Difference between revisions of "Sony Walkman"

From Dead Media Archive
Jump to: navigation, search
(Further Theoretical Concerns: Listening to Headphones and the Production of Subjectivity)
 
(48 intermediate revisions by 2 users not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
 
[[Category:Dossier]]  
 
[[Category:Dossier]]  
 
[[Category:Fall 2010]]
 
[[Category:Fall 2010]]
 +
 +
[[File:Walkman-1979.gif|200px|thumb|right|The first Walkman model, TPS L2 released in 1978]]
  
 
=Historical Overview=  
 
=Historical Overview=  
Line 6: Line 8:
 
Sony first released the Walkman personal tape player in 1978. Conceived of as an alterative to the listening practices of the “home stereo,” the Walkman represented a breakthrough in mobile listening equipment, that would allow the once large scale and public experience of listening to music to be reconceptualized on the scale of the individual listener. Accordingly, the Walkman “was originally designed for and marketed to a particular target consumer grouping: mobile, young music listeners.”(du Gay 1997, 66). Interestingly, it was both design and marketing that seemed to most notably set the Walkman apart from previous iterations of personnel listening equipment.
 
Sony first released the Walkman personal tape player in 1978. Conceived of as an alterative to the listening practices of the “home stereo,” the Walkman represented a breakthrough in mobile listening equipment, that would allow the once large scale and public experience of listening to music to be reconceptualized on the scale of the individual listener. Accordingly, the Walkman “was originally designed for and marketed to a particular target consumer grouping: mobile, young music listeners.”(du Gay 1997, 66). Interestingly, it was both design and marketing that seemed to most notably set the Walkman apart from previous iterations of personnel listening equipment.
  
==Design and Marketing==
+
==Design==
 +
[[File:Walkman-ad2.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Culture clash or mutual appreciation? Walkman advertisements often played with stereotypes as a means for "including" everyone as a potential consumer]]
  
While the tradition of mobile audio equipment extends back to the listening practices of the car radio, with its associations of individualism and freedom, the Walkman worked to radically re-associate listening practices with the production of ‘lifestyle’(1997, 66). As a design object, the Walkman was meant to be unobtrusive, sleek, and above all conducive to maximal mobility. To achieve this technically the Sony design team worked tirelessly to convert the bulky audio player technology into something that “would enable people to take their music with them” (1997, 53) wherever they went. ...  
+
While the tradition of mobile audio equipment extends back to the listening practices of the car radio, with its associations of individualism and freedom, the Walkman worked to radically re-associate listening practices with the production of ‘lifestyle’(1997, 66). As a design object, the Walkman was meant to be unobtrusive, sleek, and above all conducive to maximal mobility. To achieve this technically the Sony design team worked tirelessly to convert the bulky audio player technology into something that “would enable people to take their music with them” (1997, 53) wherever they went.  
 +
 
 +
Although the exact origins of the Walkman’s initial design remain shrouded in mystery, some commentators claimed that the idea originally came to Sony founder Akio Morita while noting his ‘children’s frustration at not being able to listen to music while traveling’(p.42), while others claimed that it was Masaru Ibuka, head engineer at Sony, who was the real genius behind the product, it was clear that the projection of a new listening ‘lifestyle’ was central to the development of the Walkman. By associating the Walkman with fresh new way of life centered around personnel desire, Sony achieved the development of a product that could embody not only expanded freedoms in personnel choice, but more importantly consumer choice. To listen meant to consume, and to consume meant to produce the ephemeral conditions of life modeled around a constantly evolving field of consumer products. It is in this dimension of the Walkman, that we find the most compelling register of innovation, namely the rethinking of consumption as production.
 +
 
 +
This reworking of the relationship between production and consumption can be expanded to attest to the central role that representations of design and innovation played within the Sony corporation. As du Gay points out, “Design at Sony, it is often claimed, is organized in a way which enables the company to make products which both create and respond to consumer ‘needs’ in a highly flexible manner.”(p.62) By emphasizing the ‘functional’ and ‘occupational’ role of design and designers, Sony worked to expand the role that engineering played within the overall corporate hierarchy, a trend that has only come to be accepted today as standard mode of organization. Further, by destabilizing the often insurmountable barriers between designers and senior management, Sony worked to foster an environment that could respond quickly and effectively to shifts in market demand. This meant that Sony needed to be organized in such a way so that “designers are kept closely in touch with contemporary cultural trends with the cultural practices of target consumer groupings”(p.63) Combing these organizational strategies into a coherent framework, Sony stands out as an exemplary case in which design and marketing played a hitherto unprecedented role in producing products, which combined both styling and concept in a way that could shift based on consumer demand and market trends, a reflexivity that would have been unthinkable under the more standardized practices of industrial manufacturing.
 +
 
 +
[[File:VintageSonyad.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Clasic Sony advertisement: The Walkman was often presented as "having a model to fit anybody"]]
 +
 
 +
==Marketing==
 +
 
 +
Similarly, the advertisements that seemed to proliferate wildly after the release of the Walkman, attest to Sony’s aggressive repositioning of ‘lifestyle’ and ‘brand’ as the centerpieces of the new consumer experience. While the initial Japanese language advertisements tended to focus on expressing the Walkman’s typically “Japanese” character, as a cutting edge piece of technology that embodies the best in “high-tech”. As the Walkman progressively became a fixture of global culture, Sony moved to expand their branding strategies in accordance with the potentially unlimited difference of the global market. Often the concept of ‘youth’ came to play a predominate role in many of Sony’s more classic adds. Most importantly though, the theme of product multiplicity stood as the center piece of many Walkman adds, displaying the sheer verity of models that the consumer had to choose from. By emphasizing consumer driven design and hip sensibility, Sony played a pivotal role in developing much of the branding and lifestyle marketing that has become a central strategy for the marketing contemporary consumer products.
  
 
==Production==
 
==Production==
Line 18: Line 31:
 
By embracing flexible production as a new model for integrating design, marketing, and consumption, Sony adopted a strategy for linking a diversity of previously disparate processes, from product development and production, to marketing and the introduction of the product to the market, into a seamless self generating productive loop. In the respect, the function of both design and marketing where reconceived of as “operating on the very cusp of production and consumption, attempting to stitch the two spheres together.”(1997, 69). Following this model, Sony moved from the production of the original model of the Walkman in 1978, to an expansive line of hundreds of Walkman audio products that where tailored to meet the demands of a continuously shifting spectrum of consumer identities. From this perspective then, the Walkman can be understood as a productive nexus, linking together the divers employment of both symbolic and material practices into a singular ‘brand identity’ (1997, 69).
 
By embracing flexible production as a new model for integrating design, marketing, and consumption, Sony adopted a strategy for linking a diversity of previously disparate processes, from product development and production, to marketing and the introduction of the product to the market, into a seamless self generating productive loop. In the respect, the function of both design and marketing where reconceived of as “operating on the very cusp of production and consumption, attempting to stitch the two spheres together.”(1997, 69). Following this model, Sony moved from the production of the original model of the Walkman in 1978, to an expansive line of hundreds of Walkman audio products that where tailored to meet the demands of a continuously shifting spectrum of consumer identities. From this perspective then, the Walkman can be understood as a productive nexus, linking together the divers employment of both symbolic and material practices into a singular ‘brand identity’ (1997, 69).
  
=Sony-Postwar Japan-Audio Artillery=
+
=Sony and Postwar Japan=
  
In May 1946 what would later come to be known as the Sony corporation was founded by Akio Morita as the Tokyo Tsushin Kogyu Kabushiki Kasha (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering). As the son of a wealthy family who had been prominent in the saki brewing industry, Morita with the help of an initial capital investment from his father, formed the company with Masaru Ibuka, “with whom he had been working with during the war on the design of new types of bombs”(1997, 46). Drawing from his background as a navel technologies officer, Morita first conceived of the Sony cooperation as a means for converting the technical innovations, that he and a number of young Japanese scientists had helped to develop during the course of the Second World War, into civilian technology. Interestingly, the company’s first major break through came in the form of audio technology. After buying the patent to the “transistorized electronic components” in 1947, the two young engineers got to work designing what would in two years time would come together as the worlds first transistor radio (1997, 47). This was then developed into a portable tape recorder and playback device that would prove to be the technical foundation of the Walkman.      
+
In May 1946 what would later come to be known as the Sony corporation was founded by Akio Morita as the Tokyo Tsushin Kogyu Kabushiki Kasha (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering). As the son of a wealthy family who had been prominent in the saki brewing industry, Morita with the help of an initial capital investment from his father, formed the company with Masaru Ibuka, “with whom he had been working with during the war on the design of new types of bombs”(1997, 46). Drawing from his background as a navel technologies officer, Morita first conceived of the Sony cooperation as a means for converting the technical innovations, that he and a number of young Japanese scientists had helped to develop during the course of the Second World War, into civilian technology. Interestingly, the company’s first major break through came in the form of audio technology. After buying the patent to the “transistorized electronic components” in 1947, the two young engineers got to work designing what would in two years time would come together as the worlds first transistor radio (1997, 47). This was then developed into a portable tape recorder and playback device that would prove to be the technical foundation of the Walkman. As an extension of war time technology into postwar application, the recorder illustrates Rey Chao thesis, regarding postwar Japan, that “Because it [Japan] was forbidden to advance in militarism, postwar Japan specialized in the promotion of science and technology for “peace” and for the consolidation of a “democratic” society. Instead of bombs and missiles, Japan became one of the world’s leading producers of cars, computers, and other types of “high-tech” equipment.”(Chow 2006, 34) By reversing Japan’s role as the war time “defeated” and “subjugated”, postwar economic development worked to secure Japan’s place in the Cold War logic of economic militarism, effectively allowing the ‘defeated “victim” of the war [to] rise again and rejoin the “victor” in a new competition, the competition in bombarding the world with a different type of implosion—information.’(ibid).
  
As an extension of war time technology into postwar application, the recorder illustrates Rey Chao thesis, regarding postwar Japan, that “Because it [Japan] was forbidden to advance in militarism, postwar Japan specialized in the promotion of science and technology for “peace” and for the consolidation of a “democratic” society. Instead of bombs and missiles, Japan became one of the world’s leading producers of cars, computers, and other types of “high-tech” equipment.”(Age of the World Target, 34) By reversing Japan’s role as the war time “defeated” and “subjugated”, postwar economic development worked to secure Japan’s place in the Cold War logic of economic militarism, effectively allowing the ‘defeated “victim” of the war [to] rise again and rejoin the “victor” in a new competition, the competition in bombarding the world with a different type of implosion—information.’(ibid).
+
==Audio Artillery==
  
Set within the legacy of the Cold War arms race, the technological development that underpins the development of the Walkman takes on a considerably broader reading. As an effective means for “bombarding,” the Walkman might seem like an unlikely technical model. Unlike projective audio equipment such as the gramophone or loudspeaker, which following Adorno’s reading is necessarily public and defining to the effect of ‘numbing the listener into a state of passivity’, the Walkman works to focus sound internally, blocking out the violent collision of the external sonic environment with the human sensorium. In this respect, the Walkman can be read as a “defensive” as opposed to “offensive” mechanism, capable of preemptively isolating the individual from being overwhelmed by a sea of threatening noise. This reductive, monistic withdrawal that the Walkman facilitates illuminates the precise type of bombardment that Chao is referencing in the above statement, namely “implosion”. Analogues to the technical development of the atomic bomb, which allowed for the unprecedented reduction of life to a pile of entropic dust, the Walkman functioned by reducing the multiplicity of heterogeneous sonic information into a single harmonious frame of experience. As Chow goes on to note, “the dropping of the bombs marked the pivot of the progress of science, a pivot which was to continue its impact on all aspects of human life long after the Second World War was over.”(2006, 29). In this regards, both the bomb and the Walkman, as both representing and furthering the “pivot” noted above, can be traced along a progressive lineage where science increasingly comes to be “''experienced'' daily as the practically useful, in the form of miniscule, convenient, matter-of-fact operations that the lay person can manipulate at his or her fingertips… Our daily use of the light switch, the television, the computer, the cell phone, and other types of devices are all examples of this paradoxical situation of scientific advancement, in which the portentous—what Heidegger calls “the gigantic”—disappears into the mundane, the effortless, and the intangible.”(p.29;emphasis in original). Such a scalar reduction of the sublimely large to the graspable at hand quality of modern technology is achieved through what Chao following Susan Stewart, has elsewhere called “miniaturization”(Chao 1990, 139). Returning to the specificity of the Walkman, we are told “In contrast to the gramophone and the loudspeaker, without which the ‘gigantic’ history of the public would not have been possible, the Walkman ushers in the history of [the] miniaturized.”(1990, 139). Among the most important characteristics of this shrinking is the production of a new form of equivalence, where the previously mimetic field of representation is reconceived in terms of the scalar, metonymic ‘correspondence between the thing and the thing of which it is a miniature’(1990, 139).As a new field of action, the miniature opens up a the possibility of revolutionary praxis at the literal press of a button, as Chow remarks “The miniature is the labor of multiplying and intensifying significance microscopically.”(p.139). This leads to the more general point about the Walkman that revels its true political potential:
+
Set within the legacy of the Cold War arms race, the technological development that underpins the development of the Walkman takes on a considerably broader reading. As an effective means for “bombarding,” the Walkman might seem like an unlikely technical model. Unlike projective audio equipment such as the gramophone or loudspeaker, which following Adorno’s reading is necessarily public and defining to the effect of ‘numbing the listener into a state of passivity’, the Walkman works to focus sound internally, blocking out the violent collision of the external sonic environment with the human sensorium. In this respect, the Walkman can be read as a “defensive” as opposed to “offensive” mechanism, capable of preemptively isolating the individual from being overwhelmed by a sea of threatening noise. This reductive, monistic withdrawal that the Walkman facilitates illuminates the precise type of bombardment that Chao is referencing in the above statement, namely “implosion”.  
 +
 
 +
Analogues to the technical development of the atomic bomb, which allowed for the unprecedented reduction of life to a pile of entropic dust, the Walkman functioned by reducing the multiplicity of heterogeneous sonic information into a single harmonious frame of experience. As Chow goes on to note, “the dropping of the bombs marked the pivot of the progress of science, a pivot which was to continue its impact on all aspects of human life long after the Second World War was over.”(2006, 29). In this regards, both the bomb and the Walkman, as both representing and furthering the “pivot” noted above, can be traced along a progressive lineage where science increasingly comes to be “''experienced'' daily as the practically useful, in the form of miniscule, convenient, matter-of-fact operations that the lay person can manipulate at his or her fingertips… Our daily use of the light switch, the television, the computer, the cell phone, and other types of devices are all examples of this paradoxical situation of scientific advancement, in which the portentous—what Heidegger calls “the gigantic”—disappears into the mundane, the effortless, and the intangible.”(p.29;emphasis in original). Such a scalar reduction of the sublimely large to the graspable at hand quality of modern technology is achieved through what Chao following Susan Stewart, has elsewhere called “miniaturization”(Chao 1990, 139).  
 +
 
 +
Returning to the specificity of the Walkman, we are told “In contrast to the gramophone and the loudspeaker, without which the ‘gigantic’ history of the public would not have been possible, the Walkman ushers in the history of [the] miniaturized.”(1990, 139). Among the most important characteristics of this shrinking is the production of a new form of equivalence, where the previously mimetic field of representation is reconceived in terms of the scalar, metonymic ‘correspondence between the thing and the thing of which it is a miniature’(1990, 139).As a new field of action, the miniature opens up a the possibility of revolutionary praxis at the literal press of a button, as Chow remarks “The miniature is the labor of multiplying and intensifying significance microscopically.”(p.139). This leads to the more general point about the Walkman that revels its true political potential:
  
 
<blockquote>Insofar as Walkman music is shrunken music, music reduced to the size of the little portable machine that produces it, it is a kind of miniature. But the most important feature of music’s miniaturization does not lie in the smallness of the equipment which generates it. Rather, it lies in the ''revolution in listening'' engendered by the equipment: while the music is hidden from others because it is compacted, this hiddenness is precisely what allows me to hear it full blast. The ‘miniaturization’ that does not produce a visible body—however small—that corresponds with ‘reality’ leads to a certain freedom. This is the freedom to be deaf to the loudspeakers of history.”(Chow 1990, 139; emphasis in original).</blockquote>
 
<blockquote>Insofar as Walkman music is shrunken music, music reduced to the size of the little portable machine that produces it, it is a kind of miniature. But the most important feature of music’s miniaturization does not lie in the smallness of the equipment which generates it. Rather, it lies in the ''revolution in listening'' engendered by the equipment: while the music is hidden from others because it is compacted, this hiddenness is precisely what allows me to hear it full blast. The ‘miniaturization’ that does not produce a visible body—however small—that corresponds with ‘reality’ leads to a certain freedom. This is the freedom to be deaf to the loudspeakers of history.”(Chow 1990, 139; emphasis in original).</blockquote>
 +
 +
What the Walkman reveals to the user is the potential, and danger, inherent in the progressive instrumentalization of life under modern science: “the mixture of danger and saving power, to paraphrase Heidegger quotation from Holderlin”(Chambers 1990, 141). While on the one hand, the Walkman provides the positive “possibility of a barrier, a blockage between ‘me’ and the world, so that, as in moments of undisturbed sleep, I can disappear as a listener playing music. The Walkman allows me, in other words, to be missing—to be a missing part of history”(Chow 1990, 140). On the other hand the Walkman, as a technological afterimage of two devastating flashes of destruction that marked the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also corresponds to another more troubling logic, the logic of instrumental reason through which war has “become not the cessation of normality, but rather, the very definition of normality itself. The space and time of war are no longer segregated in the form of an other; instead, they operate from within the here and now, as the internal logic of the here and now. From being negative blockade to being normal routine, war becomes the positive mechanism, momentum, and condition of possibility of society, creating a hegemonic space of global communication through powers of visibility and control.”(Chow 2006, 34). Containing both progressive and troubling potentials, the Walkman must ultimately be understood as a profoundly ambivalent technological artifact.
 +
 +
=Further Theoretical Concerns: Listening to Headphones and the Production of Subjectivity=
 +
 +
Another intriguing theoretical dimension of the Walkman’s usage as a “listening” device relates to the specific way that it helps to both produce and alter spatial representation. In From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity, Charles Stankievech explores how the experience of “jacking in” to portable audio equipment, helps to construct a “space that is not necessarily out in the world, but in ones head.”(p.55). Tracing the question of ‘psychoacoustic’ space back through the phenomenological writings of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Stankievech explains that as a modern technological prosthesis “headphones are quite literally a bracketing off of the world for a precise analysis of sound, allowing for a focused investigation into a “phenomenology of interiority”.”(p.55).
 +
 +
[[File:69022059_3-StethoscopesCardiology-StethoscopesBinaural-StethoscopesPediatric-Stethoscopes-Everything-Else.jpg|200px|thumb|left|With binaural stethoscopes the experience of “in-head” acoustic imaging first became possible.]]
 +
 +
Having reveled the headphone as the crucial site of investigation, Stankievech proceeds to explore the history of what he calls “in head” listening, a practice that he traces back to the invention of the early stethoscope; as he goes on to elaborate: “the stethoscope [is] a pivotal artifact in the development of modern listening. From this perspective, the 1816 invention of the stethoscope becomes the site where cultural techniques of listening were both developed and reified.”(p.56). Stankievech points out that the true breakthrough in listening that the stethoscope provided was the way that it reconceived the space of the body:
 +
 +
<blockquote>the stethoscope fostered a different engagement with the patient by allowing attention to the voice’s sonic quality as it resonated in the body: “The pure voice becomes a kind of sound effect—a container of timbre and an index of the states that shaped it.” Focusing, intensifying and isolating the sound of the internal body with the stethoscope created an increased valuation of sound in medicine. The interior of the body was listened to with great care, because the “whole thorax becomes a kind of resonating chamber; the lungs especially become like the interior of an instrument” (Stankievech 2007, p.56)</blockquote>
 +
 +
By allowing for the patients body to be reconceived as an instrument, as both a literal surface for the resonance of sound and as a metaphorical means to an end, the stethoscope opened up a radically new epistemological engagement with the interior of the body. While technically acoustic in nature, the new production of interior space had clear connection to the visual, the stethoscope created “a new sonic frame that was previously unheard—literally. The binaural stethoscope provided the first means of “in-head” acoustic imaging.”(p.56). While this had clear import for the development of medical science, Stankievech tells us that it was not “ listening to the interior of the patient’s body (which is actually the old practice of auscultation, dating back to Hippocrates)” that had revolutionary consequences, but rather “the reconstruction of the doctor’s psychological image of his own body and his resulting consciousness.”(p.56). Thus with the use of the binaural stethoscope (and subsequently with the use of headphones), “a sound field can be virtually located within the head. More accurately, space is created within the mass of the body where sound masses float in an impossible space.”(p.56). Defined as a dynamic aurel field with the “mass of the body”, the experience of ‘in-head’ visualization recalls ‘G.W.F. Hegel’s description of the “night of the world”— the poetic description of the birth of the subject based upon the transcendental imagination:’
 +
 +
<blockquote>The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head—there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful.</blockquote>
 +
 +
[[File:NYV207884_koss_3.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Koss SP-3 Stereophone, 1958.]]
 +
 +
This parallel leads Stankievech to conclude that “For both Hegel and Laennec, describing the modern subject entails recognizing that behind the subject’s eyes is an “emptied” space where phantasms and phantom signals suddenly appear and disappear. The modern subject must face the creative necessity of generating his or her own intersubjectivity—a task that is fundamentally a spatial activity.”(p.56) Following this logic further it becomes clear that what is at stake in the practice of listening with headphones is becoming aware of the fact that “The imaginative powers of the mind’s ability to imagine space coincide with a literal location of an interior space “in the head.””(p.56)
 +
 +
 +
[[File:Mobius1956_Tnail.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Möbius loop]]
 +
 +
Extnding this insight further into the practices of modern listening, Stankievech claims that headphones come to stand as an often underrepresented site for the production of subjectivity. Exploring the work of numerous contemporary sound artistes lead him to muse that, “headphones create a mobile and continually changing architecture that follows the listener, wrapping him or her in a private bubble.”(p.57). By providing access to both a private “interior” experience and a an outward representation of the self in space, headphones relate to and mediate between exterior and interior in a familiar yet unsettling way. To account for the strangeness of this experience in psychoanalytic terms, Stankievech suggests that “Perhaps, however, a way to engage [with].. head-phone listening in general—is not with Freud’s ''unheimlich'', but with Lacan’s topologically structured term ''l’extimité''.”(p.59). For Lacan, what is at stake in the concept of ''l’extimité''—a neologism that he coined combining the words ''exterior'' and ''intimacy''—is “an investigation into a phenomenology of interiority twists into a topological complication.”(p.58). This final complication leads Stankievech to conclude that:
 +
 +
<blockquote>"In effect,''l’extimité'' could be used to describe the general experience of listening with headphones, but listening to a phantom voice with headphones would be the event par excellence (''phone'' being Greek for “voice”). Moving through a dynamic space that blurs the exterior with the interior via the topology of a Möbius loop or better yet, a Klein bottle, the subject listens; or shall I say the outside is on the inside of the listener?... The difference between ''containedand'' and ''container'' dissolves, as does the difference between you and me.”(p. 58)</blockquote>
 +
 +
=A Long Farewell to the Sony Walkman=
 +
[[File:120px-Cryinglove4.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Shot from "Calling Out Love From the Center of the Earth": where the Walkman is used to access past experiences.]]
 +
After over thirty years of providing mobile sonic entertainment to the worlds masses, in October 2010 the Sony corporation announced that they would bid farewell to the Walkman. While over the years the Walkman, as a brand name, had found a new perches on life through diversifying its products into CD and later digital mp3 technology, it was clear that the name “Walkman” was somehow too imbricate in the logic of the “tape”, the specter of audio past, to continue to give off the air of the “new” that Sony has always healed so dearly to. In this respect then, it is most befitting that the disappearance of the Walkman should be predicated on the same fickle consumer tastes that it played such an instrumental role in creating. Accordingly, Sony has chosen to bid ‘sayonara’ to its first true consumer product.
 +
 +
=Works Cited=
 +
 +
Chambers, Ian. 1990. ''A Miniature History of the Walkman''. ''New Formations'', No.11, Routledge. Reproduced in Du Gay, Paul. 1997. ''Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman''. Glasgow, GB: Bath Press Colourbooks, The Open University. pp. 141-42.   
 +
 +
Chow, Rey. 1990. ''Listening Otherwise, Music Miniaturized: A Different Type of Question About Revolution''. ''Discourse'' Vol. 13, No.1, Winter 1990/91. Reproduced in Du Gay, Paul. 1997. ''Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman''. Glasgow, GB: Bath Press Colourbooks, The Open University. pp. 135-40.   
 +
 
 +
———Chow, Rey. 2006. ''The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work''. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
 +
 +
Du Gay, Paul. 1997. ''Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman''. Glasgow, GB: Bath Press Colourbooks, The Open University.
 +
 +
G.W.F. Hegel, ''“Jenaer Realphilosophie,” inFrühe politische Systeme'' (Frankfurt, West Germany: Ullstein, 1974) p. 204. First published in 1803–1804; quoted
 +
In Stankievech, Charles. 2007. ''From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity''. ''Leonardo Music Journal'', Volume 17, pp. 55-59. p. 56.
 +
 +
Stankievech, Charles. 2007. ''From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity''. ''Leonardo Music Journal'', Volume 17, pp. 55-59.
 +
 +
Williams, Stephen. 2010. ''Sony to Cassette: Sayonara''. ''New York Times.'' October 26.

Latest revision as of 13:33, 15 November 2010

The first Walkman model, TPS L2 released in 1978

Historical Overview

Sony first released the Walkman personal tape player in 1978. Conceived of as an alterative to the listening practices of the “home stereo,” the Walkman represented a breakthrough in mobile listening equipment, that would allow the once large scale and public experience of listening to music to be reconceptualized on the scale of the individual listener. Accordingly, the Walkman “was originally designed for and marketed to a particular target consumer grouping: mobile, young music listeners.”(du Gay 1997, 66). Interestingly, it was both design and marketing that seemed to most notably set the Walkman apart from previous iterations of personnel listening equipment.

Design

Culture clash or mutual appreciation? Walkman advertisements often played with stereotypes as a means for "including" everyone as a potential consumer

While the tradition of mobile audio equipment extends back to the listening practices of the car radio, with its associations of individualism and freedom, the Walkman worked to radically re-associate listening practices with the production of ‘lifestyle’(1997, 66). As a design object, the Walkman was meant to be unobtrusive, sleek, and above all conducive to maximal mobility. To achieve this technically the Sony design team worked tirelessly to convert the bulky audio player technology into something that “would enable people to take their music with them” (1997, 53) wherever they went.

Although the exact origins of the Walkman’s initial design remain shrouded in mystery, some commentators claimed that the idea originally came to Sony founder Akio Morita while noting his ‘children’s frustration at not being able to listen to music while traveling’(p.42), while others claimed that it was Masaru Ibuka, head engineer at Sony, who was the real genius behind the product, it was clear that the projection of a new listening ‘lifestyle’ was central to the development of the Walkman. By associating the Walkman with fresh new way of life centered around personnel desire, Sony achieved the development of a product that could embody not only expanded freedoms in personnel choice, but more importantly consumer choice. To listen meant to consume, and to consume meant to produce the ephemeral conditions of life modeled around a constantly evolving field of consumer products. It is in this dimension of the Walkman, that we find the most compelling register of innovation, namely the rethinking of consumption as production.

This reworking of the relationship between production and consumption can be expanded to attest to the central role that representations of design and innovation played within the Sony corporation. As du Gay points out, “Design at Sony, it is often claimed, is organized in a way which enables the company to make products which both create and respond to consumer ‘needs’ in a highly flexible manner.”(p.62) By emphasizing the ‘functional’ and ‘occupational’ role of design and designers, Sony worked to expand the role that engineering played within the overall corporate hierarchy, a trend that has only come to be accepted today as standard mode of organization. Further, by destabilizing the often insurmountable barriers between designers and senior management, Sony worked to foster an environment that could respond quickly and effectively to shifts in market demand. This meant that Sony needed to be organized in such a way so that “designers are kept closely in touch with contemporary cultural trends with the cultural practices of target consumer groupings”(p.63) Combing these organizational strategies into a coherent framework, Sony stands out as an exemplary case in which design and marketing played a hitherto unprecedented role in producing products, which combined both styling and concept in a way that could shift based on consumer demand and market trends, a reflexivity that would have been unthinkable under the more standardized practices of industrial manufacturing.

Clasic Sony advertisement: The Walkman was often presented as "having a model to fit anybody"

Marketing

Similarly, the advertisements that seemed to proliferate wildly after the release of the Walkman, attest to Sony’s aggressive repositioning of ‘lifestyle’ and ‘brand’ as the centerpieces of the new consumer experience. While the initial Japanese language advertisements tended to focus on expressing the Walkman’s typically “Japanese” character, as a cutting edge piece of technology that embodies the best in “high-tech”. As the Walkman progressively became a fixture of global culture, Sony moved to expand their branding strategies in accordance with the potentially unlimited difference of the global market. Often the concept of ‘youth’ came to play a predominate role in many of Sony’s more classic adds. Most importantly though, the theme of product multiplicity stood as the center piece of many Walkman adds, displaying the sheer verity of models that the consumer had to choose from. By emphasizing consumer driven design and hip sensibility, Sony played a pivotal role in developing much of the branding and lifestyle marketing that has become a central strategy for the marketing contemporary consumer products.

Production

As we saw in the previous section, Sony conceived of the Walkman, both in terms of design and marketing, as a way to reach divers consumer groups, but as the popularity of the Walkman grew to encompass a global market Sony was forced to rethink the relatively inflexible system (hierarchical, lifetime employment) of Fordist style manufacturing. On the level of production, this meant moving away from a model of mass produced products, “where particular products were manufactured in large batches on assembly-lines that required great investment in inflexible plants”(1997, 66), towards embracing a new logic of production that required attention to “the combination of responsive design and visual communication with techniques of market segmentation.”(ibid) By developing the Walkman as a global ‘lifestyle’ product, Sony became the leading edge of what has now become the standard mode of “flexible” production:

linked to [then] novel forms of flexible, electronic-based automation technologies… [such] computer-based technologies and a functionally flexible labor force, it [was] common for a particular model to be available in a large number of different versions, each designed for an marketed at a distinct consumer grouping.(de Gay 1997, 66)

By embracing flexible production as a new model for integrating design, marketing, and consumption, Sony adopted a strategy for linking a diversity of previously disparate processes, from product development and production, to marketing and the introduction of the product to the market, into a seamless self generating productive loop. In the respect, the function of both design and marketing where reconceived of as “operating on the very cusp of production and consumption, attempting to stitch the two spheres together.”(1997, 69). Following this model, Sony moved from the production of the original model of the Walkman in 1978, to an expansive line of hundreds of Walkman audio products that where tailored to meet the demands of a continuously shifting spectrum of consumer identities. From this perspective then, the Walkman can be understood as a productive nexus, linking together the divers employment of both symbolic and material practices into a singular ‘brand identity’ (1997, 69).

Sony and Postwar Japan

In May 1946 what would later come to be known as the Sony corporation was founded by Akio Morita as the Tokyo Tsushin Kogyu Kabushiki Kasha (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering). As the son of a wealthy family who had been prominent in the saki brewing industry, Morita with the help of an initial capital investment from his father, formed the company with Masaru Ibuka, “with whom he had been working with during the war on the design of new types of bombs”(1997, 46). Drawing from his background as a navel technologies officer, Morita first conceived of the Sony cooperation as a means for converting the technical innovations, that he and a number of young Japanese scientists had helped to develop during the course of the Second World War, into civilian technology. Interestingly, the company’s first major break through came in the form of audio technology. After buying the patent to the “transistorized electronic components” in 1947, the two young engineers got to work designing what would in two years time would come together as the worlds first transistor radio (1997, 47). This was then developed into a portable tape recorder and playback device that would prove to be the technical foundation of the Walkman. As an extension of war time technology into postwar application, the recorder illustrates Rey Chao thesis, regarding postwar Japan, that “Because it [Japan] was forbidden to advance in militarism, postwar Japan specialized in the promotion of science and technology for “peace” and for the consolidation of a “democratic” society. Instead of bombs and missiles, Japan became one of the world’s leading producers of cars, computers, and other types of “high-tech” equipment.”(Chow 2006, 34) By reversing Japan’s role as the war time “defeated” and “subjugated”, postwar economic development worked to secure Japan’s place in the Cold War logic of economic militarism, effectively allowing the ‘defeated “victim” of the war [to] rise again and rejoin the “victor” in a new competition, the competition in bombarding the world with a different type of implosion—information.’(ibid).

Audio Artillery

Set within the legacy of the Cold War arms race, the technological development that underpins the development of the Walkman takes on a considerably broader reading. As an effective means for “bombarding,” the Walkman might seem like an unlikely technical model. Unlike projective audio equipment such as the gramophone or loudspeaker, which following Adorno’s reading is necessarily public and defining to the effect of ‘numbing the listener into a state of passivity’, the Walkman works to focus sound internally, blocking out the violent collision of the external sonic environment with the human sensorium. In this respect, the Walkman can be read as a “defensive” as opposed to “offensive” mechanism, capable of preemptively isolating the individual from being overwhelmed by a sea of threatening noise. This reductive, monistic withdrawal that the Walkman facilitates illuminates the precise type of bombardment that Chao is referencing in the above statement, namely “implosion”.

Analogues to the technical development of the atomic bomb, which allowed for the unprecedented reduction of life to a pile of entropic dust, the Walkman functioned by reducing the multiplicity of heterogeneous sonic information into a single harmonious frame of experience. As Chow goes on to note, “the dropping of the bombs marked the pivot of the progress of science, a pivot which was to continue its impact on all aspects of human life long after the Second World War was over.”(2006, 29). In this regards, both the bomb and the Walkman, as both representing and furthering the “pivot” noted above, can be traced along a progressive lineage where science increasingly comes to be “experienced daily as the practically useful, in the form of miniscule, convenient, matter-of-fact operations that the lay person can manipulate at his or her fingertips… Our daily use of the light switch, the television, the computer, the cell phone, and other types of devices are all examples of this paradoxical situation of scientific advancement, in which the portentous—what Heidegger calls “the gigantic”—disappears into the mundane, the effortless, and the intangible.”(p.29;emphasis in original). Such a scalar reduction of the sublimely large to the graspable at hand quality of modern technology is achieved through what Chao following Susan Stewart, has elsewhere called “miniaturization”(Chao 1990, 139).

Returning to the specificity of the Walkman, we are told “In contrast to the gramophone and the loudspeaker, without which the ‘gigantic’ history of the public would not have been possible, the Walkman ushers in the history of [the] miniaturized.”(1990, 139). Among the most important characteristics of this shrinking is the production of a new form of equivalence, where the previously mimetic field of representation is reconceived in terms of the scalar, metonymic ‘correspondence between the thing and the thing of which it is a miniature’(1990, 139).As a new field of action, the miniature opens up a the possibility of revolutionary praxis at the literal press of a button, as Chow remarks “The miniature is the labor of multiplying and intensifying significance microscopically.”(p.139). This leads to the more general point about the Walkman that revels its true political potential:

Insofar as Walkman music is shrunken music, music reduced to the size of the little portable machine that produces it, it is a kind of miniature. But the most important feature of music’s miniaturization does not lie in the smallness of the equipment which generates it. Rather, it lies in the revolution in listening engendered by the equipment: while the music is hidden from others because it is compacted, this hiddenness is precisely what allows me to hear it full blast. The ‘miniaturization’ that does not produce a visible body—however small—that corresponds with ‘reality’ leads to a certain freedom. This is the freedom to be deaf to the loudspeakers of history.”(Chow 1990, 139; emphasis in original).

What the Walkman reveals to the user is the potential, and danger, inherent in the progressive instrumentalization of life under modern science: “the mixture of danger and saving power, to paraphrase Heidegger quotation from Holderlin”(Chambers 1990, 141). While on the one hand, the Walkman provides the positive “possibility of a barrier, a blockage between ‘me’ and the world, so that, as in moments of undisturbed sleep, I can disappear as a listener playing music. The Walkman allows me, in other words, to be missing—to be a missing part of history”(Chow 1990, 140). On the other hand the Walkman, as a technological afterimage of two devastating flashes of destruction that marked the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also corresponds to another more troubling logic, the logic of instrumental reason through which war has “become not the cessation of normality, but rather, the very definition of normality itself. The space and time of war are no longer segregated in the form of an other; instead, they operate from within the here and now, as the internal logic of the here and now. From being negative blockade to being normal routine, war becomes the positive mechanism, momentum, and condition of possibility of society, creating a hegemonic space of global communication through powers of visibility and control.”(Chow 2006, 34). Containing both progressive and troubling potentials, the Walkman must ultimately be understood as a profoundly ambivalent technological artifact.

Further Theoretical Concerns: Listening to Headphones and the Production of Subjectivity

Another intriguing theoretical dimension of the Walkman’s usage as a “listening” device relates to the specific way that it helps to both produce and alter spatial representation. In From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity, Charles Stankievech explores how the experience of “jacking in” to portable audio equipment, helps to construct a “space that is not necessarily out in the world, but in ones head.”(p.55). Tracing the question of ‘psychoacoustic’ space back through the phenomenological writings of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Stankievech explains that as a modern technological prosthesis “headphones are quite literally a bracketing off of the world for a precise analysis of sound, allowing for a focused investigation into a “phenomenology of interiority”.”(p.55).

With binaural stethoscopes the experience of “in-head” acoustic imaging first became possible.

Having reveled the headphone as the crucial site of investigation, Stankievech proceeds to explore the history of what he calls “in head” listening, a practice that he traces back to the invention of the early stethoscope; as he goes on to elaborate: “the stethoscope [is] a pivotal artifact in the development of modern listening. From this perspective, the 1816 invention of the stethoscope becomes the site where cultural techniques of listening were both developed and reified.”(p.56). Stankievech points out that the true breakthrough in listening that the stethoscope provided was the way that it reconceived the space of the body:

the stethoscope fostered a different engagement with the patient by allowing attention to the voice’s sonic quality as it resonated in the body: “The pure voice becomes a kind of sound effect—a container of timbre and an index of the states that shaped it.” Focusing, intensifying and isolating the sound of the internal body with the stethoscope created an increased valuation of sound in medicine. The interior of the body was listened to with great care, because the “whole thorax becomes a kind of resonating chamber; the lungs especially become like the interior of an instrument” (Stankievech 2007, p.56)

By allowing for the patients body to be reconceived as an instrument, as both a literal surface for the resonance of sound and as a metaphorical means to an end, the stethoscope opened up a radically new epistemological engagement with the interior of the body. While technically acoustic in nature, the new production of interior space had clear connection to the visual, the stethoscope created “a new sonic frame that was previously unheard—literally. The binaural stethoscope provided the first means of “in-head” acoustic imaging.”(p.56). While this had clear import for the development of medical science, Stankievech tells us that it was not “ listening to the interior of the patient’s body (which is actually the old practice of auscultation, dating back to Hippocrates)” that had revolutionary consequences, but rather “the reconstruction of the doctor’s psychological image of his own body and his resulting consciousness.”(p.56). Thus with the use of the binaural stethoscope (and subsequently with the use of headphones), “a sound field can be virtually located within the head. More accurately, space is created within the mass of the body where sound masses float in an impossible space.”(p.56). Defined as a dynamic aurel field with the “mass of the body”, the experience of ‘in-head’ visualization recalls ‘G.W.F. Hegel’s description of the “night of the world”— the poetic description of the birth of the subject based upon the transcendental imagination:’

The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head—there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful.
Koss SP-3 Stereophone, 1958.

This parallel leads Stankievech to conclude that “For both Hegel and Laennec, describing the modern subject entails recognizing that behind the subject’s eyes is an “emptied” space where phantasms and phantom signals suddenly appear and disappear. The modern subject must face the creative necessity of generating his or her own intersubjectivity—a task that is fundamentally a spatial activity.”(p.56) Following this logic further it becomes clear that what is at stake in the practice of listening with headphones is becoming aware of the fact that “The imaginative powers of the mind’s ability to imagine space coincide with a literal location of an interior space “in the head.””(p.56)


Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination
Möbius loop

Extnding this insight further into the practices of modern listening, Stankievech claims that headphones come to stand as an often underrepresented site for the production of subjectivity. Exploring the work of numerous contemporary sound artistes lead him to muse that, “headphones create a mobile and continually changing architecture that follows the listener, wrapping him or her in a private bubble.”(p.57). By providing access to both a private “interior” experience and a an outward representation of the self in space, headphones relate to and mediate between exterior and interior in a familiar yet unsettling way. To account for the strangeness of this experience in psychoanalytic terms, Stankievech suggests that “Perhaps, however, a way to engage [with].. head-phone listening in general—is not with Freud’s unheimlich, but with Lacan’s topologically structured term l’extimité.”(p.59). For Lacan, what is at stake in the concept of l’extimité—a neologism that he coined combining the words exterior and intimacy—is “an investigation into a phenomenology of interiority twists into a topological complication.”(p.58). This final complication leads Stankievech to conclude that:

"In effect,l’extimité could be used to describe the general experience of listening with headphones, but listening to a phantom voice with headphones would be the event par excellence (phone being Greek for “voice”). Moving through a dynamic space that blurs the exterior with the interior via the topology of a Möbius loop or better yet, a Klein bottle, the subject listens; or shall I say the outside is on the inside of the listener?... The difference between containedand and container dissolves, as does the difference between you and me.”(p. 58)

A Long Farewell to the Sony Walkman

Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination
Shot from "Calling Out Love From the Center of the Earth": where the Walkman is used to access past experiences.

After over thirty years of providing mobile sonic entertainment to the worlds masses, in October 2010 the Sony corporation announced that they would bid farewell to the Walkman. While over the years the Walkman, as a brand name, had found a new perches on life through diversifying its products into CD and later digital mp3 technology, it was clear that the name “Walkman” was somehow too imbricate in the logic of the “tape”, the specter of audio past, to continue to give off the air of the “new” that Sony has always healed so dearly to. In this respect then, it is most befitting that the disappearance of the Walkman should be predicated on the same fickle consumer tastes that it played such an instrumental role in creating. Accordingly, Sony has chosen to bid ‘sayonara’ to its first true consumer product.

Works Cited

Chambers, Ian. 1990. A Miniature History of the Walkman. New Formations, No.11, Routledge. Reproduced in Du Gay, Paul. 1997. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. Glasgow, GB: Bath Press Colourbooks, The Open University. pp. 141-42.

Chow, Rey. 1990. Listening Otherwise, Music Miniaturized: A Different Type of Question About Revolution. Discourse Vol. 13, No.1, Winter 1990/91. Reproduced in Du Gay, Paul. 1997. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. Glasgow, GB: Bath Press Colourbooks, The Open University. pp. 135-40.

———Chow, Rey. 2006. The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Du Gay, Paul. 1997. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. Glasgow, GB: Bath Press Colourbooks, The Open University.

G.W.F. Hegel, “Jenaer Realphilosophie,” inFrühe politische Systeme (Frankfurt, West Germany: Ullstein, 1974) p. 204. First published in 1803–1804; quoted In Stankievech, Charles. 2007. From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity. Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 17, pp. 55-59. p. 56.

Stankievech, Charles. 2007. From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity. Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 17, pp. 55-59.

Williams, Stephen. 2010. Sony to Cassette: Sayonara. New York Times. October 26.