Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.23 (885 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0813527473 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 240 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-11-03 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
One of the misconceptions that Morton hopes to dispel is that the only important category of sound recording involves music. As a result, Amos and Andy was sold to Mutual and went live shortly afterward. . Morton also offers fascinating insight into early radio: that, while The Amos and Andy Show initially was pre-recorded and not broadcast live, the commercial stations saw this easily distributed program as an economic threat: many non-network stations could buy the disks for easy, relatively inexpensive replaying. Off the Record demonstrates how the history of both the hardware and the ways people used it is essential for understanding why any particular technology became a fixture in everyday life or faded into obscurity. Recording culture in America emerged, Morton writes, not through the dictates of the technology itself but in complex ways that were contingent upon the actions of users.Each of the case studies in the book emphasizes one of five aspects of the culture of recording and its relationship to new technology, at the same time telling the story of sound recording history. David L. Unique in his broad-based approach to sound technology, the five case studies that Morton investigates are : The phonograph recordRecording in the radio businessThe dictation machineThe telephone answering machine, andHome ta
He notes that many of these technologies evolved to improve the quality of "highbrow" music despite the fact that most listeners used the resulting flood of audiophile goods to listen to anything but classical. When, in 1877, Thomas Edison and his associates invented the phonograph, he thought that it would be used primarily as a device for making home recordings, not as a tool for listening to recordings produced by others--a development, John Philip Sousa complained in 1906, certain to spell the end of "talent and taste." In the more than a century that has passed, new technologies have come to make it ever easier for both the mass and individual production of recorded sound. --Gregory McNamee. He also follows the fortunes o
Donald Clarke said An okay survey. I learned a lot from this book. Each survey of the early history of Edison's invention teaches me something I didn't know. I had no idea there was such a huge variety of office dictation machines, or that telephone answering machines began to be invented over a hundred years ago, or that AT&T hated them and fought against them tooth . Lively history of the technologies we all use A Customer From record players to answering machines, David Morton's history of sound recording explains where these everyday technologies came from--and why some of them, like the 8-track tape, ultimately met their demise. Chapters cover the record industry, radio broadcasting, dictation machines, answering machines, and tape recorders, but th