Revising Extinct Sound, panel on sound recording history, part of Artis public programing

Cabinet Magazine event space, 2011, NYC

 

Screening and panel with Sari Carel and Jonathan Sterne

The public was invited to join artist Sari Carel and media scholar Jonathan Sterne for an evening of conversation addressing early experiments in sound reproduction and their link to contemporary sound culture. Moderated by Leah Abir, the evening examined the relationship between sound and image, art and science, and imagination and technique through the mid-nineteenth-century device known as the phonoautograph. Invented by Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857, the phonoautograph was a sound-visualizing machine that generated images of sound vibrations—images that resembled automatic drawings.

This early audiovisual mechanism was a starting point for Carel’s Semaphore Island, a work in process that used phonoautograph drawings generated by sound recordings of extinct birds, as well as for Sterne’s book “The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction,” which outlines a comprehensive social historiography of sound culture. The event featured footage of the only functioning phonoautograph in existence today.