It seems that the question of ethical appropriation, or ethical use of appropriated sound recordings, is located in the act of editing. There is a violence there, a “cleaving” that is natural to the archive, as it is often mandated by the space restrictions (temporal or physical) of storage or creation: hours of testimony must be compressed into a ten minute news segment. Or, original intention for the media is subverted/reconstructed/made new. But is it possible that the decision to record (a person’s voice, a natural sound, an instrumental roar) marks the entry point for ethical discussion? I wonder this because to record is to create, as Hardy suggests, from a real voice or acoustic event

 

“…a close facsimile of their vibrations captured by electro-acoustic technologies” (148).

 

The recording is the first inscription. Not the thing itself but its facsimile. There is another cleavage—captured instants—that otherwise might have drifted into chaotic memory (heard and forgotten) or passed unremarkably into a collision of open-air vibrations. The audio archive is those collected pieces of recording technology. Working with the voices of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, I listened to digitized recordings in the WPR’s web archive, I also handled a clunky cassette player placed on a table in the physical room to access lectures and readings not yet digitized, but stored on tape and kept on shelves in a closet just behind the door to the curator’s office.

 

Maybe, memory is the first inscription. Hardy makes the distinction that “[m]y memory, narrated through the sound vibrations of my voice, is another piece of history animated through sound” (148). Memory narrated by the body. I think Robert Pinsky says the medium of poetry is not language, but the column of the body through which air flows.

 

I appreciate what I understood as Hardy’s lingering desire make audio art beyond the audio documentary/oral history documentary. The expansion Hardy seems to be hoping for is a move towards materiality and the construction of space—soundscapes—rather than narrative. Narrative has a place in the construction, but it is no longer central to the document. Hardy points to Graeme Miller’s “Linked.” The public installation he cites as being “[b]illed as ‘a landmark in sound, an invisible artwork, a walk’” (159). In the creation of the soundscape or audio walk history is returned to the body through geography. Rather than sound pumped into the ears through headphones or ear-buds, the body occupies the same space as sound—it affects the skin.

 

The audio archive is the body. It not only determines how we sound, how we hear, and how we record: why do more than two channels of audio become disorienting? Is the body the site of first inscription? (Is that different from memory?) I think of Derrida’s discussion of circumcision as the “immemorial archive…on your body proper.” And I wonder to what degree the creation of space through sound—and particularly the sound of archival audio fragments, because these are the fragments captured outside of memory as facsimiles—is part of a desire to return (ethically like restitution) memory, and the physical experience of sound.