The Microphone

“Testing, testing - 1, 2, 3 - Is this thing on? ?

Oral historian Alan Dein explores the world-changing cultural history of an overlooked object.

When we think about the last 100 years of recorded and broadcast sound, we might think about the programmes, the listeners, or maybe the dynamics and physics of it: the mysteries of the ether or the magic of a needle on a disc.

One small thing is often forgotten – ignored and literally spoken over – omnipresent but invisible, just out of frame.

The microphone.

It's the Zelig of recorded history, a disregarded presence as the world turns.

The microphone was there; it's heard it all.

At first an uncanny contraption approached with apprehension. Now an object of ubiquity. In our microphone-saturated era of ‘surveillance capitalism', a smart speaker in the kitchen is now also a smart listener.

The history of the microphone is a history of forgetting all about it.

Alan Dein explores the cultural history of the microphone and argues that this unobtrusive, tenacious thing has changed our lives more profoundly than we realise.

Featuring:

Mhairi Aitken, Ethics Research Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute

Raj Bhan, proprietor of The Spy Shop

David Edgerton, historian and author of The Shock of the Old

David Hendy, cultural historian and author of The BBC: A People's History

Dawn Scarfe, sound artist

Janet Topp-Fargion, ethnomusicologist and Head of Sound and Vision at the British Library

Chris Watson, sound recordist and musician.

The voice of Olive Shapley courtesy of Manchester Central Library Sound Archives.

The programme includes the following recording, from the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits:

C80/816 Vocal group (Unidentified male chorus)

For more information about the Torres Strait recordings, please visit www.true-echoes.com/

With grateful thanks to Sam Inglis; Lloyd Silverthorne; Anthony Bailey and all the great performers at the Spoken Word Poetry Open Mic at Brixton Library.

Producer: Martin Williams