Description
Book SynopsisKerim Yasar traces the origins of the modern soundscape, showing how the revolutionary nature of sound technology and the rise of a new auditory culture played an essential role in the formation of Japanese modernity.
Electrified Voices is a far-reaching cultural history of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, radio, and early sound film in Japan.
Trade ReviewA delightful and insightful narrative that weaves vivid human examples into a theoretical discussion of the meanings of media and sound. * Pacific Affairs *
With
Electrified Voices, Kerim Yasar provides a brilliant and stimulating analysis of the role of sound media (telephone, phonograph, radio, and early sound films) in the transition of Japan to modernity. -- ANDRE LANGE * Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television *
Electrified Voices is a well-researched book, which looks at the early days of Japan’s telecommunications, recording, radio and film industry. -- David Harris * Radio Enthusiast *
This is an ambitious and wide-ranging study of Japan’s modern auditory culture at a time of great changes. The book lends itself well to use in the classroom and will be helpful to historians who wish to provide a different perspective not only on Japanese history but also on the history of technology. * American Historical Review *
Insightful and informative,
Electrified Voices opens up important new paths for thinking about cultural, social, and political praxes in modern Japan. . . . The voices that Yasar reveals help us, in short, to hear history anew. -- Scott W. Aalgaard, Wesleyan University * Monumenta Nipponica *
Electrified Voices represents a valuable and highly accessible contribution to the global history of technology and sound as well as to our understanding of the cultural history of modern Japan, and it deserves a wide readership. -- Margaret Mehl, University of Copenhagen * Journal of Japanese Studies *
Electrified Voices is an innovative, pathbreaking study of sound culture, media, and technology in modern Japan. -- Seiji Lippit, University of California, Los Angeles
The sounds coming from Japan in this book are both strange and familiar to ears used to reading about acoustic modernity in the North Atlantic world. Kerim Yasar has found new stories and characters for asking classic questions in media history and I, for one, am delighted to be enriched by a media-historical book on Japan that is so innovative in its historical approach and its choice of media. This book sings the body electric in Japan. -- John Durham Peters, Yale University
Kerim Yasar recounts the fascinating story of how modernity in Japan sounded. Eminently readable, his book traces how Japan’s existing soundscape found itself translated and transformed by such modern audio technologies as the telephone, gramophone, radio, and talkie cinema, and how the process launched new debates about what it means to represent the real. -- Michael K. Bourdaghs, author of
Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-PopTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Names
Introduction: All That Is Solid Melts Into Sound
1. Vocal Cords and Telephone Wires: Orality in Japan, Old and New
2. Sound and Sentiment
3. The Grain in the Groove: Inscribed Voices, Echoed Temporalities
4. Imagining the Wireless Community
5. Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds: Early Japanese Radio Drama
6. Sound and Motion
Coda-
okeNotes
Bibliography
Index
