Methods of Investigation
The Medium is the Massage
theme & process
Where are the boundaries of sounds? Especially in a collective living environment, sounds come through walls and drown people out from all sides. While the body is at home, the ear is forced to be the receiver of all sounds and the views and the emotions they convey from public places. The ear has no particular “point of view”. (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, p.111)
The notion of “the medium is the message” (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967) made me think about what is the medium and what is the message. Sound is the message when the recorder is the medium, and vocabulary and intonation are the messages when sound is the medium. Therefore, I tried to switch mediums and wondered what happens to the message itself when the bearer of the message changes from sound to text. Referring to the relationship between sound and text, McLuhan (1964) argues that the advent of the written word created privacy and that when only sound existed, everything was public. In other words, the change in medium leads to a change in the properties of the message. Beyond this, it is interesting to note that when I introduce different mediums – machines and humans – as the medium between message and text, the results are very different. Due to language and clarity issues, the machine was unable to translate accurate text and complete sentences, and there was a lot of repetition of meaningless letters and words. The machine is more concerned with the words it hears, whereas when the medium of translation is a human being, the focus becomes the environment beyond the words, and the message becomes a variety of physical objects in public and private spaces.
‘Death of the Author’ Image, Music, Text
Form
When the not-so-advanced, or rather basic, formatting machine started converting the audio, which is full of noise, I unexpectedly got letters that did not make sense, phrases that did not follow each other, and large blank spaces. While the machine was running to translate the audio, I noted down what I was listening to in parallel. The different conclusions reached by the objective machine and the subjective me about the same audio are symbolic of the fusion and conflict between the mechanical and the human in “a multi-dimensional space” created by words (Barthes, 1967, p.146). In this space, broken letters or words are synthesized into new narrative stories. When talking about the responsibility for a narrative, Roland Barthes (1967, p.143) proposes that “it is language which speaks, not author”. In the stories relayed by the different inhabitants, the characters and plots of the initial stories fade away and the text becomes fragmented again, barely held together by the connections created by the text itself. In this multi-dimensional space, it does not matter who made the story or who relayed it, the text is naturally reorganized and recreated.
Bibliography
Barthes, R. (1967) ‘Death of the author’ Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press.
McLuhan, M. and Fiore, Q. (1967) The medium is the massage. Berkeley: Gingko Press.