A printed text has a very literal surface experienced through touch—as we smooth out a page, run our fingers along a line, pinch corners between fingertips preparing to turn. Each of these actions also produces a sound; the sound of flesh on paper registering grain, density, weight. Such is the audible tactility of the page that a recent article by Michelle Sauer on Sounding Out! is dedicated to the audiotactility of parchments used in medieval manuscripts, including their making process. She references an experiment by Jousmäki and Hari (1998) designed to explore how the manipulation of sound can actually change the perception of the texture and roughness of a material. The participants were played the amplified sound of their hands rubbing together, with the frequencies of the sound manipulated in realtime. They discovered that by enhancing the higher frequencies, the participants had the sensation that their own skin was drier, like parchment. The experience of surface texture is shared across the senses. ¶ 1
But as text becomes increasing digitised what happens to the sense of the surface of the page? John Cayley notes that “the surface of writing is and always has been complex. It is a liminal symbolically interpenetrated membrane, a fractal coast- or borderline, a chaotic and complex structure with depth and history” (cited in Hayles, 2008, p. 160). As Cayley claims, the surface of language—the linguistic surface as Hayles calls it—already has a symbolic or virtual aspect. Perhaps language actually is the surface; the skin of meaning. ¶ 2
The devices that deliver the digital texts also, of course, have a surface: the screens that we read on, shiny and backlit; the tessellated terrain of spring-loaded keys that allows us access; the glass surfaces we brush with fingertips—a cool, smooth page. But can we speak of digital literature itself as having a surface? This is where a kind of virtual tactility comes into play—the haptic image, the haptic sound—in which media provides the cross-modal stimulation of senses via imagination. (See Hayles on the materiality of the digital in theory analysis: chapter 5, “Mediation: Digital Literature and Audiography”.) ¶ 3
Perhaps the sense of a digital surface arises from the way in which digital works “might be regarded as especially inseparable from some of their processes” (Wardrip-Fruin in Hayles, 2008, p. 161). In this way there is no inside and out. This recalls Karen Barad's notion of there being no inside and out, only multiple insides in intra-relation (Barad, 2014, p. 178. See chapter 3, “To Prick Up the Philosophical Ear”.) The digital work is not a two-sided surface, like a page, a back and front, form and content, but a flow of shifting, reconfigurable surfaces that we negotiate through sensory engagements extended into the virtual. In digital experiences we are invited into a world of restless surfaces that have the potential to rewire our senses. ¶ 4
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A note on the soundpiece: The piece is a close-miked recording of the sounds of searching for, and then scanning through, “Toward a Feminist Historiography of Electronic Music” by Tara Rodgers, from The Sound Studies Reader (Sterne, 2012). I thought it fitting to sample a seminal sound studies text, and further, to highlight an article that focusses on the achievements of women who have been overlooked in canonical histories. This contextual information is, of course, inaudible, but I would suggests significant, nonetheless. ¶ 5
Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623
Hayles, N. Katherine. (2008). Electronic literature: New horizons for the literary. University of Notre Dame.
Jousmäki, V., & Hari, R. (1998). Parchment-skin illusion: Sound-biased touch. Current Biology, 8(6), 190–191. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0960-9822(98)70120-4
Rodgers, T. (2012). Toward a feminist historiography of electronic music. In J. Sterne (Ed.), The sound studies reader (pp. 475–489). Routledge.
Sauer, M. M. (2016). Audiotactility & the medieval soundscape of parchment. Sounding Out! https://soundstudiesblog.com/2016/10/17/audiotactility-the-medieval-soundscape-of-parchment/