Reading:
Courtesy links: [Sterne]
Response:
Create a comment in response to this blog post introducing yourself and one thing you liked and one thing you disliked about the reading (100 words max.)
6 thoughts on “Class meeting #1 – Course overview/Toward the digital – Wednesday 9/5”
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Hi, my name is Lara and I am a Junior in CC.
One thing I liked about this article was how it traces the definition of analog over time, and specifically the definition that relates to how we use “analogous,” and how different that is from our new definition of “not digital.” The representative definitions in the OED are particularly interesting. It generally progresses from analogous-to, to including some type of conversion process, to “old.” One thing I did not like is that despite talking about the historical progression of meanings, Sterne arrives at a stable one for himself, which he can use to say that one thing is analog and another thing is not, for example the violin. In our first class discussion, we seemed to allow for more ambiguity about, for example, whether an acoustic instrument (which is a piece of technology) is analog or not.
Hi everyone, my name is Claire and I’m a sophomore in SEAS hoping to major in computer science and minor in music. I began playing violin at a very young age and continued formal study through my senior year of high school. Now, I mostly prefer to play violin only when someone is paying me. I’ve been slowly learning the basics of music production over the last couple years, and I’ve begun to write and produce my own music, mostly indie pop and also some experimental stuff.
I liked how Sterne addressed the claim that “analog media are closer to nature (40)” as being a romanticization of time period in which physical recordings were prevalent. It is interesting to try and contrast the nostalgia we in the digital recording age feel towards, for example, vinyl records, to how they may have been perceived at the time of their conception. While we may perceive analog recordings as sounding warm and human, others may have viewed it as the opposite.
I did not quite understand the relationship between the gendered imagery used to describe waves and the discrepancy between digital and analog, and I wish Sterne explained this in more detail.
Hi everyone, My name is Yang and I am a senior majoring in Computer Science under vision & graphics track.
In my free time I would go to studios and record some music (hip hop primarily, here’s a link to my soundcloud 😛 – soundcloud.com/aka-basedyoung). I have a deep passion about the area between technology, media and culture, and it is the reason I am taking this course primarily. Secondly, digital music, no matter foreign or domestic, has penetrated Chinese internet media & society culture (I was born and raised in China) in all sorts of forms in the recent years and the trend is accelerating, and I am interested in studying the phenomena as to why it is happening and how the music industry is going to evolve in the future.
Regarding the reading, I resonate with the idea that Sterne mentioned in the last couple pages – ” …return some specificity to the analog as a particular technocultural sphere… that reality is just as analog as it is digital; and conversely, that it is just as not-digital as it is not-analog”. To me this quote is saying that the analog coexists with the technology that we have and is not just the complement of what is “digital”. And conversely the “digital” expands what is the analog too – For example, I think that the use of autotune in music, the application of computer animation in movie industry all proves the point. The “digital” can be something that we can see and feel in our lives – we can find them in live performances and movie theaters – but it is also “part of the domain of human existence” as Sterne describes it. However, the reading is really filled with a lot of technical terms which made it hard to understand, and I hope to have a better understanding of them through class.
Hello, my name is Imani and I am a sophomore in SEAS studying Computer Science with a minor in Sustainable Engineering.
In the reading, I appreciated that the author gave specific examples that disproved definitions of analog versus digital. I could understand that the author wanted readers to know that there was something between digital and analog, and that we don’t live in a binary world of just these two things, but I couldn’t name anything specific that would be characterized outside of these words. But, when the author disproved Brand’s discrete/continuous comparison with pianos, magnetic tape, and sirens, the space outside of analog and digital began to shape for me.
I didn’t like that there was a decent amount of technical jargon that made the chapter more difficult to read.
My name is Cleome and I’m a junior at Barnard majoring in American Studies (with a concentration in music in American pop culture and media). I work in artist management and marketing for two different record labels, I am an opera singer, and I am involved in several music-oriented clubs including CU Records, WBAR, Rare Candy Magazine, and Snock. I am excited about this class because I am invested in the impact of digital media on the music industry. From the introduction of MTV, to the algorithms of streaming services, the industry has shifted considerably in the past several decades and will continue to do so. I hope that through this course I can fill in some of the blanks in my music education and better understand the technological aspects of the industry.
I appreciated Sterne’s tracing of analog’s definition in the Oxford English Dictionary in the first few pages of the reading and loved learning about the comparison of food processing to sound processing on p.33. From these first few pages of the text I understood Sterne’s point that digital and analog are more complex than a simple binary. However, by introducing many other voices and definitions, the terms became muddled together in my mind rather than clarified (it even seems as if he acknowledges this difficulty in his conclusion?).
Hi- my name is Sahana and I’m a junior majoring in Comparative Literature and Society. I sing jazz music and play classical violin, and I’m interested in seeing if/how digital music production and other technologies that mediate sound, also have an a impact on improvisation. I’m also curious as to whether digital rights and internet activism may have a place in spaces of musical fusion and inter-genre collaboration.
Sterne references Lacan, who says that the real cannot be represented. Does that imply that the analog recording, which captures every moment in time, is more real than the origin of sound itself (the singer or instrumentalist who’s making the sound.) I was a little confused by his argument here, and I also thought that he didn’t do a very good job of explaining the difference between the analog and digital in the first few pages. He seems to define digital as everything not analog, and analog as everything not digital, and then he discredits this claim but then seems to keep coming back to it.
I liked the idea that analog technology has grown with our self-understanding of the senses that mediate the world, and that analog as a “technocultural sphere” is one central to human existence. It points to deeper ways that we can interact with the digital world, born from the idea that intricacies of computation reflect a certain technology of nature.