Sound hunting in postwar Japan: recording technology, aurality, mobility, and consumerism

Throughout the 1970s, the hobby of sound hunting boomed in Japan. A magazine and numerous guidebooks urged young people to get out and about recording the soundscape and hunting for “real sound”. The mobility inherent in the technological transformations of the previous decades fed into a media discourse which drew together theories and practices taken from the protests and sub-cultures of the 1960s that celebrated creativity, openness, and individuated lifestyles, whilst challenging notions of authority and expertise. Sound hunting and amateur recording was a mediatised pastime that sought new ways of incorporating technological change, as well as professional experimentation in music and sound recording, into everyday life. Sound as an object – to be understood, controlled, and manipulated – was incorporated into consumer society through a media discourse that emphasised the individualism, mobility, experimentation, and spending at the heart of youth lifestyles in the 1970s. Capturing sound required detailed research, an individual, creative approach and an amateur spirit. The sound hunting boom in Japan highlights the importance of technology, consumerism and the media to sound studies by shedding light on the wider social, cultural and media contexts within which portable sound-recording technology and new practices of listening became increasingly commodified.