It is generally agreed that “without technology, pop music in the twenty-first century is unthinkable.”Footnote ¹ In Circuit Listening, Andrew F. Jones focuses on one crucial piece of technology from the 1960s—the transistor. Transistorized electronics provide portable and efficient devices, bringing to the world powerful computers, radios, portable tape recorders—hence, the technological development spurred by the transistor is also known as the “revolution in miniature.”Footnote ² Following various applications of the transistor, the book explains how music listening in China has been forever changed by this device.

Specific technologies provide the environment in which we engage, think, and share our experiences. As John Blacking puts it: they become a specific “mode” of music production and consumption without determining anything; they are a precondition for music making, an important element in the definition of musical sound and style, and a catalyst for musical change.Footnote ³ Circuit Listening provides a fresh addition to this discourse by charting different “circuits” created by the transistor. These circuits, as argued by Jones, revolutionized the ways in which sound and music were produced, disseminated, and received in the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Not only were these circuits interconnected, they have also jointly shaped the contemporary Chinese soundscape.

The book opens with an unexpected juxtaposition of “The East Is Red” and “All You Need Is Love”—the former being a revolutionary song and the official “soundtrack” to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and the latter a Beatles hit from 1967. The first chapter convincingly connects these two seemingly distinctive songs by demonstrating their formal similarities, as well as illustrating how they were both widely circulated thanks to broadcasting networks. In other words, both songs were part of the same global “transistorized” 1960s, contextualizing the whole book in one transnational history.

In socialist China, one keyword in everyday life was “collective.” The transistor became integral to setting up a unified wired/wireless broadcasting—one voice for all. Notwithstanding challenges in rural areas, a nationwide mass media network was accomplished by installing millions of loudspeakers. Central broadcasts penetrated walls and windows, and one could not possibly escape. Jones reads such propaganda circuits centered around Maoist iconography as a media effect that reaches far beyond China, positioning it within the global media landscape. In the post-Mao era, however, it was also the transistor that dissolved this collective listening. The widespread use of domestic electronics—especially the cassette tape recorder—brought in new sounds, new music, and new ways of listening, thus pushing the media infrastructure away from the collective structures, toward privatized ones. It was, ironically, the same piece of technology that both helped form and disrupted the collective acoustic infrastructures, providing another case of how different uses of technology reflect different aesthetic and cultural priorities.Footnote ⁴

In contrast with what happened in mainland China, Taiwan developed disparate circuits, laid out in the trilogy of chapters 3, 4, and 5. Focusing on the overlooked and marginalized circuits in postwar Taiwan, these chapters remind the reader that the “revolution in miniature” did not unfold evenly. Whether it be the example of forgotten musicals in Taiyu (Taiwanese language), or copies of LP circuits in the marginalized military bases, or folk musicians’ struggle to compete with the global popular music aesthetic, these chapters powerfully illustrate how specific technologies can be simultaneously enabling and constraining.

Using transistors in the music industry as a starting point and showing its myriad formats throughout Chinese soundscapes in a global context, Circuit Listening thus emphasizes how technology does not determine music making: the transistor applications were always uneven and chaotic regardless of the country or region, inventing new and unintended circuits. The book analyses, compares, and juxtaposes these different circuits without forcing commonality, but rather positions them all in the global 1960s. Circuit Listening thus provides a bigger picture of coherence in technological developments: geopolitics, culture, sound, technology, and people form a dynamic whole. Most importantly, the outcome of technological applications ultimately depends on the power relations between the industry and music practices.Footnote ⁵