The Poetics of Electrosonic Presence: Recorded Music and the Materiality of Sound

Abstract

The properties and possibilities of music recordings remain surprisingly undertheorized despite recorded music’s ubiquity in contemporary musical life and the increasing attention technologically mediated musics have received from researchers in a variety of disciplines. In this essay, I propose that by taking recordings seriously as cultural objects and abandoning assumptions about their “inauthenticity”, we can gain new insights into the multiple roles music plays in social life. Three basic questions structure what follows: 1. What is the nature of recorded music? 2. What does it do? 3. Why do people buy it? The first question will be examined in the most detail, and will lead us to a consideration of musical sound itself as a semiotic/sensible phenomenon. Addressing the second question will occasion a discussion of how the recording and playback of musical sound transforms listening experiences and reconfigures social space, and answering the third question will involve a necessarily incomplete and exploratory investigation of the use values recorded music offers to consumers, accompanied by a rethinking of our current understandings of musical pleasure. I will argue throughout that the products of music recording technologies should not be evaluated according to their “truthfidness” as mimetic representations of live musical performances, but as specialized cultural objects in their own right. As will become clear, implementing this view entails devising new analytical tools and re-examining received wisdom on the possible meanings of musical commodities.