Media or Instruments? Yes.

In the first essay of this issue to eschew considerations specific to audiovisual relationships, Jonathan Sterne nevertheless continues with the more general theme of blurred boundaries by considering the hybridization of media technologies and musical instruments that we have become so used to in today’s world of basement recording studios and stadium DJ concerts. Yet his approach here is to address issues raised by such hybridization while taking us back in time to the genesis of this boundary crossing which, he argues, predates the origins of sound recording itself. His aim is to point to a problem with the way that media/instrument hybrids have been, and continue to be dealt with by academics: the imposed distinction between instrument and medium that practitioners have long since abandoned. As Sterne suggests: “It is time to catch up with the people we study.” This essay provides a starting point for doing just that, offering some valuable tools for future considerations of the dissolved lines between practices of recording, reproduction, and the creation of music. In turn, perhaps these tools might well be adapted for changing the way that theorists deal with artificial distinctions so frequently made between sound and image in the cinema and beyond, helping us move into an area where audiovisual art can be understood as a hybridization rather than continuing the trend of dealing with sound and image as a complementary pair.

• Media or Instruments? Yes.
  By: Jonathan Sterne
   

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