It's media studies day
Bethany Klein, As Heard on TV: Popular Music in Advertising: A nice look at the complexities of using existing music in ads, both for the artists (often struggling for recognition or a good revenue stream but trying to preserve authenticity, which means different things for indie performers than for mainstream rappers) and the audiences (who can enjoy the song, have their associations changed forever, or simply float on by). Klein situates her discussion both in history-popular music has always had a commercial component, as her discussion of Coke and Pepsi ads in particular illustrates-and the changing economics of the music industry, where traditional radio play and sales aren’t working for many artists. I found the book valuable for its interviews with participants-artists, art directors, and others involved in linking songs with products. They generally insisted that they were maintaining their own integrity, though there were sell-outs out there in the world. I also was surprised to find out that Barry Manilow wrote “I am stuck on Band-Aid, ‘cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me” and “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there”; apparently a fair number of artists are more willing to compose on commission for an ad than license an existing song.
Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format: The book is more than half over by the time the author actually gets to the MP3; the rest is prehistory-how the demands of business led researchers to investigate how human ears actually heard and what sounds they could do without (for purposes of compression and dealing with “noise” on telephone lines). Experimentation on cats is involved, which leads Sterne to suggest that the Napster logo unwittingly calls back to the long-term relationship between cats, hearing, and technology, and if that seems clever or ridiculous to you that may indicate your probable reaction to the rest of the book. As always, technologies were shaped with particular people in mind. Just as film quality was judged by how well it did portraying white people, encoding, including mp3 encoding, was judged by how good it sounded to “expert” listeners listening to music they thought was important; they just happen to have been almost entirely white male Westerners, so they tried to make “Tom’s Diner” sound good but didn’t spend much time on rhythm-driven music. Probably a book for hard-core fans of high theory history of technology only.
Jacob Smith, Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media: Another good academic book about the social meaning of technology. Smith explores various ways in which recorded and amplified sound was used to create a new kind of performer (crooner, rasper) who didn’t need to project his/her voice across a crowded auditorium, and how this interacted with race and gender assumptions and anxieties-the crooner could get up close and personal with his imagined-female listeners, but without the robust physical exertion of earlier singers. I found his discussion of “blue discs,” recorded pornography (or usually risque jokes, at least from his descriptions), particularly interesting from a fannish perspective, since he discusses the transgressive implications of women speaking desire-though the jokiness defused some of that tension. I am increasingly interested in podfic and how it embodies a women-saying-sexy-stuff-for-women fannish practice; the blue discs were for men or mixed company, though unlike burlesque or later striptease they did often feature female voices. Whereas Smith argues that humor reduced the risk of voicing sexuality, he notes that the distance permitted by a recorded performance did so too; yet the blue discs he discusses were still mostly jokey. Podfic seems to take more advantage of the reduced risk in terms of being seriously sexual-though I have speculated that what gets podficced tends to have less dubcon/noncon than fic generally, though that’s a highly subjective impression filtered through my specific experiences. Also with fannish resonances, Smith suggests that many blue discs were produced in off-hours by professionals in the industry (I don’t think that many podficcers record pro audio, but I do think that we see a lot of pro skills deployed for fannish purposes).
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Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format: The book is more than half over by the time the author actually gets to the MP3; the rest is prehistory-how the demands of business led researchers to investigate how human ears actually heard and what sounds they could do without (for purposes of compression and dealing with “noise” on telephone lines). Experimentation on cats is involved, which leads Sterne to suggest that the Napster logo unwittingly calls back to the long-term relationship between cats, hearing, and technology, and if that seems clever or ridiculous to you that may indicate your probable reaction to the rest of the book. As always, technologies were shaped with particular people in mind. Just as film quality was judged by how well it did portraying white people, encoding, including mp3 encoding, was judged by how good it sounded to “expert” listeners listening to music they thought was important; they just happen to have been almost entirely white male Westerners, so they tried to make “Tom’s Diner” sound good but didn’t spend much time on rhythm-driven music. Probably a book for hard-core fans of high theory history of technology only.
Jacob Smith, Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media: Another good academic book about the social meaning of technology. Smith explores various ways in which recorded and amplified sound was used to create a new kind of performer (crooner, rasper) who didn’t need to project his/her voice across a crowded auditorium, and how this interacted with race and gender assumptions and anxieties-the crooner could get up close and personal with his imagined-female listeners, but without the robust physical exertion of earlier singers. I found his discussion of “blue discs,” recorded pornography (or usually risque jokes, at least from his descriptions), particularly interesting from a fannish perspective, since he discusses the transgressive implications of women speaking desire-though the jokiness defused some of that tension. I am increasingly interested in podfic and how it embodies a women-saying-sexy-stuff-for-women fannish practice; the blue discs were for men or mixed company, though unlike burlesque or later striptease they did often feature female voices. Whereas Smith argues that humor reduced the risk of voicing sexuality, he notes that the distance permitted by a recorded performance did so too; yet the blue discs he discusses were still mostly jokey. Podfic seems to take more advantage of the reduced risk in terms of being seriously sexual-though I have speculated that what gets podficced tends to have less dubcon/noncon than fic generally, though that’s a highly subjective impression filtered through my specific experiences. Also with fannish resonances, Smith suggests that many blue discs were produced in off-hours by professionals in the industry (I don’t think that many podficcers record pro audio, but I do think that we see a lot of pro skills deployed for fannish purposes).
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.