Songs and scenes coexisted with records, tapes and devices. This theme brings musical creation together with the practices that made listening a ritual, from the formats themselves to everyday habits.
Readings to help you find your bearings.
Beyond hit lists, the materiality of the vinyl record and radio defined a listening structure that conditioned musical production and cultural identity of the decade.
Open storySound archives and studies of radio make it possible to distinguish recorded music from the documents that preserve and contextualize it. The available evidence opens up a line of inquiry, but cannot by itself reconstruct a listening scene.
Open storyScores, multimedia archives and recordings are not interchangeable forms of evidence. The available sources offer a way to explore what each record preserves and why distinguishing a work, an edition and a medium matters when reconstructing music history.
Open storyDistinguishing between a work, an edition and its format makes for a more precise history. Recordings and publications offer different, complementary contexts for understanding music.
This theme explores music and sound culture. Technology brings in the devices; Design and Fashion connect with the identities of each scene.
Three perspectives on the archive.
Records, tapes and habits that shaped listening at home.
Vinyl physics and the construction of sound taste in the seventies How the Microgroove Made the Long-Playing RecordCommunities and places where people came together around music.
A Radio Recording Is Also a Document Ice, radio and gas: how everyday life changed in Argentine homesPractices for creating recordings and exchanging sounds.
A Song Leaves Traces Beyond Its Sound The architecture of sound: documenting Chile's mid-century music industryHeisei retro brings together objects and practices from Japan between 1989 and 2019, but it belongs not only to those who lived through the era. Tamagotchi, stickers, purikura, anime and music show how a reissue can revive not just a design, but ways of playing, making and sharing.
Read articleThe National Museum of Performing Arts states that the oldest manuscripts in its music archive are dated 1820.
Read articleThe music archive of the National Museum of Performing Arts holds a piano piece by Camille Saint-Saëns, signed and dated by the composer in 1897.
Read articleDirector Luis París established the Teatro Real Museum-Archive, from which much of the current National Museum of Performing Arts’ musical heritage derives.
Read articleThe theremin, an electronic musical instrument controlled by moving the hands near its antennas, was invented in 1920 in the Soviet Union by Leon Theremin, also known as Lev Termen.
Read articleThe Municipal Culture Commission accepted a donation of musical instruments to launch a new museum project devoted to theatre, music and dance.
Read articleHeisei retro brings together objects and practices from Japan between 1989 and 2019, but it belongs not only to those who lived through the era. Tamagotchi, stickers, purikura, anime and music show how a reissue can revive not just a design, but ways of playing, making and sharing.
The playing time on each side of a record shaped what could be recorded, how music was released and how listeners used their players. From shellac 78s to Columbia’s microgroove LP and RCA Victor’s 45-rpm single, changing formats altered musical publishing and home listening without dictating a single idea of what an album should be.
The Famicom and NES noise channel handled both gameplay effects and percussion. Joseph Chang’s study of ten soundtracks from 1983 to 1987 shows how different composers turned its limited resources into distinctive musical voices.
The arrival of the microgroove was more than a change of material: it allowed more music to fit on each side and established two distinct formats, the 33⅓ rpm LP and the 45 rpm single. From mass production to the rise of the cassette and CD, vinyl’s history shows how a technology reshaped listening habits and found new roles among DJs and collectors.
On her 2008 debut, Lady Gaga connected 1970s glam rock and 1980s electronic pop through danceable songs, deliberate visual theatricality and a participatory idea of fame. The Fame did not reconstruct the past; it adapted it to an increasingly media-driven pop culture.
The microgroove LP did more than fit more music on each side: it helped establish the album, coexisted with the 45 rpm single and reshaped everyday playback. Its history connects engineering, commercial formats and the practices that kept vinyl in circulation after the CD’s rise.
With her 2008 debut, Lady Gaga made music, theatricality and public image parts of a single proposition. The album turned fame—its allure and its emptiness—into both subject and form, reaching an audience in a decade of accelerating digital circulation.
Columbia Records introduced the microgroove LP in 1948, extending listening time and giving music releases a longer format. Its competition with the 45 rpm single also reshaped home playback equipment and the ways music was organized and heard.
A score preserves notation, but music also depends on performance, listening and the contexts in which it was created. Research on Nikos Skalkottas and the Colombian composer Luis Antonio Escobar shows how archives can connect documents, histories and audience experiences without treating personal response as historical evidence.
A study of the Nikos Skalkottas archive explored two ways to connect documents with music: collaborative digital storytelling and a virtual-reality listening and annotation experience. Its formative design work reveals both the possibilities and the tensions of that kind of mediation.
The microgroove LP and the 45-rpm single began as rivals but settled into complementary roles: one gathered longer programmes, while the other kept individual songs in circulation. Their history shows how playing time, materials and playback equipment shaped listening at home.
Electric refrigerators and gas stoves did not enter every Argentine home at once. From the 1920s to the 1970s, infrastructure, prices, credit, local production and custom shaped access to these appliances, while radio and cars helped reorganize domestic work and leisure.
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