Everyday Devices. Mediatisation, Disciplining and Localisation of Music in Sweden 1900-1970

The aim of this project is to show how sound-reproduction technology interacted with and transformed practices and ideas related to music, sound and listening during a period characterized by incessant mediatisation.

The years between 1900 and 1970 saw the introduction and establishing of the gramophone, radio, film, tape recorder and television in Sweden, media that have changed the conditions for both music listening and other musical practices. Using different methods (i.e. discourse analysis, historical ethnography) the project investigates four mutually illuminating sub areas, all filling significant knowledge gaps. Important questions are 1) how did the emergence of the new living room interact with phonography and ways of listening to music? 2), how was home taping to be distinguished from music listening, considering both spatial/practical and ideological/substantial aspects? 3), how did the genre categories of the phonogram market, as well as what was written in advertisements and in the press, affect ideas about what was listened to? 4), how did sound film, through its representations of music reproduction devices and listening in different everyday settings affect (affirming? legitimizing?) the mediatisation processes that music went through in Sweden? In addition to musicological research the project will contribute to knowledge of an area that concerns many but is unknown to most: how our perception and apprehension of music and sound affect and is affected by processes of mediatisation, disciplining and localisation.