The introduction to “The Politics of Recorded Sound,” this special issue of Social Text, lays out the unifying mission of the diverse essays: to study sound recording within a wide-ranging, historicized understanding of mediation as a process embedded within networks … Continue reading “Introduction: Breaking Sound Barriers”
Issue: Issue 102 Recorded Sound
The Politics of Recorded Sound
Sound, Knowledge, and the "Immanence of Human Failure": Rethinking Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano, and the Piano
david suismanThis article reframes the history of recorded sound to take phonographs and player-pianos into account on more or less equal terms. It argues that the two technologies developed in complementary, dialectical relation to each other: one analog, storing and conveying … Continue reading “Sound, Knowledge, and the "Immanence of Human Failure": Rethinking Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano, and the Piano”
Deaf Jam: From Inscription to Reproduction to Information
mara millsThis article traces the history of speech wave visualization and the longstanding relationship between phonetics, communication engineering, and deaf oral education. American telephone engineers drew on this history to build the sound spectrograph in the 1940s, a machine that transformed … Continue reading “Deaf Jam: From Inscription to Reproduction to Information”
Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity
Gustavus StadlerThis essay examines 1890s commercial audio recordings–none of which is known to exist today–that reenacted lynchings of African Americans,in particular, the mass spectacle lynching of Henry Smith of Paris, Texas, in 1893. Despite rumors that the recordings were made live, … Continue reading “Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity”
Can You Feel the Beat?: Freestyle's Systems of Living, Loving, and Recording
alexandra t. vazquezFreestyle is both a musical genre and, as a multitude of fanzines will tell you, a lifestyle. The playwright Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas evoked our teenage surround when he called it a “system of living.” Described as “android descarga” by music … Continue reading “Can You Feel the Beat?: Freestyle's Systems of Living, Loving, and Recording”
Buzz and Rumble: Global Pop Music and Utopian Impulse
Jayna BrownThis essay argues for the concept of a utopian impulse, a liberating power possible in music and dance. With a focus on African music, the essay argues against conventional Eurocentric world-music commodification and points instead to new music movements from … Continue reading “Buzz and Rumble: Global Pop Music and Utopian Impulse”
Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York
jennifer stoever-ackermanThis essay examines the sonic archive of tape recording artist Tony Schwartz, in particular his 1955 Folkways album Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers. Working from assumptions located in sound studies, I argue that Schwartz’s recordings … Continue reading “Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York”