ABSTRACT
Arguably, these processes of change were particularly rapid in the decades around the mid-twentieth-century, due both to technological innovations in the field of sound reproduction, such as the tape recorder, the microgroove record, FM radio, transistor technology and the stereo record, as well as developments within amplifier and loudspeaker design and contemporaneous changes in musical style, music industry organization and the social organization of listening to music. Timothy Taylor has written of what he terms the ‘technoscientific imaginary’ of the post-war decades, and, in my material also, a strong valorization of technical progress per se appears to be prominently present, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s.3 Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to study the interaction of technological innovation and modes of listening to music in post-Second World War society from the introduction of hi-fi around 1950 to the introduction of digital audio technology in the early 1980s. This interaction affects popular music as well as ‘classical’ art music, albeit in differential ways, and the chapter aims to demonstrate how the nature of the processes identified in the analysis varies according to musical genre.
