History, Memory and Television Crime Drama

This article examines the role of sound in digital media as a technologically shaped cultural process of materializing sounds. This process is analyzed in three steps: first, the role of functional sounds is explored using the examples of ring tones, of scientific sonification, and of ubiquitous music; in a second step, the ways in which domesticated voices are used between car navigation, vocaloids, and the technically modeled voice of a moderator; in a final step, the contemporary dispositives of music are examined, which actively exploit a sonic capital. The role of sound in digital media becomes thus discernible in its orientation toward the goal of a pervasive apparatus-listening that reorders and rearranges the manifold aspects and usages of sound in everyday life.