The Hallelujah Effect: Archaeology of a Harmony in Three Parts

What is the technology of sound? What is the technology of the technical reproducibility of sound?  

Writing after Heidegger’s questioning of The Origin of the Work of Art, and at the conclusion of a list of a variety of technological means of reproducibility in the various spheres of art, Walter Benjamin reports smoothly (which is just how we scholars like it) that the 

“the technical  production of sound was tackled at the end of the last century.”

Indeed, “the technical reproduction” of sound had been “seemingly tackled” even earlier by other inventors in France but by the last third of the 19th century, as illustrated by Edison’s publication of an account of his invention of the phonograph just before year’s end in Scientific American in 1877 it would seem to have been securely tacked down.  

But Benjamin is quite precise, to the year itself (given the 1900 intervention of Emil Berliner’s patented master’s voice), such that in the decades to follow, recordings were in full productive swing.

Theodor  Adorno adds complexity  (which is not how we like it), raising as he does the phenomenological question of the techno-mechanical transmission of music in his The Current of Music and (with yet more complexity), going back to the Nietzsche of the 1870’s and indeed to 770 BC with the earliest system for the technical reproduction of sound (i.e., the Greek invention of “truly phonetic writing” as Ivan Illich argues), there is the spirit of music at the heart of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.  

In Ivan Illich’s paean to this technology, the first “truly phonetic writing was a one-time invention, made in Greece around 770 BC.”  (In the Vineyard of the Text) With beautiful concision, Illich describes this “one time invention” as characterized by “the use of signs for both consonants (which are obstacles to breath) and for vowels (which indicate the color given to the column of air that is spirited out of the lungs).”  

It is in order to raise the question of the technical reproducibility of sound, that we begin in the present day: with YouTube and other media, turning then to radio and the current of music in the era of the second World War, and finally exploring the implications of reading as Nietzsche does (and Ivan Illich only accords with Nietzsche’s reading of), ancient Greek as a technology for reproducing sound: the spirit of music.

From the postprint 
“The Hallelujah Effect: Archaeology of a Harmony in Three Parts.”