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Chapter 2 explores how electronica conceives of sound material as a metaphor. Compared with post-Schaefferian electroacoustic music, electronica spends less time dictating listeners’ responses. Sounds of the outside world, sounds of other works, and sounds newly created all figure in electronica. What matters in electronica is not the origins of sound so much as the metaphors that portray sound as malleable material, the product of construction, reproduction, or destruction. These metaphors often correspond to actual sound-production techniques. Construction is often synonymous with sound synthesis, reproduction with sound sampling, and destruction with the defacement of the phonographic medium. But of course, the most interesting moments in electronica occur when the metaphor describing sound does not correspond with the actual means of producing it. When digital signal processing hides or disguises the provenance of a sound, listeners can hear in an old sound something supposedly new.

This chapter examines the dawn of Cajun recording. The Cajun community’s relationship to recording technology, the evolving nature of America’s recording industry, and Cajun music’s relationship to the ethnic, race, and hillbilly markets, are examined to illustrate the cultural intersections between the Bayou Country and America writ large. The pioneering recording careers of Joe Falcon, Cleoma Breaux Falcon, and Leo Soileau are also offered as further examples of the recording industry’s impact on local traditions and perceptions of Cajun music.

Bayou Country’s musical terrain and the cultural and historical undercurrents that expanded the genre’s repertoire, stylistic range, and instrumental conventions are outlined in this chapter. Three factors encouraged heterogeneity in the Louisiana’s musical traditions: a musical network that stimulated exchange between musicians, thereby diversifying Louisiana’s soundscape; the historical idiosyncrasies and ethnic variation shaping cultural production in rural enclaves; and the tension between traditional and innovative tendencies within the genre. Residual colonial song structures performed by guitarist Blind Uncle Gaspard, Dennis McGee’s enigmatic fiddling that crossed stylistic and racial boundaries, the friction between conservative and progressive inclinations in regional Cajun popular culture, as performed by Leo Soileau and Moïse Robin, and Cajun readings of American popular culture as interpreted by accordionists Lawrence Walker and Nathan Abshire are used as points of departure in this discussion of heterogeneous musical expression on 78 rpm record.

This chapter explores the important biopolitical role that listening to the sounds of the other has played in the twentieth and early twenty-first world music culture industry (WMCI), in both its academic and commercial guises. It examines bodies as sites through which the other’s sounds resonate, and the deeply libidinized practice of listening that American consumers have been trained in through the technological developments of the last hundred years. Through its increasing domestication by the gramophone industry and the ascension of the bourgeois woman, the target market for the machine’s home use, chapter one also argues that the WMCI is intimately tied to the feminization of listening. I examine the domestication of sound both among collectors and among listeners as a process that brought Native and African American noises under discursive control, rendering them legible “phonographic subjects.” This practice fed the desires of feminized, domesticated listeners who not only sought exotic sounds on the phonographs that replaced the pianos in their parlors, but also a new domesticated other on whom the white female listener had a social leg up.

The flourishing of the direct voice during the 20th century was undoubtedly encouraged by the development of acoustic technologies — the telephone, the phonograph, the gramophone, the microphone, the megaphone, the radio, and the tape-recorder. The idea that the appliances and instruments are not only useful for making contact with spirits, but are also a feature of life beyond death, is a striking confirmation of the intermingling of technological modes of thought with supernaturalist ideas. For spiritualism, acoustic technology is not so much the proof of the retarding entanglement of psyche with the matter of techne, as the image of the evolving continuity of psyche. More than merely channels of contact with another order of existence, the telephone or the wireless are themselves a message concerning the magical, perfectible life of matter.

Chapter 4 questions how the common turn-of-the-century practice of listening to the telephone, phonograph, and radio through headphones may have aided modernists in turning up the volume and recording interior monologue—one’s “inner speech” that sounds out within the auditory imagination. Using Jonathan Sterne’s historical study of how headphones created a “private acoustic space,” this chapter postulates that listening to voices and music through headphones created a new sense of a personal and aesthetically objectified space within one’s head. Just as headphones brought unfamiliar sounds and voices into one’s private headspace, James Joyce represents the stream of consciousness as a collage of voices and sounds from literature, religion, popular culture, and the soundscape. In Ulysses (1922), Joyce creates an auditory cosmopolitanism, by allowing the languages and sounds of the surrounding world to penetrate and influence the interior monologues of his characters.

From June 1918 until May 1920, the Six Brown Brothers spent most of their time in road tours of Jack o' Lantern, but they continued to record for Victor, and during Jack o' Lantern's 1918 and 1919 summer recesses, they appeared in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic. Bert Williams, the great mixed-race comedian who, like Tom Brown, worked in blackface, was one of the Frolic's stars. In December 1918, Percy Brown died in the world epidemic of the so-called Spanish influenza. In 1919, the act began also to record for the Emerson Phonograph Company, and H. A. Waggener gave Tom an 1863 Sax soprano saxophone, which he began to use onstage.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of sound recording. It covers early acoustic recording machines and techniques including the phonograph, the graphophone, and the gramophone and discusses the differences between wax disc and wax cylinder recording. It also covers the invention of microphones and the dawn of electrical recording. The chapter looks also at the other important means of preserving the artistry of pianists through the process of roll recording and playback using the reproducing player piano system. The main systems (Welte-Mignon, Duo-Art, and Ampico) and their differences are discussed. The limitations of these various types of recording are debated and conclusions about the information that may be safely extrapolated are put forward.

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and planned a global business – which he launched with mediocre success; his provinciality contrasts with the collaborative skills and transatlantic success of Emile Berliner. Edison monitored his recordings with the mentality of a sound engineer; he and his associates in the National Phonograph Company dithered while their rivals at the Victor Talking Machine Company snapped up the top talent. Edison’s company tried on markets like the Chinese and other immigrant record markets, but with limited commitment to marketing. They got off to a slow start in Russia, India was a disaster, and they faltered in Mexico. By 1908 their failure at communications was manifest. By contrast, Berliner was a transatlantic networker. Born in Hanover, Germany, he emigrated to the United States and was launched as an inventor by the Bell Company. With his brother, Joseph Berliner, he built a transatlantic business that included Deutsche Grammophon. In the United States, his protégé Eldridge Johnson built up Victor with a genius for middle-class marketing, while their British partner, the Gramophone Company, became a springboard for worldwide recording.

Although mostly forgotten today, nickel-in-the-slot phonographs were a popular and telling symptom of acoustic modernity around 1890. At the rate of a minute or two of recorded sound per nickel deposited, these machines paved the way for the widespread private ownership of phonographs by pioneering their use a public venue where the uncanny experience of listening to absent voices was standardized by the logics of exchange and exhibition. The sound of money falling into the slots was answered automatically by the siren’s call of a voice with no speaker, calling for more money to be deposited. Because they flickered briefly at a conjunction of publics and markets, automatic phonographs provide a way to parse some of the conflicts attending the money economy during the 1890s, that crucial decade in the establishment of modernity as a technological way of life. Canning popular music, and privatizing its audition in serial acts of consumption, these devices were instrumental in the progressive abstraction of public space. Considering both the design and contexts of use of the devices helps to illuminate the conflicted subjectivities of markets and publics in the fin de siècle.

Reimagining the historical influence of the phonograph and recorded music in American life this chapter begins with a reconsideration of Evan Eisenberg's description of domestic consumer phonograph culture. Eisenberg imagined domestic interactions of Americans with the phonograph as “ceremonies of a solitary”, ritualistic observances in which the listener summons forth the sound of voices and musical instruments of his or her own choosing. The talking machine fragmented the unifying role of live music in late 19th-century social rituals. This chapter compares two different but interrelated patterns of listeners' reaction to phonograph records in the United States between 1890 and 1945. The first circle of popular resonance to phonographic sound emerges from the analysis of responses by a group of 2,644 Americans who filled out a survey undertaken in 1921 by Thomas A. Edison Inc. The second pattern of phonographic culture—circles of jazz resonance—first emerged at about the same time, flourished in tension with Edison's consumers, and died in the depression, only to be revived once it was over.

In the 1890s, before the phonograph industry had time to establish what became in to the teenagers of the following century a tidy facade of domestic bourgeois respectability, another largely forgotten world of coin-operated cylinder machines spun forth raucous worlds of popular entertainment. This other, earlier, and formative phonographic world, so suggestive of the juke box circles of the 1930s, provides ample evidence that the industry planted strong roots in turn-of-the-century popular culture. Many Americans learned how to use recorded entertainment as a significant new means of holding reminders of the past in suspension with reactions to the present. The phonograph parlors of the 1890s introduced short samples of the sounds of American popular music into the public urban world of “cheap amusements”, commercialized entertainments like concert saloons, musical halls, vaudeville theaters, dime museums, and burlesque halls that flourished in the emerging bright-light neighborhoods of cities in the United States. The Coney Island Crowd continued to make disc recordings intended for domestic use up to World War I.

The history of the phonograph clearly demonstrates important ways in which economic and cultural forces have shaped technological inventions in the world. In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the first functioning prototype of the phonograph, but others subsequently patented major improvements and, in the process, reinvented and reconstructed the phonograph and means of recording sound. In some ways, phonograph technology did determine the broad outlines of sound recording from the popular music in the 1890s to opera in the 1910s. All of the great pioneers of the phonograph industry—Thomas A. Edison; Emile Berliner, inventor of the flat disc; Edward Easton; and Eldridge Reeves Johnson, founder and director of the Victor Talking Machine Company—agreed that their invention should become a permanent part of every American home. The Victor Talking Machine Company reinforced the upper and middle levels of an American musical hierarchy in recorded music. This aesthetic stance influenced the initial desire to make records abroad and the subsequent program of recording within the United States for sale to this country's immigrants.

Cultural stereotypes in the United States constrained the involvement of immigrants with recorded music while simultaneously opening limited avenues of opportunity, especially for those from continental European nations. Just as Victorian tradition considered females particularly musical and, therefore, apt consumers of recorded music, so it taught that Europeans had invented and most skillfully developed the traditions of concert hall music that had been grafted onto the American artistic life. The phonograph industry therefore quickly turned to recording “foreign” concert hall vocal artists from Europe. Surprisingly enough, this colonial attitude eventually led the recording industry to a variety of multiculturalism dominated by European musical traditions. The importation into America of “foreign records” by European artists became a regular practice of the recording industry, interrupted (but not ended) by the two world wars. A second, culturally distinct, ethnic recording concept accelerated during World War I: that of recording for American ethnic customers the music of European immigrant musicians living in the United States.