much to follow on Liveness

Taken from Auslander 'Liveness'

'An importance consequence of thinking about live and mediatized performance as belonging to the same mediatic system is the inscription of live performance within he historical logic of media identified by Marshall McLuhan (1964:158): "A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress he older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them." p6

'Linda Dusman, a composer, has suggested that the dominance of recording as the normative experience of music has made it almost impossible for audiences to hear a live musical performance as something actually occurring in the moment rather than a reproduction of a recording." p38

'Benjamen's notion of a mass desire for proximity, and its alliance with a desire for reproduced objects, provides a useful matrix for understanding the interrelation of live and mediatized forms [...] headphones clapped on their ears are trying to achieve a kind of aural intimacy that can be obtained only from the reproduction of sound" p39

'Evan Eisenberg distinguishes the experince of monphonic and stereophonic recordings by saying that: "Stereo [...] arrays the musicians before an empty space ... The introduction of stereo ... changed the phenomenology of the phonograph by adding a spatial, and hence visual aspect" (Eisenberg 1987: 64-5, my emphasis). Eisenberg's point is an imposrtant one: when sound is divorced from sight by virtue of technological mediation, the aural experience nevertheless evokes a visual one: "every mode of record listening leaves us with a need for something, if not someone, to see and touch" (ibid. :65). p85