Adorno’s Path to Social Research 245supplementing it with a six-page, closely spaced exposé. In this letter he
formulated a series of questions and theses for which he was indebted
in part to Ernst Krenek’s essay ‘Observations on Radio Music’, which
Krenek had written for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.^18 Adorno
proceeded from the assumption that the tone colour of music was altered
by radio transmission. Broadcasting the music resulted in an artificial
sound that contrasted with the natural timbre of music in a concert
hall. For this reason, radio music could not be taken seriously: it lost its
symphonic qualities and degenerated into a kind of museum piece. The
constant background noise led to the phenomenon of the noise band
(Hörstreifen).^19 Music became part of a more general sound; it lost its
depth and, with that, its aura. Since radio music is piped into the house
as if it were a public service, it becomes something incidental and
dwindles to a kind of background entertainment. Cultural possessions
are reduced in this way to domestic objects of no particular significance.
Since the listener has no say in the choice of the music that is broadcast
into his home, switching off the radio is the last narcissistic pleasure
available to the impotent recipient. Because of the constant repetitions
of particular popular pieces of music, the programme gives the listener
the feeling that there is no alternative. In this way the music becomes
affirmative, something you listen to without participating in it actively.
Adorno proposed that the letters that were received regularly by the
radio stations should be subjected to textual analysis. In addition, he
wanted to carry out a number of exemplary textual analyses of hit songs
in order to uncover the relation between musical form and the message
of the songs.^20
Following these preliminary written ideas, Adorno met Lazarsfeld
on 26 February and Lazarsfeld explained the plan to investigate the
impact of broadcast music. The exact title of the overall project was
‘The Essential Value of Radio to All Types of Listeners’. Radio was
the leading medium at the time, and the original idea of using the
methods of empirical social research to explore its effects went back
to Hadley Cantrill, a social psychologist at Princeton University, and
Frank Stanton.^21 They had received a comparatively large sum of money
from the Rockefeller Foundation to enable them to carry out the
study. The general aim of the project was to discover the role of the
radio in people’s everyday life, the motives underlying their listening
habits, the types of programmes that were popular and unpopular, and
whether groups of listeners could be targeted by broadcasts specifically
aimed at them. What stood at the centre of attention was the need to
establish data that could be of use to administrators.^22 Lazarsfeld, who
had founded an institute of his own at the University of Newark (now
part of Rutgers) that was financed primarily by projects researching on
mass communications, was entrusted with the implementation of the
project on the recommendation of the respected American sociologist
Robert S. Lynd.^23