Electronic Voices: Science, Signification, and Mid-Century Soundscapes

I presented this paper at a meeting of the University of Chicago Music History and Study Group. It formed the basis of the first chapter of my dissertation. Here is the introduction.

The launch of Sputnik 1 in October of 1957 was heralded by a steady rhythmic beeping broadcast across radio and television. Like a metaphorical ticking of the doomsday clock, the satellite’s otherwise innocuous chirp signified what many United States citizens feared was a communist infiltration of both outer space and American living rooms.[1] Yet the mythos of American exceptionalism held fast in the face of impending catastrophe; just as Walt Disney’s 1956 book Our Friend the Atom spun hope and pride out of the science behind nuclear devastation, Sputnik’s beeping was absorbed into the growing compendium of electronic sounds that underscored everyday American life and entertainment. While on one hand it signified a loss in an ideological war against communist infiltration, on the other hand it promulgated a heroic narrative of capitalist science in the service of national growth.

         This slippage was made possible in large part by an electronic sound vocabulary that imaginatively and ideologically merged domestic spaces with space travel, synthesizing America’s two expansionist drives into the suburbs and into outer space—the latter barely veiled by political rhetoric that promised outer space as a neutral zone rather than its tacitly understood function as military high ground. Reporting on Sputnik 1, a television newscaster alluded to these sonically tethered territories: “Until two days ago that sound had never been heard on this Earth. Suddenly it has become as much a part of twentieth-century life as the whir of your vacuum cleaner.”[2]  

         This chapter traces how early Space Age sounds circulated across a range of genres, snowballing signifiers on their way to public meaning consensus. Beginning with the steady beep of Sputnik 1 as a sonic baseline and proliferating out into a constellation of genres available to middle-class American consumers of the day, I argue that sound transgressed a multitude of boundaries—political, social, geospatial, and conceptual—to insinuate possible worlds into the mundane. In this way, the ideas of domestic space and outer space both emerge from (or merge with) an “invisible center,”[3] that universalizing place of power that weds identity with operating norms through the perpetuating of cultural patterns. In order for outer space to be seen as conquerable, it had to remain emblematic of the periphery, a boundless “outside” kept at bay by our earthly abode. In this way, outer space could be assimilated into colonial politics whereby the powerful center defines itself by its peripheries, occupying them, drawing from them, while simultaneously subjugating them.

[1] The doomsday clock, a symbolic representation of nuclear threat instituted by members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board in 1947, had been set at a meager two minutes to midnight in 1953 after both the United States and the Soviet Union tested thermonuclear weapons.

[2] Ken Hollings, Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959 (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2008), 183.

[3] Russell Ferguson, “Introduction: Invisible Center,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 9.