All media technology has an implicit sonic structure, at least when it is operating. That, in a nutshell, is the thesis that media theorist Wolfgang Ernst develops in his two books. To situate the books it is helpful to sketch the context of their publication. Im Medium erklingt die Zeit (‘In the Medium, Time Sounds’, hereafter MEZ) was published by Kulturverlag Kadmos, which is also the home of the ‘Berliner Programm einer Medienwissenschaft’ book series. Together with the deceased Friedrich Kittler, Ernst was one of the founding editors of the series in 2006. Without a doubt, Im Medium erklingt die Zeit is theoretically and methodologically part of the intellectual development of Kittlerian media materialism in Berlin. This approach to media, with its strong focus on Foucauldian ‘dispositifs’, epistemologies, and technologies instead of discourses, practices, and texts, has successfully been exported to English-speaking academia since the 1990s, despite – or precisely because of – debates about its ‘technodeterministic’ character. This export began with the translation of monographs by Kittler and his former studentsFootnote ¹ and was furthered by the proclamations of a ‘German Media Theory’Footnote ² and, in turn, a ‘New German Media Theory’ in the United Kingdom and the United States.Footnote ³ The project now proliferates in book series such as ‘Recursions: Theories of Media, Materiality, and Cultural Techniques’, edited by Jussi Parikka, Anna Tuschling, and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young for Amsterdam University Press. This series lays out its programme with a (revealing) keyword list: ‘Media technology; Media archaeology; Technicity; Materiality; Kittler’. The second book by Ernst under review here, Sonic Time Machines: Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity (hereafter STM), is published in this series. We can thus understand it as part of the continuing boom in Anglo-American Kittler reception. Ernst himself was introduced in English through Parikka's foreword to Digital Memory and the Archive, Ernst's first English monograph.Footnote ⁴ A revised and expanded version of Liam Young's review of this book became the foreword to Sonic Time Machines.Footnote ⁵ Such a transformation of the first book's review into the second book's foreword indicates that Ernst's publications – and this also holds for Im Medium erklingt die Zeit and Sonic Time Machines – are not really separate projects. Instead, the books can be better understood as parts of an assemblage that deals with one specific problem: how media processes organize and produce time.

Most ‘German media theorists’ have a background in literary studies. Sound and music generally – with a few remarkable exceptions, of course – do not play a central role in the conceptualization of media in the German academy. In contrast, for Ernst, trained as a historian and classicist, sound is critical to the theorization of media. This ‘upgrade’ of sound in media theory – Kittler's last comprehensive research project on music and mathematics is another example of such a development – makes Im Medium erklingt die Zeit and Sonic Time Machines thrilling and productive provocations for musicology, sound studies, and popular music studies.Footnote ⁶ To a certain extent, Ernst's media theory is closer to musicology than it is to literary studies or the German Kulturwissenschaft. But – and this articulates an important difference with rather traditionalist musicological approaches – Ernst's interest in music and sound is motivated exclusively by epistemology, not by aesthetics.

In the two books considered here, Ernst develops his media theory through sound, or through what he calls ‘the sonic’ (das Sonische). This productive German neologism was introduced by musicologist Peter Wicke to study ‘culturalized acoustic matter’ between physics and music.Footnote ⁷ Wicke examines the sonic by asking how sound was conceptualized in different ways in recording studies in the twentieth century: as, say, a simulation of a performance (concert hall realism/high fidelity) or as a signal that can be designed in its physical materiality itself. Thus, the sonic addresses ‘sound concepts’ between culture and physics. Following Wicke, Ernst also situates the sonic in the in-between, between ‘physical invariance’ (naturgesetzlicher Invarianz) and ‘historical imprint’ (historischer Prägung) (MEZ 94), between acoustics and music. He writes, ‘The acoustic denotates the physical event, the sonic is already technoculturally prefigured and the musical is semantically charged’ (STM 66). As already mentioned, Ernst uses sound as a kind of tool for media theory in general. That is, because his aim is to theorize media, he is interested in sound. The books share the thesis that the temporality, processing, and operativity of media can be analysed best through sound or even as sound. Thus, sound turns into ‘an epistemic form of a dynamic process’ (eine Erkenntnisform des Dynamischen, MEZ 14). Ernst draws on a Kittler-like post-humanism and does not only analyse sound heard by human ears. He deals with sounds registered by technical sensors, or ‘sound-shaped’ (klangförmig) processes in technical media (MEZ 14). In these cases, the distinction between sound and vibration is not always clear.

In Im Medium erklingt die Zeit and Sonic Time Machines, the study of sound and music primarily provides ‘insight into time-based processes’ (STM 120). Ernst argues – sometimes he essentially postulates – that there is a ‘structural equivalence’ (MEZ 101) or a ‘privileged alliance’ (STM 100) between the temporality of electronic media and sound. As indications for such an alliance, Ernst notes that ‘most terms to describe . . . technological temporality have been borrowed by engineers from musical terminology’ (STM 36) and that mathematics and quantum theory use sonic concepts as well, such as ‘wave function’ or ‘superstring’ (MEZ 14). In this respect, Ernst argues across both books against the ‘supremacy of the visual in occidental aesthetics and knowledge’ (STM 24). Instead, he postulates a specifically sonic form of knowledge. Such a knowledge is ultimately a knowledge of what Ernst calls, with an ontologizing neologism, the ‘tempore(a)lities’ of media (STM 21).

Conceptually, the books divide the sonic into two domains: the domain of ‘physiological audibility’, which is understood as the ‘phenomenal surface’ of the sonic, and the domain of unhearable sound, a hypothetical ‘implicit music’ in media technology itself (MEZ 11). In Sonic Time Machines, these two domains are called ‘explicit sound’ and – this is another neologism Ernst proposes – ‘implicit sonicity’. By the latter he means a flowing temporality, a processing as a critical part of a machine, which Ernst defines as akin to sound. The thesis that ‘sonicity is already within machines’ (STM 90) is perhaps more convincing than the notion of an implicit machine music. It is one thing to think of media technology as a constitutive and immanent part of music, but it is quite another to argue that such technologies already contain music, that media technology itself has a musical structure and offers some kind of para-music.

The method deployed in the books is media archaeology. Its aim is to dig out audible – sonic – knowledge that is immanent to its media technologies: ‘Sonic media archaeology is concerned with directly audible knowledge that is latent, implicit rather than manifest, and that is kept within the material dispositive’ (STM 120, emphasis in original). Media archaeology is not concerned with the means by which knowledge is historically fastened to or embedded in technology and it has little concern for technology's cultural origins. Instead, Ernst's archaeological approach adopts a concept of technology from Martin Heidegger, who argued that technology can neither be understood as a means to an end nor – I would add – as some kind of sedimented or delegated cultural practice. Instead, Heidegger's philosophy of technology defines the ‘essence’ of technology as ‘enframing’ (Gestell); that is, as something which challenges and precedes the subject in modernity.Footnote ⁸

Ernst makes a distinction between media archaeology and media history. I would argue that it is easiest to understand this claim when Ernst names his allies (such as Marshall McLuhan or Hermann von Helmholtz) and his opponents (scholars working in cultural studies or hermeneutics). In general Ernst is very clear when he defines his concepts ex negativo. For instance, he argues that media's sonic knowledge is not reducible to ‘historic time’ (historische Zeit, MEZ 212). When Ernst stresses that his study of the sonic ‘should not be confused with Sound Studies’ (STM 21), and that his books ought not to be considered a contribution to ‘so-called Sound Studies’ (den sogenannten Sound Studies, MEZ 9), he is distancing his archaeology from that discourse's ‘historical’ approach and its investment in thinking about listening and sound as historically and culturally specific phenomena. However, the more recent ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies is not discussed in the books.Footnote ⁹ All in all, Ernst pretends to keep his distance from sound studies. However, most often he reduces sound studies to the study of cultural contexts around sound: a rather polemical simplification, if not, perhaps, a very serious one. Regardless, Ernst's conceptualization of time as media time – which is not reducible to historic time, and which, hence, can be analyzed by media archaeology and not by media history – is productive. Across both texts, Ernst convincingly shows that this temporality turns into a constitutive part of music. For instance, he analyses the slapback echo, a sound that was co-produced by magnetic tape and that became prominent in early rock ’n’ roll productions such as in Sam Phillips's recordings of Elvis Presley's voice. Following Ernst, as a part of this echo, the tape-machine turns into an ‘inhuman chronopoet’ (unmenschlicher Chronopoet, MEZ 81) that automatically controls time in the realm of milliseconds by simultaneously activating the machine's recording head and playback head. In this case, the peculiar temporality of media becomes a part of music. Such a form of sonic media time is at odds with a historical conceptualization of time.

Ernst's media archaeology works to foreground sonic media, or the very sonicity of the (signal) storing devices of history. He reveals the temporalities that are immanent to these technologies. On these terms, media archaeology is ahistoric, dealing with ‘ahistorical forms of tempor(e)alities derived from the physical and mathematical realities of technology’ (STM 120). Thus, it is not invested in analysing what is called ‘historical context’ (MEZ 124) in cultural studies or the more conventional notions of historical time such as chronology or other periodicities defined by and through human experience. Instead, media archaeology is a means of revealing what Ernst calls ‘invariant elements’ (STM 92). With reference to eighteenth-century musical automata, Ernst explains this concept: ‘The musical automaton produces tones that we hear today like we did 300 years ago’ (MEZ 205). Elsewhere Ernst defines such media processes as a kind of ‘re-presencing’ (STM 95). The role of the sonic here is ambiguous. Is it at the archaeological level – that of an invariant – or does it reside between historical variation and ahistorical invariance?

On the one hand, for Ernst, media archaeologists are (human) researchers who must develop a cold and passionless ‘media-archaeological ear’ (MEZ 29f). This ear does not listen to media content or for narrative. According to Ernst, ‘The archaeological method adapts to this ascetic approach to signals, resisting the temptations of premature narrative contextualization’ (STM 129). On the other hand, the media archaeologist is a machine. He writes, ‘the real archaeologists in media archaeology are the media themselves’ (STM 114). To interpret such passages and definitions as sheer anti-humanism is limiting. These ideas emphasize and critique how research is shaped by media and materialities.

The books’ subject and methodology – along with Ernst's critiques of linear narrativity, continuity, or history – are manifest in their idiosyncratic structure. The texts are composites of comparably short sections, sometimes only a half page but never more than a couple of pages. They deal with specific nodes that often combine technological artefacts with concepts from cultural theory, such as ‘The unbelievable presence of the Tube Amplifier’ (MEZ 103–7) or ‘Below the logocentrism of metadata: Kurenniemi's case’ (STM 129–31). The four parts of Im Medium erklingt die Zeit are roughly organized by Ernst's categorical distinctions between acoustic vibration (part one), sound (parts two and three), and music (part four). In Sonic Time Machines, the core concepts of ‘sonicity’ and ‘sonic time machines’ are introduced in the first part, while part two concerns ‘sirenic voices’, and part three discusses sonic media archaeology beyond media history. While sequential enumeration of the parts might suggest a linear argument, the books instead cohere through core concepts that guide the reader through the text.

Sonic Time Machines introduces a number of topics and concepts to the English-speaking academic world that were already part of Im Medium erklingt die Zeit, if more implicitly. For instance, Im Medium erklingt die Zeit already treated media as sonic time machines, but the term does not appear (in English or German) until the later book. Moreover, both books conceptualize ‘sound as an epistemic artefact’ (STM 68). Also, Ernst's ‘modest neologism’ (STM 21) ‘sonicity’ introduced in Sonic Time Machines is only modest insofar as the problem to which sonicity is the answer – that is, the conceptualization of the temporality of media technology between signal processing and culture – is already developed in Im Medium erklingt die Zeit. Thus, crucial topics and problems which Ernst discusses in Im Medium erklingt die Zeit are sharpened in Sonic Time Machines by introducing a concise concept such as sonic time machines or a neologism such as sonicity.

Ernst develops his concept of the sonic as a concept with reference to a series of specific objects and materialities, from ancient Greek instruments such as the monochord to contemporary networked computers. At a general level these references include diverse media. Instead of heeding the common and established analogue/digital distinction in media history, both books discriminate between mechanical, or ‘kymographic’, media (such as the phonautograph or the phonograph); electromagnetic media (such as tape or wire); and ‘techno-mathematical’ media (such as computers). The difference between the first pair – the mechanical and the electro-magnetic – is crucial for Ernst as it is also a means of distinguishing between explicit sound and the implicit sonicity of a McLuhanesque acoustic space; that is, the ‘sonosphere of electromagnetic waves’ (STM 33), a space of resonances, simultaneity, and synchronicity. Ernst argues that implicit sonicity ‘epistemologically demands another language’ (STM 76). Mechanical recording – as phonography – stands in the ‘tradition of writing’; electric recording is, in his words, ‘sonic latency’ (STM 79). While phonography operates through inscription, electromagnetic recording operates through the latency of waves and currents (STM 116). Thus, for Ernst there is no continuous development from mechanical phonographic recording to electromagnetic recording. Instead, his media theory argues for an epistemological break between phonography and electromagnetic media.

At a more specific level, Ernst explores the sonic through the analysis of particular aspects of music, sounding objects, and instruments. Ernst describes himself as a ‘musicological dilettante’ (MEZ 9). However, he puts himself into a ‘tradition active since pre-Socratic Greek philosophy’ that studied music primarily as a ‘model of knowledge’ (STM 120), not as an object that is reducible to entertainment or aesthetic pleasure. As a result, when Ernst discusses a wide range of musics and musical works – from the twentieth-century musical avant-garde (Cage, Stockhausen, Reich, Nancarrow) to popular music (Elvis Presley's tape-based slapback echo and techno); from Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs to Renaissance church music (combination tones in Palestrina's ‘Stabat mater dolorosa’); from folk songs (such as guslar performances in Harvard University's Milman Parry Collection) to the live coding made possible by the programming language SuperCollider – these examples further his study of what he calls, leaning on Heraclitus, a ‘musical Eigenzeit’ (STM 93), which he ultimately claims as the ‘proper’ time of media. If media have a proper time, Ernst argues, they are time machines: not machines for time travelling, of course, but machines that produce and constitute a specific temporality.

In addition to these musical references, Ernst refers to sounding objects and artefacts that are not necessarily primarily aestheticized as musical. Some of these are audible to human ears: recordings of human speech (such as the recorded voices of war prisoners in the First World War from the Sound Archive at the Humboldt University [STM 138–41]) or instruments of acoustic measurement (such as vinyl test records and modern sirens that generate frequencies [MEZ 26]). Moreover, Ernst refers to objects inaudible to human ears; for example, the acoustic delay lines that served to store computer data (STM 43) and the integration of these into media art (MEZ 84); nineteenth-century kymographic pictograms; and esoteric technological innovations and dinosaurs (what some might call nerdy tech-objects), such as the oscillating pendulums that were predecessors of the phonautograph and phonograph and the ‘implicit acoustics’ of the integrated circuit 555 timer IC (MEZ 63).

Ernst proclaims an interest in the essence of his subjects, what he calls the ‘essence of the sonic’ (das Wesen des Sonischen, MEZ 23), the ‘essence of sound’ (das Wesen des Klangs, MEZ 75), the ‘technical essence’ of recording media (STM 78), and the ‘nature of sound memory’ (STM 79). This focus on truth, nature, and essence leads him towards some broad assertions. Take for example: ‘The essence of the acoustic is in its temporality’ (MEZ 36) or ‘A temporal quality is specific to music’ (MEZ 180). Such universalizing claims will likely prompt readers to search for counterexamples. Furthermore, Ernst's definition of hearing is ahistorical, and he categorically distinguishes it from vision. Hearing is spherical, while vision is directional (MEZ 22). The ear's ‘temporal resolution’ (zeitliche Auflösung) is supposedly higher than that of other ‘sensory channels’ (MEZ 32). It is not clear to what extent Ernst subscribes to Jonathan Sterne's ‘audio-visual litany’‚ is aware of the essentializing tone of some of his claims, or desires to distinguish his work from more positivist approaches.Footnote ¹⁰

Im Medium erklingt die Zeit and Sonic Time Machines offer highly original and stimulating insight into a media and technocultural theory that is developed through sound and sonic articulations. If readers are willing to engage with the jargon as well as with the wild, discontinuous, and rhizomatic structure of the books, they are rewarded not only with thought-provoking nuggets and information but also with a conceptual tool kit that helps to explore and model the dynamics of current technoculture via sound. Moreover, the books offer what promises to be a highly productive challenge to Anglo-American sound studies from the outside. Finally, they encourage musicologists and popular music studies scholars to conceptualize music as an epistemic entity, the sonicity of which is a ticket to media's knowledge. Thus, the books have the potential to intervene in musicological discourses invested in conceptualizing sound beyond aesthetics and beyond the hearable.