The Mediumship of the Digital: Sound Recording, Supernatural Inquiry and the Digital Afterlife of Phonography.

Examining the use of sound recording in relation to the spiritualists’ practices and discourses, the chapter questions a widespread “metaphysical” understanding of phonography: the tendency to ascribe the indexical trace an evidentiary value. Through a brief historical overview, the first part highlights how, if used as a tool to explore the supernatural dimension, analog recording is evaluated more for its revelatory potential than for the transcriptive one. The second part addresses the problem of digital recording from a twofold perspective. On the one hand, it considers the analog-to-digital transition in contemporary electronic voice phenomena chasing practices; on the other one, it interprets the sonic hauntology music genre as a secularized version of the spiritualists’ inquiry, aimed at reviving phonography itself. The overall objective of the chapter is to demonstrate how the reliability of the same technologies may be differently perceived depending on the users’ shared beliefs.