Sound media and materiality

Both Carolyn Birdsall’s Radiophilia and Elodie Roy’s Shellac in Visual and Sonic Culture challenge our approaches to sound media (radio and phonography, respectively). If media research’s traditional emphasis has focused on narratives within a given medium’s diegesis, these two books are unique contributions to the ‘material turn’, in which the authors tell the stories that emerge from sound media’s specific qualities, relationships, and circulations. This approach allows each author to call attention to radio and phonography’s respective intermedial and multi-sensory attributes, as well as tracing their material and discursive circulations through shifting societal discourses.

Birdsall’s book is intended to do more than merely enrich radio history, which would be a laudable-enough goal. She seeks to map our loves, connections, and affinities with radio via a transdisciplinary approach. Birdsall contextualizes this work within radio and podcast research, sound studies and popular music studies, and media studies in general. Rather than a focus on specific radio eras or trajectories, Birdsall succeeds in mapping our deep investments in radio across geographic locations and historical eras. Radiophilia details the layered ways in which radio has entered our lives over the last century. Birdsall’s radiophilia is based on radio interactions – loving, knowing, saving and sharing – and how each mode defines listeners’ love in revealing ways. Radiophilia notes the shifting nature of our love of radio from its time as a wholly new medium through to its role as ubiquitous if often underappreciated medium, as well as its digital-age reinventions.

Birdsall carefully tends to radio’s various meanings across contexts and eras. She expertly details the intimate, individual experiences we have with radio (such as falling in love with Rudy Vallee’s voice over the air; hearing a Zulu broadcast in 1940s Apartheid South Africa; British listeners in love with Radio Luxembourg’s signature sounds and so on). Birdsall, however, importantly grounds this research in institutional efforts and enthusiasms for the medium’s sonic traces and non-sonic ephemera over time (such as radio societies like Australia’s Argonauts Club, websites like World Radio History, as well as radio museums and exhibits). Birdsall’s radiophilia is a deep investment in the medium and its programming, a rich, firsthand experience grounded in everyday materiality. It is entirely appropriate that the book opens with Birdsall’s recounting of her own listening and recording radio to cassette tape at home in the 1990s.

Elodie Roy’s Shellac in Visual and Sonic Culture defamiliarizes the materials and processes at the heart of phonography. The material focus is shellac (in its varying forms). Roy refuses general theorization in favor of mapping shellac’s interstitial connections across epochs and geographies. Roy draws from research in material culture, media archeology, cultural history, eco-media studies, music studies, and the avant-garde arts. This far-reaching analysis traverses varying socio-cultural contexts, technological eras, transnational industries and colonialist infrastructures. Through a focus on detail – the resins created from the lac bug – a broader story emerges, with displacements and disconnects, as well as recurring themes and connections. Roy focuses on shellac’s multi-sensory roles as visual and sonic material, as well as its plasticity in its chemical, industrial and colonial contexts (with its grueling labor and subjugation). Roy’s narrow focus on shellac’s material plasticity is tied to its broad representational plasticity over time.

Roy begins with shellac’s early visual uses in India for self-expression via bodily inscriptions, to its global trade roles circa the 1600s via Dutch traders and the British East India Company. Shellac became a material championed for its reflective properties (e.g. varnish for Italian violin makers). By the 1800s, the material was commonly used for musical instruments and increasingly valued for its sonic properties. Roy argues that Emile Berliner’s embrace of shellac for sound reproduction reinscribes the material’s past role in memorialization. Even in the sound recording era, Roy convincingly details shellac’s shifting representational modes (the object as mirror, mask and commemoration) and representational shifts in work by Theodor Adorno and Jean Cocteau. Following their work, she calls for more research in the gramophone-as-mirror (a neglected representational trope in early phonography).

Roy describes shellac’s shocking ‘toxic transformation’ via its war-time roles in the making of bombs and hand grenades (and the paradox of soldiers listening to records in recovery, made from the same shellac some encountered in battle). Roy notes shellac’s destructive uses as further evidence of shellac’s radically shifting applications and representations over time. In the last part of Roy’s book, she examines shellac’s ongoing role in contemporary art and design practices, in which the interrogation and use of phonographic materials in art encouraged embodied knowledge through firsthand experiences.

Both Birdsall’s Radiophilia and Roy’s Shellac in Visual and Sonic Culture are appropriate texts for graduate students and upper-level undergraduate students, as well as researchers and writers like me who have benefited in no small way from both books.

Kyle BarnettBellarmine University, USA