2 - Ping-Pong and Its Discontents

Summary

When stereo LPs were launched in North American and European markets, record companies began a fierce marketing campaign to convince consumers of its merits. Stereo demonstration records played an important role, one of the most notorious being an offering by Concert-Disc that featured the sounds of a ping-pong match. Critics, on the other hand, reinforced a pat narrative about stereophony, seeing its vocation in a single three-dimensional sound image, not in the abrupt antiphony of sonic ping-pong. The term “ping pong” quickly became a critical term of abuse. Thus was born an enduring audio aesthetic for which “ping-pong” effects were to be scrupulously shunned in high-brow offerings, an aesthetic that would go on to infuse the way “serious” music was produced in the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter traces the genealogy and evolution of “ping-pong” sound effects and its relationship to the aesthetics of musical modernism.