ABOUT THIS BOOK

Histories of phonographic technologies and industries have long overlooked the East and Southeast Asian contributions to the sonic dimension of global modernity. Fumitaka Yamauchi and Ying-fen Wang address this one-side perspective with a collection of essays that show the nations of East and Southeast Asia as vibrant contributors to and participants in human audible history.

A roster of experts on countries from Japan to Indonesia explores the complicated relationship between the gramophone industry and music genres in East and Southeast Asia. Extending the boundaries of their research across multiple disciplines, the contributors connect the gramophone industry to theories surrounding phonography and modernity. Their focus on phonography combines an interest in discs with an interest in the sounds contributing to the recent sonic-auditory turn in sound studies.

Ambitious and expansive, Phonographic Modernity examines the bloc of East and Southeast Asia within the larger global history of sound recording.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Fumitaka Yamauchi is a professor of musicology at the National Taiwan University. Ying-fen Wang is a distinguished professor of musicology at the National Taiwan University and the author of Listening to the Colony: Kurosawa Takatomo and the Wartime Survey of Taiwanese Music (1943).

REVIEWS

“The first of its kind, the book represents an indispensable go-to source for knowledge of the early recording industry across a vast swath of regions and territories. Out of a wealth of information, we discern clear patterns that transcend localities, and listen in on a new world in the making.”--Andrew Jones, author of Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Ying-fen Wang

Notes on Names, Transliterations, and Translations

Introduction: Phonographic Modernity and Audible History in East and Southeast Asia

Fumitaka Yamauchi

Part I: East Asia

Chapter 1. Technological Innovations and Corporate Power in the Japanese Record Industry, 1877–1945

Shuhei Hosokawa

Chapter 2. Phonographic Modernity and Korean Recordings, 1896–1945

Fumitaka Yamauchi

Chapter 3. The Shellac Period in China: Cooperation, Conflict, and the Sounds of an Era, 1903–1949

Andreas Steen

Chapter 4. Gramophone Industry in Hong Kong: The Production and Consumption of Cantonese Music Records, 1900–1940

Yung Sai Shing

Chapter 5. Sounding Taiwanese through Gramophone Recordings, 1895–1945

Ying-fen Wang

Part II: Southeast Asia

Chapter 6. A Missing Legacy: Evidence of Recorded Sound in Pre-1945 Vietnam

Jason Gibbs

Chapter 7. From Secretive Siam to the Independent Recording Industry of Thailand

James Mitchell

Chapter 8. Gramophone Records in Colonial Indonesia

Philip Yampolsky

Chapter 9. Recording the Modern: Local Hybridity and Meaning in the Pan-Malay Songs of British Malaya, 1903–1950s

Tan Sooi Beng

Appendix: Chinese and Japanese Names and Terms

Contributors

Index