Sound Hunting: The Tape Recorder and the Sonic Practices of Sound Recording Hobbyists in France and Britain, 1948-1978

This thesis studies the history of the practice of sound recording as a hobby, in France and Britain. Only a few scholars have hitherto explored this domain, with studies of sound hunting in the Netherlands, Japan, United States. This thesis adds France and Britain to scholarly knowledge and follows sound recording hobbyists in their clubs, radio programmes, specialised magazines, national and international contests, and via their oral histories. It investigates the sound technologies used by amateurs – most notably the tape recorders; the social ties they developed; how a knowledge about sound recording and listening was formed and passed on; and the aesthetics that these so-called sound hunters developed in their works.

The main focus is the rise of sound hobbyist practices around the tape recorder, between 1948 and 1978, but the work begins with an investigation of what sound hobbyists practices were with previous technologies used to record sound. Through documented examples, I show that sound recording as a hobby was practiced since the advent of sound recording technologies in the nineteenth century. However, the practice did not develop on a large scale until the tape recorder, and I show that this was due to a convergence of factors. The second chapter traces the technological factors, focusing on the affordances of sound recorders, from cylinder phonographs to tape recorders. The third chapter investigates the social factors through the ties that developed around the tape recorder. The fourth chapter provides an analytical view on how the audile culture of sound hunting developed and was passed on. The fifth chapter examines the recordings and works produced by these sound hobbyists, their influences and relationships with radio, musique concrète, experimental music, and acoustic ecology.

Through these chapters, I document the advent of a new sonic sensitivity, the diffusion of new listening practices. Nowadays, there is a vivid practice of field recording undertaken by both professionals and amateurs. This thesis shows that the rise of professional sound recording was paralleled by the rise of a culture of private recording and private experimentation, with similar ideas developed independently. It also shows that the sound recording field was undergoing its structuration, normalisation, and professionalization until the 1960s, and that amateurs were part of these processes. The categories of amateur and professional were porous within that context, with amateurs and professionals co-creating disciplinarity.

The thesis makes a new contribution to understanding an audile culture in Britain and France, using approaches derived from the history of technology, the social history of the media, and cultural history of the senses.