Introduction

 

In this final lecture for the course, I have a several aims. Firstly, I want to reiterate some of the important points we have covered, Secondly, I want to talk some more about one particular theme that has stood behind all the others, that is, the relationship between digital audio, technology, and contemporary culture. This time, however, I will not be engaging in any critical analysis or explication. Rather I want to look at the implications the current cultural and technological milieu has for your future work in audio. Although there is no reading for this week, I do want to introduce one more important critical perspective on digital audio and contemporary culture, which I think helps put your position as audio producers in a useful context. To that end we will be dealing briefly with some of the ideas of one more critical theorist, Manuel Castells, and his conception of the Network Society.

 

During this lecture I will be posing a series of questions, designed to gauge your response to the course and its content. While it is not necessary to do so for assessment, I strongly encourage you to take the time to post responses to some of these questions to your etute for the (informal) seventh tutorial.

 

Technical skills and critical contexts: finding the right mix.

 

In this course, we have looked at (digital) audio from many different perspectives. The contexts we have covered should be of use to you in your future multimedia work, whether that be in web development, video, interactive applications, games, or a specialization in audio. While you have gained a very broad base of practical skills and technical knowledge that will equip you well for a career in multimedia or digital audio, I believe that it is a good understanding of the issues involved and an ability to think critically about the role of audio that will give you an advantage. The history of web development practices is an interesting and useful parallel.

 

The World Wide Web was “released” (or perhaps unleashed) by CERN in 1991. Before this time, the Internet was an important tool for researchers, and the email and other electronic communications and messaging services it supported had come to be very important for academics, the military, and corporations. However, to use these services it was necessary to be familiar with the workings of command-line based interfaces such as UNIX. To do anything more than use services such as email and email based discussion lists, ftp (file transfer protocol) or USENET (newsgroups) required serious IT skills. In 1992, the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Chicago released the Mosaic browser, allowing point and click navigation of the Web. Support for digital media, such as audio or JPEG images was not built in to Mosaic, at least in the early stages, and the ability to hear any audio contact by the technically “naive” consumer of WWW sites was out of the question. With a little technical knowledge it was not difficult to embed helper applications to make unsupported audio, graphic and video content readily available, however at the time the WWW was new, and the Internet itself was new in the public consciousness, so outside of universities and research institutions there was not very much technical skill at all.

Similarly, the creation of web content was largely limited to those with institutional connections to academia and research institutions. Tim Berners-Lee’s HTML was not a difficult language, but exposure to programming and computing in general was limited. Nevertheless, the WWW flourished. 1993, the year of Mosaic’s introduction saw a growth in web traffic of 341,634% (H’obbes’ Zakon). Later developments, the most significant of which was the introduction of the more fully-featured Netscape in subsequent years furthered the popular reach of the WWW.

 

In the early 1990s, web design was an HTML centered phenomenon. A web page consisted of text, some images, and usually a carefully designed background image, a feature that has all but disappeared from contemporary web design. The ability to construct a web page was in itself a specialized skill. This changed in 1994 with the release of Softquad’s HoTMeTal, the first commercial release of a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web page authoring package. Many others followed. This had several important consequences. It meant that people with limited technical and IT experience could quickly produce web pages of the same standard as the hand-coding, IT-savvy producers. It also created a new paradigm for the creation of the web page that was based around looking, seeing, and placing elements on the screen. This lifted the bar for what was considered a good quality page.

 

Nowadays there are some very intuitive, very powerful packages. Through its dominance of the corporate and home computing world, Microsoft’s FrontPage has become very important. While FrontPage was always a graphical, wysiwyg application, from its first release it included prebuilt page templates, with a variety of “looks and feels”. Once more, those who had developed HTML, or wysiwyg compositional skills found that producers with much less skill were able to produce clean, professional web pages automatically with FrontPage.

 

Whereas the FrontPage style of page represented design sophistication and greatly democratized the process of web page production, the web was soon full of pages that were quite obviously generated in FrontPage, and as soon as the FrontPage look and feel became recognizable, it no longer represented a professional, sophisticated image. The advantage remained with those who had the design and/or HTML skills.

 

Today, the use of audio is becoming de riguer in cutting edge web design. This is in part due to the increasing popularity of the WWW, the increase in bandwidth and decrease in access cost, and particularly because of the increasing prevalence of pages containing Shockwave elements, particularly those created wit Macromedia Flash. Flash is a powerful authoring tool with a major focus on providing animated interfaces for the WWW, and allows for the relatively easy incorporation of sound. Recent versions of Flash contain a library of sounds for different purposes; clicks for button presses, thuds for error messages and the like. Increasingly, these easy-to-locate, easy-to-use sounds will become familiar, and with the contempt bred from familiarity, will be recognized by many as software-generated boilerplate, in the same way as the FrontPage template has become ho-hum. To keep ahead of the pack in design terms, it will be increasingly important to use sounds intelligently, to have the critical skills to reflect on the purpose of the audio component of a multimedia text or product, and to be able to design, produce and deploy original and appropriate sound.

 

The WWW is only one place in which digital audio is important, but the same argument applies to most other areas. For example, the most recent version of Adobe’s Premiere digital video authoring application allows you to specify a start and end point in your digital movie, select a type of music, and automatically score your film with Premier-generated music. Similarly, Sonic Foundry’s Acid and Acid Pro are tools which are powerful and easy to use. Acid-built music is becoming prevalent in many areas of multimedia. Currently, the results of relatively automatic cutting and pasting of elements from Sonic Foundry sound libraries may sound impressive. As we become more and more familiar with the production paradigm represented by this platform, the necessity to use Acid intelligently to produce audio that is appropriate and polished will become more important.

 

Since the software with which we make multimedia becomes more powerful and easier to use with each passing year, the ability to use any one given package will not be a lasting advantage. The ability to make appropriate connections between theory and practice represents a continuing advantage in this rapidly moving environment.

 

Question: In what area of multimedia would you like to specialize? What do you think is the most important lesson from the contextual strand of this course that will help you in your future career?

 

Question: If you do not plan a career in Multimedia, what aspects of this course do you see as being of must importance for you in your future career?

 

 

Contexts for digital audio: the story so far

 

I will now run through some of the important elements we have covered in the course and gloss a little on some of the issues I see as important for your future work with digital audio.

 

The specific qualities of audio

The course started with an introduction to the physics of audio, and with a discussion of the differences between the audio and the visual at a phenomenological level. In a culture that places great stress on visual communication, Audio is often seen as something secondary, yet the nature of audio is that it is not as directional as the visual, nor is it possible to ignore totally (you may recall Ashley’s assessment that we may have eyelids, but we don’t have earlids.) As a result, Audio is often the first part of any text or multimedia product to claim our attention. Perhaps, and this is debatable, once our attention has been gained, our tendency to approach things from a visual frame of reference is primary. Yet audio has the capability of reaching out from a text or product in a unique way.

 

Audio is also quite distinctive on the level of affect. There has been much mention of audio’s ability to evoke a mood or capture a feeling in a distinct manner. Audio can have a visceral and emotive effect that is quite different to what can be achieved from the visual. In part this is because of the nature of our auditory senses, and the fact that we are enveloped by sound in a way which does not apply to other senses, with the exception of smell, and we are still a long way from being able to digitize that sense.

 

While it is relatively easy to identify these specific qualities of audio and talk about them subjectively, it is more difficult to be critical and analytical regarding the nature of audio. Chion’s work, and in particular the different modes of listening that he defines, are a good reminder of the particular qualities of audio, and a useful way of foregrounding the different purposes of audio during the process of design or critique.

 

Of course, there are many things that audio does not do well. Audio texts cannot be navigated as well as written texts – for example, you can re-read any of the sentences in this lecture that you find difficult, and can leap from your current place to an earlier section to strengthen links and refresh your memory. While audio is not strongly directional, the visual is, and for that reason it was the provision of a graphical interface that lead to the growth and success of the WWW. The visual is strongly spatial, and is strongly connected to our ability to interact with multimedia. The mouse works through visual, not audible, feedback, as we watch its trajectory across the screen and coordinate this with our guiding movements. It is for this reason that the rapid development of audio technology and the use of audio in the design of multimedia has been somewhat obscured. The visual and interactive elements of computer-mediated communication are tightly interwoven, and the advances made by technologies such as the web and the computer game have been driven by developments in this field. Of course there have been historical exceptions to this particular precession, such as the development of radio. The only contemporary example I can bring to mind is the development of telephone based interfaces to services such as banking and voicemail.

The flexibility of audio

As has been mentioned or implied in several places throughout this course, the qualities particular to audio mean that it is a particularly flexible means of communication. In one sense it is far more flexible than print or the visual. All of us have grown up with the electronic media, and much of what we know has come from the radio or the audio component of television. Audio also communicates in other ways. I grew up in Central Queensland, and one enduring memory of my childhood is the alarming cyclone warning noise that would interrupt television programming during the long weeks of summer holidays. This very well designed and alarming noise managed to communicate something quite urgent without recourse to words, or anything we would usually consider as language.

 

This extreme flexibility of audio is something that you should always keep in mind. For instance, the provision of an audio interface for a computer application at once needs to function well at an intuitive level, by indexing or referring to familiar real-world (or virtually-real world) sounds and situations. As well as functioning as mnemonics and references, the components of an interface need to work well as sounds. They must be audible, at an appropriate volume so that they neither become obtrusive or ignorable. They need to work to convey affect, so that the user finds them pleasant, or at worst  not irritating. Ideally, they should work well as a sonic environment, and should instill an appropriate aura, whether that be of solidity, slickness, fun or something different. While the abstracted nature of audio means that there are an infinite number of ways to approach any sound design task, that does not mean audio use can be ad hoc.

 

Question: Since embarking on this course, have you found yourself listening differently? In what sorts have situation have you payed new attention to sound, and how has that listening been different?

 

Ethical issues

Some of the lectures in this course have directly discussed ethical issues. Others have discussed contemporary events involving related issues such as intellectual property rights. In considering postmodernism and cultural production we touched on issues of ethics in artistic practice. It is important to remember that when you use audio to tell someone’s story, whether in their own words, through field recording, or in any other way you are representing them, or the situation they are in. This must be done responsibly, sensibly and one must remain constantly aware that there are political issues inherent in the act of representation through any media. The use of field and voice recordings not only works to convey a narrative to representation, they may also have the status of a primary document, and as such must be used responsibly.

 

I hope that you will also remain aware of the importance of intellectual property. There is a lot of audio available on the WWW and on CD-ROM. An extremely small proportion of it is available as public domain use. While the problematic status of digitally “shared” music has been highlighted in the media in recent years, it is still relatively easy to find web sites offering samples of audio from TV and music sources for free and open use. This does not mean that the producers of such sites have the right to make the material available in the first place.

Modes of expression in the postmodern era

Throughout this course we have looked at many different modes of expression possible with audio, and in particular those easily facilitated by digital technology. We have also considered the notion of postmodernism, both as an ethic that guides (much) contemporary cultural production and as a cultural mode. An awareness of the traits that mark much contemporary audio production and cultural and social formations that are identified as postmodern will help you critically assess your own work as well as the contemporary cultural scene. The discussion of the poststructuralist approaches that form the philosophical basis of postmodernism has been but a brief survey, but should be sufficient for you to distinguish between postmodern practices and what could be loosely termed a postmodern ideology. The degree to which technology and poststructuralist philosophy are causally related to such practices has been left open. In your future work within your degree and after your graduation I hope you will continue to be aware of these issues, as this will lead to a deeper understanding of the place of digital audio and multimedia in general in cotemporary culture.

 

Paradigms of production and consumption

To wrap up this last important point it is necessary to move beyond a review, and to introduce one more important theoretical concept, that of the Network Society. Consideration of this issue will not only extend and strengthen your understanding of the relationship between technology, audio and contemporary culture, it will allow us to reflect on the nature of the course, with particular regard to its practical/technical component. You should take the time to revisit lecture eight and refresh your memory with regard to Michel de Certeau’s concepts of strategy and tactic before proceeding.

 

The Network Society

 

One influential theorist who rejects postmodernism as an organizing principle in favour of technological factors in analysis of contemporary culture is Manuel Castells, and for another perspective on the relationship between audio, technology and culture we will turn briefly to his work. In The Rise of the Network Society, volume one of his series The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Castells outlines his view of the Information Age, as he identifies the current period. Central to the social, economic and political organization of information age is the concept of the network society, that is, a society organized around networks, which are typically mediate by information technology. As Castells writes in the conclusion to The Network Society,

 

Our exploration of emergent social structures across domains of human activity and experience leads to an overarching conclusion: as a historical trend, dominant functions and processes in the information age are increasingly organized around networks. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our society, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture. While the networking form of social interaction has existed in other times and spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for its pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure. (469)

 

Note that by “network” Castells does not refer to a computer network, that is, his understanding of the term is not the same as one might find in the discipline of Information Systems, although such systems are part of the “material basis” of the expansion of networks. For Castells, a network is

 

a set of interconnected nodes. A node is a point at which a curve crosses itself. What a node is, concretely speaking, depends on the kind of concrete networks of which we speak. They are stock exchange markets, and their ancillary advanced services centres, in the network of global financial flows. They are national councils of ministers and European Commissioners in the political network that governs the European Union. They are coca fields and poppy fields, clandestine laboratories, secret landing strips, street gangs and money-laundering financial institutions in the network of drug  traffic that penetrates economies, societies and states throughout the world. They are television systems, entertainment studios, computer graphics milieux, news teams and mobile devices generating, transmitting and receiving signals in the global network of the new media at the roots of cultural expression and public opinion in the information age. (470)

 

Networks, for Castells, consist of combination of elements that may include social, political, economic and technological factors. The network is not determined by the technology, and networks can exist and flourish without digital and communications technology. However, since networks are predicated upon the transfer or flow of information between nodes, and IT and digital technology facilitate that transfer, the technologies of communication and digital media are key elements, and in many ways shape cultural expression in the network society.

 

Before moving on, you might like to read a concise summary of Castell’s arguments. Cliff Barney, editor of the online magazine “Tales of the Network Frontier” provides an outline. While Castells does give much space to issues of culture and cultural expression, Barney’s summary is skewed towards economic and workplace issues, but remains useful. 

 

In the discussion of file sharing in lecture eight, it was suggested that the uses made of digital technology by parties such as the file sharing community and individuals like Napster founder Shawn Fanning were tactical in nature. We can consider that the community of file sharers is a culture built around a network. That network is built around the flows of “information” such as digital audio files, knowledge of where, how and when to access files and file-sharing applications, and the file sharing applications themselves. The nodes of this network include the file sharers, the entrepreneurial individuals who initiate communication forums, resource and news sites and the like dedicated to file sharing and digital audio, the producers of audio material who utilize file sharing for publicity and the file sharing applications themselves. It can be argued that the kind of operation natural to the network in Castell’s terms is the tactic. The operations that sustain the network are tactical, for instance, the “leaking” of the Kid A tracks at the time when the Radiohead “blips” had become a major cultural artifact within the network is a tactical move, made on territory “belonging” to the record label, but enabled by the sophistication and ease of use of the technology through which the network is sustained.

 

There are many elements of this course that are similarly network-centric. For instance, the work that you have done for assessment involves the use of several different applications. In producing your work, you are transferring information from one application to another to produce something that cannot be achieved using one single application. In part this is a consequence of the nature of digital audio within contemporary multimedia technology. Since it is the visual that tends to lead the way and define the trajectories of technological development in multimedia, various vision-centric multimedia functions have coalesced around several large applications. There are products like Dreamweaver that can encompass nearly all web development tasks. Since audio remains behind the visual in the evolution of these development paradigms, there are fewer comprehensive packages, and Premiere or Final Cut Pro that will handle nearly all video development tasks. Audio applications tend to be more specialized, and in a sense subservient tools such as those mentioned above. However the ability to make use of networks in order to identify applicable tools and to have the technical skills to be able to connect technical nodes is an extremely significant skill for multimedia, and of rlife in the Network Society.

 

This course has fostered these technical skills and understandings. It has also gone a long way towards teaching you the kind of communications skills appropriate for and necessary to working in networks by including elements such as etute discussion.

 

Making use of networks

I hope that you have found the network-centered approach of this course satisfying. In order to maximize the benefit you gain from this course, particularly if you want to continue honing your digital audio skills, you should continue being active in the digital audio network. You should keep up an interest in and awareness of contemporary developments in digital audio and multimedia by surfing for interesting audio sites, by reading current scholarly and popular work in the area, by keeping active in online forums for audio, and by practicing your skills and making sure they are visible to others in the network. One way of doing this is to keep producing, and put some of your work up on the web. Keep in the know by making use of services such as Yahoo Groups  and MSN communities.

 

Question: How important do you think what we might term “network skills” will be to your career in multimedia or your chosen field?

 

A final note

I would like to thank you all for enrolling in this course, and bearing with some of the teething problems that so often attend the first run of a new and complex course. I hope that you have found the course rewarding. I especially hope that you have a deeper understanding of and appreciation for digital audio in all its variety.

 

I would also like to thank Ashley Holmes and Martin Francis for coordinating this course during its first run. They have made a great contribution  to the course and have done a great job running it.

 

To all the students of MMST12016, good luck, and I hope that this has been interesting and challenging and will have benefit for you in the future.

 

Works Cited

 

Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society, Malden: Blackwell, 1996.

 

Zakon, Robert H.,  “Hobbes’ Internet Timeline v5.6”, http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/, April 1 2002.