Media historians have long understood television as a medium that is essentially visual, a form of electronic communication that is defined as distinct from other media in its ability to transmit live images at a distance. Existing work on television sound generally tends to invert this definition by framing television as a form of “illustrated radio” in which the experience of television sound is theorized in terms of its contribution to a straightforward audiovisual realism akin to that of sound cinema in which image is added to sound to reinforce medium-specific experiences like “flow” or “liveness.” This dissertation argues that what critics, engineers, television networks, and audiences understood as the correct or desirable sound aesthetic and form of sound-image relations for American television fluctuated greatly between the development of the earliest television prototypes in the 1920s and the adoption of advanced television protocols in the 1990s, fluctuations that do not follow a simple trajectory toward better or more verisimilar practices of sound reproduction. Moving beyond the singular definitions of the medium’s aural dimensions in existing work on television sound, this dissertation explores the multiple models of television sound that were advanced over the course of the twentieth century. In addition to radio, this dissertation will focus on three other sound media that provided models for how television could or should sound: the telephone, the home stereo, and sound cinema. The chapters that comprise this project all attempt to negotiate two major binaries that shaped the development of television sound at different moments in history: high-fidelity versus low-fidelity sound and binaural/multichannel versus monaural/single-channel sound. The eventual transition of television sound from a low-fidelity monaural protocol during the network era to the contemporary a high-fidelity binaural or multichannel protocol occurred not through a straightforward improvement of the performance of the sound system of American television but rather through a long shift in the nature of television aesthetics grounded in major changes in the infrastructural organization and regulatory oversight of television, resulting in contemporary television being framed as a more immersive, personal, and individuated form of experience via techniques of spatial rendering and higher-fidelity sound. Focusing on sound primarily as a technological and infrastructural phenomenon rather than a textual phenomenon, this project attempts to theorize the way television sound contributed to defining a perceptual modernity spanning the last half of the twentieth century, a notion that has otherwise been studied in relation to other “old” analog media, especially cinema, and “new” digital media.
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