Since World War II, an impressive series of new sound technologies has entered the scene: the reel-to-reel recorder, the cassette recorder, the compact disk, the mp3 player, sampling software on personal computers and music-sharing facilities on the Internet. How did such sound technologies affect transformations in the cultural practices of listening to and making music in Western Europe? Which shifts did they trigger in the traditional boundaries between active and passive participation in music culture? What was, for instance, the impact of the tape recorder on the boundaries between producing and consuming music, listening and creating, copying and editing music? And what did such changes mean for the roles of the creator, technician, producer and distributor of music?

These were the questions that originally fuelled our research into sound technologies and cultural practices. One of our wider aims was to study the impact of technologization, particularly the impact of digital technologies, on art and culture. The original phrasing of our questions suggested a one-way arrow from technology to musical practice – technology being the agent of change in the world of music. Our actual way of working, however, maximized the options for analyzing the effect of existing cultural practices on the use of new technologies. In other words, while our wording was still cast in technological determinist terms, our research design and analysis helped us to leave that behind. We did so by focusing on analogies in cultural practices – “cultural practices” meaning the ways in which people habitually give meaning to and act upon the world surrounding them, and “analogies” meaning similarities in the ways of understanding and acting between different cultural practices. The next section explains why analogies between cultural practices may lead to new insights in transformations in arts and culture. We use analogies to understand how musical practices change when those who pursue these practices appropriate new sound technologies.

The analogies approach will be illustrated by describing two sets of examples. First, we examined how a 1950s manufacturer of a new sound technology, the reel-to-reel recorder, projected the recorder's future use as a “family sound album” by creating an analogy with the already established cultural practices concerning the family photo album.