Description

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The idea of listening to voices that are far away, or even already gone, was an important impulse in the invention of sound transmission and conversion methods at the end of the nineteenth century. New acoustic media attract their audience, not despite but because their contingent use offers a lot of variations of usage. As well as telephone, phonograph and gramophone, the early years of radio was part of such media of attraction. As I want to point out, it is not isolated discoveries and ostensibly linear developments, but rather technical, social and cultural processes of change which form the foundation of new communication and new techniques. In this research study I want to follow pictures, articles and official documents of sound technologies and sound aesthetics, between 1883 and today to trace a cultural history of listening to the radio.