Sterne casually mentions early on in his chapter the way in which a recorded voice is abstracted from the body, similar to our definition of the abject as something which once belonged to the body now existing outside of it. Though I don’t think we consider the recorded voice to be abject at this point, the idea of a voice recording existing while the voice box which gave rise to those sounds rots in the ground merits further contemplation.
I was originally very skeptical of voice recordings aimed at an imagined future audience, mainly for reasons of human pride and narcissism I feel must be inherent in such a recording. However, I remember in one of my classes last semester we listened to a recording of a black Southern woman as part of our examination of Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological work. Hurston (one of Franz Boas’s mentees) recorded this woman herself, and the existence of this recording allows us to now examine Hurston’s use of dialect in comparison to how people actually spoke (and find that Hurston’s work was incredibly accurate and thorough). Some of Hurston’s recordees had also been enslaved and the phonograph gave them a method in which to tell their own story on their terms. As with Fewkes’s research, there is a sense of time stripping away this opportunity. Hurston’s method was to use her positionality as a Southern black woman to ingratiate herself into the communities where she was performing ethnographies, so I wonder how her recordings compare to those of Fletcher and Fewkes in terms of constructed and only external nature. Regardless, when we consider anthropological work, clearly the voice beyond the grave has intellectual and academic merit beyond self-important postulating.
To say that sound reproduction is both hypertemporalized and detemporalized, as well as storing time itself is very theoretical, but makes me think of how I use song recordings to tell time in my life. For example, when I shower, I track how long I take by how many songs I’ve listened to (assuming most songs are between three and four minutes as has become the standard) (another interesting investigation might be into why this time length is so popular). I also demarcate certain periods of my life by what song I was listening to on repeat (do not ask about the month where all I listened to was Landslide). I wonder how we can connect the despacialization of sound/communication as introduced by the telegram and phone and the detemporalization of sound as introduced by the phonograph.