From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
The Snapshot project is based on the idea that tape recorders and cameras have a lot in common. That statement may seem rather obvious, yet it is something most of the world seems to have forgotten. There was a time when audio recording was not thought of in strictly musical terms.
As photography was developing into an inexpensive, easy-to-use, and instantaneous medium, tape recorders were used in much the same way that we now use home video recorders, and super-8 film before that--as a way of documenting meaningful moments and events of fairly long duration (this sense of continuum is not something that still photography, in its ability to freeze only brief instants, can quite convey). Folks who grew up in the fifties and sixties probably remember this, and perhaps some even got a little tape recorder as a gift once, to discourage them from playing with Dad's more deluxe model. There must be countless boxes of old tapes lying lost and forgotten in the closets and basements of the world. These were made as the audio equivalent of home movies. The technologies of photography and audio recording have developed along essentially parallel lines: smaller equipment, easier operation, higher-quality images, greater affordability. So it seems odd that they have diverged so greatly in terms of how they are now popularly used. Alongside its professional, commercial, and entertainment applications (art, advertising, cinema), photography has never forsaken its amateur users--people who participate in the making of images (mostly of a documentary nature) for their own enjoyment. Meanwhile, amateur sound-recording has moved in almost entirely the opposite direction. People now use the equipment in their homes almost solely for the playback of pre-recorded, commercially produced cassettes. If the RECORD button is ever used, it is usually to tape songs from records, ironically re-consuming a product which has already been once consumed. In days gone by, a microphone was standard equipment with the purchase of a tape recorder. But those days are pretty much gone.
Much as a camera--or a microscope or telescope--can encourage us to see things differently, the tape recorder presents us with an entirely other way of listening to the world. These devices focus our senses in non-usual ways. And sound recordings, like photographs, seem to allow us to pluck moments out of the flow of time, to examine them more closely and to extract more meaning from them. In the present tense, there is so much information bombarding us simultaneously that it is difficult to absorb all of it on a conscious level, but through the recorded image we can pick up on the subtleties we may have missed the first time around, augmenting and reinforcing details which almost immediately begin to evaporate in the haze of our own memory. And sometimes it turns out that the supposed "subject" of the recording isn't nearly as interesting as the "background" activity surrounding it. Hearing recordings made in locales other than our own lets us know something of life elsewhere. And in sound especially we can participate creatively, using our own imagination to construct a personal visual image to accompany what we hear.
Given the human tendency to favor our eyes over our ears, it shouldn't be surprising that people lean more towards cameras than tape recorders as a means of private documentation, and that they use tape decks as playback rather than recording devices. Part of this can probably be attributed to our training as consumers--specifically, our learned expectations regarding radio as a medium and music as a product. As a culture, we are obsessed with the consumption of music, and yet our conscious use of our ears and our response to sound as a source of enrichment seems to stop there. A radio for us is a box that emits very specific sound material: music, news, and ads. A cassette deck is essentially the same thing (minus the news and ads), only we can program it ourselves--using the same commercially produced materials that radio uses, however. The music and broadcasting industries have used radio to train us not only to deem certain sounds as valid (and the ordinary sounds of life that surround us are not among them), but to have fairly rigid ideas about the function of sound-reproducing devices themselves. In this sense the music industry can be compared to Hollywood cinema: it provides us with a spectacle designed to distract us from the supposedly less exciting reality of our own lives, a "service" for which we happily pay in more ways than one. The function of the medium (and its message) is to "entertain," not to encourage participation. The case of music may be the more insidious of the two in this regard, as music, more than cinema, tends to be integrated into the lives of individuals as an element of personal style and identity.
Nearly all of the recordings we are exposed to via radio, TV, records, films, advertisements, and most cassette releases (even the "underground" ones) are meticulously arranged. Rehearsed. Staged. Edited. And so it's almost impossible to find real life out there in the recorded world. Not to suggest that there's anything necessarily immoral about that, only that those kinds of recordings leave most of real life out, and life is what Snapshot is ultimately concerned with. Snapshot attempts to use the stuff of real life to diminish the power of "vaudeville" to fill our lives with illusions. It is an attempt to tear at vaudeville by placing "real life" in a traditional vaudeville context, to demonstrate that observations of the world around us can yield enough mystery to satisfy any appetite for wonder.
Of course Snapshot can't pretend to be real life or a substitute for actual experience. It simply hopes to awaken in the listener the memory of the need for direct, non-mediated sonic involvement. At its most effective moments, it can actually point the listener away from the radio or tape player, in the direction of appreciating the sounds which fill their own daily experience. In the ideal scenario, the listener who really "gets" what Snapshot is about will listen to the world differently; their own life will provide them with infinite opportunity for sonic enjoyment, freeing them from the dependence on commercial products to fulfill that desire.
Oddly enough, radio and cassettes can be a sneaky way of achieving this. For most of us, a sound coming from a speaker takes priority over a sound that is just floating around in the environment; we are impressed by the authority of technology, and so an electronically reproduced sound seems to command our attention in a way that environmental sound can't. Snapshot takes advantage of this relationship by broadcasting the sounds that we tend to filter out or take for granted through those same electronic boxes, as a way of getting people to listen to things they've learned to ignore, but which they might actually enjoy. It encourages listeners to re-evaluate not only sound, but the function of radio (and tape recorders?) as well, using the medium to subvert itself and the expectations it fosters. And sometimes it even works.
Clearly, sound is powerful stuff. We unconsciously use our ears more than we realize, but other people are using our ears too--very consciously. This is why we think we only want to listen to music (and music made by someone other than ourselves at that). We have been tricked. First, we let ourselves fall prey to the seductive powers of novelty; we have come to believe that a fancy product of technology is more valuable and worthy of attention than the simple stuff of our own lives. But we have also lost track of what is real and what is a representation; we have forgotten that a picture of a tree is not, in fact, a tree. And so we confuse the recording, which is really just a "movie" of someone playing music, with music itself. Thus we not only forsake the rich sonic experiences offered by daily life, but we also lose faith in our abilities to even make music for ourselves. Thanks to multi-track recording, we now think of music as some mysterious magic worked by specialists trained in the use of otherwise incomprehensible technology. The music industry seems to be populated by glamorous alchemists, "experts" to whom we look to make our music for us, just as we look to farmers to grow our food, or doctors to give us health (not to mention the ways we expect politics, religion, advertising, psychology, etc. to actually think for us). Music is associated with technology to the extent that the average person no longer feels capable of making anything that would qualify as "music" as it is now known. It is difficult to make music as an amateur these days without feeling obliged to aspire towards public performance or recording on at least a semi-professional level. The appearance of the multi-track cassette recorder--basically a modern sort of chemistry set--now allows people to make music according to the scientific model of the modern recording studio/laboratory, but how much of the resulting music is made strictly for private enjoyment remains to be seen. So far these devices seem to have merely contributed to an increase in the number of products flooding the "underground" music market, with amateur musicians following not only the model for musical production but that of distribution of the "end product" as well. But just as we have come to associate the making of music with the mysteries of science, so we have also come to associate recorded/reproduced sound almost exclusively with music. In doing this we have lost sight of the most essential possible uses of the medium, and with that our ability to use that medium in non-passive, non-consuming ways. This is like having a computer and using it only to play video games; the computer as diversion/toy eclipses its real value as a powerful tool. And so it is with radio, TV, tape recorders, even print media. We are just too damned willing to let ourselves be entertained.
Even Snapshot was, at first, based on a "musical" model. The early shows were rather densely layered collages of sounds and voices, with lots of odd juxtapositions. But it very quickly became clear that those sounds had tremendous power and value in their own right, and all of our self-conscious attempts to dress them up as "art" were only detracting from their ability to communicate the simple yet vital messages inherent within the sounds themselves. We were not really listening to what they had to offer, believing that it was our "artistic" dabblings which gave them meaning and interest. We were wrong. Each individual recording is now respected (and presented) as an entity unto itself. But Snapshot doesn't rely solely on pure, abstract "sound." Recordings of people often appear in the mix. Some of these are one-on-one conversations, almost like an interview; others are just a bunch of people talking and doing other things simultaneously. This raises issues of voyeurism, privacy, respect, dignity, trust, content, representation, performance, "reality," honesty--in short, all of the basic ethical dilemmas facing any conscientious journalist or documentary film maker. Snapshot hopes to celebrate the diversity of thought and personality around us without compromising dignity or trust. This isn't always easy to do, no matter how good our intentions might be.
The trick is to make recordings of people that do not sound fake or "performed"--a sort of cinema veritŽ approach--without ever resorting to taping secretly to get the subject at their most "natural." Unfortunately, the response to a microphone is often like that to a camera: people become self-conscious, they act goofy, or they become guarded, frequently referring to the tape recorder in their speech. This makes it difficult to make a recording that sounds candid. (One-on-one conversations can be an exception, as can more public or social situations if the tape runs long enough for people to forget about it.) Of course no one wants to sound ridiculous on tape, especially if they think that the tape might end up on the radio. Yet they often react to the microphone in ways that achieve just the opposite effect. People seem to feel that they don't have anything to say or offer which someone else would find of interest or value. This is very interesting, and very sad. This project was started as a way to help people hear the world in a different way, to encourage them to listen, to pay attention to the little details in their lives and in the lives of others. To share what is found. And to think of radio as something participatory, using whatever simple recording devices they may own to contribute. It's really a very simple thing. It is also, in its humble little way, a potentially liberating and so ultimately a subversive thing. Because the Snapshot mindset easily extends to other areas as well--to looking at and thinking (and then talking) about one's life and world in more depth, scratching the surface of "reality" as it is packaged and presented to us. It's a little like beachcombing: You walk along through the world, and once in a while some wonderful, tiny treasure washes up miraculously at your feet. You may not even know what it is, but it speaks to you in a certain way, so you take it home and put it on a table for other people to see and maybe enjoy and wonder about. And it isn't "art" (though in a way it probably is)--simply an interesting thing with a life and story and a value of its own. It didn't cost you a penny. And if you hadn't been paying attention you might have missed it...
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