David L. Morton examines the process of invention, innovation, and diffusion of communications technology, using the history of sound recording as the focus. Off the Record demonstrates how the history of both the hardware and the ways people used it is essential for understanding why any particular technology became a fixture in everyday life or faded into obscurity. Morton's approach to the topic differs from most previous works, which have examined the technology's social impact, but not the reasons for its existence. Recording culture in America emerged, Morton writes, not through the dictates of the technology itself but in complex ways that were contingent upon the actions of users.Each of the case studies in the book emphasizes one of five aspects of the culture of recording and its relationship to new technology, at the same time telling the story of sound recording history. One of the misconceptions that Morton hopes to dispel is that the only important category of sound recording involves music. Unique in his broad-based approach to sound technology, the five case studies that Morton investigates are : The phonograph record Recording in the radio business The dictation machine The telephone answering machine, and Home taping Readers will learn, for example, that the equipment to create the telephone answering machine has been around for a century, but that the ownership and use of answering machines was a hotly contested issue in the telephone industry at the turn of the century, hence stifling its commercial development for decades. Morton also offers fascinating insight into early radio: that, while The Amos and Andy Show initially was pre-recorded and not broadcast live, the commercial stations saw this easily distributed program as an economic threat: many non-network stations could buy the disks for easy, relatively inexpensive replaying. As a result, Amos and Andy was sold to Mutual and went live shortly afterward.

The electronic medium allows any audible sound to be contextualized as music. This creates unique structural possibilities as spectrum, dynamics, space, and time become continuous dimensions of musical articulation. What we hear in electronic music ventures beyond what we traditionally characterize as musical sound and challenges our auditory perception, on the one hand, and our imagination, on the other. Based on an extensive listening study conducted over four years, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of the cognitive processes involved in the experience of electronic music. It pairs artistic practice with theories from a range of disciplines to communicate how this music operates on perceptual, conceptual, and affective levels. Looking at the common and divergent ways in which our minds respond to electronic sound, it investigates how we build narratives from our experience of electronic music and situate ourselves in them.

This unique anthology assembles primary documents chronicling the development of the phonograph, film sound, and the radio. These three sound technologies shaped Americans' relation to music from the late nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, by which time the technologies were thoroughly integrated into everyday life. There are more than 120 selections between the collection's first piece, an article on the phonograph written by Thomas Edison in 1878, and its last, a column advising listeners "desirous of gaining more from music as presented by the radio." Among the selections are articles from popular and trade publications, advertisements, fan letters, corporate records, fiction, and sheet music. Taken together, the selections capture how the new sound technologies were shaped by developments such as urbanization, the increasing value placed on leisure time, and the rise of the advertising industry. Most importantly, they depict the ways that the new sound technologies were received by real people in particular places and moments in time.

For the past few decades Hal Foster's critical gaze has encompassed the increasingly complex machinery of the culture industry. His observations push the boundaries of cultural criticism to establish a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. "Recodings "has become the classic "primer in poststructuralist debate" ("Village Voice"). The essays present a constellation of concerns about the limits and myths of postmodernism, the uses and abuses of historicism, the connections of recent art and architecture with media spectacle and institutional power, and the transformations of the avant garde and of cultural politics generally.

The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music establishes EDM's place on the map of popular music. The book accounts for various ambiguities, variations, transformations, and manifestations of EDM, pertaining to its generic fragmentation, large geographical spread, modes of consumption and, changes in technology. It focuses especially on its current state, its future, and its borders - between EDM and other forms of electronic music, as well as other forms of popular music. It accounts for the rise of EDM in places that are overlooked by the existing literature, such as Russia and Eastern Europe, and examines the multi-media and visual aspects such as the way EDM events music are staged and the specificity of EDM music videos. Divided into four parts - concepts, technology, celebrity, and consumption - this book takes a holistic look at the many sides of EDM culture.

At least since the rise of the "Nashville sound" in the 1950s, Tennessee's capital city has attracted numerous books and articles offering insight into the celebrity machine known as Music City. But behind the artist in the limelight are a host of support personnel and contributors who shape the artist's music. Of these myriad occupations within the music industry, only two have received significant attention: executives at the major labels and elite songwriters who have forged a path to the top of the charts. In Making Music in Music City, sociologist John Markert compiles and assesses more than one hundred interviews with industry professionals whose roles have been less often examined: producers, publishers, songwriters, management, studio musicians, and more. The book naturally pivots around the country music industry but also discusses Nashville's role in other forms of modern music, such as rock, Christian, and rap. Markert's in-depth interviews with key music professionals provide a fresh perspective on the roles of critical players in Nashville's music industry. This book sheds light not only on the complexities of the industry and the occupational changes taking place but on the critical role of those who work behind the scenes to shape the music that ultimately reaches the public. Through firsthand accounts, Making Music in Music City analyzes just what it takes to create, produce, and disseminate the Nashville sound.

Sound and statuary have had a complicated relationship in Western aesthetic thought since antiquity. Taking as its focus the sounding statue—a type of anthropocentric statue that invites the viewer to imagine sounds the statue might make—The Sculpted Ear rethinks this relationship in light of discourses on aurality emerging within the field of sound studies. Ryan McCormack argues that the sounding statue is best thought of not as an aesthetic object but as an event heard by people and subsequently conceptualized into being through acts of writing and performance. Constructing a history in which hearing plays an integral role in ideas about anthropocentric statuary, McCormack begins with the ancient sculpture of Laocoön before moving to a discussion of the early modern automaton known as Tipu’s Tiger and the statue of the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Finally, he examines statues of people from the present and the past, including the singer Josephine Baker, the violinist Aleksandar Nikolov, and the actor Bob Newhart—with each case touching on some of the issues that have historically plagued the aesthetic viability of the sounding statue. McCormack convincingly demonstrates how sounding statues have served as important precursors and continuing contributors to modern ideas about the ontology of sound, technologies of sound reproduction, and performance practices blurring traditional divides between music, sculpture, and the other arts. A compelling narrative that illuminates the stories of individual sculptural objects and the audiences that hear them, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the connections between aurality and statues in the Western world, in particular scholars and students of sound studies and sensory history.