c:o/re Fellow 10/26 – 09/27
Eamonn Bell researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century computational thought, with a particular focus on music and the application of computing to the arts and humanities more broadly. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the Durham University, which he joined after completing a PhD at Columbia University and a Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellowship at Trinity College Dublin. He has published on the history of computing and AI in music, software studies, and computational musicology. His recent work examines how digital research infrastructure (DRI), skills development, and collaborative research software communities can support digital humanities research at scale. Since 2019, his research has been funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Irish Research Council, and several smaller institutional grants. He is currently Project Lead for Toward a Collaborative Computational Project (CCP) for Arts, Humanities, and Culture Researchers (CCP-AHC).
A new form of writing: Dutch-Japanese exchange in the development of the digital encoding schemes used in the audio CD format c. 1980
In this project, I explore the boundaries of history of technology and history of writing to develop a new case study of international engineering cooperation in advanced manufacturing: the development of the audio compact disc (CD) format by the Sony Corporation and Philips. I will conduct this from an interdisciplinary viewpoint between cultural techniques, comparative histories of technology, and computer science. The central research question of my fellowship project is: “what research-cultural, media-technical, and commercial considerations came to bear in the six international meetings in which the two key digital encoding schemes used in the audio CD format were standardised, ultimately enabling its international success?”
I focus on the development of the two novel schemes – eight-to-fourteen modulation (EFM) and the cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon code (CIRC) – that were applied commercially in the CD format that emerged from these meetings and eventually adopted as the IEC 60908 technical standard in 1980. The received account of their development paints the final version as a kind of international compromise: the best choice for the low-level EFM channel coding scheme (a chiefly Philips contribution) sat alongside the best choice for the higher-level CIRC error correction scheme (a chiefly Sony contribution).
The standardisation of the audio CD format is an ideal scenario in which to explore the differences in the two engineering cultures that converged during this period. The project benefits from the novel application of cultural techniques (Krämer 2006; Schröter 2013) and established approaches to comparative history of innovation (Edgerton 2007) to understand the genesis of nothing less than a new form of writing. These innovations fed into one of the first and most successful implementations of a “patent pool” (Kretschmer and Muehlfeld 2004). Such interconnected and international series of technical standards, patents, and licensing regimes are now symptomatic of contemporary digital infrastructure.
Publications (selection)
Bell, E. (2021). Interleaving as Cultural Technique in the Audio CD and the End of Archaeophonography. Media Theory 5 (1): 115–46. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v5i1.910.
Bell, E. (2021). Cybernetics, Listening, and Sound-Studio Phenomenotechnique in Abraham Moles’s Théorie de l’information et Perception Esthétique (1958). Resonance 2 (4): 523–58. https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2021.2.4.523.
Bell, E. (2019). Hacking Jeff Minter’s Virtual Light Machine: Unpacking the Code and Community Behind an Early Software-Based Music Visualizer. Volume ! 16 : 1: 37–59. https://doi.org/10.4000/volume.7254.