Abstract: This essay examines the sonic archive of tape recording artist Tony Schwartz, in particular his 1955 Folkways album Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers. Working from assumptions located in sound studies, I argue that Schwartz's recordings are essential listening for two reasons. One, Schwartz's meticulous attention to what he called the "sounds of [his] times"--and, I would add, of his place--helps scholars reconstruct the 1950s from a new vantage point: the ear. Two, Schwartz understood something that sound studies scholars are only beginning to tease out. Sound is not merely a scientific phenomenon--vibrations passing through matter at particular frequencies--it is also a set of social relations. "Splicing the Sonic Color-Line" begins by theorizing the mutually constitutive relationship I find between sound, listening, and race as the "sonic color-line." Next, original archival material is used to reconstruct the historical soundscape of Tony Schwartz's street recordings and reveal the sonic color-line as the aggregated racialized constraints and protocols regarding sound that Nueva York is both embedded in and struggles against. Finally, I trace the way in which Schwartz's "sono-montage" in Nueva York splices the sonic color-line, translating mainstream representations of the so-called homogenous noise of Puerto Rican life into textured, meaningful sound to assimilated (white) Americans. Nueva York is symptomatic of the ways in which listening experiences reflect and generate ideas about racial difference and its historical connection to American citizenship. Contains Web Supplement

Abstract: The introduction to "The Politics of Recorded Sound," this special issue of Social Text, lays out the unifying mission of the diverse essays: to study sound recording within a wide-ranging, historicized understanding of mediation as a process embedded within networks of power. A significant objective is to bring attention to the ways modalities of social difference, such as race, gender, class, and ability, structure the practices of making and listening to recordings as well as the manners in which we think about those practices. Another purpose is to implode the ultimately ahistorical narrative of sound-recording technology as driven by ever-improving "fidelity" in the reproduction of music. The introduction also explores the diverse ways in which sound recording plays a part in contemporary life and argues that each of these is centrally shaped by politics of corporeality, economics, or culture.

Abstract: This article reframes the history of recorded sound to take phonographs and player-pianos into account on more or less equal terms. It argues that the two technologies developed in complementary, dialectical relation to each other: one analog, storing and conveying an acoustic event (i.e., sound-in-time); the other, digital, storing and conveying in binary form information for (re)producing sound (i.e., sound-in-knowledge). Analyzing the production of sound along the same lines as Harry Braverman's analysis of manufacturing and automation, the article treats the phonograph and the player-piano as aspects of musical mechanization, which had expanded dramatically through the piano in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both the phonograph and player-piano technologies reverberated in the formation of modern society, the phonograph exemplifying the phenomenological rupture of time and space, the player-piano embodying the epistemological shift marked by machines storing and executing growing amounts of human knowledge, from automated industrial manufacturing to computers. The final section of the article considers the malign and utopian symbolism of the player-piano in the work of William Gaddis and Conlon Nancarrow, among other other writers and composers. Contains Web Supplement

Abstract: This article traces the history of speech wave visualization and the longstanding relationship between phonetics, communication engineering, and deaf oral education. American telephone engineers drew on this history to build the sound spectrograph in the 1940s, a machine that transformed the representation of sounds by considering speech not in terms of meaning nor in terms of airborne waveforms but in terms of the characteristics of its perception and the minimum features by which it could be reconstructed. The sound spectrograph was designed to make telephone transmission more efficient and to support deaf oral communication; the ability of deaf subjects to read spectrograms was, moreover, the best evidence for the identification of information-bearing features in a complex speech wave. The sound spectrograph directly influenced information theory, which gave mathematical instructions for the efficient digital encoding of audio and visual signals. Spectrograms suggested that much of the content of speech was redundant or irrelevant and could be discarded without a listener perceiving any difference. It will be argued that deafness ultimately served as an "assistive pretext" for nineteenth-century phoneticians and twentieth-century engineers, who quickly turned to more profitable applications for their devices. Contains Web Supplement

Abstract: This essay examines 1890s commercial audio recordings--none of which is known to exist today--that reenacted lynchings of African Americans,in particular, the mass spectacle lynching of Henry Smith of Paris, Texas, in 1893. Despite rumors that the recordings were made live, they were in fact examples of an early, nonmusical genre in commercial phonography known as the "descriptive specialty," which often involved studio reenactments of current events. Like other descriptive specialties, these recordings were meant to exhibit the phonographic medium to capture audience attention. Using descriptions of the recordings from period documents, the essay argues that there was a specific confluence between lynching reenactments and the notion of a "phonographic voice," between sounds elicited from persons on the edge of "the human" and the sound imagined to come from the machine itself. It places the recordings in the context of contemporary representations of blackness in phonography and ponders their place in the longer history of recorded sounds of blackness. It also argues against the fixation on disembodiment among some media historians and theorists who work on phonography and contemporaneous technologies. Contains Web Supplement

Abstract: Freestyle is both a musical genre and, as a multitude of fanzines will tell you, a lifestyle. The playwright Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas evoked our teenage surround when he called it a "system of living." Described as "android descarga" by music critic Peter Shapiro and "a soap opera set to music" by the vocalist Judy Torres, there is general agreement that freestyle is constituted by a nebulous Latin feel that is spoken about but not necessarily accounted for. This essay enters the scene of freestyle with the assumption that it is both tinge and fringe--and by that I mean both marginal part and decorative border. To do so means to surrender the accolade of theorist for stylist, to harbor the hard work of listening from scholarly convention. To try and tell freestyle's story is to say a great deal about a moment when large numbers of young women found themselves on the inside of recording studios. The story bears its own annals of the uncredited, adding volumes of names to those who have lent their uncompensated talents to the advent of studio-based recording. With a focus on freestyle's women vocalists from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, this essay picks up on a legacy of techniques developed to navigate the procedures of recording, including but not limited to those that go down in studios. The essay also suggests how freestyle's audiences have taken up such techniques from the back then and have extended them into the beats thereafter.

Abstract: This essay argues for the concept of a utopian impulse, a liberating power possible in music and dance. With a focus on African music, the essay argues against conventional Eurocentric world-music commodification and points instead to new music movements from Congo and from Angola that, engaging new forms of technology, do not require the practices of European curatorship. Contains Web Supplement