I. Introduction

In 1825 Franz Schubert participated in a session of music therapy for a young woman suffering from a mental disorder. The treatment was based on the principles of mesmerism, the proto-hypnotic healing technique devised by Franz Anton Mesmer in the later eighteenth century to straighten out the body's invisible life fluid, or “animal magnetism.” The incident is surprisingly representative of a broader interest in the power of sound, especially in German-speaking Europe. The piano music Schubert played on the occasion connects not only to mesmerism, but also to the uses of another still-recent instrument, the glass armonica; to speculations on mechanical instruments by E. T. A. Hoffmann; to music by Mozart and Beethoven; and to Rilke's early twentieth-century response to the phonograph. But the common thread in this network is not music at all. It is a certain sound: a primordial undertone that must be understood as omnipresent but that becomes audible only under special circumstances.

In accord with my book The Hum of the World, I will refer to that primary sound here as “the audiable” (audible with a resonant extra vowel sound). The coinage marks the difference between the sounds you hear and the sensory awareness of sounds that flow through and support the sounds you hear. The audiable is the “hum” of my book's title. It forms a continuous background not only to hearing but also to sense perception in general. We do not normally hear the audiable as a distinct sound, but it is a genuine auditory phenomenon. For a visual analogy, we might turn to things seen best when we look at them from the corner of an eye. Such averted vision makes faint objects more discernible. The constellation Pleiades, for example, is almost invisible if you try to stare at it, but evocatively present if you look askance. The audiable is usually best observed with what we might call averted hearing. Its presence resonates through other sounds at or near the threshold of audibility that temporarily blend with it. That is what happens in Schubert's piano piece, and to the sounds in what we might call its auditory intertext.

II. Therapeutic Resonance: The Piano Pedal

The documentation concerning Schubert's therapeutic session is scanty, and so is what we know about the patient, Louise Mora.

I. Introduction

The Work Of nineteenth-century physicist and physician Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) continues to tower over contemporary understandings of sound and acoustical perception. In its effort to uncouple the investigation of auditory phenomena from traditional strategies of visualization, from subjecting acoustics to the paradigm of the visual, Helmholtz's research played a key role in defining sound and its sensation on its own terms. Rather than wanting to observe objects meant to visualize acoustical vibrations, like Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni during the late eighteenth century, Helmholtz's aim was to investigate the ear and its operations as an independent medium of aural experience and the acoustical as an autonomous field of knowledge. He thus advanced the differentiation of both scientific inquiry and human registers of sensory perception that are often seen as decisive hallmarks of what we have come to call the modern age. As importantly, Helmholtz's writing on the physics of sound waves, of reverberation and resonance, set up a new framework in which sound could be rethought as inherently relational: as something that belonged exclusively to neither a vibrating object nor a perceiving listener, but materialized and unfolded in the space in between them. Sound needed pulsating matter and receptive subjects to come into being, yet in doing so it also defined and shaped both as interdependent elements of the acoustical field in the first place.

Though champions of musical modernism or experimental sound art will unlikely follow this path of thought, Helmholtz also remains influential as a scientist eager to ground musical aesthetics—judgments about the quality, beauty, and pleasure of musical material—in empirical and hence measurable, perhaps even computational, observations and arguments. He not only explained dissonance as a result of acoustic “beats” caused by the interference of adjacent frequencies and consonance as the absence of such beats, but in his assessment of “good” music he sought to reconcile the tensions in classical aesthetic discourses between choice and necessity, freedom and causation. According to Helmholtz, the modern major scale sounded pleasurable to the (Western) ear because listeners had learned to embrace (Western) tonality as “the necessary consequence, conditioned by the nature of things, of the chosen stylistic principle.” To put it crudely: good style and music, in Helmholtz's view, required composers and listeners willing to accept and put to work what nature prescribed and scientists could objectively describe.

I. Introduction: German Choral Singing and Vocal Health

In 1836, Trier-Born Music Teacher Joseph Mainzer addressed him-self to the children of France. “Mes petits amis” (my little friends), he started, and he described to them the central place of song and music in German (primary) education. His method for song, based on the solfège system in which each note is represented with a syllable, prom-ised to bring the same effects of joy, health, and community to French children, and therefore to the country's future adults. “Si un jour, quand vous serez grands, vous et vos petits amis savez chanter comme on le sait en Allemagne, vous pourrez dire alors à tout le monde, que les petits Français ont d’aussi jolies voix et autant de plaisir à chanter que les petits Allemands” (If one day, when you have grown up, you and your little friends can sing as they can in Germany, you will be able to tell everybody that the children of France have equally pretty voices, and take as much pleasure in singing, as the children of Germany).

For Mainzer, like many of his contemporaries, music and song were important means by which a nation could be built. His descriptions of a “German” method of schooling and singing were likely more wish than reality: in 1836, the German lands were not nearly as unified as Mainzer made it appear, and there certainly was no centralized system of schooling through which methods of teaching song could be dispersed. Nevertheless, the image of Germany as a place (and later as a nation) characterized by its love of music and communal song would have been a familiar one to many of Mainzer's readers, and the unifying forces that were at work in the German lands already often operated through (vocal) music.

The practices of singing connected to the formation of politicized identities or national unity are often presented as the exclusive domain of men: the song of soldiers, of students’ unions, of workmen's choruses very clearly symbolizes political messages. Such singing also stands out by its public nature and has received considerable attention from musicologists and historians. However, as Mainzer's text also shows, the prac-tice of singing did not start in adulthood, and was not reserved for the public sphere.

I. Introduction

Although Friedrich Kittler is sometimes cited by proponents of sound studies, it is unlikely he would have approved of much of their work. First: although his work may in some ways seem cognate to that of sound studies, in his “provocation” of traditional disciplinary boundaries, and his shared reference to Foucault, he himself was a sharp critic of Anglo-American cultural studies, which have arguably been the matrix for sound studies. Second, his own concept of sound—a term he largely contributed to popularizing in German—is quite distinct from, and even opposed to, that of sound studies, in its ontological dimension. This distinction has been continued by several of Kittler's German inheritors, whether in media studies or in musicology. Yet for all the seemingly conservative overtones of his later writing (with its central reference to Heidegger and Greece), his project remains difficult to frame or place within traditional disciplinary or philosophical contexts. Nonetheless, we can use the term sound itself as an Ariadnefaden or leitmotif to work out the peculiar theoretical status of Kittler's writings.

Relating Kittler to sound studies is rendered more difficult by the latter's lack of airtight definition, which some would see as a deliberate foil to traditional notions of scholarship. One could, perhaps, borrow Lawrence Grossberg's now-familiar, standard definition of cultural studies as “an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and sometimes counter-disciplinary field that operates in the tension between its tendencies to embrace both a broad, anthropological conception of culture and one that is more narrowly humanistic.” Right away one sees where Kittler differs: his own notions of culture were neither anthropological nor (certainly) “humanistic.” In Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaften (A Cultural History of Cultural Studies), written at around the time of his own Kehre or turn from media hardware to music and mathematics, he looks the concept of culture squarely in the eye. For Clifford Geertz, the patron saint of so much American culturalist (and new historicist) work, he has little time, calling him overrated; one suspects Geertz's debt to hermeneutics (one of Kittler's lifelong enemies) and his reduction of culture to text could hardly have interested him. Instead, Kittler is interested in the Schnittstelle (interface) of culture and technology, something “humanistic conceptions” have not always been interested in. In his attention to marginal phenomena around the production of intellectual history, Kittler may look like a practitioner of cultural studies or New Historicism.

I. Introduction

Although Television Spread Rapidly in West and East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, the cinema newsreels were still important for many people who could not afford a television set. Cinema newsreel reports and weekly editions (containing eight to fifteen single reports) were exchanged worldwide, and in this way they had the power to shape perspectives on different lifestyles and cultures. Almost every newsreel report was accompanied by music that matched its images and impressed viewers. The music was intentionally chosen and could support a particular meaning. In this regard, West and East German newsreels did not differ. For example, music was used to convey political messages and could express official views on national and international relations or the affiliation to the East-West power blocs. Music played an important role in the struggle for the “Herzen und Köpfe” (hearts and minds) of the people in East and West in their mutual perception through the Iron Curtain. The acceptance or prohibition of popular music such as jazz had an influence on the (young) people's satisfaction with their living conditions in the GDR, including having free choice as regards the music they wanted to listen to. Given the different political and ideological state models of West and East Germany during the Cold War, the use of jazz in the newsreels of the two German states is remarkable. To what extent could viewers in West and East Germany get to know jazz through audiovisual media? I argue that the newsreel films reflect the acceptance of jazz as a musical style by society and politics. Documentary films, in which jazz was presented in a more specific and detailed way, did this as well. In this essay I consider how the aesthetics of newsreels and (television) documentaries affected the popular perception of jazz and jazz musicians in the two German states.

I would like to start with an introductory example: In a report about an amateur jazz band in Hamburg from the West German newsreel Neue Deutsche Wochenschau no. 590 from May 19, 1961, the newsreels speaker says that never before had there been so many young musicians, and he explained that the “intoxication” of jazz became “acute” immediately after the war. Some young people behaved very unusually at musical events, and he comments on the pictures of wildly and enthusiastically gesticulating young people suffering from “Kinderkrankheiten” (teething problems).

I. Introduction

Roberto Rossellini's 1948 film Germany, Year Zero chronicles 12-year-old Edmund Köhler as he attempts to navigate the decimated city of Berlin, its rubble and black markets, lingering Nazi ideologues and sexual predators. In the first half of the film, Edmund runs into his former schoolteacher and still fervent Nazi, Herr Henning, who after some inappropriate touching gives the boy a gramophone record of a speech by Adolf Hitler and instructs him to sell it to the Allies. Equipped with a portable record player in a suitcase, we watch the boy and two other children traverse the rubble of the city and enter the infamous Reichskanzlei. Here British soldiers take photographs of the spot where, as one explains, “they burnt the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun” (26:30). After running up the front stairs to the building's entrance, the camera cuts inside to show Edmund and his companion descending an interior staircase to meet two Allied soldiers who are there to inspect and possibly purchase the recording. As Edmund drops the needle of the portable player, Hitler begins mid-sentence a 1943 speech delivered at Berlin's Sportpalast, in which he explains that he is proud to rule “not only in happy times, but especially in hard ones.”

Resounding from within the literal ruins of the empire he claims to lead, and from the same space in which he committed suicide, Hitler's plea for listeners to “stick it out” is both ironic and unnerving. The irony only intensifies as the camera cuts back outside to pan across the destroyed facades of countless buildings. In the next shot, a man and his son stop short; presumably they hear the recorded voice emanating from inside. The man's reaction remains ambiguous: his sudden pause implies fear, a freeze response, while the fact that he and his child look upward for the offscreen voice invests it with an authoritarian, or even divine status—it is a voice one expects to hear from on high. The scene testifies to the perceived danger of the Führer's disembodied voice, with the Allied soldiers ultimately agreeing to purchase the recording for 200 DM in order to remove it from circulation.

II. Screaming as Self-Effacement

Rossellini's juxtaposition of ruins and the voice resonates productively with accounts of Hitler's speaking that emphasize the violence exerted by the voice upon itself, described as a vocal self-effacement through con-tinuous overexertion.

I. Introduction

In The German-Speaking Regions of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the common practice of listening to the radio is deeply rooted to this day in an imperialist and thoroughly misogynistic war economy despite independent radio's persistent efforts to recast itself as a story or his-tory machine—a Geschichtsmaschine, as free as a bird. The vehemently contested role of this “medium of socialization” can be traced in the checkered fates of those broadcasting practices little concerned with upholding the status quo or even adamantly opposed to it. Identifying the breaks and continuities in their endeavors sheds some light on socio-technological and sonic aspirations to democratize society, which still reverberate with radio producers and listeners today.

II. Radio Policy Interrupted

The advent of radio in the early twentieth century opened up entirely new ways of doing politics. The mass medium forged practices that allowed it to govern listening in two ways. First, it addressed content and auditory modes of dramaturgy—in a now allegedly “authentic” voice—to a poten-tially infinite public that it constructed, familiarly, as “dear listeners.” Second, the socio-technological strategies pursued in, with, and through the medium of radio established certain listening environments that served to discipline, domesticate, and homogenize the public broadcast and any bodies engaging with it.

Media philosopher Bernhard Siegert points out that pioneers of radio in Germany emerged from the military context. It was their technical training and experience in wiretapping, and the simplicity characteristic of the early “wireless sets,” that enabled the Funker (radio and telephone operators) both to receive and transmit signals. Immediately after World War I, the German Army's intelligence unit reported that a large num-ber of these devices had been stolen from within its own ranks. A short time later, former military Funker occupied two radio stations of the Deutsche Reichspost (German Imperial Mail), near the capital, as well as a telegraph office in Berlin. Amid the revolutionary upheaval, these events fueled a diffuse fear of revolt by technologically savvy networks. It is this event that inspired Siegert's reflections on radio as a contested cultural technique encompassing the acts of speaking, transmitting, receiving, jamming, and listening—and also interference.

I. Introduction

Around 1930, Austrian Opera and operetta singer Joseph Schmidt (born in 1904) possessed one of the best-known voices in Germany. Having moved to Berlin in 1925, he performed in more than thirty-eight radio operas and helped popularize the medium between 1929 and 1933. His internationally successful musical film Ein Lied geht um die Welt (A Song Goes Round the World) was the peak of his career, but soon after its release in May 1933, Schmidt had to flee from Nazi persecution in Germany and ended up dying in a Swiss internment camp in 1942. The title song of the movie can today be listened to in the exhibition BERLIN GLOBAL at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, of which I was one of the curators and which opened to the public in July 2021. The Humboldt Forum is housed in the partly reconstructed Stadtschloss (City Palace) of the Hohenzollern dynasty, which was erected on the site of the demol-ished GDR Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), thus becoming a highly controversial site of post-reunification Germany's interrogation of its tumultuous history and its place in a globalized present and future.

The recording of the song is part of an installation dedicated to the Berlin-based record company Lindström, which was one of the largest European record companies in the first decades of the twentieth century and became part of the EMI group in 1931. You can select Schmidt's Ein Lied geht um die Welt as one of sixteen Lindström recordings on an old gramophone from the 1920s, which has been converted into an interac-tive museum exhibit. The gramophone sits in an open spherical booth with many Lindström labels on the walls, and when you select one of the songs, it is played through loudspeakers into the booth while you can read information on the song and look at its record label on a screen in the open lid of the gramophone. The exhibition is concerned with the ways in which Berlin was and still is interconnected with the world. The music recorded and distributed by Lindström therefore stands as an example of global cultural transfers and the role Berlin played in it. All of the songs in this exhibit really went around the world in one way or the other.

The Lindström installation is not the only one in BERLIN GLOBAL offering a multisensory experience.

Digital Sound Comprises a huge variety of phenomena spanning digital transformations from the spoken word to sound generation experiments with artificial intelligence. This contribution will discuss the work of the Austrian sound poet Jörg Piringer, who has been working with digital technologies since 1997. His acoustic art mirrors the multiple directions in which digital sound has developed and can therefore serve as a model for discussing its diverse aesthetic dimensions.

I. The Long Shadow of the Avant-gardes

The history of computer-based experiments with sound is deeply inter-woven with the avant-garde movements at the beginning of the twentieth century. Futurism and Dadaism freed the poetic word from its close rela-tion to the printed book and rediscovered the power of sound and spo-ken language. Works like Kurt Schwitter's Ursonate, the sound poems of Hugo Ball, and the optophonetic experiments of Raoul Hausmann realize the aesthetic program of de-semantizing the meaningfulness of word-based poetry, but they also emphasize the acoustic quality of lan-guage when concentrating on pure sound. Furthermore, they transfer the abstract character of written/printed poetry, whose sensory quality is either purely visual or combined with a sound that cannot be heard but has to be imagined by the reader in a new corporeality. The authors invented an impressive variety of sound performances that are interwo-ven with the materiality of the body and the voice apparatus. Their rela-tion to the new technologies of sound recording was not as close as one could have expected from an avant-garde movement, but at least Raoul Hausmann invented a new apparatus, which he called “optophon,” capable of transforming sound into light. This technical transforma-tion process of sound into light has quite a tradition, beginning with the invention of the color piano in the eighteenth century. Thus it might be no coincidence that prior to Hausmann's optophone-idea a major audio-visual work had its world premiere: Victor Scriabin's Prometheus (1910).

When, seventy years later, the Austrian avant-garde writer Franz Mon refers to Kurt Schwitters, Hugo Ball, and Raoul Hausmann as predeces-sors of concrete poetry in an interview led by Michael Lentz, he might have had in mind these three decisive expansions of poetry: the liberation of the word from its conventional meaning, the emphasis on the acoustic qualities of language, and the idea of the “technologizing of the word” by using or building electric/electronic apparatuses.

I. Introduction

Die Nibelungen stands out within the German film director Fritz Lang's oeuvre for a number of reasons. In addition to being the director's first great success, it is one of his most powerful films, and in all likelihood his most misunderstood. From the eminent film theorist Siegfried Kracauer onwards, this work has often been associated with Nazi and Wagnerian myths of Germanic origins, when in fact it is opposed to Wagner and all that he stood for, at least on the ideological level. It is clear to anyone who watches the film closely that it is open to many read-ings other than the blood and soil one imposed upon it by Hitler's fol-lowers. And once we move beyond the problematic approach of Kracauer, which tends to reduce this and other Weimar films to teleological fore-bodings of authoritarianism, the actual qualities of this film stand out with greater clarity. Die Nibelungen's bold, highly effective cinematog-raphy, revolutionary approach to Germanic myth, and subtle use of what I shall call “figured” or implied sound put Lang on the map of Europe's emerging directors when it first appeared in 1924. Lang's first foray into epic cinema, this film had an unmistakable impact on others working in an analogous direction, such as Sergei Eisenstein, in Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible.

In what follows I explore hitherto overlooked aspects of Lang's misconstrued epic by examining its artistic response to, and trenchant critique of, the ideological underpinnings of Wagner's music-drama. Both the response and the critique are the result of an implicit transformation of evolutionary schemes of the origin, development, and decline of peoples elaborated by the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ ethnological discourse and related speculation on the roots of “civilized” Europe. By focusing on these facets of the film, my aim is not to reset the balance between the aesthetic and the ideological dimensions of Die Nibelungen. My objective is more modest: to seek to show how Lang's strategies of sonic figuration rework Wagnerian ideas of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the leitmotiv in accordance with the novel technical conditions and aesthetic possibilities of film.

Moving from these considerations, this essay seeks to clarify the implications of the sonic as a specific perceptual attribute and narrative marker in Die Nibelungen.

I: Introduction

Vague Sounds, Insecure; Tentative. I can hear some squeaking, then cracking; sometimes I hear rumbling noises. It sounds as if I were carefully listening to a person who has not yet really decided what she or he or they wish to do now.

How this person acts sounds clueless, sometimes fuzzy. Sometimes, this person I can hear is moving much too quickly. But is it even a person? A bit later this person strange to me moves way too slowly. They are audibly breathing and idling, moving back and fro. Doubtful. Waiting. Biding their time.

I continue listening. The sounds are tender, brief, close to inaudible. Is this some thin stream of water running down? I need to listen. Is the performer just peeing now? Is it audiovoyeurism, is it my sheer surprise, or a strange, possibly perverted fascination with a clear streak of repulsion and being freaked out? The alien performer begins now to breathe in, continuously and very loud. They are breathing much harder, then more deeply, creating strange and uncomfortable noises made of mucus and air. Maybe it is cleaning his or her or their throat? Or is she or he starting to spit out or even vomit any second now? The sounds I hear are now clearly and intentionally disgusting; as if I were listening to some scaremongering, maybe alien performer who wishes to create the Foley sounds for some cheap but effective splatter horror movie. The monster is panting now, scarily—then it prepares to spit out in direction of its prey. Are we its prey, we, the listeners?

Then the repulsive performer of throat sounds turns silent, quite abruptly. One can hear them moaning and hissing; a faint hint of humming and vocalizing, briefly grunting and gargling. Again, I hear the continuous sound of some watery liquid. Even this liquid now sounds deeply uncomfortable to me: what body liquids are now leaking out, streaming out of this person?

The person moves about in its room. Further sounds can be heard, mostly of someone inconclusively moving around. A motorcycle drives by. Coughing. Then I hear more breathing, and even more guttural noises. I can actually even hear the tongue, the flesh inside this monster's mouth, the uvula palatina, moving and being moved by the harsh and panting stream of air. Is this stranger now trampling aggressively on the wooden floor of this room?

I. Introduction

Max Neuhaus Was Born on August 9, 1939, and died on February 3, 2009. He was an American musician, composer, and artist who was a noted interpreter of contemporary and experimental percussion music in the 1960s. The grandson of an immigrant from Hamburg, Neuhaus attended the Manhattan School of Music, very quickly becoming one of the best percussionists of his time. His musicianship introduced him to the magical circle of the musical avant-garde of the sixties. Meeting avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen during the inaugural performance of the composer's Zyklus in New York, as well as contacts with other composers of the time—Edgard Varèse, John Cage, and Morton Feldman—offered him friendship and access to musical culture. Very significant is also a commission by the Donaueschingen Music Festival for a collective radio sound work at the end of his life. But, more significantly, at a certain point, Neuhaus invented what he named “sound sculptures.” Soon these installations were divided into categories such as Place Pieces, Moment Pieces, etc. Their common denominator, the fact they all were tied to a precise locality and time, meant that the sound could not be reproduced authentically. Retraining at the Bell Laboratories in making electronic music gave Neuhaus an incomparable palette of sound samples from which he composed his work. He went on to create numerous permanent and short-term sound installations. He performed as a percussion soloist on concerts tours throughout the United States with Pierre Boulez (1952–63) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1963–64). In 1964 and 1965, he presented solo recitals at Carnegie Hall in New York City and in fifteen major European cities. In 1966, he published on Mass Art Inc. four live realizations of John Cage's Fontana Mix (1958).

An indeterminate graphic score originally intended for a tape piece, with or without additional instruments, the Fontana Mix-feed, in Neuhaus's realizations, employed controlled feedback generated by placing contact microphones on percussive instruments and hooking the microphones up to loudspeakers positioned directly opposite the instruments. Neuhaus's work as a percussionist culminated in an album of contemporary solo percussion work, Electronics & Percussion—Five Realizations, which he recorded for Columbia Masterworks in 1968. From then on he pursued a career as a contemporary artist by developing sound installations, using electronic or electroacoustic sounds, which would emanate from a source within a particular space or location.