” were people who had  recourse to either their bodies or “musical instruments” to sculpt acoustic energy into what they  thought were genuinely, or even just potentially, “musical” shapes. “Listeners” were people who  situated themselves within physical earshot of those sculptures. These two activities —  sculpting, and hearing sculptures of, acoustic energy — necessarily occurred over a finite span of  time and within one particular geographic location. Together, they comprised what I call “Live”  or “Concert” exchange.  
  Before the phonograph, “Live”/“Concert” exchange was all would-be musicians and  listeners had available to them. Edison’s phonograph changed all this, of course. Rather than a  “tool” for sculpting acoustic energy — that is, for producing sound — the phonograph  reproduces already sculpted acoustic energy. As such, it is a sound reproduction technology.  Such technology “does not hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices,  words, and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such” (Kittler 1999, 23). Indeed,  
 

“Upon speaking into a phonograph, the vibrations of one’s voice are transferred to a point  that engraves lines onto a metal plate that correspond to the uttered sounds — uneven  furrows, more or less deep, depending on the nature of the sound.... [W]hen the     phonograph’s small copper disk, held against the pin that runs through the grooves it has  etched, starts to reproduce the vibrations: to our ears, these vibrations turn back into a  voice, into words, sounds, and melodies” (Kittler 1999, 31).  

  Like every sound reproduction technology, the phonograph’s primary agency is to  convert one kind of energy into another, a technique known as “transduction.” The phonograph  registers sculptures of acoustic energy and converts/“transduces” those sculptures into a  sequence of mechanical code (i.e., bigger or smaller bumps and pits on a tinfoil or wax cylinder)  that any phonograph can then convert/“transduce” into equivalent sculptures of acoustic  energy, which is to say, into sculptures of acoustic energy roughly equivalent to those first  transduced. All sound reproduction technologies do the same, but using different materials.  That is, all sound reproduction technologies convert/“transduce” acoustic energy into  mechanical, electric, electromagnetic or digital code, and/or vice versa. [5]  
  Edison may well be “the father of modernity,” then, as Kittler (1999) claims. His  kinetoscope provided the technical basis for cinema. His phonograph was the first “tool” for  doing another kind of musical communication than is done by “Live”/“Concert” exchange:  making and hearing music recordings. I call the latter “Recording Practice,” and I consider it a  fully integrated — which is to say, a completely autonomous or self-sufficient —  communications system. In fact, Recording Practice is as distinct from “Live”/“Concert”  exchange as writing is from speaking. The dynamics which govern Recording Practice are  entirely different from those which govern “Live”/“Concert” exchange.  
     In Recording Practice, beyond acoustic energy, there is also mechanical, electric,  electromagnetic and digital code to sculpt. People simply lack the physical resources to sculpt  such code without having recourse to a transducer. To make a music recording, one must use a  transducer(s) (which converts sculptures of acoustic energy into sculptures of mechanical,  electric, electromagnetic or digital code); to hear such a recording, one music a transducer(s)  (which converts sculptures of mechanical, electric, electromagnetic or digital code into sculptures  of acoustic energy). Ultimately, Recording Practice is transducing, or, using sound reproduction  technology, for some musical purpose.  

  The Network of Recording Practice  

  Interpellation  

  Because transduction alone doesn’t guarantee musical experience — because  transduction is useful for as many nonmusical as musical purposes — an association between it  and specifically “musical” experience must be made each time, and while, somebody exploits  sound reproduction technology for musical purposes. By making and hearing music recordings,  record innovators and record receivers advocate the musical usefulness of sound reproduction  technology, precisely as they advocate the musicality of whatever they transduce. In so doing,  they musically interpellate, that is, they assign “musical” identity to,  
  (i) sound reproduction technology;  
 (ii) the technique of transduction; and  
 (iii) the sound reproduction medium.  
 In mandating that these interpellations occur during a musical communication,  Recording Practice makes a certain variety of technology (sound reproduction technology) and  the technique it objectifies (transduction) conducive — if not indispensable — to musical  communications. Of course, given this, the obverse must also be true: Recording Practice must also  make musical experience and musical ideation conducive to a particular variety of technology and technique. As  Albin J. Zak III notes: 

    “Although invented to record the spoken word, sound recording's greatest cultural impact  has been through music; and music itself has changed as its production and reception  processes have become permeated by technology. Like musical notation before it, sound  recording has had a profound influence on the way music is made, heard, and thought  about. With the ability to transform the ephemeral act of musical performance into a  work of art, it has altered the conceptual landscape of our musical culture in many ways,  and its influence has made itself felt in all musical idioms” (Zak III 2001, 19). 

  Each time sound reproduction technology is used for some musical purpose, its  appropriateness for such a purpose is tested. As obvious as it now seems, record innovators and  record receivers must constantly “prove,” even if only to themselves, that sound reproduction  technology is as useful for musical purposes as it is for, say, office dictation, whenever and while  they innovate or receive a music recording. At no point can the success of these interpellations  be assumed. Edison, for instance,  

"enumerated the use of phonographs for writing letters and taking dictation.... Music was  mentioned, but usually as a form of dictation: You could send love songs to a friend, sing  your child a lullaby, and then, if it worked, save up the same rendition for bedtime  tomorrow. In keeping with the important public uses of shorthand for court and  legislative reports, the phonograph would also provide a cultural repository, a library for  sounds" (Gitelman 2003, 159).  

  Sound reproduction technology can always revert to any of these “classic,” protean  functions. Consider, for instance, the audiocassette. Once the dominant, most technologically  “progressive” sound reproduction technology on the Western market, the audiocassette is now,  again, primarily a technology for office dictation in the West, namely, the dictaphone.  

  ‘Nodes’: Tracking, Mixing, Playback.  

  Tracking  

    Mixing  

    “Speak To Me”: Sounds  

  Composed by drummer Nick Mason, “Speak To Me” constitutes roughly the first  minute of a key artifact of Recording Practice: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (Capital: 1973)  LP, which, as of this writing, is the fourth best selling and, at 723 weeks on the Billboard Top  200, the second longest charting music recording in Popular Music history. As Dark Side  of the Moon’s opening track, “Speak To Me” is divisible into three sections. Section One runs to  thirty-eight seconds. Section Two runs from thirty-eight seconds to one minute and eleven  seconds. Section Three comprises the last five seconds of “Speak To Me.”

 
  Table 1. “Speak To Me” divided into three sections, with significant sound events noted (my  transcription).

  “Speak To Me” begins with silence (eleven seconds on CD, more or less eleven seconds  on vinyl LP or audio cassette). A heartbeat then fades to audibility. After another twenty  seconds, the ticking hands of stopwatches fade in, followed shortly by the pendulum swings of a  grandfather clock. Band roadie Pete Watts then confesses, “I’ve been mad for fucking years, absolutely  years man, over the edge working with bands.”  
    In the meantime, a looped cash register opens and slams shut at an obsessive rate across  the stereo spectrum. Jerry Driscoll, the doorman at Abbey Road Studios where Pink Floyd  recorded Dark Side of the Moon, then says, “I’ve always been mad, I know I’ve been mad, like most are....  Very hard to explain why you’re mad, even if you’re not mad,” and a loop of nervous, even deranged,  laughter becomes audible. Something like a pneumatic drill fades in, coupled with an electronic  frequency drone. These two tracks are then pumped to an increasingly higher volume such that  they overtake all but Clare Danes’s melodic screams and a cymbal roll, both of which sound for  the remaining five seconds over and above the rest of “Speak To Me.”  
  After one minute and sixteen seconds, “Speak To Me” transitions seamlessly into  “Breathe” (1973), which is the second track on Dark Side of the Moon.  

  “Speak To Me”: Interpretations  

  As a collection of mostly “found sounds,” “Speak To Me” is most often explained, at  least in published accounts, as the first scene of a narrative which all told comprises Dark Side of  the Moon. The remaining tracks on Dark Side of the Moon are argued to recount, via a series of  “flashbacks,” the protagonist’s encounters with what Roger Waters calls “anti-life forces” (in  order: authority, paranoia, time, money and war), each of which is alleged throughout the album  to exact an universally deadening toll upon the psyche.  
  In this respect, and given a familiarity with Dark Side of the Moon as a whole, “Speak To  Me” constitutes a sonic analogy for the album’s protagonist in medias mental collapse, as it were.  The sounds comprising the track amble randomly about the stereo spectrum, analogizing the  protagonist’s sudden incapacity to reason or situate one sound in relation to another according  to their inherent symbolic connotations. The remainder of the tracks on the album are thought  to elucidate this collapse and, in so doing, to polemicize the capitalist mode of production as a  highjacker of desire and, eventually, of sanity. During “Money” (1973), for instance, the fifth     track on Dark Side of the Moon, the album’s protagonist emerges as something like Herbert  Marcuse’s (1964) “One-Dimensional Man” in the extreme. On the album’s penultimate track,  “The Great Gig in the Sky” (1973), the protagonist contemplates suicide, realizing that he’s  achieved nothing but great wealth (a cause for celebration, to my mind). By the time of “The  Lunatic” (1973), the album’s concluding track, the protagonist has lost his mind completely.  
  Regardless of how one interprets the track — I’ve always heard a childbirth from the  child’s perspective — what one hears by “Speak To Me” is a mixing performance. Indeed,  fundamentally, “Speak To Me” is about mixing and, thus, musical interpellation of sound  reproduction technology (which is to say, Recording Practice). The “found sounds” which  mostly comprise “Speak To Me” are only available to Pink Floyd through practices and  technologies of sound reproduction. The manner by which Mason arranges these “found  sounds,” and the potential for a listener to hear them in that specific arrangement again, are  likewise only achievable thereby.  
  Above all, however, the listening position which the mix for “Speak To Me” constructs,  which is ultimately all that its receivers hear, models a “way of hearing” which is simply too  spatially mobile to ramify as anything but a “way of hearing” made for and by sound  reproduction technology. Throughout “Speak To Me,” all but Clare Danes’s melodic screams,  for instance, are constantly faded to a higher volume such that they continually approach record  receivers as the mix hears them approach, which creates a spatial metaphor for proximity and  encroachment. The tracks which comprise “Speak To Me” also oscillate variously from left to  right positions along the stereo spectrum, and vice versa. These sounds, and their arrangements  in the mix, are simply impossible to reproduce in a “live” context without recourse to sound  reproduction technology.  

    “Speak To Me”: Mix  

  Auditory Horizon. The Auditory Horizon of “Speak To Me” is established at eleven  seconds into the track, when the heartbeat first fades to audibility. Behind that horizon is  silence. Dynamic mixing techniques such as fading thus establish and, crucially, mean in relation  to an auditory horizon, which constitutes the limit of a mix’s “earshot.”  
  If a track fades in, as with the heartbeat in “Speak To Me,” for instance, it begins its trek  towards the auditory horizon from behind it. The amount of silence before the horizon is  breached represents a certain distance towards the aural perspective of a mix which a recorded  performance must travel to be heard. Conversely, if a track fades out, as with, for example, the  heartbeat on “The Dark Side of the Moon,” the album’s concluding cut, the track ends its trek  past the auditory horizon, or, beyond the mix’s “earshot.”  
  Horizontal Plane/Horizontal Span. “Horizontal Plane” refers to the horizontal position of  sonic phenomenon within a mix. It is made by manipulating pan pots on a multitrack mixing  console when code passes through. A track’s position on the Horizontal Plane describes what  degree left or right of center it is assigned to sound during record reception(s). For example, what  I call the “pneumatic drill” and “frequency drone,” which sound at fifty-five seconds into “Speak  To Me,” are panned variously throughout their brief twenty-one second existence. They  oscillate between, rather than leap from, left to right positions along the Horizontal Plane.  Together, they establish the Horizontal Plane of “Speak To Me” and, in so doing, demonstrate  that the mix for “Speak To Me” hears horizontally to begin with.  

    Figure 2. Pneumatic drill track & Horizontal Plane of Pink Floyd’s “Speak To Me” (1973), my  transcription.  
 

 “Horizontal Span” refers to the total width of a mix’s Horizontal Plane. The Horizontal  Span of a mix is thus its total horizontal reach, that is, its entire “earshot” in strictly horizontal  terms. A Horizontal Span is made by panning units of code left and right of center, to construct  distance between them when they are transduced as sonic phenomena during record reception(s).  
  In “Speak To Me,” the unit of code which Mason pans furthest to the right along the  Horizontal Plane is the loop of ticking clocks that becomes audible thirty-one seconds into the  track. Sixteen seconds later, Jerry Driscoll confesses that he’s “always been mad” at the furthest  distance left along the Horizontal Plane of any other tracks on “Speak To Me.” These units of  code, when transduced, combine to create the Horizontal Span of the mix for “Speak To Me.”  

    Figure 3. Horizontal Span of Pink Floyd’s “Speak To Me” (1973), as constituted by loop of  ticking clocks (0:31) and a male confession of madness (0:47), my transcription.  
 

 Proximity Plane.

Perhaps the most significant dimension of a mix is its “Proximity Plane,”  which refers to the proximity of sound in relation to the listening position that a mix constructs.  Proximity is made by fading the dynamic level of a unit(s) of code higher or lower. That is, one  makes proximity each time they move a “fader” (“potentiometer”) during mixing. A louder  volume moves a sound “closer” while a quieter volume moves it “away.” Ultimately, the  Proximity Plane represent the capacity of a mix to hear in depth.  
  In “Speak To Me,” as what I call “the pneumatic drill” pans along the Horizontal Plane,  it is also faded to a higher volume and, thereby, moved “closer” along the Proximity Plane to  the listening position of the mix. By fading the track to an increasingly higher volume  throughout “Speak To Me,” Mason creates the illusion that the track is ever increasing in  “proximity” and, thus, ever encroaching upon the listener.  

    Figure 4. “Pneumatic drill” track faded “closer” along the Proximity Plane in Pink Floyd’s  “Speak To Me” (1973), my transcription.  
 

  Vertical Plane/Vertical Span.

Alongside an Auditory Horizon, an Horizontal Plane,  an Horizontal Span and a Proximity Plane, each mix also has a Vertical Plane and Vertical  Span. As the Horizontal Plane and the Horizontal Span together constitute a mix’s capacity to  hear horizontally, the Vertical Plane and Vertical Span together constitute a mix’s capacity to  hear vertically. The total area of the Vertical Plane constitutes the Vertical Span of a mix,  which is to say, its total “earshot” strictly in vertical terms.  
  Units of “storage-state” data assume vertical positions in a mix when they are given  relatively stable positions along the Horizontal and Proximity Planes. That is, the Vertical  Plane and the Vertical Span are both made when record innovators exploit faders and pan pots  on a multitrack mixing console in conjunction to determine for tracks relatively fixed positions  along a mix’s Horizontal and Proximity Planes. The resulting lack of horizontal and proximity  motion causes an unit(s) of code to assume a particular vertical location on the Vertical Plane in  relation to the other units with which it sounds during record reception(s).  
    The loop of ticking clocks in “Speak To Me,” which is heard at a hard right position  along the Horizontal Plane, remains at a relatively static position along the Proximity Plane in  relation to the “pneumatic drill,” which increases in “proximity” all the while it sounds. Thus,  the loop sounds “over and above” everything else, at the “highest” position along the Vertical  Plane of the mix for “Speak To Me.” Conversely, “lowest” of all tracks which the mix for  “Speak To Me” hears is the maniacal laughter. This laughter occupies the “lowest” position on  the Vertical Plane of all the tracks on “Speak To Me.” Together, the loop of ticking clocks and  the maniacal laughter constitute the Vertical Span of the mix for “Speak To Me,” that is, its  total vertical “earshot.”  

  Figure 5. “Height” or Vertical Span of Pink Floyd’s “Speak To Me” (1973), as instantiated by  loop of ticking clocks and maniacal laughter, my transcription. 

   Mix: Summary  

  Combined, the Auditory Horizon, Horizontal Plane/Horizontal Span, Proximity Plane  and Vertical Plane/Vertical Span constitute an aural perspective to sonic phenomenon, or, a  listening position. Because all that one can say or hear by making and hearing a music  recording is a mix, music recordings, when transduced, constitute ways of hearing apparently  unitary musical performances more so than apparently unitary musical performances per se.  That is, when transduced, a music recording constitutes a past-tense aural narrative of how  certain sounds were heard. When it is not transduced, a music recording remains only an  inherently silent object.  
  Moreover, a mix present sonic phenomenon no other way but as it hears it (i.e., arranged  in time and space somehow). As such, every mix ultimately recommends the aural perspective  it construes to record receivers as the most appropriate, if not the only conceivable, given what it  hears. In so doing, it supposes and constructs a receiver, regardless of who — or, even, whether  or not anybody — actually transduces the music recording which stores it.[6]  

  Playback  

  Once mixing is finished, the sound of a music recording becomes the purview of record  receivers. Furthermore, once record innovation is complete, record innovators themselves  become consumers (record receivers) of their own innovations. They are afforded no means of  continuing their innovation(s) by the Network of Recording Practice.  
  By transducing a particular sequence of “storage-state” data into an equivalent sculpture  of acoustic energy, record receivers realize the particular sound(s) which record innovators  sculpted the “storage-state” data to represent. In so doing, record receivers make a particular      space — a specific site of record reception — which remains contradictorily abstract enough to  withstand transduction wherever a transducer happens to be. The musical labour of record  receivers is thus to realize a materiality (sculptures of acoustic energy) which record innovators  can only represent, specifically, as “storage-state” data (sequences of mechanical, electric,  electromagnetic and digital code). This materiality remains at all times both specific to the  space of its deployment and mass-produced, particular to one time and place and abstract enough  to withstand transduction whenever and wherever a transducer happens to be.  

  Conclusion  

  People are functional within the Network of Recording Practice only as programmers of  sound reproduction technology. Record innovators, whoever they may be, use sound  reproduction technology to make yet more generations of sound reproduction technology (i.e.,  music recordings). These generations of sound reproduction technology complete stereo  systems: only once a music recording is embedded within a stereo does it function as a playback  machine — stereos are manufactured to lack the components which record innovators make.  Record Receivers, whoever they may be, hear “music” only once the “play” button or some  equivalent is depressed, and only if the machine is in proper working order; or, they mistakenly  program their stereo alarm clocks and a musical communication transpires precisely when they  want silence (while they sleep, for instance); or, they depress the “play” button and nothing  happens because the speakers are broken and the machine is not adequately powered.  
  In any event, the governing dynamics of the Network of Recording Practice are clear: the  person, whomever, is utterly incompetent to engage in Recording Practice without the aid of  transducers. Sound reproduction technology is required to “correct” their insufficiencies. If the  machine fails, Recording Practice fails. People, whoever, remain always, basically, participating  witnesses in Recording Practice.  
    Recording Practice is musical experience approximated and rendered as a data  processing system: as sequences of mechanical, electric, electromagnetic and digital code —  softwares designed to vibrate speaker/headphone diaphragms at varying rates — stored on  hardwares which render playback machines functional; as buttons on playback machines,  sequences of depressed buttons (i.e., “open,” “play,” “volume +,” “bass + ,” “treble —,” “stop,”  “eject,” etcetera) and the playback machines themselves; as sculptures of acoustic energy which  represent, as they are represented by, roughly equivalent sequences of mechanical, electric,  electromagnetic and digital code. The task is double for analysts of Recording Practice, then.  They must study the Network of Recording Practice as a specifically “musical” network while  they study it as a musical interpellation of, that is, an assignment of “musical” identity to, the  industrial procedure of transduction. Analysts must, in other words, constantly remind  themselves that the Network of Recording Practice is, was and always will be, constituted by  creative use of transducers.  

NOTES

1 I capitalize “Recording Practice” to acknowledge that, by the title, I refer to a complete  “communications system” rather than just those procedures which record innovators undertake to  make a music recording.  
  2 Major artifacts of this “debate”/“polemic,” or essays which are considered to have been penned in  response to this debate, include, among others, Theodor Adorno, “The Curves of the Needle,” “The  Form of the Phonograph Record,” “Opera and the Long Playing Record,” “On the Fetish-Character  of Music and the Regression of Listening,” “On Popular Music” and “On Jazz,” all in Theodor  Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 2002), pp. 271-276, 277-282, 283-287, 437-469 and 470-495, respectively. See  also Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 2002);  and Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations: Essays  and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 217-252. Though not  concerned with phonography per se, Benjamin’s understanding of the potential of technical  reproduction to redress certain institutionalized imbalances of power which obtain under conditions  of democratic or fascist capitalism are also apparent in Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,”  Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2, 1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings. (Cambridge: The  Bellknap Press of Harvard University, 1999), pp. 768-782. For a summary of uses to which the so- called “Adorno-Benjamin Debate” has been recently put by commentators, see, for instance, Henry  Klumpenhouwer, “Late Capitalism, Late Marxism & the Study of Music,” Music Analysis 20/3  (October 2001): 367-405.  
 3 There are, of course, a handful of exceptions. I list them here as the primary inspiration for this  study: Marshall McLuhan, “The Phonograph: The Toy That Shrank The National Chest,”  Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Routledge, 1964), pp. 300-309; Friedrich Kittler,  Gramophone, Film, Typewriter: Writing Science, translated and with an introduction by Geoffrey Winthrop- Young and Michael Wutz, eds. Timothy Lenoir and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. (Stanford: Stanford  University Press, 1999); Simon Frith, “The Industrialization of Music,” The Popular Music Studies  Reader, eds. Andy Bennet, Barry Shank and Jason Toynbee (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 231238;  Jonathan Sterne, Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University  Press, 2003); Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. (Hanover:  Wesleyan University Press, 1997); Albin J. Zak III, The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records.  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Adam Krims, “Marxism, Urban Geography and  Classical Recording: An Alternative to Cultural Studies,” Music Analysis Volume 20/Number 3  (2001): 347-363; Mark Coleman, Playback: From the Victrola to MP3. (New York: Da Capo Press,  2003); and Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (New  Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).  
 4 This point is made in, among other texts, Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording  and Its Effects on Music (New York: Verso, 1995); Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records and  Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (New York: New York University Press, 1987); Simon Frith, “The  Industrialization of Music,” The Popular Music Studies Reader, eds. Andy Bennet, Barry Shank and Jason  Toynbee (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 231-238; Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine:  Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997); and Albin J. Zak III,  The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).  
 5 As Jonathan Sterne (2003, 22), notes “modern technologies of sound reproduction use devices  called transducers, which turn sound into something else and that something else back into sound. All  sound reproduction technologies work through the use of transducers. Telephones turn your voice  into electricity, sending it down a phone line and turning it back into sound at the other end. Radio  works on a similar principle, but uses waves instead of wires. The diaphragm and stylus of a  cylinder phonograph change sound through a process of inscription in tinfoil, wax, or any number of  other surfaces. On playback, the stylus and diaphragm transduce the inscriptions back into sound.  Digital sound reproduction technologies all use transducers; they simply add another level of  information, converting electric current into a series of zeros and ones (and back again).”  
 6 A mix might never be transduced, after all. That is, a mix might never exist as sound.  

    WORKS CITED  

  Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. “The Curves of the Needle,” Essays on Music, selected, with  introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, new translations by Susan H.  Gillespie, pp. 271-276. Berkeley: University of California Press.  
  Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” Essays on Music, selected,  with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, new translations by  Susan H. Gillespie, pp. 277-282. Berkeley: University of California Press.  
  Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. “Opera and the Long Playing Record,” Essays on Music, selected,  with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, new translations by  Susan H. Gillespie, pp. 283-287. Berkeley: University of California Press.  
  Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. “On the Fetish-Character of Music and the Regression of  Listening,” Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by  Richard Leppert, new translations by Susan H. Gillespie, pp. 288-317. Berkeley:  University of California Press.  
  Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. “On Popular Music (With the Assistance of George Simpson),”  Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert,  new translations by Susan H. Gillespie, pp. 437-469. Berkeley: University of California  Press.  
  Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. “On Jazz,” Essays on Music, selected, with introduction,  commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, new translations by Susan H. Gillespie, pp.  470-495. Berkeley: University of California Press.  
  Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York:  Continuum.  
  Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”  Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, pp.  217-252. New York: Schocken Books.  
  Benjamin, Walter. 1999. “The Author as Producer,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2,  1927-1934, eds. Michael W. Jennings et al, pp. 768-782. Cambridge: The Bellknap Press  of Harvard University Press.  
  Chanan, Michael. 1995. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording And Its Effects on Music. New  York: Verso.  
  Coleman, Mark. 2003. Playback: From the Victrola to MP3, 100 Years of Music, Machines and Money.  New York: Da Capo Press.  
    Eisenberg, Evan. 1987. The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa. New  Haven: Yale University Press.  
  Frith, Simon. 2006. “The Industrialization of Music,” The Popular Music Studies Reader, eds. Andy  Bennet, Barry Shank and Jason Toynbee, 231-238. New York: Routledge  
  Gitelman, Lisa. 2003. “Souvenir Foils: On the Status of Print at the Origin of Recorded  Sound,” New Media, 1740-1915, edited and with an introduction by Lisa Gitelman and  Geoffrey R. Pingree, pp. 157-174. Cambridge: The MIT Press.  
  Hofstadter, Richard. 1979. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (A Metaphorical Fugue on  Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll). New York: Basic Books.  
  Kittler, Friedrich A. 1990. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris  Cullens, forward by David E. Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford University Press.  
  Kittler, Friedrich A. 1999. Gramophone, Film Typewriter: Writing Science, translated and with an  introduction by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, eds. Timothy Lenoir and  Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Stanford: Stanford University Press.  
  Klumpenhouwer, Henry. (October 2001). “Late Capitalism, Late Marxism & the Study of  Music,” Music Analysis Volume 20/Number 3: 367-405.  
  Krims, Adam. (2001). “Marxism, Urban Geography and Classical Recording: An Alternative  to Cultural Studies,” Music Analysis Volume 20/Number 3: 347-363.  
  Leppert, Richard. 2002. “Commentary: Culture, Technology and Listening,” In Theodor  Adorno, Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard  Leppert, new translations by Susan H. Gillespie, pp. 213-250. Berkeley: University of  
  Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Sociology,  with a new introduction by Douglas Kellner. Boston: Beacon Press.  
  McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. New York: Routledge.  
  Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke  University Press.   Théberge, Paul. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Hanover:  Wesleyan University Press.  
  Théberge, Paul. 2001. “Technology,” Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, eds. Bruce Horner  and Thomas Swiss, pp. 209-224. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.   -27Watts,  
 Duncan J. 2003. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.  
 Zak III, Albin J. 2001. The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records. Berkeley: University of  California Press.