Listening Devices - by Jens Gerrit Papenburg (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

From 1940 to 1990, new machines and devices radically changed listening to music. Small and large single records, new kinds of jukeboxes and loudspeaker systems not only made it possible to playback music in a different way, they also evidence a fundamental transformation of music and listening itself. Taking the media and machines through which listening took place during this period, Listening Devices develops a new history of listening.Although these devices were (and often still are) easily accessible, up to now we have no concept of them. To address this gap, this volume proposes the term "listening device." In conjunction with this concept, the book develops an original and fruitful method for exploring listening as a historical subject that has been increasingly organized in relation to technology.

Case studies of four listening devices are the points of departure for the analysis, which leads the reader down unfamiliar paths, traversing the popular sound worlds of 1950s rock 'n' roll culture and the disco and club culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Despite all the characteristics specific to the different listening devices, they can nevertheless be compared because of the fundamental similarities they share: they model and manage listening, they actively mediate between the listener and the music heard, and it is this mediation that brings both listener and the music listened to into being. Ultimately, however, the intention is that the listening devices themselves should not be heard so that the music they playback can be heard. Thus, they take the history of listening to its very limits and confront it with its "other"-a history of non-listening.

The book proposes "listening device" as a key concept for sound studies, popular music studies, musicology, and media studies. With this conceptual key, a new, productive understanding of past music and sound cultures of the pre-digital era can be unlocked, and, not least, of the listening culture of the digital present.

Review Quotes

"In Listening Devices, Jens Gerrit Papenburg gives us a new history of sound recording with popular music at its very center. Papenburg shows how practices and contexts of listening shaped the technological forms taken by popular music, as well as its sound. The book does a wonderful job of taking formats denigrated by some sound historians, like the 45rpm single, and showing how it was both shaped by musical practice and central to popular music history. Readers will come away with a deeper understanding of mastering and the loudness wars - of the 1950s - as well how disco's quest to draw out the groove and deepen the bass led to the development of the 12" single. Papenburg's concept of "listening device" nimbly balances theories of culture and technology to help us better understand a key slice of sound history in the mid 20th century." --Jonathan Sterne, author of Diminished Faculties, MP3, and The Audible Past, James McGill Professor of Culture and Technology, McGill University, Canada

"Far too many theories of listening have been modeled on classical music. Papenburg shows that our twentieth-century ears are sculpted not by composers such as Schoenberg and Webern, but by sound engineers - as well as the jukebox and the maxi-single, by rock'n'roll and disco, house and techno. Listening Devices is a cultural history of music that is also a musical history of culture. Papenburg succeeds in threading the needle in this ambitious project: it goes right through the hole in the centre of the maxi-single." --Alexander Rehding, Fanny Peabody Professor of Music, Harvard University, USA

""How do we tell the history of listening, when listeners so rarely document their own experiences of sound? Jens Gerrit Papenburg approaches listening as a cultural technique (Kulturtechnik), finding traces of the ways it has been modeled, managed, and felt in "listening devices" that range in scale from a deep cut in a 7-inch single to the massive Berghain sound system. Listening Devices elevates rock and disco to "investigative tools" for understanding modern listening itself, as early sites of the burgeoning technification of sound and hearing. Delving into the overlooked histories of mastering, amplification, and playlists, Papenburg makes a compelling argument that today's digital listening cultures have roots in 20th century popular music."" --Mara Mills, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, USA

About the Author