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.
The Responsive Chord
The Resonance Principle in Communication
It is difficult to imagine a person who watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald before live television cameras, turning to his wife or children and commenting, “That was an extraordinary message we just received.” Yet someone analyzing Oswald’s televised assassination, from a communication point of view, will be encumbered by such terms as senders, receivers, channels, and messages. In talking about communication, especially mass-media communication, we often find ourselves using terms or analytical models that distort or oversimplify the process. The vocabulary of communication theory consistently fails as a tool for analyzing the mass-media process.
It is not just that we lack adequate terms for describing communication. Our understanding of the communication process is hindered by deep-rooted perceptual and cognitive biases. We believe that communication takes place across large spaces, over a period of time, and primarily through one symbolic mode (words). Though the exchange of verbal messages (typically, written messages) constitutes only a small percentage of human communication, we generalize this one mode as the basis on which all communication is structured. This bias is founded, in part, on Western society’s problems in communicating during the five-hundred-year period prior to the development of electronic media, when print was the dominant means of non-face-to-face communication. The movement or transportation of messages across considerable distances in the briefest period of time was the central and overriding communication problem. Most of our communication theories today are still structured around this issue.
Transportation Theories of Communication
A classic transportation model of the communication process first discusses the source of communication, or the sender. A sender experiences and formulates “meaning” through his encounters with other people and objects in his world. He codes this meaning into a symbolic form—typically, words. He is now ready to send a message, but first he must choose a way of packaging his message for the trip. Writing words on paper could serve as the package, or transmitter, in such a model. Next the sender chooses a channel of communication, such as a letter, newspaper, pamphlet, or book. A channel of communication is often low in efficiency. It requires time to move information across a given space. It may also introduce noise into the message. Newspapers can be censored; pamphlets are written in various styles, and this may alter the meaning a sender intended to put into his words; and letters may be damaged in transit.
Transportation Model of Communication
At the other end of a communication channel is a receiver. He must decode the symbolic forms in the message, assess the damage produced by noise in the channel, and match the “meanings” in the message against his understanding of the world, in order to comprehend the meaning intended by the sender. Communication may be said to take place when the two “meanings” are alike, or to the extent that they match.
The transportation model is not without value. It is a useful guide in analyzing some forms of communication in our society, and it is a good model for illustrating the communication problems in Western society during the print era. Before electricity, the available channels of communication, such as drums, smoke signals, reflecting mirrors, cannon shots, and lantern signals, were subject to severe limitations in the physical environment. Cloudy weather, darkness, trees, and mountains interfered with vision. Animal sounds, wind, thunder, canyons, etc., interfered with auditory signals. Messages had to be formulated according to a rigidly precise code and were limited to only the most crucial data—owing to the inefficiency of the transportation channel. “Getting the message across” was the consummate problem. A military leader who wanted to signal his allies through a system of pennants by day or torches by night had to concern himself with rain
