Making Radio: Early Radio Production and the Rise of Modern Sound Culture Audiobook (Free)

The opening decades from the twentieth century witnessed a profound transformation in the history of contemporary sound media, with workers in U.S. film, radio, and record industries developing pioneering production methods and performance styles tailored to emerging systems of electric sound reproduction that would redefine prominent forms and experiences of well-known audio entertainment. Concentrating on broadcasting’s initial expansion during the 1920s, Producing Radio explores the types of innovative labor pursued for the medium in the time before the better-known network period, assessing their function in shaping radio’s identification and identifying affinities with parallel methods pursued for conversion-era film and phonography. Tracing programming forms followed by early radio writers and programmers, production techniques produced by studio engineers, and overall performance styles cultivated by on-air skill, it shows how radio employees negotiated a series of broader industrial and cultural pressures to establish guidelines for their moderate that reshaped popular types of music, theatre, and public oratory and laid the building blocks for a fresh period of electric sound entertainment.