Electrified Voices

Kerim Yasar recounts the fascinating story of how modernity in Japan sounded. Eminently readable, his book traces how Japan's existing soundscape found itself translated and transformed by such modern audio technologies as the telephone, gramophone, radio, and talkie cinema, and how the process launched new debates about what it means to represent the real. -- Michael K. Bourdaghs, author of <i>Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop</i> The sounds coming from Japan in this book are both strange and familiar to ears used to reading about acoustic modernity in the North Atlantic world. Kerim Yasar has found new stories and characters for asking classic questions in media history and I, for one, am delighted to be enriched by a media-historical book on Japan that is so innovative in its historical approach and its choice of media. This book sings the body electric in Japan. -- John Durham Peters, Yale University Electrified Voices is an innovative, pathbreaking study of sound culture, media, and technology in modern Japan. -- Seiji Lippit, University of California, Los Angeles With Electrified Voices, Kerim Yasar provides a brilliant and stimulating analysis of the role of sound media (telephone, phonograph, radio, and early sound films) in the transition of Japan to modernity. -- ANDRE LANGE * Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television *