Compact Disc

Robert Barry

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501348518
• eBook ISBN: 9781501348525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The story of the compact disc is also the story of the end of physical media. It is the story of how the quest for perfection laid the grounds for the death of a great industry. For in the passage from analogue media, like records and tapes, to digital formats, like CDs, something changed in the nature of media and in the relationship we have with music. Music became code, a sequence of 1s and 0s, a flow of pure information. The material structure of the medium itself was always supposed to disappear. But the physical has proved to possess an uncanny knack for returning. Today the CD is a zombie medium, still popular amongst certain avant-garde record labels and Japanese consumers. Against all the odds, the spectre endures. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

1 The little disc

At the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, the engineers who worked on the development of the CD had a nickname for their new invention. They called it ‘Pinkeltje’, after a character from a Dutch children’s tale. Pinkeltje – the name refers to the little finger, the pinkie, and was translated as ‘Fingerling’ in English – was first introduced by author Dick Laan in a story from 1939 called De avonturen van Pinkeltje (The Adventures of Fingerling). He is described as a ‘a very, very tiny little man with a little blue cap on his head’.

The story tells of how he comes to live in the Big House with a group of mice, in a hole ‘behind the skirting board in the living room, just by the sideboard’. The human family who the house belongs to are unaware of their new guest. But at night time, or when their backs are turned, he will creep out of his hole and pay them small kindnesses: fixing a child’s broken toy or finding and replacing a misplaced sewing needle.

Like the tale of the Elves and the Shoemaker, Pinkeltje’s services to his hosts are invisible to them, seemingly the result of mysterious forces. He is like a benevolent spirit, making their lives that little bit easier. A kind of anti-poltergeist. We can see in Laan’s stories a metaphor for a particular vision of technology, increasingly commonplace today: as something not just labour-saving, but seamlessly so. Every transaction so smooth that you don’t even notice it taking place. Frictionless.

Which is apt, in a way, since up until the invention of the CD, friction had been an essential component of almost all previous sound reproduction technologies: the friction in a music box between a comb of metal teeth and the pins on a rotating cylinder, between a needle and the grooves in a wax cylinder or polymer disc, or of magnetized tape over playback heads. The CD was different. It involved no more physical contact than there is between my eyes and the laptop screen in front of me.

But the engineers at Philips called their disc Pinkeltje primarily because it was small. At eleven-and-a-half centimetres in diameter (later, at Sony’s insistence, growing to twelve), the CD was small not just in comparison to the format it was set to replace: the twelve-inch vinyl record. But also in comparison to its immediate predecessor in those same Eindhoven research labs – the ‘Reflective Optical Videodisc System’, later known as LaserDisc.

Though it was never a commercial success for Philips, the twelve-inch audio-visual LaserDisc, more than any other object, prefigured and made possible the compact disc, its younger, smaller cousin. It was its necessary precondition, but not in itself sufficient. Because the CD represented the convergence of two otherwise quite separate technological genealogies – and neither of them had previously had anything much to do with music.

On the one hand, the CD was the scion to a history of digitization, a history of computers and code. It is a chronicle extending from Leibniz’s dream of a universal calculating machine to John von Neumann’s realization of that dream at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and beyond, to the ubiquitous computing of the present, via Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, George Boole’s algebraic logic and Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulator. On the other hand, the CD came from a line of optical media, a history of the use and control of light by physicists and engineers or artists and illusionists. Without both of these seams of historical development, the compact disc as we know it would have been impossible. Nothing in the development of either made their coming together natural or inevitable. But having been united in the form of a shiny little disc, the traces of each would cast long shadows over the way we listen to music.

In a series of lectures delivered in Berlin in 1999, the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler traced the beginnings of optical media back to the first functioning models of a camera obscura built by ninth- and tenth-century Arabic mathematicians like al-Kindi and Ibn al-Haytham, and also, especially, to the use of camera obscura-type effects in the discovery of linear perspective by the Italian artist Filippo Brunelleschi at the beginning of the fifteenth century.

The story goes that in painting his canvas depicting the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, Brunelleschi positioned himself inside the darkened chamber behind the door of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, just across the piazza. With a very small hole pierced through a board covering the only opening onto the bright, daylit square, he could then project a perfect – albeit inverted – image of the street scene outside and Baptistery beyond directly onto his canvas that he could then simply trace over with his brush. It is precisely this small panel, now lost, and no more than half-an-arm’s length square, that, according to Kittler, established the technical standard of linear perspective later used by Paolo Uccelo and other Renaissance artists.

That Brunelleschi’s innovation represented not merely a new style or convention in the arts but a standard is crucial for Kittler, in so far as it is based on a certain appraisal of ‘the abilities and inabilities of visual perception’. It is not ‘fiction’ but ‘simulation’, an operation that has nothing to do with abstraction and everything to do with the measurement of bodies and the calculation of physical phenomena. With this small painting, light is not merely fortuitously taken advantage of but actively marshalled and controlled to particular ends. In a phrase that Kittler attributes to the German physicist Du Bois-Reymond, nature is led to ‘depict itself’.

By channelling the blazing light from the Piazza San Giovanni through his self-made pinhole camera, Brunelleschi inaugurated a new kind of seeing in which the images created by technological prostheses offer a superior supplement to the direct vision of the artist. A little over half a millennium later, the precisely directed light of the laser in a Sony CDP-101 would no longer require human eyes to see nor a hand to trace in order to transfer the meanings encoded in its source. Only from the twentieth century would we begin to produce types of images intended solely for the benefit of a machine vision acting as surrogate for the all-seeing eye of God.

Forty years after the death of Brunelleschi, when the Venetian Carlo Crivelli painted his altarpiece, The Annu­nciation, with Saint Emidius, for the Church of Santissima Annunziata, in Ascoli Piceno, he chose to break with the convention adhered to in previous centuries and depict the light of heaven coming down to earth not as a unified or variously diffused field but as a focused beam of light. As Sean Cubbitt points out in his extensive genealogy The Practice of Light,

For divines of the Middle Ages and early modernity alike, light was a perfect symbol of God’s presence to his creation: illuminating everything yet itself invisible. It was important then that light, especially the divine light, had to be pictured (the belief that it was too wonderful for human eyes to see was no bar to a visual culture used to portraying God himself).

So Crivelli chose to gild his shaft of light, as Cubbitt points out, making it shine uncannily, leaping out of the picture frame with the reflected lustre of the light in the room where it hung. But by representing God’s light as a straight line, a single gleaming ray direct from heaven to earth, he makes of it something more amenable to the geometer’s rule. We can almost imagine ourselves climbing into that frame with a ruler and measuring the distance between the Holy Spirit and the Madonna. It is somehow fathomable by human reason, in a manner that it is tempting to suggest may be related to the publication of Johannes Gutenberg’s first printed Bible, a serialized and typographically regularized version of God’s word, just a few decades earlier, while Crivelli was a young man.

That beam of light in Crivelli’s Annunciation was received like a gauntlet by the dawning age of reason. Witness Francis Bacon, in his utopian fable The New Atlantis, dreaming of ‘perspective houses, where we make demonstrations of all lights and radiations; and of all colours: and out of things uncoloured and transparent, we can represent unto you all several colours; not in rainbows (as it is in gems, and prisms), but of themselves single.’

Bacon’s tale begins in familiar style with a ship lost in the South Pacific, tossed by foul winds, and stumbling upon a remarkable island community, far from civilization and previously uncharted. But where Thomas More’s Utopia a hundred years earlier, had focused on the social life and cultural mores of its imaginary idyllic state, Bacon’s island shangri-la promised a utopia of technological marvels. It is an image of science in the service of technics, of each sense perfectly distinct from the others. There are the ‘sound houses’, ‘perfume houses’ and, pre-eminent amongst them, the ‘perspective houses’, capable of ‘all multiplications of light’, describing something like a Pink Floyd arena show of ‘deceits of the sight in figures, magnitudes, motions, colours’. Following Bacon’s example, the century that followed would directly equate human reason with the production of light, in the form of enlightenment.

Bacon’s omnivorous curiosity would catalyse the birth of a new kind of scientific subjectivity founded upon looking. Following Johannes Kepler’s enthusiastic promotion of the camera obscura, Christiaan Huygens’ transformation of it into a proto-cinematic device called the ‘laterna magica’ for projecting and animating drawn images, and Galileo’s pioneering work with the telescope, this would be a vision increasingly aided by technical prostheses. The emphasis on technological aids facilitated the gradual disappearance of the observing subject from optical treatises during the baroque era. An eye that was, in principle, capable of being substituted by mechanical devices could just as well be separated from the body that housed it. For Kepler, the retina was just a screen, no different from the projection surface of the camera obscura. For Bacon’s younger contemporary, René Descartes, sight was the ‘noblest’ of the senses, and rational thought itself becomes a kind of untrammelled vision. He found those ‘inventions which serve to augment its power’ to be ‘among the most useful that there can be’. By 1738, the French philosophe Voltaire would boast that, although light was ‘the most subtle of all bodies’, it was nonetheless the most known. ‘It has been traced in its motions and effects,’ he wrote in his Elements of the Philosophy of Newton, ‘it has been anatomized and separated into all its possible parts.’ And yet Voltaire would never hold in his hand nor personally command any light source more powerful than a wax candle.

In the catalogue of the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan, you will find reference to a wooden stake. A gnarled and uneven thing, cut from cedar and sixty centimetres tall, that stake once marked a boundary and the limits of a claim. But if an old cedar picket seems an oddly low-tech thing for a museum of innovation, for the item’s donor this particular staff represented something far greater than the edge lines of a territory. It was meant as the very image of innovation itself, the spark of inspiration, the gleaming bulb of a bright idea.

‘Fifty-two years ago, Mr Edison, in company with US Army officers and Union Pacific Officials, camped at the Lake, now known as Lake Edison,’ begins the note, sent in 1931, which accompanied the bequest of that particular prospector’s stake. ‘While in camp there, Mr Edison conceived the idea of the incandescent lamp. The Gold Rush occurred just ten years after Mr Edison’s visit and the stake I am sending you by Parcel Post was used at that time.’

Never mind, for a moment, the apparent tenuousness of the link to America’s great icon of invention. Nor that the story itself – of Thomas Alva Edison setting out eclipse-watching in Rawlins, Wyoming, in July 1878, gazing into his campfire and suddenly hitting upon the notion of a burning filament trapped in a vacuum chamber – is largely apocryphal. The image of the light bulb, blinking into life above the heads of cartoon characters since the 1920s, has come to stand as a symbol for all flashes of inspiration, all sudden leaps of the imagination. The Ford Museum’s stake, then, would be modernity’s own fragment of the True Cross, the perfect relic for an era in which faith in science repeats in secular form all the old saws of religious belief.

As Kristen Gallerneaux, the Ford Museum’s curator of technology collections, points out, ‘the filament idea was not plucked out of those campfire embers as a readymade idea – it took thousands of hours of labour, money, and experimentation at Menlo Park’. To go even further, the electric light bulb patented in Edison’s name in January 1880 benefitted from some three-quarters of a century of investigation by researchers both in Europe and America. Few of what today we would consider the bulb’s essentials had much to do with anyone based at Menlo Park.

Paris, 1881, was the scene of Edison’s great triumph. The International Exposition of Electricity offered for many the first glimpse of a light source that, at the flick of a switch, could compete with the rays of the sun. Alongside displays of new dynamos, electric tramcars and the recently invented Bell telephone, the Palais de l’industrie was also aglow with some 2,500 electric lights. There were incandescent bulbs from several competing inventors and manufacturers on display. But Edison’s display offered something different. With his powerful new dynamo connected to an elaborate network of switches and feeders, driving current to over a hundred different bulbs, Edison wasn’t just selling another new bulb. He had a whole integrated lighting system, ready to power a town, safely, reliably and efficiently. One of the first companies in Europe to try and commercialize that system on the continent was the N.V. Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken of Eindhoven, in the Netherlands.

In the beginning, the company that would develop into the Philips Corporation – and eventually one of the world’s biggest multinationals in the electronics industry – started out with little more ambition than to manufacture and distribute a few light bulbs on behalf of one of Edison’s rivals, Charles Brush’s Anglo-American Brush Electric Light Corporation. Those plans went south within just a few months when Brush abruptly ceased production in the UK and sold out to Edison. Philips, undaunted, decided to press on alone.

The scion to a prominent family of Dutch industrialists, Gerard Philips was born in Zaltbommel, in the very heart of the Netherlands, in 1858. But it was in Glasgow, then a pioneering world centre of the shipping trade, that Philips first saw electric light. He had arrived in the Scottish city at the end of 1884 and taken a job on the shipyards. He found there a city already fizzing with the bright glare of arc lamps in the shopping arcades and the Gaiety Theatre. In his day job, incandescent bulbs were starting to make their way onto the boats lining up in the city docks. It was a series of articles published weekly in The Electrician between 26 November 1886 and 26 August 1887 that brought the new source of illumination to life for Philips. Here was laid out in detail every stage involved in the production of a light bulb, from start to finish. ‘Perhaps nothing so simple is so little understood as the incandescent lamp,’ he read. ‘It is merely a piece of carbon enclosed in a globe with the air pumped out; yet it costs 5s., without any obvious reason.’

Reading further, Philips’ eyebrows must have lifted at the author’s suggestion that the relative failure, thus far, of the electric lighting industry was down to a tendency for companies to be run either by engineers with no business sense or by businessmen with no engineering knowledge. ‘Electric lighting,’ the article continued, ‘as a new business, needed men who had technical knowledge as well as business capacity.’ Thinking of his own family’s long-acquired business acumen and his own more recently acquired engineering chops, might Philips have perceived in that statement his whole family’s future, imparted to him as if in a flash?

When he finally returned to the Netherlands to set up the Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken as an independent company in 1891, Gerard’s first business partner was his father, Frederick. A respected financier and landowner with interests in the Dutch coffee and tobacco industries, Frederick Philips was, nonetheless, more than sixty years old and quite well tied up with his own affairs by the time he entered into agreement with his eldest son. He would remain essentially a silent partner in the business.

In his heart, Gerard knew that he still needed someone with that ‘busines...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The little disc
• 2 The faithful disc
• 3 The wounded disc
• 4 The undead disc
• Postscript
• Acknowledgements
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright