Article,
Radio Voices and the Formation of Applied Research in the Humanities
History of Humanities, 6 (1): 85--110 (March 2021)
DOI: 10.1086/713258
Abstract
In the 1920s, the emerging technology of radio required appropriate voices, whether in radio announcing, radio drama, or radio documentaries. This article traces this search for new radio voices with particular attention to the work conducted at the radio laboratory, the Rundfunkversuchsstelle, at the Academy of Music in Berlin, led by musicologist Georg Schünemann from 1928 to 1935. The article illuminates how this initiative integrated engineering and the humanities into new forms of laboratory research on speech and broadcasting technology. With its explicitly application-oriented agenda, the Berlin lab prompted the phoneticians, linguists, psychologists, musicologists, and language educators involved to reconsider their humanistic methods and spheres of social influence. I follow the trail that leads from these early forms of research in the “applied humanities,” taking shape in Berlin during the Weimar Republic with its increasingly politicized radio studies, to Vienna in the late 1930s, and thence across the Atlantic to the Office of Radio Research at Princeton. There, research on the “voice of radio” (Theodor W. Adorno) took new directions and engaged, once again, in a fundamental debate over what applied research means to the humanities and social sciences.
