Format Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc (New Material Histories of Music) - Hardcover

Williams, Gavin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226833240 ISBN 13: 9780226833248

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2024

Synopsis

The first book to consider the shellac disc as a global format.

With the rise of the gramophone around 1900, the shellac disc traveled the world and eventually became the dominant sound format in the first half of the twentieth century. Format Friction brings together a set of local encounters with the shellac disc, beginning with its preconditions in South Asian knowledge and labor, to offer a global portrait of this format.

Spun at seventy-eight revolutions per minute, the shellac disc rapidly became an industrial standard even while the gramophone itself remained a novelty. The very basis of this early sound reproduction technology was friction, an elemental materiality of sound shaped through cultural practice. Using friction as a lens, Gavin Williams illuminates the environments plundered, the materials seized, and the ears entangled in the making of a sound format. Bringing together material, political, and music history, Format Friction decenters the story of a beloved medium, and so explores new ways of understanding listening in technological culture more broadly.

About this title

About the Author

Gavin Williams is a lecturer in music at King’s College London. He is the editor of Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226833240
• ISBN 13: 9780226833248
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208