Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age (review)

Sonic Persuasion has a convincing cover. It shows an image of old-fashioned spectacles. Yet instead of transparent glasses, the spectacles have two circular loudspeakers as lenses—the perfect illustration for "reading sound," the theme of Greg Goodale's book. It teaches us the significance of sonic literacy, of being able to critically read recorded sound. By carefully listening to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century recordings of presidential candidates' speeches, to interwar period recordings of American blues and jazz, and to radio shows in World War II, Goodale shows how pitch, volume, cadence, accent, and dialect in speaking, timing in singing, sonic icons, and silence have been used to persuade listeners to vote, to buy, or to go to war. If we understand how others have attempted to persuade us in one direction or another with the help of sound, often tapping into or co-creating the "period ear," we can listen critically and withstand the power of sound, Goodale argues.

It is a very well-written book, and Goodale, an assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University, is at his best when he is closely analyzing and contextualizing specific recordings. He makes audible, for instance, how presidential candidates, or the actors imitating them, shifted from an orotund speaking style through a colloquial style to an instructional style in order to reach immigrants and the rising labor classes, while compensating for the demise of middle-class virility. Whereas Grover Cleveland still spoke with a booming voice and pronounced each and every letter over-correctly, Theodore Roosevelt used less rolling "r"s, elided sounds that obstructed his rhythm of speech, and employed tone more musically. Another example is a recording of an interracial jazz group's performance. During the performance, black singer Billie Holiday seems to have been forced to sing white or "straight" (with less syncopation) to keep the sound of race as the audience expected it to be: separated. At those instances, Goodale's analysis draws on empirical evidence from recordings that have survived from the past, as well as on historical studies and theoretical insights from Marxism, phenomenology, or art studies.

In this respect, Sonic Persuasion is an interesting counterpoint to recent work on textualized sound in literary works, such as Philip Schweighauser's The Noises of American Literature (2006). While such studies examine how literary text captures, expresses, and elicits sound, Goodale works the other way around, trying to closely read recorded sound. Where Goodale leaves this track, his book is less convincing, however. In the chapter "Machine Mouth," Goodale starts with an analysis of Richard Wright's novel Native Son (1940). He shows how the novel's protagonist rebels against the disturbing sound of the clock, and underlines that while many scholars have claimed that "by the modern age, the body had become a barrier against the outside" (p. 55), noises of clocks, trains, and factory machines were suddenly felt to penetrate the body again in the early twentieth century. So far, so good. Yet Goodale then starts with a guided tour along artistic highlights such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the futurist experimental celebrations of mechanical noise, and Igor Stravinsky's work. He concludes that by the 1920s both art and "the self" had returned to order (see Igor Stravinsky's neoclassical compositions), and that people had adjusted to the mechanical noise that had once upset or surprised them. Goodale not only ignores musical experiments such as those by Edgar Varèse in the 1920s and beyond, he also seems to forget his own 1940 example, and neglects the historiography of noise from an environmental or STS perspective, like Emily Thompson's publications. Had he taken such work into account, he would have known that the biggest anti-noise campaigns came in the late 1920s to early 1930s, and that with each new noise-making technology—jet aircraft, cell phones, etc.—societal debates about noise started again.

Yet while this chapter is less...