Sound, Technology, and Culture in French Indochina

In the 1920s, European radio enthusiasts organized clubs in Hanoi, Saigon, Hai Phong, Vientiane, and Phnom Penh. Periodicals and letters from the time provide insights on this burgeoning amateur radio culture. Members shared experiences, debated the potential of the technology, and used radio to broadcast records of music, story-telling, and other forms of light entertainment. Chapter 1 examines how these radio clubs were established in the urban centers of French Indochina and how they impacted cultural life in the colonial territories. The chapter begins with a consideration of cultural colonialism, broadcasting technology, and music in the French Empire. Archival sources provide evidence on the styles of music and recording technologies in circulation in early twentieth-century mainland Southeast Asia, when telegraphy, phonograph recordings and radio broadcasts informed the social construction of state and empire. Exclusive membership regulations of the Indochinese radio clubs, which restricted most of the indigenous population, were undermined during the Japanese occupation (1940–45). And the Japanese promotion of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Dai Tōa Kyōeiken) followed by a famine in 1944–45 fomented unrest among the indigenous population. During the August Revolution of 1945, the Viet Minh and other insurrectionaries commandeered these sound reproduction technologies to broadcast news of their uprising.

Voice in The “Long 20th Century”: From Mechanical to Electrical Aurality1

The use of microphones in theatre today is so common that it is hard to believe how recent this practice is and, more importantly, that it has provoked such long standing and fierce resistance. The fact is that the theatre, which very quickly integrated the electric lamp (at the end of the 19th century) into its technical arsenal, waited more than a century before resorting to microphones to relay the voices of the actors. Technological imperfections alone are not sufficient to explain this deferment since, between the emergence of the first sound reproduction technologies in the late 1870s (microphone, phonograph, telephone) and the 21st century, four distinct media have enjoyed considerable success on account of these technologies : records, radio, cinema and television. This article argues is that such delay was due to an ideological positioning by which the theatre tried to affirm its ontological superiority over the other media practices by establishing itself as the ultimate refuge of “authenticity” by virtue of the simultaneous – and non-technologically mediated – presence of the actor and the spectator in a single space. In this context, the human voice of theatre took on a highly symbolic value, that of unadulterated authenticity, a value which seemed perverted everywhere else.

Listening to Modernism: New Books in the History of Sound

The rapid industrialisation and electrification that characterises the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the revolutionary and irreversible technologisation of sound. The ability to send sound great distances, through time and space, amplified the instability of sonic presence both inside and outside the body. Sound reproduction technologies such as gramophone and radio emphasise the questionable materiality of sound. Scholarship in the emerging field of sound studies has tended to focus on sound technologies that emerge in this period, promoting the axiom that the ear epitomises modern sensibility. Even before technological developments revolutionised sound, discourses surrounding the ear anticipated the collapse of scientific certainty that marks the modern age. Developments in sound technology can mask the severing of scientific measurement from musical aesthetics that coincided with the age of recording. If the study of sound in modernity has tended to focus on technological changes and bracket aesthetic questions, it is perhaps because the relationships among the science, technology and aesthetics of sound have not yet been adequately parsed.

Preserving Heritage, Fostering Change

This article explores how two groups of American popular musicians have engaged with sound reproduction technologies—country artists and radio in the 1920s–40s and hip-hop DJs and video since 2000—to create an unintended but lasting cultural heritage for their musical traditions. Neither the radio broadcasts made by country artists nor the amateur videos of DJs were intended to be permanent. We argue that the practitioners of these traditions have acted as accidental archivists—shaping the development of their respective genres in the process of preserving them—and suggest how these archives may be of use to public historians.

DIS/EMBODYING AUTHORITY: FEMALE RADIO “PREACHERS” AND THE AMBIVALENCES OF MASS-MEDIATED SPEECH IN MALI

This article explores how the introduction of sound reproduction technologies inflects what were previously considered authoritative, standardized, and gender-specific forms of religious leadership and how these changes affect in turn the (gendered) subjects of media practice. Examining the recent, controversial public presence of female radio preachers in Mali, the article elucidates the often ambivalent reactions to their radio-mediated dissociation of voice and physical presence, ambivalences that are expressed in the form of gender-specific evaluations of the acceptability of preaching on radio. The article thus argues that analyses of the controversial position of Muslim women in religious debates might benefit from a close scrutiny of the media technologies that enable these women's public mediation and also from paying sustained attention to cultural constructions of the voice as a medium of transmitting religious knowledge.