Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis

Wie zich met de geschiedenis van geluid bezighoudt komt vroeg of laat het werk tegen van Raymond Murray Schafer. Deze Canadese componist en milieuactivist introduceerde in de jaren zeventig het begrip 'soundscape' of 'klanklandschap': onze omgeving-in-geluid. Murray Schafer wilde historische en contemporaine klanklandschappen reconstrueren en in kaart brengen met als uiteindelijke doel de kwaliteit van het huidige klanklandschap te verbeteren. Zijn project had een sterk ecologische ondertoon. Net zoals vele soorten dieren en planten waren uitgestorven zo waren ook vele geluiden verdwenen. In een ver preïndustrieel verleden hadden we een wereld gekend waarin signalen duidelijk hoorbaar waren geweest. Dat <i>hi-fi</i> klanklandschap was helaas verloren gegaan en vervangen door een <i>low-fi</i> geluidsomgeving waarin individuele geluiden voortdurend worden overstemd

This article questions the place and function of sound in Italian Futurism founded by F.T. Marinetti in 1909. Whereas Futurism is generally associated with noise the author proposes tuning one's ear to its 'silence': its soundless sounds. By analysing the visual representation of Futurist sounds in painting film and poetry it is pointed out that it is impossible to capture them in merely musical or acoustic terms. Futurist sounds become images; they seem to exist only in their non-acoustic dimension. The central issue thus is the notation of these 'visual' sounds. Different systems of notation are discussed: from Russolo's sound painting to the chromatic music registered on film by the Ginanni-Corradini brothers (sound = image) from Marinetti's 'declaimable scores' of words-in-freedom to the 'silent' film dialogues obtained through Futurist analogies (image = sound)

On the evening of January 7 1928 a play was broadcast by radio live from an improvised studio in Amsterdam. The play het ontslag (<i>The Dismissal</i>) was written by the socialist writer and artist Cees de Dood. Although several attempts had been made between 1920 and 1928 to broadcast plays on Dutch radio De Dood was the first to write a play that included special sound effects which were meant to activate the imagination of the listeners. In doing so he wanted to make radio a new form of art. The reactions to <i>The Dismissal</i> indicated that he had been partially successful in achieving this goal. The broadcast of January 1928 lead to a regular and rich production of Dutch plays on the radio. However the plays that followed appealed more to the respectable homes of the middle classes rather than the blunt socialistic realism of <i>The Dismissal</i>

In this 'diary on sound' written during the adaptation recording and editing process of the longest radio drama series in Dutch history the author contemplates the use of sound in Dutch radio drama over the years and on the research object in his own work. He suggests that sometime during the 1960s the awareness of realism as a certain style made place for the sound-engineers' ambition to record reality 'as it really sounds'. Realistic sound lost its function as a dramatic sign. As adaptor and director the author seeks to use realistic sound as an abstract musical entity also in a realistic anecdotal context. Hearing everyday sounds as an orchestrated reality he presupposes the existence of the <i>Nada Brahma</i> the Harmony of Spheres as an inaudible carrier wave of all audible sound. Editing recorded sound disturbs the continual modulation of that carrier wave

Over the span of a century the technology of listening moved from being an esoteric medical technique that required extended training and explanation to being a common motif in the 'radio boom' of the early 1920s. Beginning at the margins of middle-class culture audile technique was first implemented as a distinguishing feature of medicine and telegraphy. Rather than 'revolutionizing' hearing sound reproduction technologies were expanded and further disseminated constructs of listening based on audile technique which moved on from the stethoscope to advertisements for telephony sound recording and radio. What took hundreds of pages to explain in the 1820s could be accomplished within the space of a single page or even a single frame of a comic strip by the 1920s. The history of audile technique connects sound reproduction technologies with the longer history of listening in modernity. The salient features of audile technique considered here - the connection of listening and rationality; the separation of the senses; the segmentation of acoustic space; the construction of sound as a carrier of meanings in itself; and the emphasis on physical social and epistemological mediation - are all fundamental to the ways in which people have listened to and listened with sound reproduction technologies and all these practices of listening have a long history over the course of the nineteenth century. So techniques of listening do not simply turn sound technologies into sound media; they have to be articulated together in networks through the organization of new media industries and new middle-class practices

In this review article the author discusses compares and contrasts three recent books on the history of audio culture. Susan J. Douglas's <i>Listening In. Radio and the American</i> Imagination (1999) describes the golden years and decline of radio in twentieth century America. David Morton's book <i>Off the Record. The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America</i> (2000) provides a cultural history of sound recording since the invention of the gramophone. And James Lastra theorizes sound as representation in relation to technology in his book <i>Sound Technology and the American Cinema</i> (2000)

From the mid-1950s on societies for sound hunting were being established all over Europe. They were non-commercial organizations that fostered the use of reel-to-reel tape recorders as a hobby. Although their membership has slowly decreased since the late 1960s most of these societies still exist today. This paper focuses on the heyday of sound hunting in the Netherlands in the 1960s and seeks to understand why the interest in this hobby declined rapidly thereafter. On the basis of research of the archives of the Dutch Society of Sound Hunters the archives of Philips and other sources it is argued that it was not merely the introduction of the cassette recorder that negatively affected the fate of sound hunting. A more important explanation involves the failure on the part of its promoters to convince consumers of the specific options and opportunities of tape recording as hobby. These were generally couched in a comparison with other established leisure activities such as amateur photography letter writing diy painting and hunting as well as with professional artistic practices such as making radio plays or sound art. But many of the suggested merits of the tape recording hobby soon lost their validity on account of changing social cultural and technological factors for example the introduction of new technologies that made sound hunting seem less exciting and the changing appreciation of the sounds pursued by the Dutch sound hunters. Finally the metaphor of hunting and the institutional links with radio lost its force. This prevented the sound hunters as the most prolific group among the tape recording hobbyists from acting as intermediaries between the exemplary practices of high culture and the mass of consumers

The audiophile is defined here as someone who is interested in what the industry calls 'specialty' audio that is audio that is usually marketed as 'the high end'. Audiophiles are usually professional men affluent and well educated. They have extensive collections of recordings and follow one or more specialist periodicals; they distinguish themselves as a whole from buyers of mass-marketed audio and commonly describe themselves as addicted to music. The audiophile's personal relationship with the equipment is of great interest.He(seldom she) can personalize the commodity he buys. The physical modification of the equipment - the most obvious form of personalization - is called <i>tweaking</i>. The recent prominence of tweaking is due in part to the historical shift from phonographbased to cd-based audio systems. These technologies differ greatly in the scope they have for consumer appropriation. Electronic components (cd) however because they lack mechanical interfaces do not allow simple but conspicuous demonstrations of the user's solicitude; in earlier decades (lp) such components could be assembled by the consumer. For some audiophiles the fact that digitals could not be tweaked was a reason to avoid the format; others embraced the cd and found new non-technical tweaks to apply it. Manufacturers recognized in tweaking a market they could exploit and started producing tweak devices some of which were quite costly. The effectiveness of such tweaks is controversial: many audio engineers hold them up to derision. But this does not silence the tweakers; they respond especially by appealing to the ear. Awarding ultimate authority to the ear means in this case limiting the authority of scientific knowledge - it means accepting the presence of mystery in human hearing or in audio equipment: an epistemic controversy

Zoals sommige antropologen een stam of groep 'hebben' zo is Jean Desmet 'van' Ivo Blom. Sinds het eind van de jaren tachtig is hij immers al bezig met de collectie van Desmet aanvankelijk vooral geïntrigeerd door enkele films in de collectie daarna meer door het feit dat deze collectie juist zo'n bijzonder beeld geeft van de 'mainstream cinema' in de eerste jaren van de twintigste eeuw. In maart 2000 promoveerde hij op dit proefschrift en de vertraging in het beschikbaar komen van de handelseditie is meer dan gerechtvaardigd door de fraaie illustraties onder andere prachtige stills in kleur

De filmtijdschriften zijn in te zien in de bibliotheek van het Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam de andere tijdschriften in de meeste universiteitsbibliotheken