Electrified Voices

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.

Autorentext
Kerim Yasar is assistant professor of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Southern California.

Klappentext

Kerim 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.

Inhalt
List 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-oke
   Notes
   Bibliography
   Index