This dissertation explores how technological innovations influenced music and visual culture over four decades, from 1960s transistor radios to 1990s Auto-Tune. Portable music technologies in the postwar era inspired American and British filmmakers and pop stars to give pop songs increasingly mobile and visual meanings. In the 1960s and ’70s, American avant-garde filmmakers transformed pop songs’ often patriarchal and heteronormative subject matter with moving images that championed women’s and sexual liberation. And when music videos became a cultural phenomenon from the 1980s on, singers and producers mobilized popular music as a tool for political action through new visual contexts that emphasize countercultures and shatter stereotypes. Studies of pre-existing music in media have mainly focused on how pop songs shape film aesthetics—that a song of a particular era, for example, transports spectators to that time through their aural memories. This dissertation takes up an understudied aspect of media’s pre-existing music: the crucial role of music technology in how media portray, and make, history and culture. Magnetic tape, digital samplers, and voice manipulation software, with their ability to fragment and recombine pop music, irrevocably altered how humans could remix and defy forms of representation in visual media with pre-existing pop songs. New waves of visualizing recorded voice, sound, and music in postwar music technology, I argue, reveal shifting depictions of what it means to be human. Each chapter follows a two-part structure to oscillate between sonic and visual culture. First, I show how the historical and economic origins of music recording technologies shape the new sounds that pop artists make to express themselves and their societies. Second, I examine how the visual imagery paired with found pop songs in avant-garde films and contemporary music videos reflects attitudes toward gender, sexuality, race, and more. Throughout, I reveal an audio-visual feedback loop between music and screen technologies, which mutually influence how people express aspects of identity in certain decades. Chapter 1 explores how the avant-garde filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Kenneth Anger appropriated pop songs from transistor radios in their 1963 films. Their queer imagery subverts the typical heterosexual meanings of pop for spectators. Chapter 2 tracks how Karen Carpenter and Yoko Ono used magnetic tape overdubbing to amplify women’s embodied experiences. By multiplying the emotional effects of their voices, they contest male-dominated walls of sound (e.g., the Beach Boys and the Beatles). Chapter 3 analyzes the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument—the first digital sampler with a computer screen—to chart an alternate history of ’80s MTV. When Kate Bush, Herbie Hancock, and others drew music with the Fairlight’s light pen, they transformed not only sampling in pop music but also the visual style of early music videos. Chapter 4 revises Auto-Tune from an inauthentic gimmick to a distinctly audiovisual tool for creating pop music personas. Cher and her Auto-Tune heirs expand the sound and look of female pop stars. Across these chapters, I show how music technologies shape trends and countercultures in visual culture, and how experimental and mainstream art impact one another.