ABSTRACT
Pop music is characterized by an intimacy with singers that runs so deep in our auditory perception that we almost never think about it. This intimacy has much to do with the microphone, which was developed for music recording in the 1920s. The modern recording industry was the result of a convergence of two great industries: that of acoustics and that of electricity (Briggs and Burke 2002: 145), where the electrical microphone was the big new thing.
