Active Listening: The Cultural Politics of Magnetic Recording Technologies in North America, 1945-1993.

Abstract

From the late 1940s to the mid 1990s, the use of magnetic tape recorders provoked aesthetic, social, and political debates about the decentralization of sonic production. At the very moment that postwar mass culture seemed most ascendant and critics began to identify it as a coherent object of study and scorn, reel-to-reel tape recorders allowed users to reproduce and manipulate mass-produced sounds emanating from radio and recording studios, as well as the sounds of their households, their communities, and the larger world outside their homes. Many non-professional tape users, non-commercial sonic researchers, and hobbyist audio networkers would come to believe that they could be more than passive recipients of culture industry products and the dominant ideologies that they transmitted; through an active engagement with tape, they hoped to teach listeners to become producers themselves. Listening to their works produced via tape, reading their voluminous writings, and combing their archival collections for evidence of wider connections to their practices, I argue that such tape enthusiasts developed a set of media theories through a self-reflexive recording practice I call active listening. This dissertation follows hobbyists and professional recordists ranging from New York City folklorist and advertiser Tony Schwartz, composer and educator R. Murray Schafer and his World Soundscape Project in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the Iowa City-based audio collective the Tape-beatles, who all proposed multiple forms of engagement with, against, and about mass culture. They made structural critiques of commercial culture industries for separating producers from consumers in the name of profits, perceptual arguments about the capacity for sound to activate new political imaginaries, and aesthetic moves that aimed to reintegrate presumably alienated listening subjects. Not only did the ubiquity of mass culture throughout North America give listeners a shared vocabulary, but the act of appropriating and manipulating sounds on tape fostered a self-consciousness about how mass culture worked and how it might be made to work differently. Such forms of engagement both attempted to eliminate boundaries between the production and consumption of mass culture and bolstered an ideological investment in the idea of mass culture as a passive and alienating force.