Where can we find traces of human contact in online meetings? (photo: Axel Kuhlmann/Wikimedia).

The Grain of Online Voices

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Every physical interaction leaves traces. Yet, in online meetings, the human voice might be the only traceable feature left. In the fifth episode of «Sonic Vignettes», Salomé Voegelin reflects upon the grain of the voice as an irreducible trace of human contact and why it is endangered by AI cleaning language.

«Every contact leaves a trace» is a phrase coined by Dr. Edmund Locard, a French criminalist and pioneer of forensic science born in 1877. His theory describes the trace evidence that is left by any burglar or murderer at the scene of their crime, which ultimately can be used for their capture and conviction. It is the marker left by contact friction: Hair, fingerprints, textile fibres, glass, or any material transferred when subjects or objects touch. Beyond its reference to crime and its detection, the phrase enables me to think of the world as a sphere of contacts generated from traces of touching and being touched (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 133). It reveals objects and subjects as a site of transfer and transformation: Each takes something of the other and each gives something to the other in an exchange that affects them both, not necessarily symmetrically nor with equal control, but revealing a relational world.

Evidence of Relationality

Trace evidence describes reality as a narrative of meetings: Coincidental, planned, undesired, fatal, feared, and wished for. It requires microscopes, laboratory equipment, amplification devices, and efforts of reconstruction to build an image that does not represent subjects and objects as individuated forms, but makes evident their relationality and shows them in the consequence of their meeting.

Forensic scientists interpret this trace evidence of the encounter in a particular way and for a particular purpose: Substantiating a conviction. In the current state of my enforced online living I am compelled to think of this trace beyond analogue evidence, to query what traces we leave on each other in the virtual world. I am not referring to the traces left by our digital footprint: The data trail of all my activities online – every click, move, and visit that leaves an ephemeral but seemingly indelible trace of our existence, wants, and desires, and by which we are reconstituted forensically from our search histories. Such traces remain without the reciprocity and generosity of the exchange. Instead, I want to think about the traces we leave on each other when we meet in Zoom, or on other online platforms, however distanced we might be. Do we remain, as remote toucher and touched, always interwoven, always both taking and giving on contingent terms?

My experience of 12 months’ relentless digital meetings is that this reciprocity, if it exists at all, exists in sound, which holds the potential to perform the generosity and intimacy of touch: «The slight trespassing which is the mark of individuality» (Dolar 2006, 21). Sound is a trace of transfer. It is a contingent moment of contact friction. Thus, I listen and hope that a sonic sensibility that embraces this friction, and hears also what might appear semantically irrelevant to our exchange, might compensate for the loss of a physical trace online. And that it might reconfirm our existence to each other, generated in moments of coincidence, rather than by a pre-given name, indifferent to circumstance and a contingent vis-à-vis.

Amplifying the Grain

However, most online platforms reject sound’s diffuse materiality, and opt for semantic clarity instead. Conversational AI is employed to render the voice «natural» and «intelligible». Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML), they learn continuously from our exchanges to clean language off the viscera of the unintelligible body; to erase the «side-effects» of the voice that are considered noise and clutter, and «fill in the gaps» to achieve perfect, but uncanny clarity (ibid.).

The Zoom team speaks of «the magic of Zoom.ai» that parses data, renders «experience as frictionless and natural as possible» and «gives users the space to be more creative and happy in their work days». Whereas all I hear is the misery of a voice without a body, unable to touch or be touched. Zoom strives for a voice without non-semantic sound, or what Roland Barthes, borrowing from Julia Kristeva, called the grain: The geno-song, which my body speaks and with which I touch yours, and through which we understand beyond the semantic, the sense of a relational world (Barthes 1977, 182).

Online, this grain might be all we have left to touch each other, to leave a trace, and enter into a reciprocal encounter. Therefore we should re-programme AI not to suppress noise, not to learn to make us speak intelligibly, but to amplify the grain so that we might enjoy from the diffuse materiality of sound the generosity of being a part of each other, in a relational digital world that does not seek aseptic clarity, but the sense gained through contact, contagion, and the transmission of touch.

List of References

Barthes, Roland. 1977. The Grain of the Voice. Image Music Text. London: Fontana.

Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1984. The Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press.

Merlau-Ponty, Maurice, and Alphonso Lingis. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Claude Lefort. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

«Sonic Vignettes» is a Norient Special discussing sound: one fragment, one experience, recording, one viral video, stream, one monograph or encounter at a time – in all its depth, its historical and affective ramifications, with the finest expertise in Sound Studies. Initiated by Holger Schulze, Rolf Großmann, Carla J. Maier, and Malte Pelleter, published as a monthly column.

Biography

Salomé Voegelin is an artist and writer engaged in listening as a socio-political practice. She writes essays, books and text-scores for performance and publication. Recently her book «Sonic Possible Worlds» 2014/21 appeared in a revised second edition, extending the discussion on the sonic possibility of the world to rethink normative constructions and fabulate a different body from its sound. Voegelin’s practice engages in participatory, collective, and communal approaches and uncurates curatorial conventions through performance. She is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, and currently represents the Professorship in Sound Studies at the University of Fine Arts Braunschweig. Follow her on LinkedIn, SoundCloud, X, or on her Website.

Published on April 28, 2021

Last updated on November 05, 2021

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Like meme music, but without sound (photo: Euterpia via Wikipedia, 2014).

The Seduction of Meme Music

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by Holger Schulze

Meme Music went viral during the COVID-19 pandemic. Distributed via apps like TikTok, it might transform not only the way music is made, but also how it is consumed. An article about the cultural implications of an emerging digital format – and why we all might be Memecubators.

Meme music is music that circulates widely by being attached to or being the actual content of an internet meme. Take, for example, the Ratatouille musical from the winter of 2020/21. In August 2020, a TikTok user, the composer Daniel J. Mertzlufft, arranged a song, originally crafted by another TikTok user, Emily Jacobsen, to figure perfectly as the grand finale of some imaginary Broadway musical based on the Pixar movie Ratatouille. Mertzlufft’s performance circulated quickly, provoking many other performances which in turn circulated virally. On January 1, 2021, a virtual concert was staged presenting an actual musical, whose visual style, timing and cut-up form gave the impression that it was built out of individual TikTok videos. This prime example of meme music follows the core definition given by Limor Shifman, who stated that memes are: «(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users» (Shifman 2013, 8).

During the pandemic meme music thrived, attaching itself to almost all contemporary discourses relevant to the wider public: hygiene measures were timed to songs (Pauliks 2020) and cities in lockdown were mourned in meme music (Schulze 2021). Earlier, the Trump regime had been mocked and ridiculed through music in memes, as had the Brexit governments of Theresa May and later Boris Johnson (Karpf 2018, 201, Moody-Ramirez and Church 2019). The continuation of racist attacks, and resistance to them by the Black Lives Matter movement, was also reflected in both silent and musical memes (Vickery 2020, Williams 2020). Finally, a growing number of performers – from Marc Rebillet to JazzEmu and Igor Levit – became musical memes themselves, performing online and connecting to their audience through viral videos (Baym 2012). Are we witnessing the emergence of a format that shapes and contributes to public discourse, guided by musical structures, sound effects, and production tricks? How might this transformation form a future public discourse? Which new roles, practices, and conflicts are emerging in the course of this transformation?

Memecubators, Memblematics, and the Meme Vortex

At this point of my inquiry I recognize three main constituents that might shape the future trajectory and meaning of meme music. First are the users and producers of meme music and memes in general, who cannot any longer be described simply in terms of influencers (Galeotti and Goyal 2009, Uzunoğlu and Kip 2014, Stubb, Nyström, and Colliander 2019) or prosumers (Toffler 1970). Instead, you and I serve as involuntary Memecubators, contributing to a meme in a wider variety of ways: our attention, recommendation value, sharing, clicks, comment value, and even the more direct work we do on memes, altering them to produce new examples, interpretations and variants. As wetware on the web, we all incubate memes and foster their future circulation – in particular at the points when we are not even aware of a meme’s presence.

Next are the Memblematics that structure meme music. The traditional triad of constituents that make up the so-called emblem, an artistic form with its origins in 16^th century literature, can also serve as an analytical matrix for memes. In this matrix, a GIF is the pictura, the inscriptio takes the form of a brief catchphrase, and a subscriptio further explicates, interprets or even adds sound to the meaning of catchphrase and GIF (Schulze 2021). The parallel is clear in silent memes, and becomes even more obvious in meme music: here, the interpretation by means of an added soundtrack, sonic reference or sample cut-up provides additional meaning and interpretation with a stronger impact – as in the famous examples of the so-called Spencer Punch.

Suspended Satisfaction

Finally, consumption of and conversation through memes operates within what I call the Meme Vortex. A Meme Vortex is entered every time the endless scroll that is fostered by most social media platforms leads us down the proverbial rabbit hole. The seductive and addictive quality of memes and of social media feeds serves primarily to guide us towards consuming even more seductive memes with similar qualities, from comparable sources, and with a generally comparable audience. The meme vortex is prolonged, suspended satisfaction commodified, digital seduction without end. This is even more the case with musical memes and their potentially endless sequence on an app like TikTok. This is a situation of use and consumption that is inherent to contemporary memes in 2021. To stay for a prolonged moment of time in the self-sustained and supposedly inconsequential pleasure zone of the Meme Vortex might just be the inherent goal of producers and users of memes – indeed, of all of us Memecubators.