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Introduction

Radio and I grew up together, and my ear developed a sensitivity to audio communication, which carried over to other areas of my life. I couldn’t read, work, or do homework without the radio on. My mother often complained that people could not read and listen at the same time. She was half right. Some people, those who shared her sensory orchestration, could not attend a strong visual message and a distinct auditory message occurring simultaneously in their environment. But radio reshuffled the interrelations among the senses for those of us who grew up with it, and for generations that followed. I examined my own listening and reading habits very carefully, and noticed that I was oscillating in my reception of auditory and visual stimuli. At one moment I would attend a visual cue (e.g., a word on a page), and in the next instant, attend the auditory stimuli emanating from the radio. Although I was not simultaneously perceiving two sensory inputs, the oscillation process was so quick that I could readily absorb distinct auditory and visual information occurring simultaneously. This discovery encouraged me to look deeper into the new communication environment.

My first exploration in sound communication was through amateur radio. It was short-lived, however, because I quickly discovered that most “hams” were interested in the technical aspects of the transmission system, not communication from people to people. When I spoke to someone in Africa, Texas, or Australia, they would ask about the equipment I was using or the quality of the signal being received. I would ask about the work they did, the food they ate, the local folk songs, and generally, what life was like in their part of the world. We were not on the same social frequency, and my interest in amateur radio faded after a year or two.

In 1945 I bought a Webster wire recorder, and my life immediately took a new direction. At first I recorded music off the air, particularly those forms of music that did not exist on record—jazz and folk songs. I also developed an acquaintance with many of the great but poor folk performers of the day, such as Josh White, Harry Belafonte, Yma Sumac, Pete Seeger, Moondog, and many others. Most of these performers could not afford a sound mirror (as recorders were called in those days) to hear themselves. I would call performers, after hearing them on the air, and ask if they would like to be recorded. Most of them welcomed the idea because it enabled them to refine their performance and develop new material. The experience taught me a great deal about folklore, the relation between speech and songs in a community, and the function of music in different cultures. It also generated the idea of exchanging recordings with people all over the world. So in 1946 I started the first audio exchange of wire and tape recordings by mail. I placed ads in foreign newspapers offering to send a recording to anyone who would mail a wire or tape of their local music to me. Using this method, I exchanged recordings with over eight hundred people in fifty-two countries, and accumulated some twenty thousand songs and stories.

In 1946 I also began a weekly morning program on the New York City radio station, WNYC. A wealthy New Yorker who listened to my programs called and asked if he and his wife could visit me. They were very excited by my work and suggested that I leave my job and devote full time to a project in sound. They offered to pay me more than I was currently making, and gave me complete freedom in choosing the project. I quit my job the next day and spent a year and a half studying the sound of life in my postal zone, New York 19. I felt that since I was asking other people to send me the sound and song of their towns and cities, the material would take on greater meaning if I made an in-depth study of the auditory environment in my own neighborhood.

The New York 19 project was to be a documentation of sounds and songs in their natural environment. So I did not want to bring a vegetable vendor or street musician into my studio in order to record him. But in 1946 there were no portable recorders. If a sound could not be brought into the studio, a sound effect was created to substitute for reality. I developed a portable recorder specifically for the New York 19 project. It was battery-operated, could be used while walking or running, and weighed about fourteen pounds. Once I was free of Mr. Edison’s cables, I could explore the beauty of language in everyday situations and the sounds of life around us.

Moe Asch of Folkways Records heard of my work and asked if I would create some records of sound in everyday life. I conceived and executed a number of records for him, among them, New York 19; 1, 2, 3, and a Zing, Zing, Zing; Millions of Musicians; The World in My Mail Box; Music in the Streets; Sounds of My City; Nueva York; and The Sound of Children. I believe these were the first records to capture sound that was part of everyday city life. My material enabled a listener to experience actual sounds—sounds that served vital communicative functions in people’s lives.

In the mid-fifties, some people in the advertising world asked me to work on sound in commercials. Among them was Steve Frankfurt, at that time an up-and-coming art director at Young & Rubicam. I produced the soundtracks for several Johnson & Johnson baby powder commercials. They were extremely successful, for a simple reason. I applied the same philosophy to my commercial work that I had used in my sound documentaries. It may seem rather obvious now, but the Johnson & Johnson commercials called for “children’s voices,” and I used real children. Previously, all children and baby sounds had been created by mature women imitating children. I realized that if one could create a sensation in the advertising world by using real children to create the sound of children’s voices, the industry must be extraordinarily ignorant of how sound functions in people’s lives. It was. I soon found myself doing a great amount of work for all the major agencies. To date, I have created over four thousand TV and radio commercials.

Advertising agencies attempted to label my early commercials with numerous deadly compliments. First, I was a “great specialist in children’s sound,” then a “sound effects genius.” None of these labels had anything to do with my work. Advertisers, to this day, look perplexed when I tell them I have no interest in sound effects. I am solely interested in the effect of sound on people.

In the early sixties I discovered the work of Marshall McLuhan. The pop culture that developed around McLuhan, and the guru status accorded him for a while has, unfortunately, clouded the extraordinary contribution he has made to communication theory. McLuhan’s argument that people can approach a medium from totally different sensory bases allowed me to focus clearly on how I had been working all along. I realized that I approached sound from an auditory base, while the rest of the advertising industry was structuring sound communication from a written, print base.

My association with McLuhan and Ted Carpenter led me to investigate how auditory communication interacts with the total communication structure. I knew that the sound environment documented in my early records had changed radically, and I wanted to discover how mass-mediated sound functions in people’s lives today.

In 1967, another dimension was added to my career when I met Joe Napolitan, a political campaign consultant and public affairs analyst. Since then, I have created several thousand radio and TV spots for political campaigns. Joe can precisely and accurately conceptualize communication problems better than anyone I know. Equally important, he creates a work environment within a campaign that permits a communicator such as myself to deal exclusively with the communication problem. This is a crucial element in the task-oriented approach to communication discussed later in this book. In addition, Joe is a brilliant researcher, and he has contributed immeasurably to knowledge about reaching and affecting specific audiences.

The knowledge I acquired through knowing Napolitan and McLuhan, along with the findings that emerged from a National Endowment for the Arts study and my years of work in sound, provided the basis for this book.