The Deep Meaning of Noise in an Emerging Audio Platform

• In Event: 540 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. Biomedicine and Health I

Abstract

Personalized audio is an emerging technology meant to adjust for the differences between user bodies, where physical and perceptual distinctions affect the experience of sound. This platform is conceived in opposition to conventional accounts of audio which assume the possibility of a perfect technology around which listeners differ in quality. I argue this opposition manifests critiques of the modernist concept of “noise” within constructionist social theory. To explain some underlying motivations for this change, I observe the discourse and practices of engineers in the R&D lab of a large audio firm. In this study I introduce work on morality and meaning-making from cultural sociology to enrich STS scholarship on design fictions and values in design. I make the analytical distinction between technical classifications and moral codifications to argue this change in understanding and its manifestations in design results from the redefinition of “noise” to distinguish “good noise” as an engineering concept with deep meaning.

Author

• Joseph Klett, Yale University