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Reel-to-Real: Intimate Audio Epistolarity During the Vietnam War

Campbell, Matthew Alan
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1555657052871048

Abstract Details

2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Music.
For members of the United States Armed Forces, communicating with one’s loved ones has taken many forms, employing every available medium from the telegraph to Twitter. My project examines one particular mode of exchange—“audio letters”—during one of the US military’s most trying and traumatic periods, the Vietnam War. By making possible the transmission of the embodied voice, experiential soundscapes, and personalized popular culture to zones generally restricted to purely written or typed correspondence, these recordings enabled forms of romantic, platonic, and familial intimacy beyond that of the written word. More specifically, I will examine the impact of war and its sustained separations on the creative and improvisational use of prosthetic culture, technologies that allow human beings to extend and manipulate aspects of their person beyond their own bodies. Reel-to-reel was part of a constellation of amateur recording technologies, including Super 8mm film, Polaroid photography, and the Kodak slide carousel, which, for the first time, allowed average Americans the ability to capture, reify, and share their life experiences in multiple modalities, resulting in the construction of a set of media-inflected subjectivities (at home) and intimate intersubjectivities developed across spatiotemporal divides.
Ryan Skinner (Advisor)
Danielle Fosler-Lussier (Committee Member)
Barry Shank (Committee Member)
300 p.
American Studies; Cultural Anthropology; Music
sound studies, reel-to-reel, vietnam war, epistolarity, cold war, cassette culture, phenomenology, media studies, military

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Campbell, M. A. (2019). Reel-to-Real: Intimate Audio Epistolarity During the Vietnam War [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1555657052871048

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Campbell, Matthew. Reel-to-Real: Intimate Audio Epistolarity During the Vietnam War . 2019. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1555657052871048.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Campbell, Matthew. "Reel-to-Real: Intimate Audio Epistolarity During the Vietnam War ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1555657052871048

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.