Room for Noise in Soviet Sound Recording

Abstract

When he was nearing the end of his life, Viktor Shklovskii recorded an oral interview that was recently digitized and published by the Moscow oral history project (http://www.oralhistory.ru). During the audio encoding process, Shklovskii's voice and the contents of the interview were badly distorted. This article frames noise as an important force that impacts not only how sound documents become authoritative archival evidence, but also indexically points to the context of their creation. To do so, I compare the role that sound plays in Shklovskii's own writing with the history of the Soviet state's archival preservation of sound, a variety of amateur sound recording projects, and mainstream discussions of audio quality and sound recording in the Soviet press. Ultimately, I argue that for audio researchers, making room for noise allows us to see the emancipatory gesture embedded within amateur tape recording itself: the ambiguous noise that seemingly marred unpolished recordings can instead be heard as a sonic alternative to official narratives.

In 1981, the theorist and critic Viktor Shklovskii spoke with two visitors to his Moscow apartment. One was the journalist Vladimir Radzishevskii, and the other was a machine. As the men talked, the machine listened, and it pressed each sound they made onto a moving strip of cellophane tape. This process is commonly called tape recording, and Shklovskii was no stranger to it: Radzishevskii's mentor, the literary scholar Viktor Duvakin, also brought a Reporter-3 magnitofon reel-to-reel recorder to Shklovskii's apartment in 1967 and 1968, hoping to add their conversations to Duvakin's growing, unofficial archive of Soviet oral history.¹ Duvakin's grandson, Dmitrii Sporov, has now published these recordings and many others through his internet-based Moscow Institute for Oral History, where several hours of Duvakin's audio documents are freely available.² Sporov's virtual pantheon of voices from the Soviet Union has opened exciting and crucially important frontiers for any scholar of twentieth century Russian intellectual history, but some users of the website might encounter a problem: because several tape recordings deteriorated for decades before researchers recovered them, the tantalizing Real that sound documents promise (“so that's what they actually sounded like!”) is sometimes deferred. For example, at one point in his conversation with Radzishevskii, Shklovskii declares that “[in the 1920s] the human voice became a tool . . . to organize people into groups that know where they're going and what they're doing,” but the tape warbles and breaks, replacing Shklovskii's voice with what many would perceive as meaningless, interrupting, or extraneous noise.

How should we evaluate these imperfectly embalmed voices, and is there anything significant about their imperfections? What is the distinction between hearing this noise and reading an otherwise tidy transcript? This essay re-contextualizes the role of what is often called “noise,” and it does so by offering a more detailed historical account of the reception and theorization of noise within practices of Soviet sound recording. In what follows, I argue that noise in Soviet recordings can and should be heard as an indexical marker of alternative modes of perception that rival official, state-sponsored narratives. I am thus suggesting a particular value that this noise can have for listeners today. Doing so departs from familiar misconceptions about sound recordings’ relationship to reality, which have treated vocal recordings as the reproduction of an authentic, live presence, or which have framed sound recording as the capture and storage of an unadulterated truth (such approaches unintentionally reproduce utopian desires the Soviet state had for the use of this technology).³ Instead, making room for noise allows us to grapple with the failures of sound recording, and to rediscover important features that a listener might at first interpret as defects or accidents. This micro-case study thus shows that Soviet sound recordings can be heard as much more than a struggle between noise and information: they are spaces that blurred the lines between artistic or imaginative creation and historical documentation, and which facilitated a larger encounter between amateur recorders and their state counterparts.⁴ The first half of this essay clarifies precisely what I mean by “noise,” and shows how Soviet ideas about sound recording differed from those that emerged in other contexts; the second half re-introduces Shklovskii's theories of language, perception, and art to better frame the value of Duvakin's project and noise for amateur Soviet sound recording.

The Noise of Tape

Working conceptually with noise is often made difficult by the vague quality of the word itself. At its broadest, “noise” refers to the physical contact of sound waves with an eardrum, regardless of the content of that sound. But “noise” can also speak to a more specific, metaphorical notion of unwanted, undifferentiated excess, as it does in philosophical writings associated with figures as far afield from each other as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Kittler.⁵ These negative characterizations have done little to prevent the emergence of niche communities that appreciate contemporary noise music, but they undoubtedly motivated urban noise abatement leagues from the early twentieth century to call this type of sound a social nuisance.⁶ While the poet Aleksandr Blok embraced the sounds of “music of the revolution,” Osip Mandel΄shtam wrote about his own tumultuous age and biography as if it were trailed by a “noise of time.” This proposed pairing of noise and sound as that which is undesirable versus that which is inevitable has stayed with us: in correspondence with me, Sporov characterized his work for the Oral History institute as a rescue mission that saved sound recordings from “dust and garbage,” thus dividing extant recordings into those that were salvageable and those permanently ruined.⁷

For some recordings in which noise or other interrupting factors become prominent, the Oral History Institute's transcribers have compensated by inserting the phrase “[нрзб]” (“nerazborchivii,” or “unintelligible”) into each textual accompaniment, thus designating noise as a feature that does not deserve encoding.⁸ Using these four letters as a placeholder, however, expresses something quite different from a listener's encounter. For example, the placeholder does not give a clear indication as to why or how the noise of each recording fails to signify: did the tape rot? Is the recording apparatus malfunctioning? Has the recorded subject become upset, distracted, or otherwise turned away from the microphone?⁹ If we want to name the significance of this noise more precisely than [нрзб], we can take a strategy from scholars working in affect theory, who reject the idea that noise is an exception or negation within signifying acts. Marie Thompson has argued that treating noise as a negation proposes an artificial category of “natural” sound versus unnatural noise, and Thompson has instead characterized noise as a kind of middle ground that overcomes binary oppositions between meaning and non-meaning (or natural/unnatural), thus imbuing semiotic systems with “greater complexity and variety, increasing their capacity to act.”¹⁰ For the purposes of this short essay, I follow Thompson's lead by using the word noise to refer to those moments when a sound recording meaningfully indexes the medium of recording itself, particularly in a way that surpasses a simple, phatic form of self-referentiality. The noise that interests me thus communicates supplementary information about the context, intentions, and political positioning of the recording and recorder(s) in question, and carries the possibility of radically reframing our perception of both.

Part of this task requires that we listen to old recordings with new strategies. To better understand what this type of listening entails, it is helpful to consider another sound document stored at Moscow's RGAFD, the Russian State Archive of Sound Recordings.¹¹ While speaking into the microphone of a Shorinofon system in 1936, the actress Alla Tarasova announces that “together with leading academics and inventors, our government recognizes and commends those who make our art and literature.”¹² Just moments after uttering the phrase, a recording technician interrupts Tarasova to tell her that she has mistakenly transposed the word deiateli (creators) in place of deiatel΄nost΄ (activity), thus personalizing the phrase and deviating from the script assigned to her. A second take is required, but the tape screeches forward instead of backwards, inserting a high-pitched squeal in between both versions of Tarasova's speech. The recording is thus divided by noise that separates two slightly different sentences, forming a sonic tear that prompts the listener to hear competing versions of Soviet history: one is constructed and restricted by the bounds of the scripted word, while the other accidentally reveals by the features, demands, and flaws of the recording apparatus—the tool of historical production itself—through a single squeal.

But such observations or techniques of listening are not unique to our contemporary moment. By the 1940s, Soviet officials started to grow concerned that the state's faulty, noisy sound recordings (like those featuring Tarasova) were not up to par with those produced by the rest of the world. In response, they coined phrases to describe and enforce a desired quality of Soviet sound recording, aiming for sound that was “brighter” (iarche) and never “harsh” (rezkii).¹³ Eventually, the state even smuggled home microscopically enlarged photos of grooves in vinyl records pressed in West Germany, so that they could compare foreign craftsmanship with domestic, Soviet products.¹⁴ Doting over the quality of a sound recording, however, was not a pastime reserved exclusively for Soviet officials. No one thought and wrote more about it than the amateur photographer, ethnographer, and recording hobbyist Leonid Volkov-Lannit, who in 1964 published a book of popular science, Iskusstvo zapechatlennogo zvuka (The Art of Sound Recording). The book appeared in Soviet libraries the same year that Marshall McLuhan's wildly influential Understanding Media filled western bookshelves, and although he was wholly unaware of McLuhan's approach to mediation, Volkov-Lannit put forward a McLuhan-like lineage of media: he suggested that sound recording in particular had reached the vanguard of mechanical recording by inheriting strategies from other media (photography, phonography) for reducing noise and interference.¹⁵ Somewhat counterintuitively, Volkov-Lannit prized the successful mastery of noise reduction, because a pristine recording could index the human hand that facilitated the illusion of noise-free mechanical capture. Sound recording was thus always noisy, and it was the operator's task to “naturalize” it, which became particularly important after consumer-grade magnetic tape democratized the recording process, but introduced much more noise into the system: “Tape isn't inferior to a vinyl record because it is a cheaper medium, nor because its spinning reels can have variable speeds. Instead, it's because when a user duplicates a recording, it greatly raises the level of noise (shum). No copy has ever surpassed an original.”¹⁶

What at first seems like Volkov-Lannit's aversion to noise in general is made more complex by his concluding remarks about copies and originals. Unlike the state's critics, Volkov-Lannit anticipated that noise would linger in recordings by design, and throughout the book he demonstrates a muted acceptance of its enduring role in recording. His biography might explain why: Volkov-Lannit was arrested in 1941, sent to a labor camp, and eventually imprisoned in a psychiatric institution until Iosif Stalin's death. While imprisoned, sound recording produced objects of immense personal value for Volkov-Lannit. In 1952, he wrote to the writer Lev Kassil΄, a close friend with powerful connections, hoping to expedite his release: “You very likely know that I have lost absolutely everything—my health, my drawings, my manuscripts (among them two manuscripts by Vladimir Maiakovskii), and half of my sound recording archive (fonoteka), including the entire card catalogue that accompanied it.”¹⁷ Volkov-Lannit would spend the rest of his life rebuilding and writing about that interrupted archive.

This embrace of noise management would have been somewhat unfamiliar to intellectuals outside of the Soviet Union. There, the New Left in France eventually laid the groundwork for what remains the most widely cited theory of noise to this day, the economist Jacques Attali's 1977 book Noise (Bruits). Attali suggested that historical changes we can observe in the appreciation of noise were not merely expressions of a shifting cultural base, but that they actually prophesied the future, because the combative nature of noise had forcibly, on its own, changed that very cultural base.¹⁸ Noise inspired generations of musicologists and cultural historians, but Eric Drott has recently disputed Attali's legacy by levelling a common-sense critique: the idea that futurity can be found in only sonic objects too simplistically flips Marx's base and superstructure model and conveniently overlooks the particular cultural and technological reasons for that noise's production in the first place.¹⁹ Instead of simply applying Attali to the Soviet situation, we can find a compelling, alternative theory of noise had already appeared in the Soviet Union seven years before Attali's book was published, in one of Yuri Lotman's central works from his Moscow-Tartu school, The Structure of the Artistic Text (1977). Lotman did not comment specifically on sound recording, but he indirectly developed Volkov-Lannit's writings by metaphorically embracing the inevitability of noise as a strategy that allowed listeners, readers, or observers to resist narrow modes of perception:

Noise [shum] drowns out information. All forms of destruction—the muffling of a voice due to acoustic interference, the destruction of books from mechanical causes, the distortion of a text's structure due to the censor's interference—all these are noise in the communication channel.

. . . there is no difference between an extra-systemic [vnesistemnyi] fact and a fact belonging to another system. For a Russian who does not understand French a conversation in the latter will be just as much a disturbance as mechanical noise.

Art—and here it manifests its structural kinship to life—is capable of transforming noise into information.²⁰

When Lotman concedes that noise can never not be present in a world now reliant on mechanical reproducibility and censorious state apparatuses, he develops a major theme already present in Volkov-Lannit's thinking. “Acoustic interference” does not jeopardize perception, nor does it diminish appreciation. Instead, recognizing the management of noise (or its lack thereof) enables a listener to perceive the decisions that go into the process of sonic capture, thus transforming it into a multivalent and interpretable art, as Volkov-Lannit specifically called it. In Lotman's schema, the process of recording is much more than the capture of information, but a technique for managing undesirable noise that reveals a great deal about that very manager. It is a site where noise can distinguish the official from the unofficial—and thus the artistically productive—in Soviet culture. Tarasova's recording, for example, demonstrates how by forcibly interrupting, noise reveals the rules for the construction of an official document; Duvakin's recordings persist through their noise, ignoring these rules.

Obshchii shum

What might Shklovskii, one of the most influential Soviet thinkers on topics ranging from modern perception to the social utility of art, have thought about the tape recorder's reels spinning in front of him? And why did three men who devoted their lives to the study of literature (Duvakin, Shklovskii, and Radzishevskii) decide to put their voices on noisy, fallible tape instead of the page?²¹ On the day Shklovskii met with Radzishevskii, the two were discussing Volkov-Lannit's photography, and while it is only a coincidence that he became a topic of the interview, Volkov-Lannit and Shklovskii undoubtedly shared an interest in early forms of Soviet medium-specific thinking. We might recall a phrase Shklovskii used to describe his early days of working in Soviet cinema, when he claimed that the film studio was “processing” him (obrabatyvaet menia) just as much as it processed its subjects in front of the camera.²² Shklovskii had long participated in a form of non-mechanical sound recording as well: he dictated much of his writing and criticism to his wife, and later to his secretaries.²³

But Shklovskii's thoughts about noise were complicated. In the same memoir where he described himself as an object processed by larger, mediating forces, Shklovskii warned that it was easy to confuse noise (shum) with the real deeds (rabota) of history.²⁴ He developed this seeming aversion to noise in one of the final essays he wrote, where he discussed the promise and potentially deleterious effects of television:

[Before television,] Writing contained living sound (zhivoi zvuk) within the box (korobochka) of the word . . .

But we now read without even noticing words, we read automatically, not reading words in their entirety—by now we've been saying “zdra” instead of “zdravstvuite” for a very long time . . .

All of that noise (shum) and chaos falls right onto the heads of children.²⁵

Despite the gloomy pronouncements at the heart of this essay, there are many reasons to question how serious Shklovskii's aversion to noise and chaos really was. For one thing, Shklovskii's attitude towards sound and listening significantly changed during his lifetime. In a retrospective essay from 1963, Shklovskii wrote that he regretted his misinterpretation of the significance of non-linguistic noise in Dziga Vertov's early sound films, admitting that he was “deaf” before a later moment of recognition.²⁶ Moreover, Shklovskii began and ended his intellectual career by writing about Zaum΄, a Russian and Soviet nonsense poetry movement that blurred the lines between signifying language and seemingly meaningless sound. In the same year he wrote about television, Shklovskii made a statement similar to Lotman's ideas about noise, where he acknowledged that the dividing line between noise and information is where the potential of art emerges: “Our perception of the world is not linguistic. The language of Zaum’ is the language of pre-consciousness, it is the rustling of the chaos of poetry, it is a proto-literal, proto-linguistic chaos, from which everything is born, and unto which everything will return.”²⁷ Here, Shklovskii obliquely endorses the power of noisy systems, in which the medium can never be the only message. Instead, it is the breakdown of the medium itself, and all the noise that might result from it, that allows for the possibility of a significant signal. Of course, we should not be surprised to find a hint of Shklovskii's famous concept of ostranenie (defamiliarization) in this maneuver, in which an encounter with noise refreshes the message it interrupts.

Finally, we should consider what it would mean to listen to noisy recordings without considering their complex abilities to signify that I have discussed above. In 1919, the popular Soviet writer Efim Zozulia explored this form of listening by publishing “Gramophone of the Ages,” a short story about a device that can replay the sonic history of any space, but which repels listeners. The inventor of the failed device is crestfallen to hear his audience complain that the noise of time is too grim, too boring, and too painful to hear, calling it a cacophony of “cruel sounds” (zhutkie zvuki): “your invention is fantastic,” explains one listener, “but it's completely useless. The old world should be damned, forever! We don't need its cries, we don't need its horrors. We don't want to listen to its cruel voices!”²⁸ More destructive than anything else the machine emits is a torrent of indecipherable noise—“obshchii shum,” Zozulia writes—that muffles voices of protest and change trying to escape from underneath it.

Zozulia's story presciently mirrors the dilemma we face as listeners today, but I have suggested that we should not dread the “obshchii shum” that hangs over this damaged, noisy, and fragmented recording of Shklovskii and Radzishevskii. When the source material to sift through is a pile of damaged recordings, how else could we meaningfully answer calls for more serious considerations of listening, audio culture, and sound? Noise tempers our unrealistic expectation that tape will simply deliver the past to us unmediated, and the noisy artifacts of sound recording—many of which are still waiting to be acknowledged in scholarship—demonstrate how amateur recorders challenged the production of historical memory in the Soviet Union. Making room for noise allows a listener to do much more than acknowledge a recording's proposed contents: it indexically points to the specific context that yielded these recordings, and if we follow Lotman, the interference that hovers over (and sometimes structures) these documents is a salient, important marker of the recording's unofficial qualities. It is only by embracing the entirety of these difficult artifacts, noise and all, that we can begin to adequately understand the achievements of Duvakin, his group, and other recordings waiting to be found.