James Lastra situates the development of sound technology within the context of modernity with special attention paid to the relation of sound to other representational technologies such as photography and phonography. The book attempts to trace the exchanges and shifting relationships between human senses, technologies, and forms of representation (i.e., senses shaped technology development and those devices shaped our sensory experiences). The first couple chapters are a more general account of the material history of sound technology as both a means of simulating the sensory capacities of the ear and as a means of "writing" sound. The remaining chapters are nominally about the cinema beginning with the coming of sound and moving through the classical Hollywood system. Overall, Lastra's book is indebted to cultural theorists of modernity (Benjamin, Comolli, Adorno) which is not surpising as Lastra teaches at Chicago along with other modernity film scholars Tom Gunning and Miriam Hansen. The book has many strengths including giving ample attention to the practices and theories of early film sound technicians and engineers (and not just academic theorists), but suffers a bit from lack of attention to actual films themselves. Chapters 5 & 6 claim to examine the relationship between sound aesthetics, technology and film form, but while attention is paid to various sound technologies and ideas of "realism" there is little attention paid to demonstrating their effect on the form of actual films. Still, it is a well written and interesting book that will be especially useful for those interested in modernity, technology and theories of representation.

The aims of this research project are to 1) historicize the Classical Hollywood orchestra, and 2) interrogate the cultural significations of the orchestral sound that Hollywood both deployed and helped to form.

This history of the American audience is fascinating; the historical specificity with which it treats transformations in audience behavior and conceptions I have encountered no where else. For example, the segregation of audiences by class can be pinpointed in the 1830-40s when elites became concerned about working-class sovereignty and moved to contain its en masse expression by condemning “rowdy” audience behavior. With the advent of movies, public concerns shifted from audience behavior to the entertainment’s content, from what audiences were doing to what was being done to them. The book traces audiences for drama theater, minstrelsy, vaudeville, movies, radio and television because there is continuity between these entertainments; concerts do not participate in this lineage. As a result, mentions of music are few and far between. The Nickelodeon chapter, which discusses extensively the economic class and geographical variation of audience demographics, mentions live musical accompaniment, claiming that it was provided primarily by female pianists – a gender typing I’ve not come across in other readings – who resisted cue sheets distributed by producers after 1910. Also interesting is the practice of sing-alongs while the projector was being loaded. The chapter “Storefronts to Theaters: Seeking the Middle Class” cites the coming of sound for its effective silencing of audiences. The debate between disparagers of “canned music” and optimists about new possibilities for the dissemination of music is tantalizingly mentioned but unsatisfactorily footnoted. The chapters on radio are fascinating though only tangentially related to my concerns. They confirm that highbrow vs. lowbrow, moral uplift vs. commercialism, classical music vs. jazz were the operative binaries in the discourses around radio in the 1920-30s, and cite an interesting result from audience surveys between 1928-32 that radio programming preferences in descending order were: popular music (jazz, Tin Pan Alley and old-time [an unfortunately broad category]), comedy, drama, sports, classical music, general talk, religious, news, educational. This history demonstrates how class anxiety has constantly factored into entertainment practices and discourse across media since the mid-19th century.

Coming of sound - the technologies.