“It Has Seldom Been So Difficult to Try to Dress Up a Sound Experience in Words”

Technology and the Rhetoric of Sound and Music Reproduction in Hi-Fi Magazines

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the rhetoric of sound in high fidelity magazines, and how this rhetoric is linked to a technological discourse. Rhetoric of sound refers to the magazines’ efforts to describe sound and music experiences in words. The aim is also to show how an identified technological discourse legitimizes a specific social order. The paper argues that the technological discourse naturalizes the link between technology and masculinity based on notions of gender differences, and that it reproduces a technological worldview in general by offering multiple positions of identification.