Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, and Culture (review)

Timothy Taylor, also the author of Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (1997), teaches musicology at Columbia University. It is good news that a musicologist who is familiar with the field of science and technology studies and makes extensive use of works in the history of technology embarks on a study on the relationship between music, technology, and culture. Although he concentrates on aspects of popular music from the 1980s onward, he also has something significant to say about musique concrète of the late 1940s and "space-age pop" of the 1950s and 1960s.

In this theoretically ambitious study, Taylor aims to address both agency and ideology. He advocates a "practice theory," regarding technology as a special kind of structure in the classic social-science sense. In line with recent work in science and technology studies and in the history of technology, he focuses on the distribution and changing patterns of consumption rather than on production, emphasizing that consumption is not a mindless act but has distinct social meanings. That is, he takes the position of the consumer as agent seriously. This is particularly appropriate in digitally recorded music, because free internet websites enable consumers to remake and remix other peoples' music without much effort.

Taylor's book includes interesting chapters on authorship in the age of digital music and on the politics and political messages in pop music. Chapter 8, "Turn On, Tune In, Trance Out," is particularly strong. Taylor clearly feels at home here and tries out various theoretical approaches on the Goa/psychedelic-trance scene in New York City. In examining this little subculture, in which there is no sign of any oppositional politics, he finds classic theories of religion and ritual more helpful than subculture theory.

There is a lot of convincing analysis in this concise book, but there are also some shortcomings. It would have been useful if Taylor had clarified exactly what he means when talking about "music-making" or "musicking." And, while it is certainly true that there is a misleading binarization between determinism and voluntarism, what serious author in science and technology studies can be called a distinct technological determinist or technological voluntarist? In attempting to reconcile opposites, Turner has recourse to Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration, which, though generally useful, is somewhat coarse-grained. This may still be acceptable, but something else is not: when Taylor states that "technological changes tend to occur for historical and social reasons rather than technical ones" (p. 26) the reader wonders why historians of technology have for at least four decades taken so much effort to advance their field. History here and technology there? Is there no such discipline as history of technology?

The quality of the graphic reproduction—covers of long-playing records, to a large extent—ranges from poor to hopeless. If these were mere illustrations, this would not have been a great problem. But they are unusually important because they are central to analyzing the message and meaning of "space-age pop." It would also have been useful to learn something about the people who designed these LP covers. One other point: many of Taylor's references develop arguments put forward in the text, and the book would have been much easier to use with footnotes rather than endnotes.

Still, Strange Sounds is a book both ambitious in concept and interesting to read, and it offers many new insights on a fascinating topic. It does have some deficiencies, but few books do not.