Paul Theberge. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. xx, 293 pp (original) (raw)

In 1904 Erich M. von Hornbostel and Otto Abraham published an article entitled "On the Significance of the Phonograph for Comparative Musicology" in the Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, thereby formally establishing the connection between technologies of sound recording and reproduction, and their field of academic inquiry, then known as comparative musicology. Since then, both domains have developed significantly. In the United States comparative musicology became ethnomusicology in the 1950s, while in the realm of musical technologies, the primary function of the phonograph shifted from recording to playback and, more recently, to performance. A second important technological shift for musicians and musicologists alike was the spread of audiomagnetic tape recorders in the 1950s and 1960s, a development that has more recently led to the mass marketing of technologies such as digital audio tape (DAT) and recordable compact disc (CD-R). In many corners of the world at the end of the twentieth century, digital audio technologies have become the media of choice for purposes of composing, recording, archiving, analyzing, and teaching music. Histories of audio technologies and studies of the relationships between musical practice and technologies (especially those associated with post-World War II developments in popular music) are, however, small in number, and most of them have not kept up with the impact and significance of this technological evolution. In sum, at a time when digital audio technology has extensively altered the ways in which both the musical layman and specialist interact with music on a daily basis, systematic and comprehensive research into audio technologies has at best been marginal to both musicological and ethnomusicological studies. 1 This lamentable situation is not, however, the only reason why the publication of Paul Theberge's Any Sound You Can Imagine is a welcome and timely affair: combining diachronic and synchronic approaches, this book offers more than just a comprehensive look at the history of musical technologies, beginning with the first inventions about a century ago; more importantly, the book traces a parallel history of shifting meanings attached to musical technologies and their uses. The author describes the book, a reworking of his Ph.D. dissertation, as "[a study of] the role of recent digital technologies in the production of