vocalic projection: a work in progress

Music: Between Interval: Autumn Continent (2006)

Today I worked on two measley paragraphs. TWO. I am uncertain why it takes me so long to spit something out these days (well, that's not true: I know why, I'm just frustrated I cannot "bracket" as well as I once could). Once I get the thing rolling out, though, the writing spirit usually takes over, maranatha style. Maybe that will happen this weekend.

Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past is an awesome book, by the way. Reading this tome makes me nervous: my next book will simply pale in comparison to its brilliance. It's not discouraging; its just one of those books that, when you read it, gives one a sense of his or her place in the pecking order of good scholarship.

Anyhoot: here's a draft of the introduction of the current essay in progress:

On the Uncanny Voice of Acoustic Projection

Results obtained by my collaborators affirm the existence of the phenomenon, and unless the mind is immovably fixed on some preconceived theory, we seem to be faced with the inescapable conclusion that the voice-phenomenon confronts us with an autonomously existing world hitherto unknown.

--Konstantin Raudive (303)

For the Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive, "dead air" was not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps with the exception of local college and National Public Radio station broadcasts (respectively with their untrained "uh"-prone disk jockeys or those slow-speaking, commonly cold commentators), dead air is that unfortunate if not startling moment when a video or radio broadcast falls unexpectedly silent, rupturing the charged "flow" of broadcast with a blank screen or an audible buzz of ambient hiss (Williams 179-187). As one of the earliest pioneers of capturing "electronic voice phenomena" or "EVP," however, Raudive registered dead air as faint and often nonsensical messages from the dead, ghostly voices discernable only with an ear finely tuned to rapid, rhythmic streams of multilingual speech.

Inspired by the ghost voices accidentally discovered in the 1950s bird-song tape recordings by the Swiss artist Friedrich Jürgenson (Banks 77), Raudive devised a series of experiments in the 1960s in which he used a microphone and magnetic tape "to record the ambient sound in an apparently empty room. The experimenter then replayed the ten-to-fifteen-minute section of the tape several times, listening very closely for voices that emerged only with intense scrutiny and concentration" (Sconce 85). Raudive eventually moved on to finding EVP with a radio tuner, and then published his findings in English as Breakthrough: Electronic Communication with the Dead May Be Possible in 1971. Apparently the book was read by academics, psychics, and paranormal investigators worldwide, thereby spawning an EVP movement that was more recently popularized in the 2005 Hollywood horror misadventure, White Noise, and its stronger 2007 sequel, White Noise 2: The Light (Bander 9; Sconce 85).

Of course, many have dismissed EVP as the aural equivalent of the Rorschach inkblot test, which operates on a "hard-wired" human tendency to find patterns in otherwise nonsensical sensory stimuli (Banks 80; Nass and Brave 2-7). In addition to our well-documented and researched cognitive tendencies, however, the vocalic attribution that underwrites this postmortem preoccupation also participates in the affective processes of projection. As a common defense mechanism, projection typically refers to a practice whereby "qualities, feelings, wishes or even 'objects' which the subject refuses to [recognize] or rejects in himself, are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing" (Laplanche and Pontalis 349). As Joe Banks has detailed, however, studies from Gestalt psychological perspectives identify projection as a central mechanism of listening, such that our cognitive tendencies to "read familiar shapes into clouds, or melodies into the monotonous rattle of a train" are motivated by "emotional agendas," of which an individual may not even be conscious aware (78-79). For example, although an individual cannot help but recognize a pattern in a Rorschach inkblot, the character of what she sees is shaped by latent and overt fears and desires. Hence, projection is not simply a process whereby an individual displaces things she does not like about herself onto another (projection), for it is simultaneously a form of wish fulfillment (indentification). From a secular standpoint, then, EVP is a practice of acoustic or vocalic projection that bespeaks an unwillingness to accept mortality or, alternately, a strong desire for immortality.

A number of media theorists and historians have observed the constant and ubiquitous association between fantasies of immortality and communication technologies. John Durham Peters has argued a centuries-old belief in "soul-to-soul" communication, rooted in Plato and extended through the work of Christian theology, was literally amplified to a popular, Spiritualist craze by the technological innovations in the Nineteenth century (63-108). The "dream that electricity can mingle souls" was exacerbated by the advent of telepresence-via telegraphy and telephonics-and led to a popular movement with mediums claiming to be psychic telegraph and telephone operators to the hereafter (94). Jeffrey Sconce has shown that EVP and related spiritualist practices is also a consequence of disembodiment: the intellectual leap from voices of the living traveling across a geographical distances to the speech of dead souls traveling across the spiritual plane is a rather short one (59-91). Finally, Johnathan Sterne has demonstrated that from the advent of the wax cylender phonograph, writers interested in sound recording

repeatedly produced tracts on the possibilities for hearing voices of the deeased as some kind of guarantee or signature for the cultural and affective power of recorded sound. The chance to hear 'the voices of the dead' as a figure of the possibilities of sound recording appears with morbid regularity in technical descriptions, advertisements, announcements, circulars, philosophical speculations, and practical descriptions. (289)

Telepresence promised communication with deceased loved ones; sound recording, however, promised a new form of archival immortality-one that escaped the deadness of script to dwell in the interior presence of recorded speech.

Although fantasies about voices from the dead are ubiquitous in the history of modern communicative technologies, few scholars have explored why human speech is foregrounded and celebrated as the primary object of communication with the dead as well as the most cherished means of preserving them.[i] In the spirit of Walter Ong's work, in essay I argue that modern communicative technologies have "stepped up the oral and aural" in pursuit of Ong's now famous thesis: "Voice, muted by script and print, has come newly alive," even in after death.ii Of course, Ong is most known for arguing that the transition from an oral culture to a print culture effected profound epistemological changes. Perhaps contrary to the assumptions of some readers, however, in the 1960s and 70s he argued consistently that new visual technologies only increased the significance of voice and speech in Western culture. "Recordings and tapes have given sound a new quality, recuperability," said Ong, and, interestingly enough, at the very same time period that Raudive was recording and scrutinizing dead air.

What is it about the human voice that gives it such a special, ontotheological status for Ong and Raudive? What is the relationship between this privilege and sound recording? Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Mladen Dolar, Steven Conner, and others, in this essay I examine EVP and its demonic counterpart, backwards speech, in order to suggest that speech as such is uncanny, often provoking a deeply ambivalent, characteristically religious response of fear and hope from auditors. This response, in turn, is catalyzed and intensified by the practice sound recording, goaded by an archival impulse. Hearing voices in a recording of noise-from dead air, to the gurgles of one's coffee pot, to the sounds of a record album played in reverse-is merely an exaggerated form of vocalic projection that I argue is becoming increasingly common in our image- and screen-saturated environment: from the "black-box" recordings of downed aircraft, to the taped emergency phone-calls of Nine-eleven victims, to the saved voice-mail messages of a deceased loved one, vocalic projection has become a primary means by which we memorialize-and avoid-the dead.

Notes

[i] Stearne's history of sound reproduction is a notable exception. Although he does not grant ontological privilege to any one of the human senses (e.g., the assumption that visual studies has trumped sound studies, and so on), Stearne does underscore the fantasy of "idealized hearing (and by extension, speech)" that underwrites discourse about the possibilities of new communicative technologies (15). From Plato onward, hearing and speech are understood as "manifesting a kind of pure interiority," while seeing and vision concerns the outside and exterior. Consequently, the dead are often heard before-or if-they are seen.
[ii] Ong, Presence, 88.