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The Materiality Of Mediating Music

Imagining non-mediated popular music is close to impossible. Rather, mediating technology may be considered a central and defining trait of popular music. Hence, pointing to a state of ‘before’ or ‘outside’ of mediation, a state of ‘raw’ or ‘original’ sound simply makes no sense when dealing with this genre.

This article is the starting point of a cross-disciplinary project focusing on music as mediated, particularly aimed at studying the role of mediating technologies in the sound of music. Of special interest in this article is how the concrete sound and musical recording of a pop tune may be understood in relation to the possibilities and constraints of radio or other media used in musical distribution and listening. Our interest is not in seeking the essence of media or medium specificity in a modernist sense, such as claiming that the essence of painting is ‘flatness’ (cf. Krauss 2000). Still, our belief is that technology as well as social and institutional practices in music and media production do influence popular music sound.

Not everyone shares this assumption, especially not in the age of digitization. One increasingly hears claims of convergence and talk of a ‘post-medium’ condition reducing the role of individual media. This paper will take as point of departure claims of convergence – particularly assumptions that digitization erases ‘material aspects’ of musical recording. After a brief presentation of some central theoretical contributions on this topic, we will go on to confront these claims with an investigation of mediation and materiality in contemporary popular music, using Madonna’s "Don’t tell me" from the album Music (2000) as point of entry. Our first main focus will be on musical production, before turning to the process of reception and how our experience of mediation may differ in various contexts.

Music in a post-medium conditionWriting in the mid 80s, Friedrich Kittler is one of many contemporary

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scholars forecasting convergence. His claim is straightforward, and related to digitization:

The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface. […] Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound or voice. And once optical fiber networks turn formerly distinct data flows into a standardized series of digitized numbers, any medium can be translated into any other. (Kittler, 1999: 1-2)

Thus, not only will media converge, but also the very concept of a medium will disappear according to Kittler and fellow critics. An assertion related to such claims, is that digitized media loose the ‘material qualities’ associated with the process of mediation in analogue media. In their eulogy to phonography, Eric W. Rothenbuhler and John Durham Peters are among those who draw a sharp distinction between analogue and digital media, raising interesting claims about the semiotic status of analogue and digital sound:

In terms of the logic of the sign-referent relation, the difference between analog recording and digital recording is the difference between indexes and symbols in Peirce’s scheme. The analog recording is an index of music because it is physically caused by it. The digital recording is a symbol of music because the relation is one of convention. (Rothenbuhler & Peters, 1997: 249).

One might certainly question the premise that analogue recordings bear a direct physical relationship to an original sound event. This was once the case, during the era of direct engravings of live performances. For most of popular music history, however, even analogue recordings have been composited from multiple recordings or sessions, in principle not unlike the case of digital recordings. Furthermore, digital recordings have routinely been released in both analogue and digital reproductions since Ry Cooder’s Bop till you drop (1979) was recorded digitally, as is the case of more recent or previous analogue recordings. Yet, our main interest lies not in challenging the problematic ‘indexical/physical’ premise in Rothenbuhler’s & Peters’ argument, but rather in discussing the distinction they make between digital and analogue reproductions.

2 (draft version - not for citation!)

In Rothenbuhler's and Peters' view digital recording not only lacks an indexical relation to a physical aural event, but the digital record – the CD in this case – bears no indexical trace of use. Since digital sound can be reproduced without any generation loss and played back without any signs of time passed, digital sound shows no indexical signs of wear and tear of use. In contrast to digital sound, the playback of analogue records:

[…] audibilizes two histories: one of the recording and one of the record. […] The data encoded on the CD do not mix with the history of the disk; they can be obscured by dirt and scratches, but dirt and scratches cannot sound from a CD player. As the history of records speaks while they are being played, they thus invite us to think about the passage of time; by contrast, CDs obscure it. (Rothenbuhler & Peters, 1997: 255).

In order to discuss such assertions of convergence and loss of materiality of mediation in digitized recordings, we would like to use an example from Madonna’s album Music (2000) as point of departure, before coming back to some general points at the end of the article.

Mediating Madonna’s Music Madonna’s "Don’t tell me" (Music, 2000) makes use of a format well known to a pop and rock audience. The instrumentation is in one sense modeled on the traditional lead vocal with band; the form of the song is binary with verse and chorus, etc. Along these lines, one might argue that contrary to the sound and texture of much contemporary dance music, which is almost unthinkable without recent technological developments, "Don't tell me" could in fact have been realized by means of analogue tape recording techniques or in a live performance.1

However, the medium, or mode of production and reproduction, is made an important part both of the musical and the cultural signification of this song. One of the most striking material traces of mediation on this track is the use of what we may call a digital 'jump-cut'. The effect resembles a CD player having problems in reading the information on a CD. As we know this might happen when a record has become dirty 1 Insert note on JOE HENRY and other versions of the same song, for instance LIZZ WRIGHT ”Stop” on the album Dreaming wide awake (2005).


(literally speaking). It may also be a sign of a ‘worn-out’ laser. In both cases, the effect is caused by various forms of wear and tear, and the sound may, thus, be understood as an index of use – in the sense that Rothenbuhler and Peters reserved for analogue playback. Hence, it seems also digital sound and reproduction technology in certain cases may show indexical signs of use, and – we would argue – in some sense may invite us to think about ‘passage of time’ and the ‘history of the disk’, to use Rothenbuhler’s and Peters’ terms. Furthermore, it may even invite listeners to reflect upon the act of mediation and technical reproduction, as will become clearer below.

The sonogram below gives a visual representation of the digital jump-cut, showing, for example how the ‘digital black’ cut-outs (represented in white) makes the music skip the first beat of the second bar, and how the last beat of the fourth bar has a very small sound bite repeated in a way that is impossible to achieve in the same way by a musician in live performances (both when it comes to the rhythm and the identical sound), but easy with the practice of copy and paste.2 In the following we will dwell shortly on the introduction of the silent pauses in the opening bars, and what they may mean.

One central premise for the further discussion is that silence may have several different functions in different media and communicative situations. In pantomime, for instance, silence is part of the ‘frame’ and a normal state, leaving silence without any communicative importance. In theater, however, silence is a communicative activity.3 In this context silence may be interpreted in relation to the sound preceding and following it. In addition to these broad categories of silence as a state and silence as communicative activity, we propose that the latter may also be subdivided. On the one hand there is planned silence appearing as part of work itself, such as pauses in music, silence introduced by actors to raise tension in a play etc. This may be called ‘textual silence’, as it is part of

2 We need no sonogram to notice these effects, as they are very obvious. A visual representation, however, ‘freezes time’ and translates an aural flow into a visual representation of certain events that may thus be simpler to draw attention to.3 See a fuller discussion in Jaworski 1993 and Maasø 2002.


the text or work itself, and is often scripted as silent pauses in plays, film scripts, music notation etc. In addition, aural media, such as stereos, radio, television, film, etc. may have what we might call ‘medium silence’, where the medium seizes to function either as an error of technology – or because it is designed so as to appear as such. Put differently, when the old Cantor in the classic movie The Jazz Singer (Crosland 1927) surprises his son (Al Jolson) singing jazz in his home, he cries “STOP!”, resulting in a 19 second pause, before dramatic music continues under the action. This stunning silence is perhaps the first dramatic use of textual silence in cinematic dialogue. When this and other early sound films were introduced in theaters, however, medium silence was more common than textual silence, exemplified in the following newspaper account of the first sound film exhibition in an Oslo cinema:

The same way people from the country side quickly get used to the clatter and noise of the city, the silent movie supporter will soon enough come to accept the many noises of the sound film. We experienced this already yesterday: When the sound equipment shut down […] and the movie finally went silent, it did not only seem comic, but the mute scenes seemed empty and stupid. (Arbeiderbladet, September 12, 1929)

Medium silence is (as in this case) most often non-intentional, and is even considered a major taboo in many cases, such as ‘dead air’ in commercial broadcasting.4 Yet, it may also be used for aesthetic purposes, and take on a communicative role similar to textual silence, which we argue is the case in Madonna’s "Don't tell me". Here the CD as a digital medium, and the possibilities of digital drop out, is explored as an effect.5

‘Textual’ and ‘medium silence’ in "Don't tell me"As shown in the sonogram, the silence in "Don't tell me" is, on a technical level, what one may call ‘digital silence’ or ‘digital black’: in this case the 4 The main reason for this taboo is that it may lead to channel switching, or, as in the case of FM-radio, to the signal of a competing channels seeping through ‘stealing’ the frequency. Cf. Mott (1990) or Maasø (2002).5 Other kinds of technical errors may be used in order to make similar aesthetic effects to ‘medium silence’, such as the use of ‘broken film’ and faulty projectors in the animated classic Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, 1953) and in countless other examples.


signal drops out completely, not even leaving a hiss or ‘dead air’, but a complete lack of any sound.

Figure 1: Sonogram of the first four bars of the intro (9.6 s). A grid is added with fine lines representing each new quarter note beat and thicker lines marking each new bar.

In "Don't tell me" the generic expectations raised by the acoustic riff during the first bar drive us to expect a repeated – or developed – rhythmic figure in the following bar. When silence is introduced on the fourth beat, one may on the one hand interpret this as an ‘active’ silence – in the sense described above, in theater – raising tension and expectations of a returning phrase or riff. On the other hand, if heard as a complete silence (depending somewhat on the listening conditions) – or a ‘digital black’ – this is clearly not part of such generic conventions, and will thus appear strange, if not inappropriate altogether.

When the riff then reappears ‘mid air’ during the 5th beat — so to speak — and confirms the missed downbeat and cut-off phrase, we would argue that the silence is – at least for some seconds – clearly marked out


as a ‘digital drop out’ of the listening medium, and hence a medium silence. The silence in this case ceases to be part of the text or of the communication, and is instead (at least initially) marked as being a technical error, which drains the pause of potential communicative force, that might still have been there if the riff reappeared on the ‘downbeat’.6

For listeners hearing this as medium silence, only when the subsequent silent pauses form a rhythmical pattern in a steady temporal flow, does the frame change again, and we hear the seemingly random digital dropouts as a highly meaningful device, both rhythmically and otherwise. In other words, it soon becomes clear that the presence of digital jump-cuts on this track is not a sign of a worn-out medium. In the beginning of the song, however, the effect still plays on the index of use, outlined above, signifying a form of digital ‘weariness’. Put differently, the presence of digital jump-cuts displays, by way of imitating a common malfunction of a certain medium, the function and presence of the very same medium.

Interestingly, as the song proceeds, the connotative meanings linked with digital weariness gradually fade away. Instead, the effect becomes more and more musical. Towards the end of the song, the effect is not only experienced as a textual silence altogether, it is ‘normalized’ in the sense that it has become almost purely musical, adding important rhythmic and textural qualities to the sound. Also when perceived as a musical-aesthetic means, however, the jump-cuts indicate the presence of a digital medium, seeing as such an effect could not have been realized in the same way - at least not to such an extent - by way of analogue media, since analogue media are rarely able to reproduce silence without any noticeable hum or noise, as with the ‘digital black’. Moreover, the silent jump-cuts contribute to the overall impression of the groove, which 6 As will be discussed later in the article, silent drop outs may indeed be interpreted differently according to the listening conditions and the playback medium. In some conditions it may be argued that it is not a medium silence at all. A technical error caused by a scratched LP would typically lead to an ellipsis of the temporal flow without any silence. LPs could thus cause a skipped beat, but not a missed beat. In the latter case silence is inserted into an ongoing temporal flow continuing after the pause, which is not the way a needle tends to behave when meeting a scratch on an LP.


conveys a highly quantized, digitized feel, typical of much club music from the digital era. Equally important in this regard are the many quantized tracks operating according to a subdivision in 32nds. The hi-hat, for example, may have been produced by quantizing a poorly played hi-hat pattern. Quite a few strokes seem to be positioned in odd places, most typically one 32nd before or after what would, in a played groove, be regarded as a more idiomatic location. The bass drum also contributes to this quantized feel. The upbeats to the downbeats are straight 32nds, and throughout the song there are some characteristic recurring bass drum rolls of 32nds.

The use of silence takes on yet another layer of meaning when interpreted in light of the lyrics. After the characteristic jump-cut effect is introduced in the intro, the first verse reads:

Don’t tell me to stopTell the rain not to dropTell the wind not to blow’cause you said so, mmm

Whereas sound has been associated with life, fullness, temporal progression and community, there is a long tradition for metaphorically associating silence with death, emptiness, temporal immobility and isolation.7 Along these lines, it may be argued that the use of silence in "Don't tell me" is making audible a place outside of sound and time, alluded to in the lyrics. This is underscored by the way Madonna’s voice is edited. The word “stop” in the first line tellingly ends with a silenced ‘p’. This way of editing gives the impression of the human voice suddenly being cut off, underscoring the threat of immobility or absence of life in the lyrics. In other words, the effect of the inserted silence in this song may be analytically divided in three: initially it comes forward as an indexical sign of the act of digital mediation, for then to be heard as a musical-aesthetic means as it becomes normalized during the course of repetition. It may, however, also be interpreted as a textual silence related to the theme of the song.7 Cf. Maasø (2002: 95f), Peters (1999: 160f), Schafer (1994: 256).


Mediation as a signifier of past and presentThe way silence is inserted into the sound in "Don't tell me" is quite untypical for the singer-songwriter tradition and the musical style of country music alluded to by way of the format and the instrumentation of the song. Rather, such a way of editing sound, especially if taken together with the programmed, quantized feel of the rhythm tracks, connotes a modern urban space linked with contemporary club culture and digitally produced dance music. Combined with the fact that such a microrhythmic design, like for example the rolling patterns of bass drums, are unplayable in the way they are designed in this groove, these features may be interpreted as signs of mediation found on this track.

The sound production of "Don't tell me" is not unique in displaying the signature of its mediating technologies. Another distinctive artist employing similar techniques from the same time period is Squarepusher, the performing pseudonym of British electronic music artist Thomas Jenkinson. In "My red hot car" on the album Go Plastic (2001), the presence of digital music technologies is striking from the very first bar. The ‘high definition’-feel of the programmed, quantized rhythm tracks and the processed voice are the first signs of digital mediation on this track. The most striking part of the song as regards digital mediation, however, occurs in the middle section of the song, where Jenkinson explores the possibilities of digital editing to the full in an extensive montage of chopped-up sonic material. The result comes forward as a well-formed cacophony of sounds.

Nevertheless, the use of silence in this case is quite distinct from "Don't tell me". While one will clearly hear the silent ’bursts’ as ’digital silences’ in "My red hot car", the silence never appears as ’medium silences’, but wholly as ’textual’. This is in part due to the fact that the silent breaks are much shorter than in "Don't tell me" or are enveloped in other continuous patterns of sound or reverb, and partly because the ’chopped-up’, rhythmical use of silence is gradually introduced into the song after a 16 bar intro, when a chopped-up vocal enters on top of a repeated four bar pattern in drums, bass and synth organ that continues


into the verse. The silence here is therefore put forth as a communicative silence displaying a playful processing of digitized sound and silence, rather than as digital dropouts of the medium itself.

While "My red hot car" points more or less unequivocally to one specific moment in the history of music production, an important aspect of "Don't tell me" lies in the way in which it plays on the relation between old and new forms and media in popular music, as well as on the contemporary listener’s deep sensitivity to the signatures of different media. In a short essay called “The Revenge of the Intuitive”, Brian Eno reminds us that artists often play on these sensitivities, since “in the end the characteristic forms of a tool’s or a medium’s distortion, of its weakness and limitations, become sources of emotional meaning and intimacy.” (Eno 1999). Joseph Auner, in an essay called “Making Old Machines Speak: Images of Technology in Recent Music”, also addresses the meanings produced by relating old and new technologies in music. He draws on several instructive examples. From the pre-digital era he points to Pink Floyd’s montage of old and new media on the album Wish you were here, (1975). In the transition between "Have a cigar" and "Wish you were here" the poor, noisy sound of an old distribution medium, an AM transistor radio, is contrasted with the crisp intimate sound of the new technology of that time, namely home stereo equipment. (Auner, 2000: 7,8,9)

From the digital era, Auner uses several songs by Portishead to demonstrate how the foregrounding of recording media and musical technologies may be used “to engage tradition and to manipulate memory and time” (Auner 2000: 13). As Auner rightly points out, Portishead can produce a very strong emotional charge, and quite surprisingly, one might say, they do so by using samples and allusions to outmoded styles, old movies and soundtracks in a highly stylized, often ironic, way. Their focus on the limitations and weaknesses of old mediation technologies, such as for example the noise caused by dust and scratches on a well-used, and tacitly understood, deeply loved, vinyl LP, contributes to bringing out a nostalgic theme, a mourning for a lost past,


running through many of Portishead’s songs. Nevertheless, there is still an emphasis on the presence of the contemporary digital technologies through which these outmoded technologies are re-entering the present. In this respect Portishead’s use of old modes of mediation differs from what might be called a more traditional nostalgic use, where the expressiveness of the old forms of mediation is left undisturbed by the contemporary media actually in charge of mediation.

As Auner also points out, old technologies often connote authenticity, warmth and wholeness while the framing contemporary mechanisms mediating the old sounds remain invisible (inaudible).8 In one of the Portishead examples discussed by Auner, the song "Cowboys" from the album Portishead (1997), the sound of a highly distorted electric guitar is sampled and looped. Instead of playing on this instrument’s connotations to rock authenticity, however, the sample is used in a way that not only foregrounds “the fragility and imperfections of the old materials, but exposes their artificiality.” (Auner 2000: 30). It could be added here that the sound of this ‘guitar’ is so far from the sound of a traditional rock guitar that it would not trigger these connotations in the listener at all. It may also be doubted whether the source of the sound actually is a guitar, or if the source is, for example, rather a synthesizer? However, whether one buys into Auner’s interpretation of the origin of the guitar-like sound or not does not change his main point: instead of letting the act of mediation remain transparent, the mediating technologies are foregrounded, leaving an irreducible impact on the sound and the meaning of the music. In another example, "Undenied" (Portishead, 1997), Auner points to their play on the contrast between digital silence and vinyl noise (Auner 2000: 14). The song is marked by continuous vinyl noise, but this is interrupted at two key moments of the song. At these occasions the

8 One of Auner’s main concerns is “the question of how instruments and media become marked as “old” or “obsolete” in the first place.” (2000: 6). As our examples reveal, the relation of old an new in the field of musical media comes forward as a rather dynamic one, for as Auner points out, the age of a 300 year old Stradivarius or a 30 year old Stratocaster do not mark these instruments as old or obsolete. (Auner 2000: 6).


absence of noise added in post-production or, in other words, a kind of digital silence enveloping the musical sounds, is used to create intensified emotional tension, opening up for a heightened presence of the almost trembling, highly emotionally charged voice of Beth Gibbons.

Returning to Madonna’s "Don't tell me": In the Madonna universe, there is no mourning, not even an ironic one, of the impossibility of calling back a missing past. Nor is there any attempt at restoring the sound of such a past. Instead of commenting on the limitations and weaknesses of old technologies, or exploring the potential expressiveness of these weaknesses, it is rather the presence and the potential malfunction of a contemporary medium that is brought to the fore. It is the weaknesses and the limitations of the new that are put into play. In fact, Madonna’s use of an old, or perhaps rather timeless format (the song), past technologies (acoustic guitar), and a traditional musical style (country), comes close to the Jamesonian notion of pastiche in that there is no claim as to the validity of the relation to a presumed origin, to a real past, or a real tradition. Neither is there a “satiric impulse” in the use of these elements. (Jameson 1984: 65, 67) Rather, the past and the musical tradition possibly representing this past is approached by way of stylistic connotation. In this respect her music resembles Beck’s highly eclectic use of former styles and genres, a feature also commented upon by Auner in his essay. (Auner 2000: 16)

In fact, the way in which the dialogue between tradition and contemporary music technology evolves in "Don't tell me", links up with what might be understood as an overarching theme of the album Music, and, one might say, of Madonna’s oeuvre in general, namely the play, re-invention and co-optation of stereotypical identities and forms. In parallel with how Sean Albiez (2004) describes her visual image as “a hyper real urban/rural cowgirl …a club version of the Western look”, the musical solutions in "Don't tell me" point toward a similar artistic strategy in the field of music: "Don't tell me" is the club version of country-pop. Moreover, the polished sound bears all the common signs of glamour and artifice commonly associated with a Madonna production. As Albiez writes, there


is very little on the album that asserts itself as Country music per se, but the turn to acoustic instrumentation within a digital environment, and songwriting that alludes to acoustic singer-songwriting, mixes the organic with future machine music. (Albiez 2004: 131). The traces of the process of mediation, whether that be the play on the presence of a digital medium or the iconography of Western values, transforms country & western — a style connoting authenticity and traditional American values — into its own hyper real travesty. Neither the singer-songwriter tradition nor the country genre, nor the modes of production associated with these traditions, are necessarily associated with something outdated in the first place. When contrasted with the digitized chopped-up rhythms produced by the digital tools, however, the song format and the instrumentation of the song come forward as belonging to another era.

In other words, also in this case the introduction of modes of production linked with new digital technology marks the “old” medium, the song format, as old, but this exchange between old and new is not nostalgic, as is the case with Portishead. The use of digital silence as a marker of digital mediation also takes on very different meanings in Portishead’s second-hand aesthetics and Madonna’s pastiche-like universe respectively. In both the songs by Portishead and Madonna’s "Don't tell me", however, what could have been left to transparency is in stead made audible. As in Portishead’s "Undenied", although the effect of it differs, the use of digital silence in Madonna’s "Don't tell me" comes forward as more than a play on the presence of a certain medium. The audible interplay between the signatures of old and new production media has in fact become an indispensable part of the meaning of the song, with regards to both the domains of aesthetics and semantics. Moreover, when Madonna uses the silent jump cuts as an effect alluding to the fragility of digital sound production, this effect is not well established and immediately recognizable as a conventional sign of pastness, such as the vinyl noise mentioned above, or the effect of a scratched film. Madonna nevertheless manages to make the digital jump into an effect marking the specificity and historicity of a contemporary medium during the course of


the song. And in marking the present as history in this way, Madonna also achieves a powerful act of communication, forwarding her sensitivity in interpreting contemporary culture and her power to pull back and ‘go meta'. Over a few bars of music, Madonna thus both manages to say that digitization is passé (and so-o-o 1999) – and at the same time reasserts herself as The Queen of Pop.

Convergence, stardom and genre - Economic and industrial factorsIf produced in a different way, for example in accordance with an ideal of reproducing a live performance, "Don't tell me" could perhaps have been used to support the claim that medium in the age of digital reproduction leaves no mark on the content. However, Madonna is a branded pop star, which means that there are certain presumptions on the side of the industry and the listeners alike regarding what kind of ‘package’ Madonna is expected to deliver. One aspect of this concerns the expectation that she will use state-of-the-art production technology. Another and related aspect lies in the tendency to pick up, explore and comment on the latest innovations and trends. One might thus ask whether it would at all be possible for an artist like Madonna, with her position and history as a pop artist, to record "Don't tell me" without commenting on the medium and on the ‘artificiality’ of the potentially nostalgic format used by this song.

This situation raises the question of the role of other factors than technology in the discussion of digital technology and media convergence. One aspect of this is the manufacturing of stardom. As was pointed out in the anthology On record, the most important commodity produced by the music industry may not be records or songs, but stars. (Frith and Goodwin 1990: 425) In keeping with this, one might assume that, without reducing the importance of a willed consequence in her artistic intentions, the economic and institutional constraints of the music industry linked with the branding of Madonna, the star, could perhaps be thought to have overruled a different strategy in her appropriation of genre, or new technology, anyway. As was pointed out in the analysis above, even though country is a new field of ‘research’ for Madonna, her pastiche-like


approach to tradition in "Don't tell me" links up with earlier productions that are also focused on playing and commenting on stereotypical identities and forms. Moreover, it displays a polished ‘artificial’ sound commonly associated with a Madonna production.

Another, related aspect that should be considered in this respect is the different role of technology in different genres. Although new media have been of the greatest significance for the development within the cultural industries in general, new media hold different positions and have been used differently for example in country music and pop respectively. As Keith Negus has pointed out, different genres in fact represent different forms of creation, circulation and consumption of popular music. He writes, “genre categories inform the organization of music companies, the creative practices of musicians and the perceptions of audiences.” (Negus 1999: 3). Different ‘genre cultures’ represent different ways of producing and distributing music, including different traditions for appropriating new technology. This means that even if the use of digital technology is central to both the production and distribution of country & western and contemporary pop music, there are important differences in the expectations regarding how this technology is going to be used. This is not least true when it comes to the question of whether the mediating technology is allowed to leave its mark on the sound or not. In a genre culture with no focus on contemporariness or artificiality, but, on the contrary, on authenticity and tradition, the ideal is media transparency. Digital music technology is in these cases used rather in order to let the actual mediating medium disappear in favor of the audibility of a vintage medium, such as for example steel guitar or analogue recording devices.

In other words, when considering claims of convergence in the age of digital reproduction, other factors, such as the manufacturing of stars, musical traditions and existing practices linked with genre cultures, may in fact overrule what have been conceived of as a technological ‘imperative’, understood as an inherent tendency to make use of the latest technological innovations in the most contemporary way – an assumption often underlying the discourse on technological mediation of


music within technically oriented disciplines.9 Furthermore, added to the weight of these other factors is the point that they most often go together with economic interests. The culture industry is not an innovation driven business. Innovation is in fact expensive and involves a high risk of losing money. Thus, as David Hesmondalgh points out in his book about the cultural industries, the creative autonomy of artists is often limited, and there is a danger that any change in direction of musicians or of an artist will receive an unsympathetic response from the record company. (Hesmondalgh 2002: 169)

Last, but not least, the factors discussed above, the star system as well as the cultural and industrial factors that are linked with genre, are not only constraints on the production side, but also imply constraints on the side of listeners. The reception of Madonna clearly put limitations to her choice of artistic ‘course’. In some senses, Madonna is not free to do anything she chooses, but has to take into account the listeners’ expectations. Pop music is not a one-sided communication process. It is a dialogue between artists and their audience, or in the words of Negus: “Musical sounds and meanings are not only dependent upon the way an industry is producing culture, but are also shaped by the way in which culture is producing an industry.” (Negus 1999:13)

Summing up, Madonna cannot be nostalgic, she cannot leave the medium, the carrier, to silence. Her music is expected to include such connotations to contemporariness as those her use of medium silence invokes. Moreover, it is in the interest of the culture industry to maintain different cultural spheres and channels of circulation. The act of mediation cannot be separated from such forces. The presence of digital media at the production side is not enough to ensure convergence, since the way these media are actually used are to a great extent subordinated to the expectations these different musical spheres activate with regard to mediation.9 As Andrew Feenberg has pointed out, there is often a certain technological determinism at work in analyses of the role and impact of technology on modern society. A premise for this technological determinsim, which originates in one reading of Marx, is that ”social institutions must adapt to the ’imperatives’ of the technological base.” (Feenberg 1999: 77)


So far we have discussed matters of importance concerning expectations related to production and institutional practices. There are also matters to consider in the sonic constraints of distribution media, as well as in listening practices. To this we will now turn our attention.

Convergence, distribution media and listening practicesConvergence is often used as a ’totalizing term’, covering everything from black boxes to markets, networks and rhetoric (cf. Fagerjord and Storsul, forthcoming). However, the fact that music is distributed digitally, and that this form of distribution is shared with other digitized types of information – pictures, text whatever – does not mean that music is no longer different from graphics, or that radio listening is no longer different from using the iPod. Also Hesmondalgh, in a discussion of Castell’s analysis of the role of media in the information age, is critical of what he labels “the homogenisation-through-convergence” hypothesis put forward by Castells. Hesmondalgh finds, for example, that the development within the cultural industries after the second world war, that is, during what he calls “the complex professional era”, is characterized by “a pattern whereby new technologies tend to supplement existing ones, rather than replacing or merging them, leading to an accretion of separate devices.” (Hesmondalgh 2002: 236) According to Hesmondalgh, this pattern has not been severely changed during the last twenty years.

When Auner addresses Pink Floyd’s transition between "Have a cigar" and "Wish you were here" (Wish you were here, 1975), he writes that it

[…] sounds as if it is sucked out of the speakers into a lo-fidelity AM radio broadcast. The radio is evoked first through the cramped, tinny sound quality and static, and then confirmed as the radio is retuned through several channels—in what is itself a striking trajectory through newscasts, discussions, and excerpts of symphonic music—before settling down on a station broadcasting a mellow guitar accompaniment. As the radio continues


to play, we become directly aware of the person in the room who has been tuning the radio, as he clears his throat, sniffs, and then starts to play along on an acoustic guitar. (Auner 2000: 8)

Importantly, this effect, writes Auner, could not in itself have been recognizable to someone listening to this on a portable AM transistor radio. Rather, this effect is dependent on FM stereo or home stereo listening, which boomed in the mid 1970s when the record was recorded.

Similarly, the jump-cut effect in "Don't tell me" is dependent on a certain kind of distribution media and playback in order to achieve the status of (first) medium silence, then textual silence. Two typical ways of listening to "Don't tell me" would be on the radio or on a CD-player connected to home stereo equipment. In both cases, it is likely, at least it was when the song was new, that the listener would experience the opening of the song as a sign of a bad CD-player in the radio studio, or at home, before realizing that this was but yet another of Madonna’s clever tricks. In the case of radio listeners, there could be no way of knowing for sure, listening to the musical text alone, whether the song was played back from an CD, DAT or a hard disc, for that matter. Yet the well-known jump-cut effect associated with CDs is likely to make listeners in both situations draw the inference that it in some sense was a bad CD disc.10 In both cases the initial silence was heard as medium silence – i.e. as a problem with the CD-player or radio – not as textual silence, or an aesthetic effect. If, however, the listener heard the song on MTV or had a passionate relationship with analogue records and bought an LP, she would, for different reasons, probably immediately have heard this as textual silence. In the first case, the continuous movement on the visual track would have been a sign that there was not something wrong with the TV signal (the movement freezes in the video, but there is no jump-cut effect as the movement continues from the same position after the

10 According to Wikipedia, many listeners returned their CDs, believing it was a disc-malfunction (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Tell_Me_%28Madonna_song%29).


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Tell_Me_(Madonna_song)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Tell_Me_(Madonna_song)

freeze.) In the case of LPs, such a jump-cut effect simply is hard if not impossible to imagine with the technological constraints and possibilities such record players afford (cf. footnote 6). Flaws more typical for television and LPs as technologies, would, for instance, have been a frozen or chopped up image, with silence or bursts of white noise in the first case and Portishead-like scratching in the latter.

Our main point here is that the listening conditions and the choice of playback medium influence the way certain artistic effects are heard – such as narrow or broad frequency spectrum and stereo effects in the Pink Floyd case, or silence in the case of Madonna. This also points to the inherent problem of making judgments about material traces of technology and mediation from listening alone. As Umberto Eco wrote three decades ago, it is a fundamental characteristic of any sign that it can be used to tell a lie (1976: 58f). Any act of mediation thus introduces something ‘between’ the original sound (if such exists) and the listening to this sound. The hiss of history often heard on CDs, may thus be a sign of a digitized version of a vintage recording – as well as a post-80s pop-production parasitically sucking authenticity, grandeur, and historicity from the scratches of an old record.

Moreover, when it comes to radio listening, whether or not "Don't tell me" is produced and transmitted by analogue or digital means is in some ways subordinate to the role of radio as a medium in the shaping of the sound of the song. For example, institutional and economic factors, such as casting and signing of stars to fit TV and radio play (as indicated above), as well as generic constraints of radio formatting (cf. Maasø 2002), have no doubt played pivotal roles in the shaping of popular music sound in the past, and there is little evidence to suggest that such structural and economic factors in the cultural industries will cease in importance in a digital future. Also important in considering claims of convergence is that listening practices will most likely not converge, but rather diverge, as we are provided with even more possibilities for mobile and private listening on a presumably increasing number of different listening devices.


Progress and nostalgiaAs pointed out above, as regards artistic strategies, the new digital technological means rely on established cultural modes. As we have heard and seen, the strategies used by Madonna and her producers are in accordance with aesthetic solutions and strategies that are also present in Madonna's earlier work. In general, we might say that Madonna’s "Don't tell me" fits well into what might be called the ‘genre culture’ of contemporary pop music. It does not deviate severely from common expectations linked with the creation, circulation and consumption of this tradition. In line with this, it may be argued that the appropriation of new technology happens first and foremost within a context where technology offers solutions and possibilities within the framework of existing values and practices (cf. also Danielsen, 2005). Or put differently, the appropriation of new technology does not take place in a cultural vacuum; both the use and the understanding of new media rely on existing cultural modes.

One aspect of the latter seems to be the recurring belief in the transparency of contemporary media, a belief that in turn can be linked to the narratives of progress and innovation underlying the story of new technology within modernity.11 The belief in the transparency of contemporary media does not seem to be limited to the current age of digital reproduction. In keeping with this, we might ask why the currently dominating form of mediation of music – digital audio – in particular should remain transparent for all future, and thus be the transparent medium per se in a historical context. We would be surprised if this form of mediation would not, at some point in time, sound dated or obsolete as well, and thus be drawn into the dialectic of old and new described in Auner’s essay. In such dialectics, as Auner demonstrates, old technologies

11 In his discussion of technological determinism, Feenberg claims that such a position relies on two premises: unilinear progress and determination by the base. With the former he points to the view that technical progress appears to follow a unilinear course, a fixed track, from less to more advanced configurations. For a presentation of the latter, cf. footnote 9. (Feenberg 1999: 77)


are often left to connote authenticity and pastness, while the new or contemporary medium is allowed to remain transparent.

One aspect of this, as Auner rightly points out, is that we are trained to overlook the limitations of current technology, believing in the promises of transparency and fidelity (Auner 2000: 10). When home stereo equipment conquered our living rooms towards the end of the 1970s, this medium was also thought to leave no mark on the ’content’. Although we may today notice the analogue noise accompanying Pink Floyd’s "Wish you were here", it is our claim that at the time of the release of Pink Floyd’s classic album, we did not hear the medium in this way. The home stereo equipment or FM stereo radio supposed to bring us this magnificent, impressing contemporary production, remained transparent.

Returning to Kittler's, Rothenbuhler's and Peters' claim of convergence and the interlinked idea of the disappearance of mediation in the age of digital reproduction, their theoretical contribution may also be read in light of just such a modern story of progress and innovation. Moreover, discussing the loss of the medium specificity of our analogue past also seems to relate to the flip side of such a narrative, which is the mourning over a lost, more authentic, warm human past.12 (This aspect of the modern world’s ambivalent relationship with its own modernity is made use of by Portishead, for example, in their nostalgic play on the weaknesses of analogue technology.) As Madonna reminds us, however, also digital technologies have material aspects and may take on a certain weariness. Moreover, the opacity of digital mediation also comes forward in the form of certain modes of musical production and reproduction typical for this medium. For example, the foregrounding of both the limitations and the possibilities of digital production technology in Madonna’s Music makes current certain aspects of a technology that are often not heard. As such, the musical production of "Don't tell me" displays that even in the digital era there is medium specificity, for example in the form of material traces of the history of mediation.

While "Don't tell me" may be regarded as an exception, exploring the

12 Cf. for example, Berman 1982.


boundaries of digital mediation, materiality and indexicality in an age of presumed heightened possibilities for media transparency, Madonna’s play on the shortcomings and presence of digital mediation may nevertheless make us consider digital reproduction and mediation in more general terms, pointing at how nostalgic accounts of analogue media and, vice versa, claims of the lack of medium specificity in the digital age, may cast a nostalgic veil over mediation as such. A consequence of this may be that past and current practices seem more different to each other than they perhaps are. If one insists on the ’disappearance of mediation’ or digital convergence, one in fact risks overlooking the specific material aspects involved in contemporary aesthetic practices, as well as the economic and institutional factors of the cultural industries constraining the production as well as the reproduction and use of digitally mediated music.

This, however, points at the importance of investigating technology as it is actually used. Questions regarding the impact of digital technology on our society and culture ought not only to be met with the visions of technologists or studies of technology in isolation, but through concrete studies of cultural and historical practices. If not, one may end up looking at culture only through the rear view mirror, which may be fascinating, but not particularly useful if one is to understand the mediation of contemporary music – such as Madonna’s Music.


ReferencesAlbiez, Sean (2004) "The day the music died laughing: Madonna's and Country", in Freya Jarman-Ivens & Santiago Fouz-Hernández (eds.) Madonna's drowned worlds : new approaches to her subcultural transformations, 1983-2003. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Auner, Joseph (2000) “Making Old Machines Speak: Images of Technology in Recent Music”, in ECHO: A music centered journal vol. 2 No. 2 (Fall). Available online at www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo [last visited february 2006].

Berman, Marshall. 1982. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Simon and Schuster.

Danielsen, Anne (2006, forthcoming) “Technological Mediation and the Musicalization of Reality on Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet.” Proceedings from the Art of Record Production Conference. London.

Eco, Umberto (1976) A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Fagerjord, Anders (2003) "Four Axes of Rhetorical Convergence", in Dichtung Digital vol. 30 no. 4, <http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/4-fagerjord.htm>.

Fagerjord, Anders & Tanja Storsul (forthcoming). “Questioning Convergence” (article manuscript).

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http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/4-fagerjord.htm

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Maasø, Arnt (2002b) "Rollen til radio og TV i formidling av populærmusikk", in Jostein Gripsrud (ed.) Populærmusikken i kulturpolitikken. Oslo: Norsk kulturråd.

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Rothenbuhler, Eric W. & John Durham Peters (1997) "Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory", in The Musical Quarterly vol. 81 no. 2, Summer, pp. 242-264.

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