This is my acoustic space. That's your acoustic space. Let's cha cha.

Question 1: Sterns spends a long time talking about the ability to mentally "filter out" external noise in order to construct an individual acoustic space. He writes, "The forgetting associated with technology was the forgetting that all learners do as they achieve mastery--technique moves from a conscious effort to a kind of second nature, a disposition, a feel for the game" (113). Later on, in his discussion of fidelity, he also discusses the fallacy of "perfect fidelity" (218). So I wonder, if we as an iPod-obsessed culture have been trained to mentally filter noise, does purposeful noise in recordings indicate that we've transcended the very concept of "perfect fidelity"? Take, for example, a recently recorded song that purposefully contains record-like static. (I'm ashamed to admit that the only concrete example of this I can think of is the song "Say You'll Be There" by the Spice Girls. The song starts out with record static, as though someone's just put the album on a turntable.) Evidently, we're meant to process that "noise" as more than noise--it's supposed to be a form of nostalgic interference. We're supposed to notice it. This seems to reveal that we as a culture have moved beyond the drive for perfect fidelity, whether it existed in the first place or not, though I hate to say we've regressed into something else. Instead, it seems that we're taking fewer noises for granted. What once was an annoying static on an LP that we could train ourselves to ignore has now become an artistic or even just nifty addition to a digital recording.

On top of this, I wonder how highly-mediated recordings like Kanye West's latest album, 808s and Heartbreak, in which he uses an electronic voice-modulator (ish type thing) called Auto-Tune to electronicize his voice, changes the concept of fidelity. To whom is this album being faithful? The computer that changed Kanye's voice? And Kanye's not the only person to ever use this technique--Cher and Daft Punk have also experimented with it (just to name a few). This again seems to indicate that we're transcending the marketable drive for perfect fidelity, and yet the electronic voice is problematic in and of itself. In this situation, the sound isn't just being transduced and spit back out in its original format. It's being changed into electronic signals, then digitized, then being transformed into something completely different, to the point where it hardly even seems to be a "recording" in the original sense of the word. So what is it? And how does it fit into our cultural conception of listening and privatized acoustic space?

(This is where I stopped having answers to my own questions. It's all downhill from here.)

Question 2: While talking about transducers, Sterne mentions that in science, sound had to be transduced into sight (45). So I began to wonder how this works mentally--how do we go from hearing something to being able to picture it in our heads? Specifically, I'm think of iconic sounds from film, like the Star Wars light saber noise. The sound itself is, obviously, not in reality connected to a light saber. Yet that's the image we conjure in our minds (or at least my fellow geeks and I do) when we hear that sound. Can we say that this is a form of mental transduction? And if so, why does it happen? How are sight and sound bound up together through this type of fictionalized atmosphere, such as in film?

And what about the notion of mentally filtering noise? How does this work with sound design in film? Obviously, when designing a soundscape for an imaginary world, there is no literal noise. Everything is inserted for a very specific reason, and sometimes for the sole purpose of having something there for the audience to filter out in an attempt to create a more realistic ambiance. But what does this indicate about the fact of filtering in the first place? Why construct sound to be filtered? Would we notice if we weren't filtering anything?

My second question here is something I've been thinking about for my final paper, so I'm going to leave it unanswered for now. But I would like to explore this connection between sound and mental imagery more, perhaps in relation to iconic sounds like those from Star Wars. Another idea along these same lines I had, too, was to look at the episode of M*A*S*H called "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet." It's about a war correspondent writing a book called "You Never Hear the Bullet," the premise of which is essentially that the movie moment when the audience hears a ricochet immediately before the hero is shot is a fallacy. That doesn't happen in war. But then this correspondent is shot in combat, and as it turns out, he heard the bullet. The interesting thing here is that we, the audience of M*A*S*H, never actually hear a bullet ricocheting in the whole episode, and yet we can easily follow the reference. I wonder how this type of sound-memory interaction works in relationship to iconic television and movie moments?