sound

You can imagine life without the internet but what about an environment without recorded sound: no CDs, radio, film soundtracks and dictaphones?

As a starting point for considering the implications of sound recording consult Evan Eisenberg's The Recording Angel: Music, Records & Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (New York: McGraw-Hill 87). George Steiner's meditative In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 74) and Hans Keller's Essays on Music (Cambridge: Cambridge 94) are more austere examinations.

Timothy Day's A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 00), Michael Chanan's Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording & Its Effects on Music (London: Verso 95) and Norman Lebrecht's When The Music Stops (New York: Simon & Schuster 96) explore recording's consequences for the composer, artist and theatrical performance. 

Essays in The Phonogram in Cultural Communication (New York: Springer 82) edited by Kurt Blaukopf and The Global Jukebox: The International Music Industry (London: Routledge 96) by Robert Burnett offer insights into the business of recording. There's a synoptic account in An International History of the Recording Industry (London: Cassell 98) by Pekka Gronow & Ilpo Saunio.

Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 90), Lisa Gitelman's Scripts, Grooves & Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 99) and Greil Marcus' The Dustbin of History (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 95) provide other perspectives.

We've pointed in our economy guide and the Ketupa media resource site to studies of the shape and size of the recording industry. Robert Burnett's The Global Jukebox: The International Music Industry (London: Routledge 96) is a crisp introduction. It highlights that the five major groups are responsible for around 75% of global sales, a figure unlikely to be seriously affected by the rise of new technologies such as Napster and Gnutella.

There's a more staid rendition in Russell Sanjek's From Print to Plastic: Publishing & Promoting America's Popular Music, 1900-1980 (New York: Institute for Studies in American Music 83) and Pennies From Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the 20th Century (New York: Oxford Uni Press 96), the latter co-authored with David Sanjek.

For the technology two starting points are Andre Millard's America On Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 95) and David Morton's more technical Off The Record: The Technology & Culture of Sound Recording In America (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 00).

For Australia there's a serviceable account in Ross Laird's Sound Beginnings: The Early Record Industry in Australia (Sydney: Currency Press 99), covering developments to the late 1920s.



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