Selling Sounds

Suisman, David

doi:10.4159/9780674054684

Cited by 210 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Jonathan Sterne has shown how a set of ‘audile techniques’ (a set of values attached to auditory attention), initially developed in medicine and telegraphy, proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how close listening became ‘a symbol of modernity, sophistication, skill, and engagement’ (Sterne, 2003: 137). David Suisman (2009: 240–272) recounts how a new musical soundscape emerged at around the same period, including the new music-related technologies of phonography and radio, embraced by some as cultural democracy, but accompanied by new anxieties about the effects of business and technology on sound and music, including ‘a culture of degraded listening’ (2009: 255). This is the context in which metaphors about muzak and wallpaper emerge.…”

Section: Streaming Makes Musical Experience Distracted and Passive An...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Streaming’s Effects on Music Culture: Old Anxieties and New Simplifications

Hesmondhalgh

2021

Cultural Sociology

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This article identifies five key themes, or sets of criticisms, that have emerged in online commentary on the new musical system centred on streaming platforms, and in related academic research: Streaming encourages ‘functional’ rather than meaningful, aesthetic musical experience. Streaming encourages bland, unchallenging music. Streaming makes musical experience passive and distracted, and music recedes into the background (here the article also discusses limitations of the widely used concepts of ‘ubiquitous music’ and ‘ubiquitous listening’). Streaming makes music tracks and songs shorter, and musical experience more fragmented. Streaming discourages and/or limits musical discovery and adventurousness. The article addresses each of these themes in turn, examining the degree to which criticisms of streaming’s effects on musical experience along these lines might be considered valid, and the degree to which they might genuinely enhance critical understanding of contemporary musical experience. It also considers these themes in relation to older forms of evaluation, particularly those that developed in the 20th century in response to the industrialisation of music, and argues that many recent criticisms problematically reproduce older anxieties and assumptions.

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Section: Streaming Makes Musical Experience Distracted and Passive An...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Streaming’s Effects on Music Culture: Old Anxieties and New Simplifications

Hesmondhalgh

2021

Cultural Sociology

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“…Some of this work focuses on the cultural dimensions of recording technology, and shows how new recording companies created "a new commercial class of music makers, including in one form or another entrepreneurs, inventors, manufacturers, publishers, sales agents, advertisers, critics, retailers, educators, and lawmakers." 16 Other work focuses on the ways that these records became part of the soundscape of modern leisure culture, first as a novelty in urban leisure districts like Coney Island and only later as serious music in the parlors of middle-class American homes. 17 Still other work focuses on the ways that consumers learned to integrate recorded sound into their lives, shaping "patterns of popular behavior, thought, emotion, Figure 7.…”

Section: Hearing Black Voicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hearing the Americas: Understanding the Early Recording Industry with Digital Tools

Dauterive,

Karush,

O’Malley

2023

J. gilded age prog. era

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This article describes the methods and arguments of Hearing the Americas, a digital public history project that illuminates the history of popular music and the recording industry from 1890 to 1925. We argue that the use of digital tools allows the website to integrate sound directly into writing on music and thereby explicate a series of historical arguments. The article examines three arguments advanced by Hearing the Americas, showing in each case how digital tools generate new insights. The first case uses mapping to reveal some of the specific ways in which the economic and social context of Jim Crow shaped the experiences of Black performers; the second integrates sound and text to reveal the origins of certain blues conventions in the racist stereotypes of minstrel shows; and the final case uses digital tools to argue that the marketing strategies of the recording industry throughout the Americas helped produce a key shift in patterns of globalization.

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“…73 One final work in sound history is worth mentioning: special issue co-editor David Suisman's Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (2009). 74 Selling Sounds is especially salient to Gilded Age and Progressive Era history, and several contributions to this issue are in dialogue with it. David brings together cultural history and the history of capitalism to investigate the roots of music as big business at the turn of the twentieth century and the foundation of what would later be called the culture industry.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: New Approaches to Music and Sound

McKenna,

Suisman

2023

J. gilded age prog. era

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This introduction to the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s special issue, “New Approaches to Music and Sound,” provides a historical sketch of American music and the American soundscape at the turn of the twentieth century. It also offers a discussion of relevant historiography, taking stock of recent work in sound studies and its influence on research on music and sound of the period. Finally, it introduces the four research articles featured in this special issue and marks their contributions to our understandings of listening practices, normative understandings of audition and speech, and the sonic dimensions of politics and capitalism, race and national identity, imaginings of the past and visions for the future in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Selling Sounds

Cited by 210 publications

References 0 publications

Streaming’s Effects on Music Culture: Old Anxieties and New Simplifications

Streaming’s Effects on Music Culture: Old Anxieties and New Simplifications

Hearing the Americas: Understanding the Early Recording Industry with Digital Tools

Introduction: New Approaches to Music and Sound

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