The Instrument as Medium: Phonographic Work

To understand the emergence of new sound instruments through media technology, it is helpful to
overcome the limitations of thought that arise from the history of European art music. The
Western European cultural tradition of the instrumental production of sounds is almost
opposite to the concept of sound art. It follows the tradition of abstraction from concrete
sound in favor of melodic and later harmonic structure. Here an instrument is necessary tomake the signs of time and pitch of the written score (re-)sound. More precisely, the sound
of an instrument is an accidental property of the tone, which is defined by its frequency, its
pitch. Not until the twentieth century, with its emancipation of noise, did the paradigm of
pitch leave the “universe of tone,” which contrasts with the “universe of sound.” The
development of technical media of sonic writing, most of all the phono-graph, which for
the first time made it possible to record acoustic events in their own sound, had a decisive
influence on this change.