The rapid industrialisation and electrification that characterises the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the revolutionary and irreversible technologisation of sound. The ability to send sound great distances, through time and space, amplified the instability of sonic presence both inside and outside the body. Sound reproduction technologies such as gramophone and radio emphasise the questionable materiality of sound. Scholarship in the emerging field of sound studies has tended to focus on sound technologies that emerge in this period, promoting the axiom that the ear epitomises modern sensibility. Even before technological developments revolutionised sound, discourses surrounding the ear anticipated the collapse of scientific certainty that marks the modern age. Developments in sound technology can mask the severing of scientific measurement from musical aesthetics that coincided with the age of recording. If the study of sound in modernity has tended to focus on technological changes and bracket aesthetic questions, it is perhaps because the relationships among the science, technology and aesthetics of sound have not yet been adequately parsed.
Like the study of visual culture, sound as an organising principle for scholarship permeates broadly into fields that are de facto sonic such as music or film, as well as those that don't attend to sound per se, such as geography, philosophy and the histories of science and technology. It is the pervasiveness of sound that leads some sound studies scholars to resist the term ‘discipline’ to describe the field. Michel Hilmes has argued that the study of sound has a tendency to remain ‘always emerging, never emerged’.Footnote 1 Yet when sound studies becomes a keyword, as evidenced in job descriptions and book titles of the recent past, the forces of disciplinarity are clearly at play. This review considers a handful of recent titles that could be housed in the expansive territory that constitutes ‘sound studies’, considering the ways in which an emerging trend towards historical analysis of sound interacts with some assembled characteristics of the field.
The foundations of sound studies follow diverging trajectories within disciplines centred around particular types of media. Until recently the study of sound was often contextualised within film, radio or music, and this prevented discussion of common problems across disciplines.Footnote 2 In the past decade this trend has reversed among a growing base of scholars who take sound as their object of inquiry. While sound had previously orbited around the particular media to which it was tied, it now takes centre stage as the site of coalescing cultural beliefs about listening practices and cultural beliefs about sound. The promise of a field like sound studies is that such a capacious object of analytic inquiry will engender interdisciplinary dialogue. The past decade has seen just such an amalgamation of diverse work on sound, as evidenced by the many edited volumes published on the subject during that period.Footnote 3 Significant contributions have come from historians who treat sound as a category of analysis through which questions about subjectivity in particular epochs can be posed, such as Emily Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 and Alain Corbin's Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside. The books reviewed in this article can be grouped with these historically oriented studies that link changes in the human experience of sound to specific cultural practices. Although scholarship that casts a historical lens on sound was foundational, the emergence of sound studies as a discipline has been more populated by philosophical and anthropological approaches.
While sound studies can be broadly described as an orientation towards the ways in which sound and hearing shape our understanding and knowledge of the world, there is a proclivity to render the contemporary era as particularly shaped by aural epistemology. Simply put: we hear everything from factories, sirens, church bells and the humming of a computer, and these sounds shape the societies that take shape around them. Since its inception, sound studies has promised a radical rerouting of Cartesian coordinates, a new configuration of the rational subject epitomised by visual spacing between self and other. An orientation towards hearing followed critiques of vision-generated, vision-centred interpretations of knowledge. Charting cultural change through the ear promised a history of hearing to offset that of seeing.Footnote 4 Visual culture, in other words, needs an auditory companion. The notion of ‘soundscape’ provided a conceptual framework that is adaptable to particular historical and cultural sites. First coined by R. Murray Schaefer in the 1970s, the soundscape has been used to pose interdisciplinary questions about intersecting cultural meanings enacted through sonic forms.Footnote 5 Expanding the framework of analysis from what is exclusively musical outward to include any and all sound promised both an ideological critique of the intellectual validity of musical aesthetics and a smorgasbord of untouched scholarly topics of investigation.
But the slippage between the ideological critique of musical aesthetics and the concept of soundscape has resulted in an under theorised aestheticisation of sound objects. What did it mean for a German national to hear a muezzin in the 1960s? What did it mean for peasants in industrialising Romania to hear the rumbling of a factory beyond their collectivised farm? Such questions help us to think about the ways that sound has shaped European societies and worldviews.
Perhaps most central to the evolution of sound studies has been the question of how technological manipulations of sound proliferated in modern Europe. The propensity of sound studies scholars to focus on sound technologies is tied to an archival orientation towards the twentieth century, as well as a turn toward materiality that is part of a larger backlash against the linguistic turn, the study of representation and traditional conceptions of hermeneutics grounded in textuality. In the introduction to The Oxford Companion to Sound Studies, one of the many recent multi-author compilations on the topic of sound, the editors propose that technological manipulations of sound render it capable of mediating cultural and economic values. But equating sound with its mechanical reproduction leads to a focus on sound as media and technology, sometimes bracketing the human perception of sound, simply as cultural practice.Footnote 6 Working against this trend, the books reviewed here take a decidedly historical approach, and in doing so they ask historians of modern Europe to think about how we can probe and conceptualise sound in our understandings of culture, politics and society.
Situating Sound in Time and Place
What does it mean to ‘study sound’ from a historical perspective? In Sounds of Modern History editor Daniel Morat proposes that histories of sound and auditory perception profoundly shape the cultural practice of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe. Bringing together scholars from media and cultural studies, history, English and the history of science and technology, most of whom focus on German political history, the volume provides compelling empirical and historical evidence on the impact of sound and auditory cultures in Europe. For example, in the chapter ‘In Storms of Steel: The Soundscape of World War I and its Impact on the Auditory Media Culture during the Weimar Period’ Axel Volmar argues that specific listening practices developed in the context of warfare, and these led to both increased individual awareness of hearing and to increased attention to hearing at a community level. Focusing on aspects of auditory culture, he suggests, may challenge the ways in which we conceive of a critical historical moment such as the interwar period in Germany. Many pieces in Sounds of Modern History demonstrate an effort to destabilise aesthetics from an isolated realm, to bring scientific and aesthetic ways of knowing about sound into dialogue with one another. For example, John Picker's ‘English Beat: The Stethoscopic Era's Sonic Traces’ argues for a concept of late nineteenth-century aurality and technology through analysis of phonograph recordings of spoken word literature texts made in the 1880s and 1890s. Here we have a claim that technological changes in sound recording ‘deepened’ the relationship between speaker and speech, and this deepening is rendered palpable by aesthetic choices made by the producers of spoken word records. The decentring of music from the privileged site at which questions about listening are asked makes room for broader questions about the relationship between sound and culture. By thinking about sonic practices as a means of answering larger historical and cultural questions the volume challenges the narrower theoretical approaches to sound often taken in the field of sound studies.Footnote 7
Although Sounds of Modern History spans a chronological trajectory, it does not intend to present a single narrative regarding the development of auditory cultures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. Instead, the volume's goal is to develop a methodology within sound studies that can speak to historians, one that helps to make sense of distinct listening cultures. To this end, Hansjakob Ziemer's essay ‘Listening on the Home Front: Music and the Production of Social Meaning in German Concert Halls during World War I’, is a particularly useful example of how listening experiences could transform in wartime. Ziemer argues that the climate in the First World War ‘altered the social life on the home front by erasing boundaries between the military and civilian realms and by intruding on all aspects of social, political, cultural, and emotional life’ (202).
Ironically, many pieces in the compilation could easily be labelled ‘musicology’, suggesting that the disciplinary orientation away from music may be changing in the field of sound studies. Music, after all, can be classified as sound, and yet the discipline of sound studies has historically avoided questions about music, which suggests that the distinction between the fields may be a matter of branding more than anything else. Compilations like Sounds of Modern History suggest that we are coming full circle from sound studies’ point of departure – a desire to think about sound in a more thing-like, technological sense – to an expanded social context of listening culture that allows for music and sound to be integrated more directly into political history. While the collection gestures towards historical specificity, it maintains a tendency in edited volumes on sound studies towards conceptual organisation. For example, while the second half of the book is organised around the First World War, the Interwar Period and the Second World War, the first half of the book is organised around topics such as ‘Sound Objects as Artifacts of Attraction’ and ‘Music Listening in the Laboratory and the Concert Hall’. The volume would speak to historians more directly if it had been organised chronologically.
Sites of Production: Hearing with Historical Ears
The three monographs to which I now turn each integrate historical methodology into the field of sound studies and shed light on the ways in which modes of perception are implicit in knowledge production. Together these studies indicate a methodological shift in the way scholars are thinking about sound, one that connects scientific and technological approaches to cultural analysis. In particular, these books consider aesthetic judgment in tandem with instruments of science, asking readers to suspend normalised distinctions among aesthetic, philosophical and technological definitions of sound. By doing so they demonstrate that just like aesthetics are dependent on a perceiving subject, the relationship between sound and technology is also a historically contingent question. While each is grounded in case studies that focus on the long nineteenth century, they lay critical foundations for scholars of twentieth century to understand the shifting soundscape of Europe.
Both Alexandra Hui's The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 and Benjamin Steege's Helmholtz and the Modern Listener study the formation of contemporary principles of musical acoustics in the nineteenth century, articulating an epistemological shift that grounds common contemporary understandings of sonic materiality. This shift has been recorded in technologies of sound reproduction that revolutionise this moment, as well as the transformation between sensation and representation that distinguishes modernist aesthetics – the equation of the unconscious with music, or the notion that modernist painting directly affects the sensorium. Both monographs focus on an earlier historical period, but their relevance to the contemporary era is salient in that by joining scientific-materialist understandings of sound and hearing to musical aesthetics the authors show that the temporal shift that is attributed to the development of sound recording was already underway in the late nineteenth century. These books are therefore relevant to anyone interested in the history of modernism, as well as historians of the contemporary era who specialise in the history of science and technology, aesthetics or intellectual history.
Offering a new interpretation on the relationship between the histories of music and science, Alexandra Hui's monograph The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 argues that early understandings of sonic perception were explicitly tied to musical aesthetics and to the belief that the assessment of musical beauty could be used as a tool for scientific measurement. By exploring the interactions between scientists and music theorists and critics in the same period, Hui analyses how musical aesthetics became understood as a potentially useful scientific tool.
Central to her argument is an analysis of the psychophysics movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, a movement pioneered by physicists, physiologists and psychologists who studied the measurable relationships between physical stimulation and psychical impressions. Hui argues that the psychophysical movement provided a space for dialogue between musicologists and investigators of the natural sciences that contributed to the stability of the concept of absolute music. Whereas aesthetics had driven understandings of music up to this point, now science became the basis for telling people how they were supposed to listen to music. For example, in a persuasive chapter that analyses the intersecting aesthetic ideas of music critics A. B. Marx and Eduard Hanslick and music theorist Hugo Riemann, Hui unearths the widespread belief that an understanding of German classical music (and Beethoven in particular) was a vital part of understanding their contemporary age. Their belief that music was based on natural laws that governed both the phenomena of human existence and the phenomena of sound was used to buttress a moral imperative to listen to eighteenth-century music in the correct way.Footnote 8 By exposing the synchronicity between precise sonic perception and ethical listening, Hui renders sound as epistemology. While Hui limits her conclusions to the areas of musical acoustics and perception, her work lays foundations for new ways of thinking about the history of technology more generally. For example, it would be interesting to consider Hui's argument about changes in the value of musical expertise in the late nineteenth century to Friedrich Kittler's oft cited notion of the phonographic unconscious, the idea that ‘the phonograph does not hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such’.Footnote 9 This axiom, commonly repeated in scholarship on sound in the twentieth century, furnishes a technological authority over the real, granting primacy to the technological reproduction of sound in the modern age.
Benjamin Steege's Helmholtz and the Modern Listener closely analyses Helmholtz's experiments and intellectual trajectory, arguing that Helmholtz was at the forefront of what we now understand as the science of perception – or in other words, the relationship between sounding objects in the world and the hearing subject. According to Steege, Helmholtz's split between the mental ear (das geistiges Ohr) and the bodily ear (das köperliches Ohr) created a situation in which the bodily ear was itself a mechanical resonator, a fusion of organic and inorganic matter inside the hearing subject. To Steege, Helmholtz is thus at the forefront of modernism. By suggesting that the bodily ear collapses the measuring instrument into the body of the measurer, Helmholtz was among the first thinkers to explore how the collapsing of object and objectifier became a problematic concept in the early decades of the twentieth century for thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Edmund Husserl.Footnote 10 But it had significant implications for the notion of the modern listener and music theory, which Steege draws out in the second half of the book. In particular, Steege suggests that Helmholtz's division of the modern ear into a bodily and mental ear, which are fundamentally deaf to each another, created a discursive space for a third kind of ear (Steege actually calls this a ‘third ear’) that can listen with greater or lesser accuracy. Starting in the 1850s music theorists emphasised the role of aural attention as a basic rationale for the music pedagogy that is common in European and US institutions today. But Steege takes his argument a step further by arguing that Helmholtz saw the training of the ear as a form of social mobility. If listeners could be trained to hear the presence of overtones, music theory could be used to elevate the masses to an enlightened state of attention that, ironically, would also serve as a move toward social democracy. Steege thus sees Helmholtz as a far more significant European thinker, one whose relevance can only be fully understood when reconciling his aesthetic theories to his scientific materialism. This is an important turn for the field of sound studies. By arguing that Helmholtz's greater contribution was to shifting the way people learn, rather than simply listen, Steege situates music theory more centrally in the broader narrative of European intellectual history.
Together the studies provide complementary pictures of the connections between listening, aesthetics, and psychology that came to the fore in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Both books explore the historical conditions that make possible the idea that the physics of sound can be materially tied to aural perception.Footnote 11 In so doing, they lay the foundations for how we approach this entanglement in the twentieth century. For example, a burgeoning area of sound studies focuses on the topic of noise. Discussions of noise often seek to reconcile aesthetic with material definitions of noise, drawing on philosophy and communications theory for the latter. For example, in Noise Matters, Greg Hainge articulates a theory of noise based in theories of electrical resistance that supposes a conceptualising subject (who might participate in the ontology he proposes) without consideration of a physiological level of noise.Footnote 12 Without historicised concepts of the aesthetics of noise or theories or philosophies of noise, it is impossible to disentangle one from the other, ending up with an anachronistic notion of the concept. The historical lens employed by Hui and Steege untangles the aesthetic from the technological and scientific. The books thus make a strong argument about the persistence of nineteenth-century modes of hearing and thought in contemporary discourse on aesthetics and music theory. If one takes a look at any music school today they will note that the pedagogy of music theory is still based on the notion that one can learn to be more attentive to musical phenomenon, but the slipperiness between ‘musical’ and ‘sonic’ remains ambiguous.
Like the monographs from Hui and Steege, Brian Kane's Sound Unseen: Sound in Theory and Practice directly questions the material constitution of sonic phenomena; however, Kane's methodology is theoretical rather than historical. If Steege and Hui's work shows us that nineteenth century physicists tied the fact of sound to an aesthetic corporeality, Kane's book zooms out to question the epistemology of sound in the contemporary era through a longue durée analysis of the interstitial nature of aesthetics, perception and technology. Fundamentally interdisciplinary in scope, Kane's project weaves together histories of technology, philosophy and musical aesthetics towards a singular conceptual scaffold, presenting a model for how topics in sound can be approached historically without posing explicitly historical questions. Kane's contribution to sound studies both critiques the tendency to extract the human listener from the sonic object and also presents a model for thinking about sound in tandem with the objects that produce it. Upon first blush the book appears topically focused on the work of French composer Pierre Schaeffer and the school of musique concrete; however, its major contributions are to twentieth-century histories of aesthetics and the senses.
Pursuing a theory of acousmatic sound, the phenomenon of hearing sound without being able to see its source, Kane shows how aspects of sound that are technologically produced become naturalised in general conceptions of what sound is and how it is experienced. He argues that acousmatic technologies, including everything from studio sound recordings to the process of speaking to a psychoanalyst, have been obscured in all sorts of productions of transcendence – be they musical, technological, psychological or philosophical. Kane employs the Marxian term phantasmagoria to describe this process of erasure between the sound source and its aural presentation, arguing that the acousmatic situation involves an erasure of its means of production, rendering it under the same logic as the commodity fetish.
If sound studies can be seen as a counterpart to the study of visual culture, Kane's book puts the two in dialogue with one another from a philosophical perspective. Kane contends that acousmatic sound is epistemological in nature, meaning that seeing and hearing are actually just different ways in which the mind apprehends the exterior world through the senses. He thus rejects the assumption that the senses are qualitatively different from one another, arguing instead that they merely appear this way because of discrete historical conditions. Differences between seeing and hearing, he argues, are constructed by a combination of technological means (i.e. sound reproduction) and bodily techniques (i.e. closing one's eyes). The term he uses to describe this is techné, which should be useful to sound studies and historians alike. The term, taken from Derridean deconstruction and applied to specifically sonic contexts, neutralises crude definitions of the technological that meld historical and conceptual categories, allowing for concepts like sound reproduction to include both CD players and music notation. Kane's study thus demands that we not syphon off analysis of technology in the post-recording age, as many scholars of music and sound tend to do, as it creates a false epistemological boundary between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kane's approach to sound studies, in other words, challenges the very way we periodise intellectual history and the history of technology.
Kane forges links between twentieth-century musical aesthetics and twentieth-century philosophy, revealing how distinct intellectual histories should be understood as interrelated. He begins with an analysis of the so-called acousmatic tradition of musical composition developed by French composer Pierre Schaeffer, who coined the term musique concrète in 1948 to describe a method of composition he had been developing in his work at the studios Radiodiffusion Française. This method sought to fundamentally reshape the way a composer approached musical material. Rather than basing composition on ‘preconceived sound abstractions’, as composers had done previously, Schaeffer used recorded environmental sounds as a basis for electronic composition. His goal was to create an abstract sonic object that was based in source recordings, something like a Platonic ideal that can be pointed to in recorded examples. In order to achieve this abstraction, Schaeffer required that the worldliness of these sounds – trains, ocean waves, etc. – be stripped from their practical associations or identities. By unpacking the evolution of this way of thinking about the acousmatic experience, Kane connects Schaeffer's ontological footing to the work of both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.
Kane then interrogates Schaeffer's contention that the acousmatic situation encourages ideal contemplation, revealing an aesthetic program that hearkens to Helmholtz's investment in a physiological basis for the theory of music. Kane argues that ‘were acousmatic sounds truly autonomous, as they are in Schaeffer's theory of the sound object, they would possess none of their gripping tension and mystery’. Here, as in the case studies that follow, Kane performs a deconstructive reading of Schaeffer's sonorous object, revealing a gap in knowledge that produces this tension and mystery. One might press Kane on the limits of his theory. Working through examples ranging from Kafka's short story Der Bau, the nineteenth-century Dunkelkonzerte practice of hiding the orchestra from sight, studio techniques and the psychoanalytic method itself, Kane forms a genealogy inherited from nineteenth-century philosophies of music. He explicitly links the concept of music phantasmagoria to Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy, yet the relationship between the case studies of Les Paul's studio practices and the phonographic voice presented at the end of the book and the lineage of the philosophical conditions that bound his theory of acousmatic sound is unclear.
Listening Subjects: History as Aesthetics of Sound
In 1913 George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion introduced the world to the character of Henry Higgins, a phonetic instructor determined to reform the cockney accent of the young Eliza and usher her into a new class – socially, aesthetically and aurally. As Benjamin Steege writes, ‘for all its quixotic irony in the play, though, Shaw's fixation on the aural as a perceptual modality of critical social significance was typical for the playwright and music critic, who began his London working life at regional offices of the Edison Telephone Company, and later published one of the era's richest interpretations of Wagner's Ring tetralogy’.
What is the material definition of sound in the absence of a perceiving subject? What does it mean to be a modern listener? These are questions at the heart of sound studies. With their impressive and deeply interdisciplinary approaches, Hui, Steege and Kane argue that we cannot ignore the human subject in developing an analytic framework for thinking about sound. This is a sharp historiographical break from early models of sound studies, best known for Deluzian-based work in sound studies and argues for an affective model of sound, in which ‘sound is a material, vibrational force; when it encounters a body, this force makes a direct impact on the nervous system of the listener, one that bypasses his or her cognitive categories and forms of representation’.Footnote 13
Aesthetics is the axis on which sound plays out these complex manifestations of technology, science and art. Ultimately, Steege's argument is that two forms of modernism – what Dorothy Ross terms ‘modernist impulses’ in the human sciences, and aesthetic modernism – implicate aspects of one another even though their projects seem very different. The contingent and constructed ‘modern subject’ as explored by Ernst Mach, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Sigmund Freud, versus aesthetic modernism, more often characterised by artistic alienation from increasing industrialisation, cultural differentiation and socio-economic mobility. Steege's excavation of the modern ear is an answer to Ross's question about how these different forms of modernism influence one another, continuing in the vein of Jonathan Crary's project examining changes in categories of perception over time.
Kane is also interested in the ways in which incidental subjectivity is interpolated into technologies. For Kane, musical transcendence is revealed time and again to be a phantasmagoric effect of techné, in which the means of production are eclipsed, resulting in a suprahuman category. Hui's tight study of the interactions between musical aesthetics and psychology winnows the concerns shared among Steege and Kane about the correlations and implications between the knowable in sound and the capacity of human subjects to experience sound in different registers.
In his 1999 history of sound in the arts Douglas Kahn wrote that ‘modernism has been read and looked at, but rarely heard’, a statement that might ring false today, now that the ear has risen to epitomise modern sensibility for a core of scholars working in and around sound studies. While a preponderance of work in the growing area of sound studies focuses on the contemporary era, these studies tend to employ methodologies adopted from anthropology, ethnomusicology, media and literature studies. Collections like the Oxford Companion to Sound Studies and the Sound Studies Reader demonstrate the tendency either to tie sound to its technological mediation or to approach sound from a philosophical angle. Both approaches limit the interventions of sound in cultural history because, crucially, sound is rendered outside of its historical context. By contrast, the books reviewed here explore epistemological changes enacted through music and sound in which hearing becomes different instruments for scientific and aesthetic knowledge at the turn of the twentieth century. As such, the source materials these histories draw upon present opportunities to think not only through questions about media and technology but also national and cultural identities.
