Historians and musicologists have increasingly come to recognize the political power of sonic media and its pivotal role in shaping public discourse and national consciousness. Recent research on early radio broadcasts, folkloric recordings, and pioneering broadcasting experiments has shown how musicians and composers have crafted narratives—whether ideological or nationalist—and leveraged songwriting and broadcasting as means to disseminate and entrench these narratives.^[1] However, a considerable body of archival evidence suggests that many of these early creators and arrangers did not primarily view their work as crafting narratives; rather, their main interest lay in exploring the potential of new media soundscapes to manipulate emotions. Indeed, such efforts predate what is commonly recognized as the era of new media, with cultural producers from the turn into the twentieth-century onward endeavoring to use music–in written, recorded, and even esoteric forms–to evoke specific emotions such as anger, nostalgia, or hope on a widespread scale, efforts that gained in intensity during strategically political periods and seasons.

This panel presents new research from a global perspective, offering a panoramic view of these early attempts at emotional engineering. It convenes a diverse group of innovative scholars at various stages of their careers—from recent appointees to tenured faculty—and from a range of institutions, including Middlebury College and the University of Toronto. Together we examine four case studies—in Brazil, Canada, Italy, and the Russian Empire—that center around experiments with aural media during the early twentieth century. As a panel, we first share the ways in which we are breaking new ground in the examination of the history of affect, social engineering, and authoritarianism. Then we specifically deliver lessons in method, making it possible for non-musician historians to reconsider the value of listening to the archive.

^[1] Pamela Potter (1998) and Karen Painter (2007) show that music critics and musicologists endorsed the narrative that German music was “supreme among the arts”; Carlos Sandroni (2001), Hermano Vianna (1999), Bryan McCann (2004) Marc Hartzman (2013) explain how samba was employed to create narratives linking samba to Brazilian national identity; Pauline Fairclough (2016) has explored the Soviet use of concert music to endorse support for the revolution.