Schizochronia: Time in Digital Sound

  • John Potts

Abstract

You are sitting in front of a screen. The screen may be part of a digital audio work station, or it may be the screen of a laptop. You press a key and watch as the cursor moves through the waveform. You hear the sound at the same time as you see it traversed by the cursor. You decide to retrieve a sample, which you’ve stored in the computer. It’s located way up ahead of the present waveform: in a few seconds you’ve scrolled forward, claimed the sample and positioned it next to the waveform. You magnify the image, to get a better ‘look’ at the sound. You decide to insert the sample into the waveform, trying various positions. If you change your mind, nothing is lost: this is, after all, non-destructive editing.

Keywords

Visual Display Recorded Sound Digital Audio Visual Term Marshall McLuhan 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Notes

  1. 1.
    Pierre Levy, ‘Toward Superlanguage’, in International Symposium on Electronic Art 94 catalogue, Helsinki: University of Art & Design, 1994, p. 10. This is an updating of the proposal made in 1977 by Jack Goody that writing is an ‘intellectual technology’ that creates a ‘different cognitive potentiality’ (The Domestication of the Savage Mind, p. 128).Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Ken C. Pohlmann, Principles of Digital Audio, Indiana: SAMS, 1992, p. 40.Google Scholar
  3. 8.
    R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980, p. 90.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© John Potts 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • John Potts
    • 1
  1. 1.Macquarie UniversityAustralia

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