Charles Hardy’s use of quadraphonic audio to create pieces of “audio ephemera” such as “This Car to the Ballpark” are not just aural artwork, but soundscapes. The movement of a train across the four speakers and the layering of sounds such as rain and crickets behind singing and William Robison speaking create the illusion of various levels of proximity to the listener. The (abstract, nonmaterial) train appears to travel southwest to northeast as the whistling sound that emanates from it moves from one speaker to another (while in fact, the original audio is flat). In this way, the audio-scape is made three-dimensional through form.

Hardy creates a similar affect when he pairs a woman’s narration with the jangle of a name tag and the pitter-patter of dog paws in “Virgins.” The narrator tells about meeting a man at the same time the sound of his voice emerges, giving the listener both the voice of recollection and the present-tense audio of the plot. In this way, the piece of audio art conveys two temporalities at once. While not as synesthetic as the “movement” in quadraphonic audio tracks, this technique constructs a sort of travel that’s imagined.

This clear manipulation of “space” and “time” seems to be an integral element in aural art making, unlike the more historical audio pieces that Hardy’s career focuses on. However, the presence of these spatial and temporal illusions in Mordecai Mordant’s Audio Ephemera reminds a listener that these aural devices are available to historians and journalists too. While historians typically attend to the structure of audio with a fidelity to “fact,” these topographical and temporal manipulations are possible in the development of those truthful narratives too. In fact, I can recall Ira Glass of This American Life explaining how radio newscasts will switch from one journalist to another to give the illusion that the newscaster delivering a specific story is somehow closer to the real action. This illusion of temporality and geography seems to be one of the elements that Hardy celebrates through his artwork—one of the “performative elements” that he hopes will keep historians and documentarians interested in the form of audio and its true material, the sounds themselves (159).

While I’m wary of a historian getting too exuberant about these techniques and can envision a misguided attempt to create propaganda, I agree that developing these technical skills will make historians better analysts of audio and its aural devices. A strong understanding of the devices available to audio recorders and mixers enables a historian to investigate the integrity of any produced piece of oral history. In this way, Charles Hardy has the expertise to both create and analyze complex sound landscapes, but also to fabricate audio history, if he should so choose.

However, it feels unfair to evaluate Hardy’s work in these ethics. Mordecai Mordant’s Audio Ephemera is a nostalgic celebration of sounds that are easily overlooked and lost. The presence of the whistling train or William Robinson’s muffled mumbling—and the ability to play each again and again—is the point in and of itself. They’re ephemera in an ephemeral medium—the sections that would be edited out for the very purpose of “sticking to the facts” or “point.” Ironically, maybe it’s the art, which uses these manipulative techniques to map space and sound, that creates the “truer” history—one that presents the sounds alone rather than the meaning that language fashions those sounds into.