Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio

Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio. Edited by Timothy D. Taylor, Mark Katz, and Tony Grajeda. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. x + 412pp (softcover). Illustrations, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-0-8223-4946-4. Price: $27 As Timothy D. Taylor observes in his general introduction to this extraordinary volume, the burgeoning research disciplines of Science and Technology Studies and Sound Studies are focusing scholarly attention on the interaction between technology and culture as a whole. Musicologists and ethnomusicologists, likewise, have not been tardy in exploring the important role technologies have had in shaping the way cultures have consumed and conceptualized music in everyday life. (It has long been central, for instance, in studies of popular music or jazz.) Still, a general history that emphasizes the technology over the musical products that it mediates has not yet appeared. This book offers the next best thing: an engaging anthology of primary sources that trace the developing cultural awareness of sound-capturing and/or reproducing technologies as well as the use of real-time acoustic voices or instruments or pre-recorded sounds to accompany motion pictures. The readings span the years from 1878 (the earliest entry Edison's article "The Phonograph and its Future") to 1945, the year when, as Taylor claims, all three technologies reached a state of maturity and were fully integrated into American life (p.6). Of particular interest is the emphasis on everyday life that all three editors employ in their choice of texts. The narrators of this history in sources come from every walk of life, including professionals in the field--Edison, radio and TV pioneer David Sarnoff and Joseph N. Weber, president of AFM from 1915 to 1940--hobbyists, journalists, and many others. The selection guarantees the widest possible representation of the complex cultural reception of these technologies, along with a range of differing reactions--from sober objectivity to unadulterated wonder--and a freshness and spontaneity that could not be achieved in any other way. The three large sections of readings--one each for sound recording, cinema, and radio --are arranged topically, not chronologically. Principal headings for the sound recording section, for instance, include predictions; men, women, and phonographs; and the pro and con view of the phonograph. …