Témoignages sonores et critique des sources audiovisuelles

Today, we can archive audiovisual documentary works produced during the last fifty years. But transferring an analogic tape recording onto another support implies bringing two systems together: the historical analogue system, of which the work is a manifestation, and the “remediation” system, created by new technologies, by the body of knowledge and the means available to a specific era, in the place where the work was transferred to the new medium. Within this context, we view recognition as the intentional act that leads to the discovery and identification of an audio document; and to perceiving it as the memory or evidence of a system engendered by technical and theoretical conditions. Seen from this angle, audio restoration appears as the methodology for recognizing recorded musical works. This paper proposes two examples: Al gran sole carico d’amore (In the Bright Sunshine Heavy with Love), a seminal opera with music by Luigi Nono written in 1974, and Gérard Grisey’s mixed electronic/acoustic work, Jour, Contre-jour. To conclude, the different possible approaches to sound recordings – be they conservative, documentary, reconstructive, sociological or aesthetic – are presented in a grid whose diasystem of remediation shows the degree of variation that the information has undergone.