The Indexical Inscription of the Acoustic by John Puterbaugh, is a short “preliminary investigation into memory and its role in technologies used to reproduce sound.” It has one of the best short descriptions of transcription, inscription and acoustic technologies. The investigation leads to the interesting idea of how neural nets might be explored as a form of associative memory device for recording sound which would be closer to how we remember acoustic events than how a CD is a memory of an event.
Would we want recordings that were associative rather than “soley indexical”? Would we want memory technologies that were interpretative rather than literal? I’m not sure I know what that would mean except that it would be the difference between depending on my memory as a record of information (lets say of a conversation) and a transcription to a text file.
How would one use a computer that used associative memory? Imagine calling up a paper and finding it subtly different at each recall the way your partner’s memory of a conversation drifts differently than yours.