Sounds of Accompaniment: Transcript from an SCMS 2022 Panel on Music, Technology, and Labor

Andy Kelleher Stuhl is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University. His dissertation examines the cultural meaning of automation in American and Canadian radio’s industrial and artistic contexts, ranging from the 1950s into the 2010s. In this research and in other work, he approaches media history as a resource for overlooked precedents that scholars and artists might adapt toward critical intervention in present-day technological systems.

Alexandra Hui is an Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University and Co-Editor of Isis. She is the co-editor of Testing Hearing: the Making of Modern Aurality (Oxford, 2020), the 2013 Osiris volume on music, sound, and the laboratory, and is the author of The Psychophysical Ear: Musical experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT, 2012). She is interested in the co-development of new forms of listening, technology, and concepts of the environment. Her two current projects are histories of the science of background music and how field scientists listen to nature.

Alexander Russo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He is the author of Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio Beyond the Networks, Duke University Press, 2010. He has also written articles and book chapters on the technology and cultural form of radio and television, sound studies, the history of music and society, and media infrastructures.

Amy Skjerseth is incoming Lecturer in Audiovisual Media and co-director of the MA Music in Audiovisual Media Program at the University of Liverpool. She recently received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, Music’s Visual Waves: Popular Music Technology and Audiovisual Aesthetics, explores how music technologies from transistor radios to Auto-Tune transformed visual expressions of popular music in media. Further research examines how devices from musical automata to deepfakes shape audiovisual cultures.