Noises, silences, and blank spaces

One of the most fascinating recurring touch-points of the text was Gitelman’s (1999) descriptions of the breakdown of the divisions between “orality, aurality, and textuality” (p. 185), through her discussion of the noise stretching across these categories. Gitelman gives a brief overview of some of the definitions and workings of noise:

The ‘noises of speech,’ as scientists noted right away about the phonograph, get lost in mechanical reproductions. ‘Noise’ is Jacques Atali’s term for the political economy of music. It is similarly William Paulson’s term for encoded culture, for ‘anything that gets mixed up with messages as they are sent’ (ix).Its very mixed-up quality of inarticulation makes noise difficult to identify
and explain. (p.183)

She nicely sets up this metaphor of noise in several places in the text, which encouraged me to start thinking about the possibility of noise ala Bijker’s model. I see shades of Bijker in Gitelman’s discussion on p. 4 where she brings in the concepts of symmetry and workability. Noise though adds a more nuanced notion of the various possibilities between working and non-working categories. Noise, potentially a nuisance for some, is alternately what is sought by others, i.e. as in the “noises of speech” mentioned above. In her discussion of patents, Gitelman suggests the linguistic difficulties in transferring the noises of the phonograph and the records it played into legal discussions about copyrights. Who owns the noise? The one who makes it, the one who hears it, the one who writes it, the one who produces it, the one who performs it? These issues were new due to the previously assumed ephemeral quality of noise.

She brings the issue of noise to the fore in her discussion of “noiseless” typewriters (p. 216-218). At the end of this section, she notes the creation of “the sound of blank space” (p. 218), which is particularly intriguing. On my initial reading of this, I wanted to disagree with her due to music’s centuries’ old use of silence. One can certainly play silences in music, and also use them in conversations in a highly rhetorical manner. To cite a musical example, Nicholas Cook (1990) examines musical and non-musical listening and describes the effects achieved through John Cage’s entirely silent composition, “4’33.” Cook states, “The effect of this piece in live performance (it hardly makes sense to envisage a recording of it) is to create an expectation of musical sound, which in the event, remains unfulfilled; this results in a distinctly heightened sensitivity on the listener’s part to the environment of the performance” (p. 11).

However, as I re-read Gitelman’s passage, it seemed that she was making a distinction between blank space and silence. I remain uncertain of the possibility of blank space in an aural sense, but I do see her point in terms of the visual, so this provides further means of complicating the movements between these categories which occurs with the introduction of the technologies she describes.