17

Sound Histories

Communication, Technology, Media, and Fidelity

Eric W. Rothenbuhler

The study of sound and sound technologies received a burst of new attention in the 1990s from scholars otherwise primarily associated with art, history, literature, media, music, or technology studies (e.g., Altman, 1992; Chanan, 1995; Kahn & Whitehead, 1992; Keightley, 1996; Kenney, 1999; Millard, 1995; Morris, 1997; O'Connell, 1992; Rothenbuhler & Peters, 1997; Siefert, 1994, 1995; Thompson, 1995; Weiss, 1995, 1996). Practicing professionals (e.g., Ondaatje, 2004) and trade book authors also made notable contributions (e.g., Eisenberg, 1987; Lanza, 1994; Schafer, 1994), as items from the engineering literature reached a broader readership as well (e.g., Pohlmann, 2005; Strawn, 1985; White, 1991). “Sound studies” has continued as a strikingly interdisciplinary and heterogeneous topic area, within which each scholar tends to forge his or her own approach.

A history of sound and sound technology is necessarily constructed of disparate elements, and not only because it is not a standard genre of professional history. All histories of media are divergent, as Schudson (1991) pointed out, because the same medium is used in different contexts in divergent ways with divergent outcomes. Beyond that, sound history is organized by reference to a modality of human experience, rather than a medium of communication, cultural form, or institution. So while radio history, film history, and television history are recognized categories of scholarly work, sound history could include attention to all three and to music and the telephone as well. Indeed, a history of sound might consider modes of communication, media of communication, cultural forms, and institutions ranging from public speech to sexual intimacy, the telephone to the radio, ham radio to network radio dramas to formatted music radio to satellite radio, film sound to Internet sound, the recorded music industry, the performance music industry, and the music education industry. The subtopic of audio recording and playback alone might include everything from the phonograph to the digital studio, the 78 to the mp3, the luxury goods of high fidelity to the ring tone, and popular music to audio books to business dictation. Even confining ourselves to one national culture, attention would be drawn everywhere and it might take a book-length treatment just to give brief mention of every possibility.

So sound history is necessarily a selective and heterogeneous collection, defined by arbitrary boundaries and populated by arguable choices; yet scholars must make some reasoned way through it. This discussion will focus on conceptual orientations and methods for making those choices. Discussion starts with the need to define a field of concern and prioritize within it. This is a problem for any student of sound, though here the emphasis is the study of sound technologies as media of communication and culture. The second issue is to establish points of reference for analyzing the social construction of technology, and here there are special problems and solutions for the student of media. The third issue is a potential topic of interest whenever sound technologies are discussed, but becomes especially important and vexing for students of communication. That issue is fidelity.

Fields of Concern

Anyone approaching the study of sound and sound technologies must make choices of orientation, emphasis, and boundaries of concern in two dimensions. In addition to the usual problems of periodization in historical work are choices of topic and focus within the breadth and heterogeneity of uses, roles, and forms of sound and sound media in communication and culture. These two dimensions are not independent, of course, and we will show how they interact in examples below.

Sound studies, as a topical specialization of its own, invites a kind of horizontal slice across what are otherwise seen as disparate fields of study, creating a new field of concern that is both broader and more specialized than those other fields from which it draws. Some influential edited books from the 1990s, for example, included essays on such otherwise heterogeneous topics as network radio dramas, the microphone, experimental radio, the telephone, music, the phonograph, television sound, and more (e.g., Altman, 1992; Kahn & Whitehead, 1992; Morris, 1997; Weiss, 1996). This approach has not been sustained, though, because no individual scholar can maintain expertise in such a range of phenomena. Individual projects must have a topical point of emphasis within that territory; individual scholars, too, will develop their specializations. The wide interdisciplinary promise of sound studies, then, has tended to result in several different versions of sound studies as a specialty within its various home disciplines. Rather than scholars who study sound in all media, we have film scholars who specialize on sound, music scholars who specialize on sound, those who study the telephone but pay little attention to other media, and so on. The partial exception is a handful of scholars who organize their work by reference to the technologies of sound, whose work then crosses media as related technologies are applied in different fields.

One common choice is to emphasize recording and music, giving little or no attention to radio, sound in film or television, the telephone, or other media. For example, Chanan (1995), Day (2000), Katz (2004), Millard (1995), and Morton (2004) examine the history of recording technologies as an influence on musical history. Within that emphasis there is also room, of course, to examine the influence of recording and playback technologies on the development of audiences, industries, markets, and in turn, their influences back on musical culture and on larger social and cultural trends, as Millard (1995) and others show. Kenney (1999) puts his emphasis there, focusing on recording and its roles in American life, more than its influence on music as such. This is a rich literature; communication and media scholars would profit from giving it more attention.

The changes wrought in musical culture by the advent and growth of recording technology and the recording industry provide valuable case studies of the historical impact of communication media. This is a type of media effect seldom considered in the media and communication literature but well documented elsewhere. Space limits preclude more than a few quick examples. When music is recorded and recordings reproduced and distributed, music enters the social world as a thing rather than a process, an object rather than an event. That difference was the central concern of Eisenberg's (1987) influential book and ontological questions have continued throughout the literature (e.g., Rothenbuhler & Peters, 1997; Sterne, 2003). Philosophical concerns aside, the record travels the world, finds its audience, and registers its social effects differently than does the musical performance. Record collecting and listening at home, for example, became the dominant activities of music lovers in the twentieth century, and this is a very different mode of musical engagement than is attending musical performances. With this change in the communicative structure of the music audience experience came a series of cultural implications and consequences, ranging from shifts in musical performance style to the development of musical celebrities and new markets for manufactured goods (Suisman, 2009). Attention to the social consequences of the physical properties of the medium has proved useful in the work of multiple authors. Katz (2004), for example, builds a convincing case that the way in which the recording medium renders the performer and audience invisible to each other gave impetus to the shift in classical violin technique between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from an emphasis on the bow and a steady tone to an emphasis on the left hand and vibrato as the key to artistic expression.

It is widely accepted in the literature that the influence on blues music of recording and the record business from the 1920s on was to narrow the range of stylistic variation, emphasizing a few standard song forms and narrowing the range of lyrical themes. Any of the performers from the 1920s and 1930s had a broader range of styles in their performance repertoire than in their recorded, several of them told stories of record producers wanting only certain kinds of songs, and the variation of performance styles of blues music on record narrows across those same and subsequent years (Calt, 1994; Hamilton, 2008; Rothenbuhler, 2007; Wardlow, 1998). By contrast, over those same years it can be shown that the evolution of stylistic change in jazz music increased in both speed and range (Kennedy, 1994). How can both be explained as “effects” of recording?

Here we have an example of what a statistician or logician might call a contingent effect, what Pool (1977) called a dual effect in regard to the social impact of the telephone, or what Mumford (1934) pointed out about communication technologies in general, that they multiply other tendencies. Pool pointed out that the telephone was a great power, changing our relations to space and time, but that power and its consequences were shaped by other social purposes. As a market for blues records grew it was shaped by ideas of authenticity and tradition, so the genre narrowed and hardened; only certain musical forms were accepted as authentically representing the tradition. On the other hand, jazz players and audiences alike value innovation and change, so as records allowed players to study each other's work and audiences to grow familiar with new styles more quickly, the pace and breadth of change accelerated.

These are only a few examples of a whole literature of evidence of the social and cultural consequences of recorded music and the recording industry. For all the years of scholarship devoted to media effects, nearly no one in the communication literature has paid attention to these already documented cases.

Alongside recorded music history, another common topical orientation within the sound studies territory is film sound, sometimes with additional attention to television sound. Historical questions around “the coming of sound” have been a major issue in film studies, as have more general concerns with the role of sound in what is conventionally defined as a visual medium (Altman, 1992; Bandy, 1989; Gomery, 2005; Lastra, 2000). Sound has come to be recognized as a specialist area within film studies, and the resulting literature defies brief review. The historical questions include the invention and development of sound on film technologies and other systems for sync-sound; competition between technologies and businesses of sound; the conversion to sound film in technology, business, and culture; the forms of sound accompaniment for silent films; and the development of technical and artistic conventions for sound film. Film scholars have also examined the roles of diegetic and non-diegetic sound and music, and the relations of dialogue, sound, and music in film practice, artistic expression, and audience experience. Of course, film scholars tend to give less attention to recording, radio, and the telephone. So, like the focus on recorded music, this choice of topical emphasis produces one type of sound studies within the wide, horizontal sweep of multi-topic, cross-disciplinary possibilities.

The tendency to focus on one medium rather than the broad sweep of sound phenomena is greatest in regard to radio. Radio history, of course, has a huge literature of its own. There is relatively little attention in that literature, though, to radio's specific status as a sound medium. Most historical work has focused on the institutions of radio, addressing issues of business, industry, markets, law, policy, and politics. Radio programming provides another focus for historical work, but here too, until the 1990s, little of the work addressed the specific contingencies and processes of audio art and expression or of the audio listening experience of the audience.

Important exceptions to these characterizations of the radio history literature began to appear in the 1990s. Douglas's (1999) Listening In gave systematic attention to the listening experience of audience members within a broad overview of twentieth-century US radio history. By necessity this was speculative and theoretical work, for the audience experience leaves little in the way of historical evidence. Scannell (1996) used the archival materials of the BBC and a phenomenological theoretical frame to examine how audio events were constructed in order to function as communication for the dispersed audiences of radio broadcast. This innovative work was based in part on the close analysis of strips of broadcast talk (cf. Scannell, 1991) – something on which the sociologist Erving Goffman (1981) had also focused. Talk is a form of sound for which we can fairly confidently say there are communicative purposes and implications. McCracken (1999) provides an example of close analysis of the extra-linguistic elements of radio sound for their communicative and cultural implications. She and others have shown how the singing style of crooning, produced by microphone technique, yielded a different listening audience experience, that supported a different sense of relationship with the performer, and helped produce different kinds of celebrity. Of course, like Douglas's Listening In, this case too depends on inference where evidence does not exist. We know what crooning sounds like and we know it was associated with the rise of a new kind of star who received new forms of audience attention. If that intimate, close-miked sound produced feelings of close relationship with its distant and dispersed audience members, that would explain the audience behavior and connect the sound to the resulting behaviors through the communicative experience.

Radio, film, television, recorded music – each has its own literature within which sound can be a focus; the telephone too has its own literature, though it is a small one and the topic deserves more attention. The telephone companies appear in media histories as dominant players in the early research on electrical sound technologies and their uses, the development of industries, and attendant legal issues. Standard histories of broadcasting, for example, discuss the telephone companies in early chapters, and then move on to other concerns. Western Electric, for example, is treated as an important engineering firm, but once the inventions have been patented and implemented, the company drops out of the story.

More recent work focusing on the development of sound technologies as such have treated the telephone companies as having longer range, more subtle consequences than that. Part of Sterne's (2003) argument, for example, could be simplified this way. When tubes and amplifiers designed to boost voice signals in long-distance telephone wires became, or at least influenced, the standard model amplifier for radio, cinema, and electrical recording, a solution for a problem of communication in one realm became an unnoticed influence on culture in other realms. Telephone design was shaped by the goal of voice audibility and the midrange focus of the circuits they designed served that purpose. Since the huge capital of the telephone companies allowed them to dominate technological research, later companies and other media were built on this foundation, and radio and music recording of the 1920s and 1930s, for example, both ended up with the same midrange emphasis of the telephone circuits. What is even more interesting, to the extent it can be shown to have happened, is when the sound the technology affords feeds into the culture and becomes a value standard as well. This kind of attention to the deeper historical influences of the telephone technology and system has become more common in sound technology studies.

The social uses of the telephone as a sound medium, though, tend not to receive much attention in literature on recording, radio, and film. These latter became mass media and producers of public culture while the telephone became a point-to-point system for talk. But the telephone system could have developed in a different way – there were experiments with using it to deliver music to the home, for example, and telephone lines were used to deliver Muzak services and radio programming as well – and studies of its social development have proved quite rich. Pool (1977, 1983) helped bring the paucity of research on the telephone to the attention of others interested in technology, communication, and social change. Fischer (1992) provided a social history of the telephone, couching his work as a study of the role of a communication technology in the development of modern societies. Rakow (1992) illustrates another approach to the social study of the telephone, examining gender roles and networks in the processes of community life. Such issues of technology-enabled communication networks and social relations are at the heart of much recent work on the cell telephone (e.g., Ito, Okabe, & Matsuda, 2005; Wallis, in press). Ling's (2008) work in particular makes a fascinating case for the reshaping of social orders and processes via the ubiquitous use of mobile telephones, systems that allow portable personal networks rather than geographical ones, shifting again our relations to time and space.

Music recording, film and television sound, radio history, and the telephone provide media-centric foci for sound studies. Another approach grows out of interest in communication technologies as such. Interest in sound technologies can derive from theories of the social consequences of differences among media as forms of technology. Innis (1951, 1972) and McLuhan (1964) are well-known sources here; Adorno (2002) and others too have provided a range of ideas about such differences. Those who emphasize the way that recording makes music a thing, discussed above, are working with a similar logic, focusing on the consequences of the technology as such. Such approaches can be criticized for treating the technical form as too autonomous an object, too independent a force in history; the most important alternative is to analyze the development of technology as itself a product of social activity, shaped by the work of people and institutions with their own purposes and interests. Williams's (1974) Television: Technology and Cultural Form is an oft-cited source for this point, while the field of science and technology studies is also widely influential (e.g., Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987; MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1999).

The science and technology studies approach emphasizes the social dynamics of invention, development, and use of technologies in general, inviting scholars to see one medium as comparable to others in this regard, and all media as comparable to any other technology. That comparative interest produces a reshuffling of the categories conventional to media studies, as in studies of the influence of telephone technology on radio, recording, and film sound (discussed above), in Gitelman's (1999) study of the phonograph as a writing machine, or Sterne's (2003) argument for the influence of the nineteenth-century stethoscope on twentieth-century ideals of fidelity.

Any one study can only do so much and attention to sound media as technologies widely comparable to other technologies has tended to reduce attention to the specifics of each medium and to its cultural and communicative content, uses, and consequences – and vice versa. The scholarship devoted to the history of music recording, like that devoted to radio history, holds many lessons for the interested reader, but the focus on a chosen medium and cultural content that produces those results, reduces the opportunity to view the medium in broader, comparative perspective. Such work can be informed by science and technology studies, though. Wurtzler (2007) began his work with a media-centric focus on the development of sound film. Following the social development of the technology, though, led him to broader study of electrical sound media, examining the commonalities and differences as the same technologies were deployed for different purposes in the different media and institutions of radio, records, and film.

Wurtzler's (2007) book also provides a good example of how choices about topical focus and analytic emphasis interact with issues of periodization. If a project on “the coming of sound” to the cinema is centered on the sound-on-film technology that eventually prevailed, then the nineteenth-century development of the phonograph may be irrelevant – but perhaps not if the work examines the sound-on-disk systems that were competing alternatives. Similarly, if the telephone is considered a fundamentally different medium with a different history, then the years of its development and adoption can be set aside as outside the period of concern for the study of cinema sound. But as Wurtzler found, the technology and social practices of audio, and even the controlling institutional structures, shared much across the different media of recording, radio, and film – and each made extensive use of technologies originally developed for the telephone. In that case, a history of film sound can quickly turn into a history of all forms of sound technology, and become too sprawling a work for author or reader alike. Wurtzler's decision was to distinguish the electrical sound technologies from the acoustic ones. This allowed him to devote most of his attention to the 1920s and 1930s when the use of microphones, sound studios, amplifiers, and speakers defined major commonalities across recording, radio, and film. Similarly Millard (1995) characterizes public communication, culture, and entertainment in the 1930s and 1940s as dominated by “empires of sound.” He emphasizes that not only the technologies of sound were shared across media and industries, but also corporate ownership and everything from engineers and producers to major stars and hit products moved across the media and markets of radio, records, and film. Both examples show how examination of the media and institutions can identify a network of relations and lead to a periodization unique to the study of sound media; boundaries can be drawn in historical chronology in quite different places for the purposes of explicating different topics.

Sterne (2003) takes a very different cut at history than does Wurtzler, or most other historians of sound media. His argument is that the history of the development of new listening practices is essential to understanding the history of sound technologies and their uses. Tracing out that history he finds key points of commonality and an important series of precedents from the microphone–amplifier–speaker based systems of the 1920s and later, back through the telephone, the acoustic phonograph, and various predecessors right on to the stethoscope. Each technology required, and so presumed as he emphasizes, the development of a technique of listening, and those techniques of listening have more in common than we usually think the technologies do. So his different observations of the same historical materials yielded a different logic for identifying and prioritizing the connections among events in the historical record (or vice versa), thus a different choice of topical and analytic focus, which required in turn a different periodization.

The connection of topical and analytic focus with periodization is obvious enough in the case of any individual study, as illustrated by these examples. For the field as a whole, though, it means that many books that appear to address the same or similar topics cover quite different topics and periods. More than an interdisciplinary field of sound studies, it appears we are developing several different quasi-disciplinary versions of sound studies.

Points of Reference: Analytic Terms for Socio-Technical Systems

A major contribution of the science and technology studies literature is the idea that the history of technology is not only about hardware but must also be a history of technique, social uses, discourse, and institutions. We would be better off to think of the study of socio-technical systems than of technologies as such, and this is especially important for the study of communication and media. While the technology as such may be necessary to communication and interesting to study, our primary disciplinary focus must be communicative forms and processes, media institutions, and the social and cultural implications of the communicative uses of the technology. These are socio-technical systems and in the case of communication technologies, the dynamic relation of technology, technique, and social outcomes is especially complicated.

The history of the telephone is an illustrative case. The technology could not achieve widespread adoption until the development of new social norms for its use. From the engineering point of view the telephone was a device for transmitting voice signals over a switched network. From the social point of view, it was a kind of machine in the parlor; it rang alarmingly and without polite warning; it thrust disembodied and uninvited voices into the home, and intimately into the ear; it paid no regard to age, sex, or class distinctions. It was a device for communication that did not follow any of the existing rules and expectations for communication and allowed forms of communication no one had asked for or thought they needed. The development of technique for the telephone, such as norms for greeting, leaving, and turn taking without eye contact, expectations for the proper conduct of business and personal relations by telephone – these were developments of new forms and processes of communication, necessary to, but independent of, any changes in the physical technology. Similar processes of learning how to use new communication technologies, when, where, and for what – including the technique of capitalizing on the technology and its uses, building industries to serve them – have been necessary to the development of each communication medium. What we see here is that technique transforms technologies with communicative capacities into communication media.

One conceptual frame designed to handle these issues is the “social shaping of technology” (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987; MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1999). These scholars emphasize the process by which technologies are fitted into social orders and processes. The technical capacities of a device define a range of possibilities, within which social groups make choices, pursue some options and ignore others, are troubled by some limitations and never notice others. The physical properties of the device are “affordances” and the enacted technology of any given group can be a rather different thing. There can be a sort of redesigning of the technology in uses shaped by the values and interests of the group. This process can be seen in the social adoption of all technologies, from the steel-tipped plow to the cell phone.

While no technology can succeed as a communication medium without uses that individuals find compelling and without fitting into the communicative norms and relations of everyday life, neither have any of our communication industries resulted from accidental evolutionary processes. Regarding television, as Williams (1974) argued, we cannot understand the shape it eventually took nor its consequences for society without understanding that it was developed by businesses for business of a certain broadcasting kind. Television did have to find a normatively settled place in the US living room and network of family relations, and that process was consciously aided by the industry that profited from it too (Spigel, 1992). Similarly the efforts of the telephone companies to promulgate the communicative norms that would make their device acceptable in the home are well documented (Fischer, 1992). In studies of religious communities' adaptations of new communicative technologies, Campbell (2010) shows how other institutions can have their own ongoing influence, producing kosher cell phones and Islamic web portals for example.

Analogous to the processes of social shaping for the telephone, many possible uses of the phonograph were imagined and tried in the decades before the Victor company developed the business plan and marketing concept to build an industry of recorded music for playback in the home (Siefert, 1994, 1995; Suisman, 2009; Thompson, 1995). Today we see that industry being reshaped not by a new technology directly, but by new social uses of the technologies of digital compression, file sharing, the Internet, and portable digital music players. Here we see that the range of affordances of technologies for recorded music can have social results at odds with the industry-preferred ones.

The range of communicative possibilities for any given technology is such that historical developments of a medium and its social uses can be independent of the underlying technology. The US radio industry, in competition with television in the 1950s and adapting to the growth of car radios and transistor radios, went through a transformation of its programming, advertising strategies, and audience appeals, resulting in a very different audience composition, listening experience, and cultural role. Radio came to fit into US life in a different way, serving different cultural processes and communicative interests (Rothenbuhler & McCourt, 2002). The radio of local DJs and popular music hit-lines in the early 1960s was a very different medium from that of network serial dramas of the 1930s and 1940s. But the underlying technology of transmission and reception had not changed a bit.

These historical processes are interesting and worthwhile dynamics for any student of communication. They also present a set of challenges to anyone studying the history of sound technologies as media of communication and culture. Any such studies need an analytic system for sorting these complications, or run the risk of confusion. Wurtzler (2007), for example, distinguishes between a

Lastra (2000) distinguishes among devices, discourse, practices, and institutions. Sterne (2003) devotes a chapter to the processes by which “technologies [were] articulated to institutions and practices to be made media” (p. 25). Alternatives are clearly available and no claim will be made here about the right set of terms. The important point is that scholars working on sound technology need to give attention to selecting and using an analytic vocabulary that distinguishes phenomena and points of reference in the complex socio-technical systems of communication media, for the analysis of the process by which technologies with communicative capacities are developed into communication media.

It is worthwhile to look at some examples of tight fit between choices of analytic vocabulary and larger theoretical purposes. The attention Sterne (2003) devotes to the historical activities by which already existing institutions – businesses, industries, and capital interests – shaped technologies into media becomes a platform for his critique of the discourse about those media. Arguments about the cultural value of music in the home or the fidelity of phonograph playback, for example, whether in the Victor company's advertisements or in magazine editorial copy, in his view disguised profit interests behind an attractive but impossible theory of communication. Wurtzlert's (2007) terms, apparatus and application, are well chosen for his interest in “sound technology as a transmedia phenomenon” (p. 9) and draw attention to his argument that we may have given too much attention to the social shaping and not enough to the material realities of devices as such.

To look at a different sort of example, Katz (2004) has nearly no interest in the social process of shaping a medium. His concern is with the consequences of recording technologies for musical culture, which only begin to be registered after recording technology is used as a medium of musical culture. While such authors as Lastra, Sterne, and Wurtzler ask how technologies came to be used the way they are, and how a medium came to be such as it is, Katz asks what difference it makes for the culture that the medium is so used. He needs an elaborate vocabulary to handle the differences of recorded and performed music and the consequences of recorded music cultures and industries, but not so much for distinguishing technology, medium, and institution. On the other hand, readers of Katz could well profit from having such distinctions in mind. For while much of his discussion is couched in terms of the effects of technology, we can recognize that in our terms he is discussing the cultural consequences of media.

Fidelity

The issue of fidelity in sound media could appear to be a concern for engineers primarily, and relatively unimportant socially or culturally. If equipment is designed and operated to work accurately, to produce outputs that sound like their inputs, or otherwise as they were intended to sound, then it is said to have fidelity. That could be more or less the end of the story. Students of communication and culture, however, cannot fail to notice the prominent presence of “fidelity” in the discourse of audio – among professionals, in advertising and magazine articles, among consumers and hobbyists. If the phenomenon were so simple, why would it need to be talked about so much?

Indeed, studies have documented a great variety of social uses and implications of discourses of fidelity: sales strategies and advertising (Thompson, 1995), an ideological construction (Sterne, 2003), a means of expressing gender codes (Keightley, 1996, 2003), class position and aspirations (Keightley, 2004, 2008), an example of the social construction of technology and the establishment and defense of an interpretive community (Downes, 2010; O'Connell, 1992; Perlman, 2004), and the development of conventions of film sound, used by producers and audiences alike (Lastra, 2000; Wurtzler, 2007).

As another example of unintended and mostly unrecognized social and cultural implications, there is an argument to be made that the pursuit of high fidelity equipment for the home playback of recorded music in the 1950s through the 1970s nurtured also the growing social importance of recorded music as popular culture and leisure activity (Anderson, 2006; Keightley, 1996; Millard, 1995; O'Connell, 1992). The pursuit of portability, convenience, and lower cost in audio in the last couple of decades operationalized different values and has promoted other uses of music (Sterne, 2006a, 2006b). That shift of orientation is also at least correlated if not more strongly associated with declining public interest and the shifting cultural status of recorded music (Rothenbuhler, in press).

So fidelity is not only a matter for engineers, not just a question of accuracy in signal recording and transmission, but has larger and more remote cultural implications of a potentially diverse range, but how to analyze it? We gain traction on the problem by focusing on audio as a communication phenomenon: sound made and presented by one to another, for the other, sound intended to be heard as something. I will elaborate on this below, but first let's examine what appears to be the simplest possible approach to fidelity in communication, and see how quickly it gets complicated, how quickly the reasons for the critique of fidelity emerge.

As a first approach we can conceive of the social importance of fidelity as primarily a question of accuracy, a social or cultural reflection of the same concerns the engineers have for the equipment. The social importance of fidelity in a business telephone call, for example, is pretty well exhausted by issues of intelligibility and accuracy. In most social settings and for most cultural uses this aspect of fidelity is necessary but it tends to fall into the taken-for-granted background of social life. Fidelity becomes more loaded and more fraught in social life, and more interesting to scholars, when it is about something more than “can you hear me now?” – to quote the slogan of a US cell phone advertisement. But even the simple case is more complicated than it appears.

The business telephone call appears amenable to a simple model of fidelity because it is a transmission system with obvious inputs and outputs, as well as, we imagine, relatively unambiguous intentions and responses. The telephone is not really a high fidelity system, but a good-enough fidelity system. Good enough on average, that is, as most anyone can attest, after misidentifying the sound of a friend's voice or trying to conduct a difficult conversation over a poor connection. So lower fidelity can interfere with social purposes and higher fidelity is not always easily set aside as a matter of mere aesthetics.

In regard to the social uses of most recording and many transmission situations, even the idea of an input or original to which an output, reproduction, or response could be compared is open to question. Since the use of multi-track tape and post-performance editing and mixing became widespread in the 1960s, popular music recordings have been constructed artifacts of musical sound rather than records of a musical performance. They are built up layer on layer for a finished product that can be received as if it were a performance, but they are not copies of the sound of a performance. One of Sterne's (2003, 2006b) primary themes is that what we see here is not just that the recording is not a copy of a performance, but that the performance is for the recording. It has no independent status, which introduces logical problems for a test of fidelity (truth or knowledge) that depends on comparing a result with that original. The same is true, we can add, of apparently simpler transmission situations like the way we listen to the radio signal of the DJ talking into a microphone and playing records, or for that matter, the person talking on the telephone: There again we see that there is no original that is independent of our social uses of the medium. So the question of fidelity cannot be quite so simple as testing the accuracy of the system by comparing independent inputs and outputs, autonomous originals and reproductions.

The reception end is complicated too, because of the phenomenon Altman (1992) called the material heterogeneity of sound. Sound, being a physical phenomenon of vibrations in objects and air, is always affected by the position and space of performance, the position and space of recording, the position and space of playback, and the position and space of hearing. The sound of an oboe will be different if it is played in a large or small room, a resonant or dry room, and played in one or another end, the middle, or a corner of any of those rooms. Instruments that make more harmonically complex sounds, like a piano, will be more affected. Different recorded sounds will result from using different microphones or placing them differently or in any of those different spaces. Similarly, a recording played back through equipment that is positioned in different ways or in different rooms will sound different – even leaving out the phenomenon we all know, that the same recording can sound startlingly different on different home stereos, or an office computer, or different headphones or portable players.

Finally, the placement of the listening audience member in that room matters as well, with different sound resulting from sitting in the middle, against a wall, near a corner, etc., as well as sitting in resonant or absorptive, large or small rooms. The result is that no two sounds are the same; they are, in Altman's terms, materially heterogeneous. In sum, reproduction and reception is always a singular event, each case unique, and so “the” fidelity of any given system depends on the moment of its use and the attention of its users.

These observations give rise to a prominent critique of fidelity. If recorded music, film sound, radio programs, and so on are not copies of an original, but unique, constructed artifacts, and then not independent of the recording, transmission, reproduction, and response, but tied to them in a single social system, and on top of that each moment of reproduction and reception is its own unique event as well, then how does “fidelity” apply? To what “original” can we compare which instance of reproduction? And if fidelity in the sense we appear to use the word is not possible, maybe not even logical, what does it mean that it continues to enjoy such prominent use? Why is fidelity still used to organize professional work, to sell products, in consumer literature, and by audience members? This line of thinking leads to three positions in the literature, presented as alternatives though not entirely mutually exclusive.

One position is a critique of fidelity as an ideological construction; it is an impossible concept and misapplied to media. It serves to distract audiences from the actual profit and power relations of the consumer goods and culture industries through the invocation of an attractive but false theory of communication. This is Sterne's (2003) well-known critique and it is widely accepted in the literature. While the historical record of the industrial exploitation of the concept of fidelity is clear, and deserving of critique, this position has the classic weakness of ideological explanations. Other than an abstract reference to power and distraction, it offers no explanation for how the false concept endures.

A second position views fidelity as a social construction and focuses analysis on how it is used in different settings for varying social purposes. Lastra (2000) and Wurtzler (2007), for example, focus on professional debates among film sound engineers and show how recording practitioners constructed a professional practice of sonic manipulation for producing recordings with sound that (a) counts as fidelity in professional circles, and (b) follows conventions that audiences can decode. Doyle (2005); Gracyk (1996), and others have shown similar processes at work in record production.

Another use of the social constructionist approach examines fidelity in what we might call domestic practice. Keightley (1996, 2003, 2004, 2008) has provided a series of studies documenting the gender and class coding of household technologies, the television versus the hi-fi, for example, and the use of hi-fi to claim domestic space for masculine pursuits. Keightley is not alone in focusing on hi-fi hobbyists and he and other scholars (Downes, 2010; O'Connell, 1992; Perlman, 2004) have shown two interconnected processes among these audio fans. One is the social construction of technology, by which a social group adapts, redeploys, or even redevelops a technology to its own uses and values. Some CD players, for example, are received as and used for higher fidelity than others, thus requiring that they be deployed and used differently. The related process is the development and defense of a discourse community or interpretive community, so that a network of high fidelity enthusiasts, in touch with each other through magazines, stores, social events, and the Internet, can share a vocabulary, set of interpretations, values, even epistemologies and knowledge claims. These analyses of the social construction of fidelity provide explanations for its endurance, by showing its social utility to those who engage in the discourse.

Most of these studies of the social construction of fidelity still arise, like the ideological critique, from a hermeneutics of suspicion and retain the implications that fidelity, because constructed, is false and its uses likely to be invidious. Both may be true in any given situation, but they do not have the logical foundation to stand as a priori truths; as implicit presumptions they too often steer our analyses toward the foregone critique. One cannot help noticing, for example, that while fans of high fidelity equipment and recordings offer a fascinating case study, the literature on them is almost hostile. Where studies of fans in most other domains are entirely accepting, even celebrating their creative engagements with media and culture, audiophiles seem to inspire dismissal and ridicule from academics.

In order to solve these problems I have advocated a third position on fidelity which accepts the analyses of the social construction of fidelity, and Sterne's critique of the industrial exploitation of the concept, but not the implication that fidelity is therefore false and wrong. This position takes fidelity as a social reality, recognizing the reality of socially constructed phenomena (Peters & Rothenbuhler, 1989). Evidence that a concept is socially constructed is not evidence that it is false, ideological, or somehow less true than other concepts that are purportedly not also socially constructed – indeed, all concepts are, including those used in the critique. The analyst's job is to step inside the logical circle and understand the world constructed there, as it is there. This approach explains the widespread use of the concept by its usefulness, seeing fidelity as a term for organizing and evaluating communication.

Indeed, to the extent there is a culture of audio, hence a culturing of audio, fidelity is a key term. Reference to the ideal of fidelity is one of the ways that some sounds are distinguished from others, signal from noise, and hence registered as audio. Audio, as a selection from the world of sound, is defined in relation to a listener; it is sound that operates as a sign of something for someone. In this sense audio is for the listener, hence a phenomenon of communication and never simply a matter of physics or engineering. Fidelity, as part of the culture of audio, is a key term for evaluating the relations implied by listening to something in order to connect communicatively with another experience recorded or transmitted elsewhere.

In this view the fact that the recording is a constructed artifact for an audience and not a record of a performance is not only not a problem, it is the key to the solution. For Sterne and others, recognizing the record as a constructed artifact shows that there is no original and thus “fidelity” to an original is a logical impossibility; anyone, then, who claims fidelity either does not understand it or is up to mischief. For the communication perspective advocated here, recognizing that the record is a constructed artifact designed to be played, shows it to be a communicative performance, for an audience. As Hymes (1975) defined the breakthrough into performance, the acceptance of responsibility for the display of communicative competence, all that Sterne's critique of “no original” does is displace the original and reassign the responsibility, from the artifact to the communicator.

Conclusion

By way of brief conclusion let me restate a short series of points given passing mention above.

Whether sound studies is or should be a singular field remains an open question (Hilmes, 2005). On the basis of this review it would appear to be trending away from that possibility, from a wide-open interdisciplinary territory to geography marked off by several different quasi-disciplinary fields. Sound studies not only have different topical orientations, they are conducted somewhat differently, too, by those who focus on film, music, radio, telephone, or technology as such. Too much missing is communication as such.

Our disciplinary focus should be communication and the sound studies literature would benefit from more sustained attention to audio technologies as communication media. A few of the questions that could follow have already come up here. We need to examine the processes by which technologies become media; these are rich, complex, worthy of study in their own right, and illuminating to other problems of communication and cultural theory. Focusing on technologies in use as media provides an analytic lever as well as a disciplinary anchor. The question of fidelity, for example, is rendered answerable by shifting to a communication-centered analysis. In studying the consequences of sound technologies in use as media communication scholars may make important contributions to the sound studies literature and bring rich, new materials into the study of media effects in the communication literature as well. These are only a few important issues in what remains an intellectual territory rich in possibilities.

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