with the Beatles song “She’s Leaving Home.” The result was a stunning montage in which the teenager’s raw emotions and her accounts of life on the streets meld with the irony and pathos in the song.
Tony Schwartz also pioneered in a number of media innovations: for example, using real children in commercials (previously, women were used to imitate children’s voices in the mistaken belief that children could not be directed), instant commercials that responded to something which happened a few hours earlier, a truly portable recorder, time-lapse audio and virtual reality audio. He also created the first anti-smoking commercial.
Much of his work foreshadowed the media environment we live in today. For example, using large, high-quality speakers he created virtual reality experiences in his studio for visitors, transporting them to other environments. He also created viral media campaigns. One example was a campaign to save John Jay College, the school that trained the firefighters and policemen of New York. He used media to organize thousands of protesters outside City Hall and to prompt thousands more to telephone the public officials who were targeting the school for closure. Many notables joined the viral campaign, including famed anthropologist Margaret Mead who heard the commercials and called Tony Schwartz, volunteering to appear in radio commercials for the school. The campaign succeeded and the school was saved.
The Responsive Chord addresses media in terms of changing perceptions of space, such as the preference by many people to experience reality in media spaces rather than physical spaces. Because Tony Schwartz did not like to travel, he used the telephone to transport himself to other spaces and people into his space. In this way, and at a time when they were very rare, he did hundreds of tele-lectures over the phone. His work with perceptions of space preceded that of many modern communication scholars, such as Scott Campbell, James Katz and Richard Ling, who study how media, especially mobile media, have changed our perception of space. They consider, for example, what it means to experience two spaces at once: the physical space we occupy and the space conveyed through a mobile phone connection to another person who is in a different space.
The Responsive Chord has been used widely in undergraduate and graduate communication courses and influenced countless product and public service advertising campaigns, both in the U.S. and internationally. It has also had a huge impact on the world of modern political communication. I was told by a senior member of the Obama campaigns for the presidency that The Responsive Chord was a must read for all senior members of their communications team.
Who should read The Responsive Chord? Certainly, it will benefit anyone in advertising or marketing who wants to influence people by engaging them in the communication process and evoking deep emotions. These days, that includes millions of the self-employed, who seek clients and customers. Academics who research or teach about media will find it uniquely insightful and current, as will their students. And in today’s world where everyone has access to media—social media, texting, blogging, etc.—the book explains to anyone how media work and how we can use them to create powerful communications, whether to support a political cause, encourage better lifestyle habits or simply get lots of likes on Facebook. For all these people, it’s a good time to rediscover The Responsive Chord.
John Carey
Fordham University
I wish to thank and acknowledge John Carey’s significant contribution to this book. I regard him as a co-author of portions of it.
I wish to thank Ted Carpenter, Joe Napolitan, Art Pearson, Michael Rowan, and Reenah Schwartz for their thoughtful suggestions and criticism in relation to earlier versions of this manuscript.
I want to extend a special thanks to Bill Whitehead of Doubleday for his superb job in editing this book, and for the skillful way he handled our work relationship.
I also wish to thank the Polaroid Corporation for supplying equipment and materials used in researching and illustrating this book.
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
