Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History

This paper studies the prehistory of the birth of modern media: the externalization and instrumentalization of the senses in the 19th century. It addresses, first, the inherent contradiction in the idea of these changes, that the desire of theoretical and medial separation of sound phenomena never has been able to disentangle from the fields of other senses. Second, the detachment of sound phenomena from the body is inconceivable without the reciprocities between body and medium (for example, that the latter always expresses the deficiencies of the first). While the physiological and acoustical research of Helmholtz played a leading role in the externalization of the senses, the acoustic inventions of Edison pioneered their instrumentalization. They both represent determining moments in the history of sound recording. Media history as philosophy of history like this is able to reveal: new media as vehicles that carry our senses and bodies across the space-time-continuum, introduce us to old modes of experience that we never recognized we had before and therefore seem new.