Early Musical Impressions from Both Sides of the Loudspeaker

he deep changes that have affected aural perception since the late 19th century may be reduced to a common denominator: loudspeaker-mediated listening. In the earlier half of the 20th century, we encounter the influences and effects of such changes in countless reflections and practices, which I introduce through a metaphoric image of the loudspeaker and its sides: on one side, the listener, whose perception and cognition come face to face with events originating far away in time and space; on the other, the manifold processes of production and transmission that may be of service to those events. While traditional musics strive to adapt to new production and diffusion conditions, new ideas blossom, widening and transforming musical experience on both sides of the loudspeaker. One can easily imagine a loudspeaker separating the worlds of listener and producer in the case of live radio, but the metaphor becomes blurred when previously produced sounds come into play. But even then, be it a question of a musical record or of any sound recording whatsoever, the notion of a medium that conveys sound events seems to prevail in aural perception, which effortlessly reconstructs an original soundproducing event (not seldom a mere supposition). Appraisals of such objects not as media but as aesthetic objects per sea record and its grooves, images resulting from optical sound recording-represent exceptional cases. I shall not deal herein with the development, up to 1950, of electro-electronic instruments, that vast topic; rather than significantly altering paradigms of musical performance and discourse, they inevitably invoke comparison with their unamplified relatives. Three specific processes-recording of music, radio broadcasting and sound recording-are tackled here. In the last two sections I discuss, in a more generic fashion, not only the impetus that the rise of new reproduction and transmission means has provided to the aesthetic-musical imagination but also the impact of such means upon the perception and conceptualization of seemingly trivial sonic facts.