作为音乐塑料的紫胶

IF 16.4 1区 化学 Q1 CHEMISTRY, MULTIDISCIPLINARY
Gavin Williams
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引用次数: 0

摘要

在整个20世纪上半叶,虫胶对留声机行业至关重要,但这种材料长期以来一直保持低调。紫胶是一种塑料和殖民时期的商品,有着广泛的应用。在最近的学术研究的基础上,探索其生态砌块,这篇文章还提出了一个案例来理解它作为一个音乐的东西。首先,它展示了紫胶——紫胶昆虫的树脂外壳,以及一种南亚用来保存东西的技术——是如何成为一种全球商品的,紫胶有助于声音繁殖的发展。其次,它调查了一个促进紫胶虫研究的科学官僚机构,这种昆虫在20世纪20年代出现在印度森林中。第三,它追踪了音乐需求如何强化了将紫胶加工成紫胶的移民、契约劳工和技术劳工体系。在重建紫胶的经济和科学网络时,文章认为材料是一种多样性,它既包括其生产的纠缠知识系统,也包括决定性的转换:从生产的身体技术到中介音乐聆听的技术。通过对紫胶的关注,它以北美关于声音复制技术发展的叙述为中心,展示了南亚的知识、劳动和环境是如何深刻地参与其中的,即使它们在媒介音乐体验中很少得到承认。事实上,在合成碳氢化合物聚合物出现之前的年代,虫胶通过其不引人注目的特性发挥了音乐塑料的作用:它能够容纳和协调多种唱片成分,同时消失在它提供的背景中。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
Shellac as Musical Plastic
Shellac was essential to the gramophone industry throughout the first half of the twentieth century, yet the material has long kept a low profile. At once inaudible and urgently required, shellac was a plastic and colonial commodity with wide-ranging applications. Building on recent scholarship that explores its ecological imbrication, this article additionally presents a case for understanding it as a musical thing. First, it shows how lac—the resinous encrustation of the lac insect, and a South Asian technique for preserving things over time—became a global commodity, shellac, aiding the development of sound reproduction. Second, it investigates a scientific bureaucracy promoting the study of the lac insect, which emerged in Indian forests during the 1920s. Third, it tracks how musical demand intensified a system of migrant, indentured, and technical labor involved in processing lac into shellac. In reconstructing shellac’s economic and scientific networks, the article argues that the material was a multiplicity, which entailed both the entangled knowledge systems of its production and a decisive switch: from bodily techniques of production into those of mediated musical listening. Through a focus on shellac, it decenters North American narratives about the development of sound reproduction technology, showing how South Asian knowledge, labor, and environments were profoundly involved, even if they were only rarely acknowledged in mediated musical experiences. Indeed, in an age before synthetic hydrocarbon polymers, shellac fulfilled the role of musical plastic through its inconspicuousness: its capacity to hold and harmonize multiple disc ingredients, while disappearing into the background it supplied.
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来源期刊
Accounts of Chemical Research
Accounts of Chemical Research 化学-化学综合
CiteScore
31.40
自引率
1.10%
发文量
312
审稿时长
2 months
期刊介绍: Accounts of Chemical Research presents short, concise and critical articles offering easy-to-read overviews of basic research and applications in all areas of chemistry and biochemistry. These short reviews focus on research from the author’s own laboratory and are designed to teach the reader about a research project. In addition, Accounts of Chemical Research publishes commentaries that give an informed opinion on a current research problem. Special Issues online are devoted to a single topic of unusual activity and significance. Accounts of Chemical Research replaces the traditional article abstract with an article "Conspectus." These entries synopsize the research affording the reader a closer look at the content and significance of an article. Through this provision of a more detailed description of the article contents, the Conspectus enhances the article's discoverability by search engines and the exposure for the research.
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