Vox Machinae: Phonographs and the Birth of Sonic Modernity, 1870-1930

Sound Recording;Culture Industry;Popular Culture;Sound Studies;Technology;Capitalism;History (General);Humanities;History

Vest, JacquesSelcer, Perrin ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Sound Recording;    Culture Industry;    Popular Culture;    Sound Studies;    Technology;    Capitalism;    History (General);    Humanities;    History;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/146079/jacquesb_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In late 1877 Thomas Edison cobbled together a crude mechanism of metal and wood he called the ;;phonograph,” a device capable of mechanically reproducing sounds as varied as speech and birdsong. The scientific community and the general public hailed Edison’s invention as a wonder of the age and speculated endlessly on the practical applications to which it would soon be put. But as Edison and his financial backers discovered, making money from sound recording was no easy task.;;Vox Machinae” draws on business records, newspapers, trade journals and advertisements to detail the first five decades of the business of sound recording. It begins with the technology’s origins as a staged spectacle in the 1870s before detailing its application to office work in the 1880s and 1890s. Following an examination of the nickel-in-slot phonograph parlors of the 1890s it explores the technology’s evolution as a form of ;;home entertainment” in the twentieth century. ;;Vox Machinae” argues, first, that each of these business models was an historical artifact produced by a give-and-take between phonograph entrepreneurs, the public and sometimes-intransigent material things. The story of twentieth century music is not only one of race, class, gender, taste, capitalism and consumption. It is also one of motors, batteries and hand-cranks and it involves production and distribution no less than consumption and meaning- making. Secondly, this dissertation argues that the search for a profitable business model also enlisted phonograph entrepreneurs and the public in a project of determining exactly what kindof things phonographs and recorded sounds were. Did the phonograph represent a ;;talking machine” in the European and American tradition of the speaking automaton? Was it a ;;sound writer,” inscribing spoken messages on sheets of foil and then reading these scripts aloud? Or did one’s phonographs and records serve as frictionless conduits, channeling the actual singing, playing, preaching, and joking of distant (or even deceased) subjects? Sound recording technology was not a stable entity to be packaged and sold to the public. Rather it represented an ontologically-fluid cluster of material, cultural and social relations requiring that those who wished to sell it must first determine what it was.;;Vox Machinae” complicates the existing historiography of recorded sound in two ways. First, it draws insights from Science, Technology and Society as well as the ;;new materialism” to show how the materiality of sound recording technology shaped its commercial evolution. Rather than a blank slate on which to project commercial ambitions, the phonograph presented would-be entrepreneurs with a tightly entangled set of commercial, material, social and cultural ;;problems” to solve. Secondly, it seeks to bring together the nuance of recent cultural histories with an older interpretive rubric—that of the ;;culture industry.” In so doing, it lays bare the tight relationship between production and consumption, without succumbing to the totalizing, historically ;;flat” conception of the recording industry offered by Theodor Adorno and other mass culture critics.