The short history of recorded sound becomes, conversely, a teleology of silence. While the sheer physicality of this new medium that allows one to handle "frozen sound," as Mark Katz has it, is initially thrilling, a desire to forget the existence of this clunky intermediary device grows quickly. Moving from cylinders to phonograph records, vinyl records, tapes, and CDs, the goal is always to place the music in the middle of an vast, noiseless abyss, that this music might sound realer than real, a siren of purity emanating from a hushed continuum. Of course, this silence is a put-on: the level of immaculateness striven for is certainly overkill in every sense of the word, for the elimination of error is necessary the elimination of a human element.

        Even as the recording process becomes an increasingly limitless means of documenting and cultivating creativity, so too does the almost comically violent vocabulary of the recording studio point to a destructive desperation designed to choke out all unsanctioned stirrings. Control and tracking rooms must be "deadened," killing all sneakily resonating frequencies with spongy, sound-absorbing surfaces placed at nonparallel angles. Drum heads, too, must be deadened, an effect achieved by veritably taping their mouths shut. The initial full-band track laid down at the beginning of a session for later reference is nothing so much as a "scratch track," the animalistic clatter that will be entirely cast aside as each successive part is overdubbed and replaced. Most unfortunately, the sound of whatever is being sung to that inevitably leaks from headphones to microphone is simply called "bleed," the faint, tinny remains of one's fellow bandmates, perhaps. The willful sound wave is tortured in all sorts of ways: compressed, limited, distorted, overdriven, delayed, fuzzed, and baffled. 

          Such hygienic sound was not necessarily expected from the outset. Thomas Edison already felt that his phonograph was "practically perfected in so far as the faithful reproduction of sound is concerned" by 1878, and though we may (and should, by god) laugh at this, he is sort of right. The machine does just what it is supposed to: it makes an audible record of an event, albeit one that has a few pops and clicks on it. It is curious to note which of Edison's original terms have stuck. As Hans-Joachim Braun points out, our use of the word "record" is something of an insult to the concept (22). "Phonograph" works far better - written sound. We are still very much in the business of writing sound, but deal little in recording it. Why then do we cling to Edison's vision of a "faithful reproduction of sound"? 

            It is no wonder that we so prod and torment our creations, for indeed, they have become less a reproduction, but more a representation of self in audible format; Greg Milner even claims that "making a sound recording may be the ultimate narcissistic act" (371).Held under the scrutiny not of two and a half minutes of a tinfoil trance, we can self-examine at a rate of 192,000 twenty-four-bit samples per second, the best digital approximation of the analogue sound wave, a mirror in 0s and 1s. We are bound to exhibit a little anxiety.