Final Report Summary - ELECTRIFIED VOICES (Electrified voices. Acoustic Communities in the Soviet Union, Germany and Great Britain at the beginning of electronic voice reproduction) • A summary description of the project objectives,By analysing early sound sources and public debates conducted by radio & film magazines in Germany, the Soviet Union and Great Britain, the researcher sought to determine the contribution of electro-acoustic technologies to the rise of a new type of media community in Soviet Russia.• A description of the main results achieved so farSummaryThe study managed to show how the practice of sound mediation led to the creation of an implicit regulatory system through which social and ideological hierarchies, logics, and narratives were expressed and communicated. The main emphasis was laid on the process of mediatisation of religious, professional and gender based communities in the USSR. Alternative trends that were particularly typical for the community building processes in USA and Great Britain were analysed in terms of counter examples. Particular conclusions1. First, the interrelationship between sound and community was investigated in terms of social implications of sound production. The comparative analysis has demonstrated a high social relevance of the three approaches to sound production that determined the communication between sound producers and target audience in the interwar period. These approaches were implemented in very different ways at in U.S. Germany, Great Britain and the USSR. The first approach that aimed at the formation of primordial types of communality was based on direct sound recording. Most typical for this approach was the (1) critical attitude to the voice of the omniscient narrator (voice-over), (2) the intended abandonment of music, (3) the particular attention paid to the recording of environmental noise, (4) the high importance attached to the role of a mobile cameraman (“a man with a camera”). This approach proved to be particularly prevalent in societies with a low technical level of sound manufacturing (USSR, France). This approach took on a particular ideological value in the context of the loss ridden industrialisation in the USSR. The Soviet direct way of sound production has also affected the British Documentary Movement founded by John Grierson in 1932 (GPO-Films). However the Bolshevist ideas of sound production have undergone a significant change once being applied to British shooting practices. The second approach aimed at the formation of techno-scientistic types of communality (‘World as laboratory’). A special emphasis was laid on the implementation of a future oriented concept of a ‘global wireless communication’. This approach encompassed the electric synthesis of sound and voice. It also sought to transcend the boundaries of cognitive interpretation of sound events focusing particularly on the effects of sensory perception. This approach proved to have far-reaching consequences for the Soviet society in which science was entitled to solve social problems. Until the late 1980s sound production in the USSR was under state control. So it was impossible to draw sharp distinctions between sound production for the purpose of entertainment, on the one hand, and the sound production aimed at conducting propaganda and brainwashing, on the other.The third approach defined as ‘stage sound’ aimed at keeping up the continuity of the sound productions that takes its origin from the theatre. This approach proved to be most appropriate for building traditional types of communality that includes the idea of common history, shared collective memory and identity. A clear boundary line can be drawn between the Soviet society and the Western societies in regard to the implementation of ‘stage sound’. Indeed the Soviet Union had more difficulties than its Western counterparts trying to build up music based listening communities, given the fact that the production of musical instruments before the Revolution (1917) was limited to a small number of German factories located in large Russian cities. Regarding the idea of tradition, Russian sound communities have been mainly based on the mediation of voice. This encompassed the mediation of speech voices, opera voices, folk song voices, etc. 2. Second, the interrelationship between sound and community was investigated in terms of sound consumption. The comparative analysis has shown that the spread of radio, sound film and telephone technologies in Russia was drastically different from the European average. Until the end of the twenties programmes transmitted by the Moscow radio could not be received in Leningrad/St. Petersburg. Programmes from Germany and Poland were better audible in the suburb of Moscow than programmes transmitted by the Soviet radio. The Soviet government attached a great importance to the “radiofication” of the whole country. However even in 1963 the percentage of Soviet citizens possessing own radio receivers was at the level of 14,5% (in USA – 97%, United Kingdom – 29 % comparatively). The comparison reveals a picture of Russia being short of integration facilities provided by sound technologies. 3. Three micro studies related to the media of ‘music’, ‘voice’ and ‘soundscape’ helped to establish a number of differences between Eastern and Western European cultures of sound. Unlike in the UK, U.S. and Germany, where authorities in front of the microphone were regarded as an obligatory part of political self-presentation, the Soviet power elites had a problematic relationship with audiovisual personal speech performances. Against the background of deficient media coverage of the political voice culture in Russia in the 1930s, the preponderance of lisping, hissing, spluttering and quite simply rhetorical inept politicians during the time period of 1930-1999 appears quite symptomatic (starting with Stalin, Khrushchev, Malinkov, Brezhnev, Podgorny and Chernenko to Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin). 4. The term ‘acoustic culture’ which has been elaborated in the course of project, is comprised of two aspects of society and media, which are brought together in terms of an interdisciplinary analysis model. The first aspect is caught up in the controversy of sensory perception vs. discursive interpretation that are the two poles of the reception process. The sound environment is perceived by acoustic stimuli, interpreted based on auditory events and communicated through collectively shared sound symbols. The second aspect is caught up in the controversy of mediation (construction of meaning) and mediatisation (the spread of acoustic technologies within a particular society). So far a research implying the distinctions mentioned above has not ever been done in terms of a comparative analysis of Eastern and Western media cultures.
