For a couple of decades already, without quite coalescing into anything institutionally substantial, the sort-of-coherent, cheerfully vague academic para-discipline known as sound studies has survived and more or less thrived. The cultural historian Jonathan Sterne, probably its most prominent representative, has described the field as ‘the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytic point of departure or arrival … redescrib[ing] what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world’.Footnote ¹Ferment may be overdoing it, but Sterne is right to highlight a curious aspect of sound studies – the fact that it is strongest when passing through or around its nominal object. The field, moreover, seems to have come to terms with this fact. There is much less, these days, of the sonofetishism that marked some earlier academic writing on sound. At its worst, this involved posing as the liberator of an oppressed mode of perception, while in fact acting as the huckster of an academic novelty. This stance was usually indicated by liberal use of onomatopoeia, exhortations to hear the din! and so on. These days, a steady stream of more substantial work is appearing. In general, the better it is, the more it takes sound not as an object in and of itself, but as a kind of provisional heuristic, a method for defamiliarizing social and historical landscapes.

This can all make for a field of cultural inquiry either excitingly fluid, or dubiously unstructured, depending on one's point of view. One reliable fallback framework might be the nation. Film studies, after all, long leaned on national cinema as a plausible organizing principle. But how useful is the nation to the study of sound, and vice versa? It depends. Take Germany, for example. It has, of course, a dauntingly rich variety of musical traditions – baroque through Krautrock, say – and of musical theories. Beyond that, there is the importance of the idea of thought's own musicality, a figure of interiority and ineffability familiar not least through its ironization by Thomas Mann. But we might just as easily consider German radio, its particular importance, at various times, as a political medium, as a literary milieu or as an experimental technology. There is the history of noise abatement and noise incitement, to codes of speech and codes of silence. Recent scholarly work on ‘German’ sound touches on all of this and more.

Of the books discussed here, Alexandra Hui's The Psychophysical Ear most closely addresses sound as a physical and physiological phenomenon. But at the same time, Hui's book bears the least relation to sound studies. It is better understood as part of a counter-historical tradition of science studies – a tradition that refuses received narratives of epistemological progress, instead reconstructing past knowledge formations and the cultures that surrounded and suffused them. The book's particular aim is to explore the lost world of psychophysics, the mid-nineteenth-century science of sensory perception that sought to understand and measure the relation of outside stimulus and inner sensation. Hui wants to recuperate psychophysics, these days languishing undeservedly as a footnote in the history of cognitive psychology. Furthermore, she aims to show that – to a degree hitherto unappreciated – psychophysics was an acoustic science, concerned with sound as much as with aspects of visual perception.

Above all, questions of sound here are fundamentally questions of music. Psychophysics, runs the book's central argument, was both indebted to and deeply immersed in the musical culture of the mid-nineteenth-century liberal Germanophone bourgeoisie. The thought and experimental practice of Gustav Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, or Ernst Mach can only be understood, Hui suggests, if we understand their work as an engagement with musical thought and as a product of a social milieu steeped, as few others, in the practice and theory of music. This engagement took place on many levels. The psychophysicists moved in a world of musical literacy and familiarity; they were friends with musicians, theorists, and critics, their research questions were thoroughly enmeshed with contemporary musical aesthetics. At a still deeper level, the very structures of their scientific imagination – from their models of cognition to the form of their experiments – were conditioned by the musical world into which they had been socialized: the concerts they attended, the instruments they played, the music they heard and read. When they thought of sound, they both thought of and with musical phenomena.

On one level, Hui's book is a kind of network analysis, unfolding in five overlapping, roughly chronological chapters, each presenting a new cluster of people, ideas, and tones. The biographical connections are perhaps the most contingent, but the easiest to grasp. Leipzig in the early and middle nineteenth century was, as is well known, a centre for musical performance and publishing, but it was also a hotbed of early experimentation in the science of sound. The personal connections are close indeed. Ernst Chladni – inventor of the famous sonic figures in sand – was a lodger in the childhood home of Ernst Heinrich Weber, whose work was then developed by his student Fechner, who was related to the Schumanns by marriage, and who had close friendships with the publisher Härtel and the critic Hanslick, and so on. Similar patterns continue throughout the book, in vignettes of association that underline the productive smallness of these overlapping musical and scientific worlds.

On another level, arguably more important, the book traces the relation of sounds themselves. The preoccupations of the psychophysicists are only one instance of a new intensification of acoustic micro-perception. This interest in the tiniest units of sonic differentiation was present at the very beginnings of psychophysical thought: its first wave of experiments, around 1850, had investigated the thresholds of perception, fascinated with sound's appearance at the very limits of audibility. As psychophysical thought developed, a concern with micro-differentials fed into other preoccupations, such as Mach's long-standing inquiry into ‘accommodation’ – the name given to the miniscule shifting of attention that took place when an acute listener distinguished between the component notes of a chord. Early on, seeking to measure this phenomenon, Mach had his assistants sing notes into a testing device. In later decades, convinced that the ear was akin to a piano, he speculated that cochlear fibres resonated individually like little strings and built physical models to test it, hanging tiny weights on the bones of a dissected inner ear. In this theory of ‘cochlear resonance’, as in much else, Mach drew heavily on Helmholtz. Indeed at one point, he wrote a book explaining Helmholtz's theories of tone perception for the benefit of practising musicians, yet another instance of musical-psychophysical cross-fertilization.

The Psychophysical Ear is strongest as close-grained intellectual history, moving fluently between close textual exegeses. It has a good sense, too, for broader intellectual affinities and the migration of thought figures across discursive regions. Throughout, thus, Hui correlates scientific debate with structures of preoccupation in musical aesthetics. In the most striking example, Hugo Riemann's strange theory of undertones, recently the focus of renewed attentionFootnote ² – a theory based on miniscule sounds that he alone claimed to discern – is read as confirming an extreme subjectivist turn in both musical and psychophysical thought, which valued individual listening experience almost to the point of solipsism. Riemann's privileging of his own inner ear, Hui suggests, was not an isolated occurrence, but a cultural symptom. A further correlation is made between, on the one hand, psychophysics' various attempts to reconcile universal scientific law and the particularity of individual experience, and on the other, attempts among musical formalists to square the fundamental properties of sound with an immanent historical unfolding of form. This historicism is in turn linked to a widening sonic horizon: the period from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the timespan covered by Hui's book, was an epoch of rival temperaments, spurred on by new knowledge of tuning systems of the past and of the non-European world. The reconstruction of such complex interconnection results in a rich and necessarily interdisciplinary patchwork. At times, it is a dense and difficult read for the non-musicologist; a glossary of technical terms is helpful, but only goes so far. Some more intellectual contextualization might have cleared a path through the wood a little more. But this is not meant to put off the non-specialist, or to minimize Hui's achievement in her reconstruction of the psychophysical world: at its best, the book matches the agile polymath thought of its subjects.

Politics has little place in Hui's account of psychophysical acoustics and its cultural entanglements. It looms large, however, in Caroline Birdsall's Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945. Birdsall offers a well-researched and thoughtful study of the political and cultural valence of sound under National Socialism, an investigation of what might be termed ‘political auditory culture’. Sound – encompassing a wide variety of acoustic phenomena and auditory practices – here serves as an entry point and red thread for a re-investigation of a much-discussed but still pressing topic: the German public sphere between 1933 and 1945. The particular focus is on the ways in which the Nazi State used sonic techniques and acoustic practices to embed state and party ideology in the culture of daily life, re-ordering the lifeworld and ‘nationalizing the nation’. In other words, seen from the point of view of the state, sound was a key tool for interpellating the subject and re-forming the body politic. However, the formation of this body, and its infusion with national feeling, as Birdsall shows, was a highly mediated process. The soundscape, for Birdsall, refers to this process, involving the complex interaction of ideological formation and everyday horizons of experience.

Birdsall borrows the word soundscape, as many others have, from R. Murray Schafer's acoustic environmentalism of the 1970s, a holistic doctrine of sensory pacification. The distance between her usage and Schafer's is an indication of the book's second aim: to assess the theoretical corpus, such as it has come to be, of sound studies. A wide-ranging survey of theories of sound and listening takes on the brilliant but sometimes speculative thought of an earlier generation – Michel Chion's reflections on audio-visuality, Don Ihde's phenomenology, Jacques Attali's essays on noise and music, the acoustic ecology of Schafer and Barry Truax – in the name of a more empirically grounded historiographical practice. Birdsall critically appropriates a number of key terms and presuppositions, from ‘soundscape’ to ‘resonance’ to ‘ear-witnessing’, taking them as tools for the local analyses that form the bulk of the book's narrative. This account of sonic politics is more or less chronological, beginning with the standard marker of 1933, but wisely refusing to take this as an absolute historical break. In spatial terms, the book is centred on Düsseldorf, an original move and welcome change from the Berlinocentric tendency of Anglophone cultural histories of modern Germany.

The regional focus does not lead to provincialism, but rather highlights the close and complex interconnections between local and national, as well as between real spaces and mediated events and representations. This is neatly illustrated in what is perhaps the book's strongest chapter, a dense and impressively thoughtful reconstruction of the cult of Albert Leo Schlageter, a Düsseldorf youth killed resisting French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, later elevated to the pantheon of National Socialist martyrs. The monumental scale and ongoing development of the hero cult are striking, as are the manifold mediations exhibited between older traditions and new technologies, and the tight linkage between local events and the horizon of a national imaginary.

At first, the sonic culture of memorialization was ad hoc and patchy. During the Weimar period, Birdsall shows, violent political struggles were in part battles in sound, with rival groups vying to acoustically occupy the urban environment, not least through popular song. Thus the ‘Schlageter Song’ adopted the tune of a folk ballad of resistance to Napoleon, retooling it as a paramilitary street-fighting song, a parallel to the better-known Horst Wessel Lied. But the Schlageter cult's acoustics went beyond song and slogan. Over time, it incorporated monumental architecture and mass-medial theatricality. Even before the Nazi takeover, a huge open-plan monument was dedicated in Düsseldorf to the local martyr. This was to be the centrepiece of increasingly elaborate local and national events; with the post-1933 blending and blurring of party, state and nation, discrete elements of the Schlageter cult were subsumed into Goebbels's mass-media orchestrations. Hitler's birthday in 1933 saw – among other things – the national broadcast of radio plays on Schlageter's life, with different offerings for children and for adults. These were, however, just a warm-up for the following month, when three days of Schlageter events in Düsseldorf culminated in a ‘call to national awakening’ on a city-wide and nationwide scale. The famous Nazi slogan of ‘Germany awake!’ was staged in literal form: on the third day, a mass loudspeaker reveille woke the population at 6 a.m., exhorting participation in a mass rally at the monument. Later, 185,000 people here heard speeches by Goering, before the day's sonic climax: two minutes of national memorial silence, broadcast live across the country.

Birdsall reconstructs these events with a sharp eye for acoustic detail. Throughout, however, she refuses to fetishize sound, or to separate it from the wider weave of cultural practices and hybrid media formations. Thus, another focus is on the political aesthetics of Carnival – a central Rhineland cultural event – whose traditions of noise and unruliness were all too easily incorporated into a public theatre of racist marginalization, refuting easy notions of its inherently resistive capacity. (In an image worthy of Fassbinder, Birdsall cites accounts from 1938, on the day after Kristallnacht, when Carnival's opening procession crunched over broken glass.) A further chapter investigates wartime conditions. Here, the extraordinary attention to detail in Goebbels's media orchestrations is highlighted by an analysis of the poetics of emergency war announcements, a technology honed through trial and error into an apparatus of affective engineering from above. This is supplemented, below, by an acoustic anthropology of life under heavy bombing, with its new listening practices and new array of significant sounds. This throws up another memorable image, this time from an oral history interviewee, who alludes to the domestic radio: always on, a permanent channel of the State, a constant potential short-circuit of State and home, a low hum of interpellation.

The frequency of such powerful images is a strength but perhaps also a weakness of the book. There is something audacious – almost Benjaminian – in the way images punctuate and supplement the book's argument. This can be seen in the book's final chapter, which combines an analysis of Nazi theories of cinema as a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk with an account of wartime cinema as a social technology. Nazi media theories are used here to document the role of wartime cinemas as resonant social spaces, closed structures in which audiences were not only ideologically instructed but also immersed in a bath of affect. Wartime cinemas here, in other words, are presented as a miniature instantiation of a broader biopolitics of resonant belonging, a formation of the body politic within a kind of McLuhanian ‘acoustic space’. But cinema, both as an entertainment institution and as a social technology, was increasingly disrupted by the war. Its spaces were less and less hermetic, in both acoustic and more general terms. Sirens came through the walls. Bombing raids stopped the images and cleared the auditoriums. The institutions of ‘affirmative resonance’ – microcosms of a national public sphere – are sonically undermined, then swept away.

The material is assiduously sourced: Birdsall finds plentiful citations of Wagner to justify a reading of cinema as an institution of ‘affirmative resonance’. But this analysis of cinema as Gesamtkunstwerk also functions as a meta-image, a metonymic representation of the downfall of the Nazi public sphere. These imagistic moves make for a powerful addition to the book's careful empiricism. But it is arguable that here the book highlights the shortcomings of a sound-based theoretical armature. The centrality of notions of political resonance and of soundscape as political sensorium perhaps lead the book too far back towards an imagination of the Nazi public sphere as a totalitarian social form, away from recent approaches which have de-emphasized propaganda and hegemonic engineering, instead underlining the complex functioning of the culture industry, and the flourishing of a culture of popular consumption.Footnote ³

This is not to detract from the book, which adds both to the historiography of the senses and to the analysis of Nazi public culture. As a genuine attempt to fertilize orthodox historiography with concepts drawn from two decades of sound studies, it contributes – among other things – to sound studies' development as a critical intellectual pursuit, capable of productive dialogue beyond its own boundaries, surely the key test. It is hard to say the same of the essay collection Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century: An Introduction. Here, the term ‘soundscape’ also looms large, but it is here – as with the ‘loud’ of the title – deployed more as a buzzword than as a concept. The ten essays range from readings of films and literary texts to broader-ranging pieces on topics including sonic architecture, German hip-hop, and noise in the First World War. There are interesting things to be found. David Tompkins gives a brisk overview of musical festivals in East Germany's Stalinist period. Sabine von Fischer's essay on acoustic architecture and the design of concert halls addresses the relation of acoustics to the lived history of a building. Nicole Dietrich's piece is journalistic in a good sense: a thoughtful, interview-based essay on memories of sound of the former DDR.

But there are weak pieces, and the overall feel of the book is of a random grab bag of topics and methods, glued together with otherwise redundant editorial interventions. The introductory text mixes portentous generalization with a kind of manic enthusiasm, reading at times like a press release for a commodity called ‘Sound’. (Or maybe ‘Sound!’) There are many grammatical, syntactical, and substantial errors. Even as an object the book is unsatisfactory: the low-grade paper and gaudy cover give it a vaguely airport feel, but – unlike Grisham & Co. – it comes in a tiny, barely readable typeface, the text crammed onto the page. Rather shockingly, the book is published by Oxford University Press. Those in search of a multi-author introduction to the acoustics of German cultural history would do better to turn to Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture (Berghahn, 2004), which did it well a decade ago.