Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age

Studies in Sensory History

by Greg Goodale

Sonic Reading Sound in the Recorded Age critically analyzes a range of sounds on vocal and musical recordings, on the radio, in film, and in cartoons to show how sounds are used to persuade in subtle ways. Greg Goodale explains how and to what effect sounds can be "read" like an aural text, demonstrating this method by examining important audio cues such as dialect, pausing, and accent in presidential recordings at the turn of the twentieth century. Goodale also shows how clocks, locomotives, and machinery are utilized in film and literature to represent frustration and anxiety about modernity, and how race and other forms of identity came to be represented by sound during the interwar period. In highlighting common sounds of industry and war in popular media, Sonic Persuasion also demonstrates how programming producers and governmental agencies employed sound to evoke a sense of fear in listeners. Goodale provides important links to other senses, especially the visual, to give fuller meaning to interpretations of identity, culture, and history in sound.

189 pages, Paperback

First published March 29, 2011

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is definitely a provocative book with a quality of research that is phenomenal. It is about "reading sound"; that is, considering sound to be a text that can reveal much about our culture to us. At its core, it considers sound to be rhetorical and it outlines some of the many ways sound can persuade. My favorite part of the analysis is Goodale's focus on how sound persuades us using the same rhetorical device that Aristotle wrote about 2500 years ago: the enthymeme. In other words, sound can persuade not only because of its explicit sonic qualities, but (perhaps more so) because of how the audience chooses to "read" the sounds.

This book comes from a pedigree of excellent scholarship on the subject. It contains copious theoretical insights from my favorite musicologist and cultural critic Theodor Adorno, which is always a plus. It's chock full of curiosities and obscure examples from 20th century Americana that the author mines for very novel insights. Goodale is an elegant writer and top-notch critic, who brings together much research into a coherent and insightful whole.

His rhetorical criticisms of the pro-LBJ "Daisy" political ad of the 1960s and the bomb sound effect in Chuck Jones' Wile E. Coyote cartoons are among the most insightful and exciting analyses I've ever read. Would that there were more criticisms in the book like those; I was expecting the book to be more of a taxonomy of sound as persuasion, but it read more like a cultural history throughout. Not that's a bad thing, but not what I was expecting either. The book hints at its potential as a template for future endeavors in sound criticism in its concluding chapter, but, alas, it is too brief here. To his credit, Goodale does direct curious readers to many other seminal works of scholarship, but I was hoping for a more fleshed-out model. Also, I withheld the fifth star in this review for some tangential and overtly partisan political insights in the final two chapters. While they ostensibly add to the analysis, they seem to detract from the excellent caliber of the rest of the book.

Despite some of my issues with the book, Goodale's analysis is excellent. I look forward to assigning it as a mandatory text in future courses of my music and communication class.