Conference Agenda

Since its beginnings, rock ‘n’ roll has been obsessed with cars, motorcycles, and the American road. Following World War II, as the United States experienced a dramatic boom in automobile ownership and travel, listening to cars became a necessary responsibility and a regular social practice for many Americans (Krebs 2011). Moreover, as transistor radios came to occupy automobile dashboards, this amateur listening practice was increasingly accompanied by the sound of popular music. Recent scholars have detailed the influence of car culture on the narratives, symbolism, and ideologies of rock ‘n’ roll (Duffett and Peter 2020, Slethaug 2017, Wall and Webber 2020). Yet seemingly no attention has been paid to the purely sonic relationship between automobiles and music of the mid-20^th century.

This paper situates the sonic practices of 1950s suburban America within what I call a highway acoustemology. It considers how the sounds of early rock ‘n’ roll— its pitches, rhythms, amplitudes, and characteristic timbres— were both mimetic of and complementary to the distinct sounds of the internal combustion engine. An organology of the automobile engine demonstrates how cars and motorcycles produce their characteristic “voices” through instrument-like combinations of oscillators (cylinders) and resonators (exhaust manifolds). Following this, I examine a handful of influential early rock ‘n’ roll recordings— including Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” Charley Ryan’s “Hot Rod Lincoln,” and Gene Vincent’s “Cruisin’”— to hear the engine’s sonic markers. Not only do these songs describe acoustic relationships with cars through their lyrics; they also musically mimic and complement the fetishized sounds of the internal combustion engine.

I close by acknowledging the internal combustion engine as a common agent between the production of dirty air and the production of “dirty” guitar tones. This connection leads to questions about the environmental ramifications of a “ubiquitous” music (Kassabian 2016) that encourages affectual identification with the sound of burning carbon. A highway acoustemology thus situates rock ‘n’ roll within a contemporary environmental gaze that aims to reckon with the contradictory inheritances of American optimism and waste.

Music is labor. While Marx reminds us that all commodities embody the labor behind their production (Marx 1867), recording and especially reperforming technologies also mediate the labor of performing musicians. The production and consumption of such mediated labor is inseparable from dynamics of race and class, as a media archeology of the player piano demonstrates. These instrument-machines were marketed to the white middle class as labor-saving devices that would take over the domestic work of music-making in the home. In the case of race rolls, the player piano mediates the labor of Black pianists within the white bourgeois parlor room.

Several scholars have argued that the player piano erases the problematic racialized body while mediating the soul of the pianist (Wente 2022), giving the white subject access to the Black soul (Dolan 2009; Ellis 2013). I counter such discourse with observations from Black studies, namely theorizations of the nineteenth-century Black body as a soulless object (Moten 2003; McMillan 2015). In this paper I argue that the player piano mediates the mechanical objecthood of the laboring Black body. I situate the player piano within a broader history of racialized automata, linked through the technological ventriloquizing of Blackness. The player piano represents an early stage in a history of Black technopoetics, where technology emerges as a primary mediator between the inhuman and the human through race and sound (Chude-Sokei 2017).

Through historical case studies dating from the turn-of-the-century U.S. I examine how Black pianists reappropriated the player piano as a site of resistance. By tracing the self-depressing keys with their fingers, pianists established tactile, transtemporal contact, employing recording technology to revamp notions of subjectivity, temporality, and community central to what Weheliye terms Sonic Afro-Modernity (Weheliye 2005). It is through reappropriating labor and objecthood that Black pianists perform the role of what McMillan dubs embodied avatars (McMillan 2015), reframing the player piano as a site of Moten’s “resistance of the object” (Moten 2003). Situated at the intersection of media theory, organology, and Black studies, this paper illuminates the nexus between the history of sound recording and the construction of race within U.S. modernity.

Thomas Brand, an English tutor and tour guide, encountered a shocking sight on his arrival in the French Alps in the winter of 1780. Upon opening his baggage, he discovered that his father had packed his ice skates next to his beloved tenor violin, badly damaging the instrument in transit. “I fear that the wounds will be incurable,” he wrote his friend Robert Wharton, mourning the loss of his “faithful companion,” his “comforter in all [his] misfortunes, real and imaginary.” Wharton replied as quickly as the post allowed: “If I ever wrote a poem in my life—if I ever was inspired by music—if I ever wish to hear thee play the tenor again—I will write an ode upon it.” For musical travelers such as Brand and Wharton, the loss of an instrument was a severe blow indeed, prompting them to write back and forth repeatedly regarding its “convalescence.”

In this paper, I draw on new archival research in tourist correspondence to illuminate the movements of musical instruments across Europe in the final decades of the Grand Tour. For well-to-do amateurs, tourism provided unparalleled opportunities for networking with other musicians and trying out new and desirable instruments. The same travelers that collected art, antiquities, and curiosities from across Europe also purchased musical instruments and scores, and they sought after a variety of musical souvenirs for family and friends. Scholars have extensively mapped the travels of the best-known composers and performers of the period, but the movements of musical tourists have mostly been overlooked. Through an examination of the activities, purchases, and preoccupations of musical travelers, I argue that tourism was not only a major force in the spread of musical objects, but also in the evolution and diffusion of musical tastes across eighteenth-century Europe.