I write about contradictions in scholarly and everyday approaches to acoustically and electronically produced sound. In my doctoral dissertation I investigated cultural practices and beliefs embedded in various sound reproduction technologies, and argued that theories of mediation and sound representation, rather than the gadgets themselves, have influenced listening practices, particularly in the case of electroacoustic and acousmatic music. In my paper “Is it Art? : A Social Genealogy of Cinema, Photography and Sound Reproduction” (Musicult '14, Dakam Publishing May 2014) I argue that the status of the “phonographic arts” since the invention of sound reproduction has more to do with cultural interactions between certain actors such as electrical engineers and classical musicians, than any inherent properties of sound reproduction apparatus per se, as many other scholars have previously maintained. In "Sound, Reproduction, Mysticism: Thomas Edison and the Mythology of the Phonograph" (Revista Música em Contexto, to be published January 2015), I examine texts written about the phonograph from the time of its invention in 1877 up to about 1890, and argue that at a deep level these texts function as mythopoeia, a kind of fabricated mythology with a clear and consistent thematic structure. I show how authors deployed mythopoeia to support a utopian cultural agenda, and also identify complimentary patterns of cultural anxiety that, while seemingly written in opposition to the “utopian” texts, rely on the same engagement with myth and mysticism and incorporate many of the same themes.