This paper examines how early media reform work evolved from political activism into a system-building advocacy campaign in support of Schools of the Air between 1930 and 1940. Calling upon archival work that focuses on 1935–1940 records, it examines how prominent activist groups the National Committee for Education by Radio (NCER) and the National Advisory Council for Radio in Education (NACRE) shifted their strategic approaches to adjust to the “public interest” mandate of the Communications Act of 1934. Though scholarship has chronicled disagreements between the NCER and NACRE over how to best support educational broadcasting, a dialectical interplay emerged after the act during the New Deal due to the influence of the Federal Radio Education Committee (FREC). FREC inspired A.G. Crane of the NCER to build the Rocky Mountain Radio Council (RMRC). The RMRC was the first sustainable educational media network, and the group coined the term public broadcasting . While the Communications Act signaled the end of the first wave of media activism, the policy also inspired reformers to develop a new system-building strategy that set the groundwork for NPR and PBS.

Ventriloquism, Edison’s playback, and the sound film base their appeal to spectators primarily on the tension between the two-dimensional image and three-dimensional sound, between space and surface, as well as between body and voice. My focus is on the disembodied voice in cinema, the voice with no body attached. The meanings attached to the unaccommodated or unlocatable voices in various kinds of ventriloquism seem to produce just such a suspension. The opening of the connection between a voice and a body as its source reminds us of the voice as a partial object in the writings of Jacques Lacan, as well as Rick Altman’s model of ventriloquism, in which whoever controls sound in film is a ventriloquist who “uses” the body, manipulating it as if it were a puppet. This notion becomes fascinatingly complicated when applied to The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin). The Exorcist stages the battle between the forces of sound and image, body and voice, elevating it to a terrifying good-versus-evil theological level. This battle extends the diegetic narrative to become a battle between two actors (the voice actor and the actor seen on screen) trying to share one body, a split between two personalities. The film is an exceptional case study that allows us to examine the ways in which cinema contributes to and mediates the ventriloquial act, as well as the roles of the visual, aural, and tactile perceptual channels and their relation to each other in the cinematic experience, in particular in the horror genre.

Throughout the 1950s, the American propaganda radio station RIAS Berlin transformed women’s radio into an anti-communist medium designed to enlist German housewives into the Cold War. Based in West Berlin, RIAS—Radio in the American Sector—broadcast a full array of shows deep inside East Germany as part of the U.S. psychological war against communism. One of its key target audiences was German homemakers. Drawing upon scripts held in the German Radio Archives in Potsdam, Germany, this article analyzes the program Can You Spare 5 Minutes? ( Haben Sie 5 Minuten Zeit? ). It explores how RIAS inscribed the international contest between democracy and communism onto the domestic lives of women. The show built a sense of solidarity by treating typical “female” topics such as cosmetics, childcare, and recipes. In this way it forged a bond between its listeners that provided an opening for political messaging. Programs contrasted access to food, marriage rights, and educational policy in the rival Germanies to demonstrate the benefits of democracy and the need to resist the East German state. Women’s radio on RIAS, far from offering mere fluff, provided its female audience a political education.

Drawing on Karin Bijsterveld’s triple definition of noise as ownership, political responsibility, and causal responsibility, this article traces how modern Japan problematized noise, and how noise represented both the aspirational discourse of Western civilization and the experiential nuisance accompanying rapid changes in living conditions in 1920s Japan. Primarily based on newspaper archives, the analysis will approach the problematic of noise as it was manifested in different ways in the public and private realms. In the public realm, the mid-1920s marked a turning point due to the reconstruction work after the Great Kantô Earthquake (1923) and the spread of the use of radios, phonographs, and loudspeakers. Within a few years, public opinion against noise had been formed by a coalition of journalists, police, the judiciary, engineers, academics, and municipal officials. This section will also address the legal regulation of noise and its failure; because public opinion was “owned” by middle-class (sub)urbanites, factory noises in downtown areas were hardly included in noise abatement discourse. Around 1930, the sounds of radios became a social problem, but the police and the courts hesitated to intervene in a “private” conflict, partly because they valued radio as a tool for encouraging nationalist mobilization and transmitting announcements from above. In sum, this article investigates the diverse contexts in which noise was perceived and interpreted as such, as noise became an integral part of modern life in early 20th-century Japan.

This essay considers the politics of sound on the model of migration and borders, that is, as concerning flows and codes, inclusions and exclusions. A rigorously materialist analysis of sound would consider it as one of the many flows that constitute nature and culture. On this model, the fundamental function of society is to code flows, that is, to intercept them, organize them, regulate them, channel them in particular directions, impose meanings and limits on them, and the like. A politics of sound, then, would consider the local and global circulation of sound, its flow, capture, and blockage, the forces (technological, legal, economic, cultural, social, moral, linguistic, racial, gendered, etc.) that accelerate, decelerate, and otherwise inflect it. It would ask: What are the forces that generate sonic flows and propel their movement and circulation? What are the forces that constrain this sonic flux sufficiently to enable it to congeal into languages, musical styles, or scenes? And what are the forces that block, annul, or cancel these sonic flows?

This study unearths 20th-century U.S. music histories to demonstrate that racism accompanied the entry of yoga into American “belonging” and domestication, while “Indians” were excluded. There are three yoga song sites in this study; each presents a composite of racial constructions that utilize Othering tropes long deployed to affirm White supremacy and legitimize colonial power. I analyze the sound world, lyrics, and films of (1) the 1941 popular song “The Yogi Who Lost His Will Power,” by Orrin Tucker and His Orchestra; (2) the 1960 chart-topper “Yogi,” which catapulted the Ivy Three to one-hit-wonder status; and, (3) the 1967 Elvis Presley song “Yoga Is as Yoga Does, ” from the movie Easy Come, Easy Go . Questions that guide this study include: How does racist displacement appear in historic contexts of sonic productions and U.S. proliferation in yoga? What racial stereotypes accompanied yoga’s entry into American cultural discourse? I argue the evidence supports three key findings: (1) yoga’s movement into American popular culture is inextricably tied to racism and Othering; (2) widely circulating stereotypes of Indians, yoga, and yogis in American popular music include classic racist tropes, such as the grinning Sambo, and (3) the logic of elimination operates to hide U.S. music histories of racialized yoga. I conclude that U.S. yoga and its musical and cultural productions, branded as peaceful and flexible, camouflage the settler nation and White supremacy. The article concludes with a forecast for the importance of music studies to the nascent field of critical yoga studies.

Washington, DC–born vocalist and pianist Shirley Horn was one of the most singular and respected musicians on the jazz scene during a career that spanned more than five decades. Despite minimal accolades, Horn’s contributions to the art form are rarely rivaled. She was a virtuoso pianist and a genius song stylist. In a 1992 article in the Washington Post , prolific composer and arranger Johnny Mandel explained that “Horn’s playing wasn't just self-accompaniment. It was percussive counterpart and harmonic commentary that worked with the singing to create a whole, a work of art that was more than the sum of its parts. ‘It's almost as if when Shirley plays, she has two brains. I don't know how she can play what she plays and sing what she sings.…Playing piano like that is a very complex undertaking, and singing with that amount of sensitivity and concentration—she sounds like Siamese twins.’” 1 Through recorded performances that best exhibit vocal phrasing, chord voicings, and comping patterns in the jazz tradition, Horn’s piano and vocal performance will be analyzed in order to demonstrate why her genius should occupy the top echelons of revered American musicians this country has ever produced. Jazz and classical musicians whom Horn cited as her biggest influences will be discussed to demonstrate how she absorbed and expertly integrated chosen elements of those individual styles into her own performance to create a distinctive sound and a unique approach to interpreting standard jazz repertoire. Through biographical information, Horn’s career will be examined through a lens of intersectionality to discover how social categorizations such as race, class, and gender might have played a part in informing her musical and professional choices.

Can we expand our awareness of remote environments by connecting them to our own bodily experience? “Sound Is Round” takes a winding journey through the superimposed environments of ocean and desert, bringing sounds from the deep ocean of Monterey Bay in California to the high desert of Northern Arizona. In doing so, it brings together experiences of material sensory space expanded by a sonic sense, an amplified listening. The intertwining of these environments and experiences comes together in a notion of roundness, through the form of the Möbius strip. By approaching land-based spaces through a different orientation, thinking through a lens of fluid sounds and listening, a sense of “oceanic consciousness” is explored. A simultaneous experience of relationship to others, to site, and to distant place is reflected through personal stories of participants. The writing reflects the author’s own artistic practice, using the headphones and soundscape from a recent project Melt Me Into the Ocean, which explored connectedness to the deep ocean from land through sound walks. It also discusses the current project From a Whale’s Back, which works with video, sound, and data from the latest scientific research on tagged whales. Our connection to, and understanding of, the deep ocean environments are considered through these displaced remote experiences of place. Colliding sounds from these underwater environments with a research project around Roden Crater—artist James Turrell’s ongoing land-art work inside an extinct volcano—it emphasizes the importance of physical material sensory experience of place.