Distracted listening is a constant, commonplace occurrence in our mass-mediated world. We are accustomed to having broadcast or recorded sound all around us, whenever we want, and to listening distractedly or closely at different times and places. I recently visited a deli in New York that had two radio stations playing—one with Christmas music (presumably for the customers) and one a Hispanic talk station (presumably for the staff)—and both were on loud. While some today would be disconcerted or annoyed by such a barrage, others admire the aural dexterity of those who can inhabit and negotiate such a...

“Her Voice A Bullet Aimed at the Hearts of American Foxhole Soldiers”—Paramount publicists coined this phrase to promote the 1946 film Tokyo Rose. The power of radio to sway wartime emotions was a major theme of the movie. The film opens with a group of American prisoners of war listening to Radio Tokyo. Most of the men think announcer Tokyo Rose is harmless, but one, Pete Sherman, knows that words can kill. He blames Tokyo Rose for the death of his buddy Joe, who went berserk and was shot by a Japanese sniper after listening to a taunting broadcast...

“History,” writes communications scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “has many themes. One of them is that women should be quiet.”¹ Across time and cultures, women’s voices have been contained, confined, and channeled in ways that parallel other constraints placed on women’s bodies. Voice and voice difference have reinforced and naturalized gender roles. Praised for its qualities in soothing crying babies and educating the young, the female voice has been presented as unsuited for public oratory, a terrain typically reserved for men and often directly linked to constructions of masculinity and male citizenship. During the modern era, women have made sustained claims...

In the late 1920s a new breed of listener entered the scene of American popular culture—the jazz record collector, who appreciated jazz as an art form and sought to hoard the artifacts of its early evolution. Most of the early jazz recordings were produced in limited numbers by small or unstable companies. The records collectors loved best had been targeted largely at African American consumers, who played the discs until they were nearly rubbed raw. “Your sole consolation was that early jazz was like folk music, a people’s music,” collector Charles Edward Smith reflected years later, “and the grooves...

“Picture, if you will, a tour through the halls of a music school, past 100 practice rooms each with its occupant singing or playing at top volume, and you will have some idea of how the Audio Fair sounded last weekend,” wrote the New York Times of the third annual New York Audio Fair of 1951.¹ Ten thousand “electronics experts, high-fidelity fans and home-style music lovers” descended on the Hotel New Yorker that fall, constituents of a high-fidelity boom that took off with the introduction of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948, grew from a do-it-yourself hobby into a 1950s...

On 18 June 1990, pedestrians approaching the Place de la Concorde in Paris witnessed an astonishing spectacle. Near the former location of the fearsome guillotine of the Reign of Terror and the dazzling electric light display of the 1881 Paris Exhibition stood an enormous radio. The mock replica of a 1940s receiver towered thirty-five meters into the air and encased the Luxor Obelisk. Throughout the day it played excerpts of period broadcasts from French radio and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). At regular intervals, a voice uttered the words of the most famous French radio address of all time: l’appel...

The 1977 documentary film CB Radio: A New Hue and Cry, produced with the assistance of retired Los Angeles police officer Lee Kirkwood, opens with a detailed costume drama set in a medieval town. A ship’s captain observes a thief stealing from the blind beggar who sits in the busy marketplace. Seeing the theft, the captain and other citizens give chase to the robber, calling out “Stop thief!” and gathering an ever-larger crowd as they pursue him through the town, eventually catching him. A male voiceover informs the viewer that in those days “any citizen witnessing a crime was bound...

At the depth of the Great Depression, the recording and phonograph industries in the United States were virtually moribund, victims of both the economic downturn and the phenomenal success of radio, which afforded listeners less expensive musical entertainment and superior sound quality. In 1927 some 104 million recordings and one million phonographs were manufactured; by 1932 annual production had plummeted to six million discs and forty thousand players.¹ The recording industry was revived in the late 1930s, as jukeboxes became a fixture in taverns and restaurants across the country. By the decade’s end, some 400,000 coin-operated phonographs had been manufactured,...

In 1932 an entrepreneur applied to the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) for permission to build a new radio station in Jeannette, Pennsylvania, a town of 15,000 people about thirty miles from Pittsburgh (which then had a population of 670,000). He hoped to offer a more local alternative to the Pittsburgh stations that were “not altogether suitable advertising outlets for many of the merchants in the Jeannette area who are interested in and might patronize a local station.” The FRC summarily denied the application, arguing that Jeannette was already well served by broadcasters in Pittsburgh and did not need a station...

Daily life in the 1920s and 1930s was a bit louder than it had been previously, as the new invention of radio gave Americans the sound of music, news, sports, church services, and dramatic programming.¹ “With but little equipment,” sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd marveled in 1929, “one can call the life of the rest of the world from the air.” Six years later, psychologists Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport argued that radio expanded and democratized human experience through sound. While listening to the radio, the “poor man escapes the confines of his poverty; the country dweller finds refuge from...