the invention of music

The phonograph was the very first technique for representing music that was autographic - musical notation and other forms of 'transcription' up until then were decidedly allographic, according the sounds of speech and music to a system of 26 letters and a subsystem of seven notes - from A to G - "thereby categorically excluding all noise sequences" (Kittler 1999: 3). Once a technology can represent sonic singularities, then music is finally freed from the reign of composition/symbolism. Jazz, Rock, Disco, Pop, etc. are not possible without the phonograph.

(But what of oral transmission?)

discourse networks

(Gramophone, Film, Typewriter)


The Wired, Present Day, Present Time
(Serial Experiments Lain)

Communication as a person-to-person activity became thinkable only in the shadow of mediated communication. Mass communication came first ... Miscommunication is the scandal that motivates the very concept of communication in the first place.
(John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication)

Everybody can give you the proper nightmare, or the proper story of the human subject alienated from the world. Everybody knows how to run that story by. But if you start talking to people about how they cook their dinner or what kind of language you use to describe trouble in a marriage and you’re very likely to get notions of tape loops, communication breakdown - you’re likely to get amazing stuff.
(Donna Haraway in conversation with Hari Kunzru, 1996)