The MP3 moment is well understood as a decisive episode in the
history of music industry (Sterne 2012), as it engendered radical
changes in how music was distributed and consumed, and ultimately
precipitated music streaming, which consigns listeners to the status of
renters. However, with limited exceptions, scant attention has been paid
to the mechanisms and practices by which users reformatted physical -
albeit digital - releases in the compact disc (CD) medium into audio
files, so that they were amenable to later distribution via the various
infamous file-sharing platforms. In this paper, I discuss the first
codes for that enabled bit-for-bit capture of audio data from CDs
(digital audio extraction, or DAE), which circulated on the Internet
during the early 1990s.
The US-based Voyager Company realised the creative and commercial
potential of optical media formats—Laserdiscs and mixed-mode CD-ROMs—for
early-1990s interactive multimedia. In this paper, I briefly chart the
technological history of Voyager’s CDLink platform, provide a flyover
view of this archive, and describe the value of recovering these
early-Web digital music experiences. These pages pose technical
challenges to preservation, access, and analysis. CDLink, like all
obsolete and oft-forgotten platforms, provides an object lesson that the
apparent abundance of the digital record today is always mediated by the
retrieval techniques of tomorrow.
Notes on a section of Adorno’s long essay on “Radio Physiognomics”
from his time at Princeton.
When the digital audio CD format was launched in 1982, it introduced
a new paradigm for sound reproduction to the consumer market. Instead of
tracing recorded sound with a quasi-indexical groove like its
phonographic forebear, the microscopic pits and lands on the CD’s
plastic surface represent sound as symbols. As the interpretation of
symbols is largely conventional, precisely how these pits and lands
corresponded to audio was determined by a small group of engineers who
had worked to define the CD standard in the years leading up to its
release. In this short talk, I discussed test CDs: discs that were used
to put the audio CD format on trial both before and after its
standardization by its creators, Philips and Sony.
In this talk, I focus on the second movement of Nicolas Collins
Broken Light, a piece for modified Discman and string quartet
composed in 1991 and revised in 1992. Sound art historian Caleb Kelly
has already overviewed Collins’s musical experiments with CD media in
his 2009 survey of sound art and composition that featured “cracked”
technical media: both destroyed vinyl records and damaged compact
discs…
The potential for the systematic analysis of YouTube comments has
been recognised by many researchers in fields including music
information retrieval (MIR), sociology, and musical ethnography (Yadati
et al. 2014; Thelwall 2018; Born and Haworth 2017). Notably, since 2008
YouTube has automatically detects timecodes in user-generated comments,
converting them to “deep” links that skip playback directly to the
moment in the video cited (Vliegendhart et al. 2015). Presenting the
history, use, and future prospects of these time-coded comments (TCCs)
on YouTube, I assess their value as a novel primary source for digital
musicologists.
The Voyager Company realised the creative and commercial potential of
mixed-mode CD-ROMs as the platform par excellence for
interactive multimedia. The company’s CDLink platform enabled and
inspired commercial ventures and amateur productions alike, such as Sony
Music’s short lived ConnecteD experiment, a small but dedicated
community of fan-sites that published time-synced lyric pages alongside
hyperlinked commentaries for popular records, and even experimental
sonic net.art in Mark Kolmar’s Chaotic Entertainment (1996).
Owing to the mostly obsolete hardware and software dependencies of the
CDLink platform and the challenges posted by the fading born-digital
traces of the mid-1990s Web, CDLink-dependent artifacts create
difficulties for preservation and access. I summarise the
above-mentioned developments that culminated in CDLink and describe the
challenges of preserving Kolmar’s artwork and making it available for
future audiences, as well as those of the larger so-called “extended CD”
ecosystem, which flourished during this decade.
I’m delighted to announce that I have been awarded an Irish Research
Council (IRC) New Foundations grant for the project “Uses, reuses and
abuses of the compact disc at 40: an obsolete format and/or a new
opportunity for critical digital media literacy?”. This year, the New Foundations
programme supported projects that aim to “to bring science
(including social science) and art/design/humanities together to work on
new ways of communicating scientific concepts and/or complex societal
challenges for a lay audience,” and I’m pleased to say that this project
was funded under this STEAM strand.
This is a response to a
prompt over at the TAXIS blog, where we read the first chapter of
the classic Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things
Out: Classification and Its Consequences, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2000).
Media in their broken states can tell us as much about their social
construction as they can in their putatively “normal” modes of
operation, so I’ve taken an interest in how the designers and
manufacturers of CD players and CD media have managed defects in their
engineering work. I’ll set aside the question of exactly where or what
the “infrastructure” is here—is it the defect-handling electronics? the
players? the damaged discs? the entire CD media “ecology”?—for the
moment and focus instead on the work of classification in the management
of defects in optical media. Most of the sources for the material in
this post are journal articles and published reports of research done at
various sites over the last 30 or 40 years, with a focus on the CD. I’m
drawing on the chosen reading for guidance about how to parse this
material as well as where I should look for more.
Doing some reading for my current project (a history of the CD Audio format), I stumbled
across a physical phenomenon that does not often crop up in discussions
of the history of gramophone recording: the Buchmann-Meyer effect. This
optical effect was once used to measure the quality of gramophone
records, both qualitatively and quantiatively, by shining a band of
light on a disc and capturing the characteristic “Christmas tree”–like
pattern that is reflected back to the viewer. If the pattern is clear
and distinct, the record is in good nick; if the “branches” of the
pattern are ill defined, the disc surface has perhaps become subject to
wear and disintegration, or, indeed, was never fabricated to a high
standard in the first place. In a figure from a very interesting recent
paper—interesting for other reasons!—we see three discs.
Visible are Buchmann-Meyer patterns reflected from the A and B sides of
an Audio Engineering Society test record from 2007 (well defined) and
one from an undated lacquer transcription disc, probably produced in
France (not as well-defined).