Reprise
Marian Halls
You have a conversation to record: any conversation whatever. Let’s say you plan to conduct an interview, which you will transcribe from your recording. That transcription forms the skeleton of your most recent piece: a review of a sculpture exhibition1. It is possible this conversation has taken place before, that sounds have become audible because at one time or another an event took place. It is also possible that what happens here becomes a force that shuttles through any recording whatever. Consider, then, this possible turn of events:
Rummaging through the old junk drawer, beneath sundry office supplies, to find that clunky tape recorder which should do for a quick interview at the exhibition space. Finding it, noting that it’s twice the size you expected, hard black plastic that rattles when you move it. Reading red sans serif caps along one side as it announces itself: “voice activated recording.”
Testing the device on unsuspecting friends around coffee table in one yellow lamp’s dim light one indistinct evening. Stereo speakers playing music to mask the click as you press the black play and red record buttons together. How one sounds when playing one’s voice back, slowing down the speed:
- In timbre, oboe-like.
- Pauses between each individual clause.
- The shape of the sentence determined by your inflection which goes upward first and then down, taking a sharp turn, three quarters of the way in and finally, trailing off at the end....
- Still higher in pitch than you’d expect despite slower playback.
Later, in another room, filled with objects to be discussed: pressing those two buttons in order to begin. With embarrassment: there is no masking the click in the wide and empty room. Holding the recorder to the chest, against one’s legal pad, circling the room and asking questions. Muffling the sounds that you’ll later need (remaining unaware of this). Muffling them more or less depending on their distance from the microphone that rubs against the legal pad.
At home, returning to the conversation by pressing play on the clunky black recorder. The exhibition room, wider and emptier than one could have seen with the eyes, itself becomes audible in the playback. The space is loud and large, full of clicks and suspensions, crescendos and reverberations. The room has much to say on its own: much to drown out the sculptor’s thoughts on his latest pieces. As you listen to the room’s sounds, one phrase of his echoes back to you, but one you didn’t record. As you turned to leave, having turned off the tape recorder, he said:
“I hope the recording comes out. That room is full of echoes.”
Plugging the recorder up to the stereo, to which the sound travels through a wire. The way the speakers split the tenor from the bass, the left ear from the right. The way the stereo picks up the recording of the sounds coming from its own speakers, two weeks before, and alters them. Playing and stopping the recording by pointing the remote to the stereo receiver. Leaning the ear in, first to the right speaker, then to the left, so that the waves of sound from the sculptor’s throat, off the hollow walls, through the recording microphone, off the thin strip of tape, through the wire, split through double chords, out through four large orifices, sweep over one’s head and tickle one’s ear drums. Not listening too closely, understanding how what one hears is like what was traveling through one’s eardrums in another place, at another time.
The cause (and finally, the result) of these acrobatics: through the whole recording you can’t find, locate, hear, sustain, the speaker’s “voice” long enough to string a single sentence.
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So you head to the experts. The sound technicians know what it takes to make meaning from a sound. Unfortunately, they must work with the material you’ve generated for them. Beyond what was captured, nothing can be recovered. It might occur to you at this point that the sculptor’s voice no longer exists – neither, for that matter, does yours, though it is simpler in your own case to maintain that illusion. The sculptor’s voice is gone. In its place, a collection of grooves on a strip. When converted to sound waves, these grooves capture some features of the vibrations that came from his throat through time and space at a particular moment and place. To reduce the sound is to give it the semblance of accuracy but to challenge the capacity of the human ear; to amplify it is to emphasize approximate lines that must accommodate the gaps by estimating the value of what fell through them during the recording process.
Having achieved the ideal compromise between the inaudible and the distorted, the technicians transfer the cassette recording to digital format. To you this appears as a series of green mountainous lines moving across the black background of a computer screen. The lines move synchronically outward from a horizon on screen, like a Rorschach in motion. To guide you in what you are seeing, the technician traces the same lines –static once his pencil stops – over the lines of a yellow legal pad. He flips the page and begins, diligently and methodically, but not cleanly, to fill another page with zeroes and ones, showing you as the page fills where the sound appears – and its infinitesimal distance from where it should appear.
Once the procedure is complete, the technicians usher you into another room, where you are shown a machine, which looks much like the one you just left. You are told that this machine has the special ability to “learn the sound of noise,” so as to cut the noise away from the sound of the “voice” you are trying to hear. All you have to do is listen to the recording until you find a moment of “silence” – a moment that occurs between speaking. You soon discover such moments have only the appearance of silence.
The machine on which you now play the digital recording has the added feature of an equalizer. You take advantage of this fact, since too much of the noise, and not enough of the voice, has carried over from the digitizing procedure the sound has just undergone.
You can make some of the shrilling at the top and the buzzing in the middle stop, but when you remove them, out comes also the buzz of his voice, the shrill that subtly contours off one syllable from the next. Sometimes you toggle back to default; you patiently weather a bit more ringing in your ears to rescue one more word, one more boundary line between inflection and articulation, from the dank swamp of sound in which you find yourself immersed.
Matters have grown desperate. You must forge a pathway through which to lead your readers into a conversation that cannot be repeated. One last measure must be taken: from tinny speakers, or ‘earbuds,’ or even stereo surround sound, to Headphones.
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The new headphones make a crucial bit of difference. After many starts and stops on your equalized machine, wired up to the most advanced listening technology available, you retrieve enough threads of sentences that you can weave together a reasonable narrative to stand in for a complete interview. You use plenty of [brackets] to fill in what you think the sculptor said, relying on the context and the loose shape of the sounds. Exhausted from so much listening, you construct a review based on the quotations you had time and capacity to salvage. When you’ve finished writing, you believe you have conveyed something that approximates the sculptor’s own conception of his work.
You return to listening. You want to see if you can fill in any pieces you couldn’t capture last time. At this point you note that you have one more, untapped tactic in your arsenal. You fumble through that desk drawer again. You find that clunky tape recorder once more. You’ve inserted the tape; you connect the Headphones. You initiate that familiar click and the old analog whirs to life. By now, you’ve been through this strip of sound a dozen times – but digitally, where the repetition doesn’t wear grooves in the sounds themselves. This time, armed with all those piecemeal renditions of the “same” sound – the reduced version, the amplified, the noise-free, custom-equalized for “voice,” the buzzing shaved off, the shrill filed down – this time, you hear it new. The headphones cupping your ears, it sounds to you now with the aid of your memory as if you are standing in the room of sculptures and you hear its voice. Astonished, you discover that the simplest was also the most lucid approach: minimize tinkering, maximize the quality of listening. But the rub: you had to sustain a movement through every possibility to arrive there, as if through a chamber of echoes, where the sounds as qualities in themselves threatened to draw you aside from your objective. Just in time you were able to regain the right direction, and you ventured to say what happened in that conversation and how. The countless clicks and murmurs, sounds where the sense of the words did not adhere, are the infinite errant flights by which you may have gotten lost.