Karl Würzburger's radio theory labels novel vocal-acoustic forms of presence with the concept of »Mikrophonie« . Passing through the microphone, transmitted voices undergo a ubiquitous distribution, which in a play with effects of presence and absence promotes the development of specific forms of radiophonic voices. German Die mediale Ausprägung neuartiger stimmlich-akustischer Präsenzformen stellt die Radiotheorie von Karl Würzburger im Jahre 1932 unter den Begriff der Mikrophonie . Im Durchgang durch das Mikrophon erfahren hier übertragene Medienstimmen eine ubiquitäre Verbreitung, die in (...) einem Spiel mit An- und Abwesenheitseffekten von Körpern und Stimmen die Entwicklung spezifisch radiophoner Sprechformen fördert. (shrink)

ArgumentIn the early twentieth century, counting and speaking horses, like the famous Clever Hans or the “Horses of Elberfeld,” became widely debated subjects in experimental psychology. The idea was to determine whether their learning success was only a fraud, or if it might open up a new chapter in “animal psychology” - or even belong to the realm of parapsychology and telepathy. When their tricks were discovered, the teachers of the animals were marked as charlatans. Both the attempts to detect (...) charlatans and the efforts to avoid this accusation during the talking horse experiments proceeded using the method of introducing new levels of communication into the human-animal interaction process in order to substantiate each respective standpoint. This paper argues that the scientific studies and debates on the talking horses are relevant not only from psychological, biological, and semiotic vantage points, but also from the perspective of communications theory, giving rise to the foundational issue of levels of communication. (shrink)