LAS REDES SOCIALES DURANTE LA PANDEMIA

systems (hi fi; home stereo; the transistor radio; audio tape players; the walkman; the CD player) is more than simply a succession of ‘technical’ triumphs. Reflecting changes in the technologies of sound recording and production, each new form of sound reproduction has been accompanied by significant changes in how, when, and where we listen to music.

A talking machine Edison invented the phonograph, a ‘talking machine’, in November 1877. This followed his work, along with researchers such as Bell and Watson, on the transfer of speech electrically, which led to the development of the telephone. The phonograph represented the true beginning of the reproduction of recorded sound, replacing ‘the shared Victorian pleasures of bandstand and music hall with the solitary delight of a private world of sound’ (Millard 1995: 1). Edison’s phonograph used cylinders and was able to record and reproduce sound. Other researchers developed the new tech-nology further: Berliner developed the gramophone (1888), using a disk instead of a cylinder, while Edison considerably improved on his original in 1887.

Various commentators have identified a succession of phases in the technological history of the phonograph: an acoustic one from 1877 to the 1920s; the use of elec-trical/magnetic tape, from the 1920s; and the digital age, with the CD, from 1982:

‘the industry built on the phonograph was driven forward by the constant disruption of innovation: new systems of recording, new kinds of machine, and newer types of recorded music’ (Millard 1995: 5–6; see also Jones 1992; Read and Welch 1977). By the 1970s, most homes in ‘developed’ countries had a home stereo system, the modern phonograph, consisting of an amplifier, a record player, tape recorder, and radio.

The phonograph was originally intended primarily as a business tool, but moved into entertainment initially through coin-operated phonographs (from 1889). With the development of pre-recorded cylinders in the early 1900s, the phonographic industry took off. While in 1897 only about 500,000 records had been sold in the United States, by 1899 this number had reached 2.8 million, and continued to rise.

The impact of the talking machine was international. Farrell’s (1998) discussion of the early days of the gramophone in India presents a fascinating story of the intersec-tions between commerce and technological innovation and their impact on traditional Indian modes of music patronage and music making. Economics under-pinned the move of GLT (Gramophone and Typewriter Ltd) into the Indian subcontinent. As John Watson Hawf, their agent in Calcutta, put it: ‘The native music is to me worse than Turkish but as long as it suits them and sells well what do we care?’ (cited in Farrell 1998: 59). For the first time ‘Indian musicians entered the world of Western media’ (ibid.: 58), as photography and recorded sound turned

‘native’ musics into saleable commodities.

The gramophone arrived in India only a few years after its invention in the West, and recorded sound brought many forms of classical Indian music out of the obscurity of performance settings, such as the courtesan’s quarter, and on to the mass market.

Recording these was a formidable exercise: the visits to various parts of India in the early 1900s were quite correctly termed ‘expeditions’, involving complex logistical problems. For the emergent Indian middle class, the gramophone was both a techno-logical novelty and a status symbol. The images in the company catalogues, reproduced by Farrell, illustrate this, along with the use of traditional images of Hindu deities to add to the appeal of the new medium. The constraints and possibili-ties of the new technology affected the style and structure of the music recorded.

While Farrell is cautious not to generalise too far from the one detailed example he presents, he suggests that one possible limitation of the limited duration of the early recordings ‘was to lead artists to give greater weight to the composed or fixed parts of the performance than they would normally have done in live recitals’ (1998: 78).

Stereo and the sound system

Stereophonic sound was first developed for use in film theatres in the 1930s, with home stereo systems as scaled down versions. In 1931 the first three-way speaker

systems were introduced. The sound was divided into high, middle and low frequen-cies, with each band sent to three different transducers in the loud speaker, each designed to best facilitate that part of the sound spectrum: the large ‘woofer’ for the bass, a mid-range driver, and the smaller ‘tweeter’ for the treble. Due to the depres-sion, and the difficulty of reaching agreement on a common stereo standard (compared with the battle over recording formats), this system was not turned into a commercial product until the late 1950s.

In the 1950s, tape was the format to first introduce stereo sound into the home.

Read and Welch (1977: 427) observe that the ‘introduction of the stereo tape recorder for the home in 1955 heralded the most dramatic increase ever seen for a single product in home entertainment’. The increased sales of magnetic tape recorders and prerecorded tape forced the record companies to develop a competing stereo product, particularly for the classical music audiophile. By the 1960s, stereo sound was incorporated into the loudspeakers used in home stereos. December 1957 saw the first stereo records introduced to the market. These were not intended for the mass market, and sales were initially not high, but home stereos became popularised during the 1960s.

In addition to home stereo systems, there are more mobile forms of sound repro-duction, important for decentring the listening process, and sometimes identified with particular lifestyles and social groups. ‘Sound system’ is the term given to large, heavily amplified mobile discos and their surrounding reggae culture. These initially emerged in Jamaica, from the 1950s onwards, and were subsequently transplanted to Britain with the influx of Caribbean immigrants.

The basic description of a sound system as a large mobile hi-fi or disco does little justice to the specificities of the form. The sound that they generate has its own characteristics, particularly an emphasis on the reproduction of bass frequencies, its own aesthetics and a unique mode of consumption.

(Gilroy 1997: 342)

Compact cassette audio tape and cassette tape players, developed in the mid-1960s, appealed because of their small size and associated portability. Initially a low fidelity medium, steady improvement of the sound, through modifications to magnetic tape and the introduction of the Dolby noise reduction system, enhanced the appeal of cassettes. The transistor radio (made possible by the invention of the transistor in 1948) and the audio cassette had become associated technologies by the 1970s, with widely popular cheap radio cassette players, and the cassette player incorporated into high-fidelity home stereos. The development of powerful portable stereo players (boom boxes), associated with inner-city African-American youth, created a new form of social identification and a new level of noise nuisance. Another mobile form

of sound system is the walkman, which had a major impact when it was introduced during the 1980s, enabling the listener to maintain an individual private experience in public settings (see Negus 1992).

An efficient format for the expansion into remote markets, tape cassettes became the main sound carriers in ‘developing’ countries, and by the end of the 1980s cassettes were outselling other formats three to one. As a portable recording tech-nology, the tape cassette has been used in the production, duplication and dissemination of local musics and the creation of new musical styles, most notably punk and rap, thus tending to decentralise control over production and consump-tion. Home taping is individual copying (to audio or video tape) from existing recordings, or off-air, and was made possible by the development of cassette audio tape and the cassette tape player. The term cassette culture has been applied to the

‘do it yourself’ ethic that underlies such practices, and the network of musicians and listeners it embraces. Such practices pose a considerable threat to the music industry, with their violation of copyright.

CD-ROM

CD-ROMs are 4.5 inch plastic, aluminium-looking disks, the same size as the musical CD, which can each hold up to seven hundred megabytes of data, in multimedia form. This is equivalent to approximately one thousand 300 page books. Although they have gone largely untreated in the critical literature on popular music, the music CD-ROM represents a new marketing niche and a new advertising avenue for the popular music industry.

CD-ROMs are part of the explosion of multimedia in the 1990s. While this term is often loosely used, it generally refers to the communication of messages or informa-tion through the combined use of text, graphics, animainforma-tion, audio, and moinforma-tion video. In the modern sense, it goes with another basic concept of new technology – interactivity. Multimedia has come to imply more than just the convergence of voice, music, alpha-numeric text and so on, it also implies that the user has some degree of interactive control over these, instead of being a passive viewer, as with broadcast TV. In a broader perspective, multimedia is a synonym for convergence:

major media companies working together, often under corporate umbrellas.

Music CD-ROMs are one aspect of the ongoing convergence of the electronics and music industries which began in the 1980s (see Chapter 2). By the early 1990s, record companies, including EMI and the Warner Music Group, began forming multimedia distribution divisions, which started exploring the possibilities of new technologies, including music CD-ROMs. For example, in 1994 EMI spokesperson Don Harder (senior VP of information technology) announced a CD-ROM featuring heavy metal band Queensryche, to be released with the band’s new album:

‘We are looking at creating as much synergy as possible between the CD and the CD-ROM. With both of those titles being carried in many of the same locations, we want to do a lot of cross marketing’ (Billboard, 30 April 1994: 1, 98).

CD-ROM became an important and influential part of the music industry, extending the possibilities for listeners/viewers to interact with the musical perform-ance (see Hayward 1995; Shuker 1998). An increasing number of popular music CD-ROM titles have become available. These are usually artist-specific (a pioneering example is XPLORA 1 Peter Gabriel’s Secret World (Interplay, 1993, and updates), but there are also music CD-ROMs which let users compose, play guitar, and edit music videos, along with music encylopedias (e.g. Music Central 96, and updates). Increasingly, regular CD releases now include multimedia material which can be accessed when the recording is played through the appropriate computer; e.g.

The Rolling Stones, Stripped, 1996). In addition to CD-ROMs, there are now music/artist specific computer screen savers and video and computer games, complete with sound bites. A logical extension of this, has been the current links between the major record and on-line companies.

SOUND DISSEMINATION