Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording Book

An excellent book for those less interested in the technology of sound recording than the culture surrounding the practice. The first chapter provides a concise overview of the sound recording industry and argues that its embrace of high culture (i.e. classical music) allowed the industry to push its technology under the guise of improving the masses despite the sales trends following popular music. The second chapter describes the American broadcasting system and the rise of recorded programming. The third chapter, "Girl or Machine?" on the use of dictation equipment is especially interesting and could be used well in a course on gender and work as office dictation could have easily been embraced if it wasn't for the negative social connotations attached to the process. The fourth chapter covers the rise of answering machines, or rather lack thereof thanks to the AT&T monopoly. Finally, the fifth chapter (followed by a long conclusion to the book) touches on several aspects of American recording culture with a special focus on pirating or rerecording commercial music. Of course, excellent notes round out the book, and each chapter's conclusion summarizes them well, so busy students can determine if they need to read the whole chapter or not.