Review: Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past

Since its publication in 2003, Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past has become a staple in the growing field of sound studies. A story about the development of sound-reproduction technologies, Sterne’s book was one of the first in a now well-populated list of scholarship across many different disciplines that aims to rigorously examine sound as an historical, analytic, and philosophical category. Recently referencing The Audible Past on his blog, Sterne writes,

I guess the main thing to say is that the book was written at a time where there wasn’t a whole pile of other contemporary scholarship on sound that was aware of OTHER scholarship on sound. So there is a lot of effort to think through what it means to talk about sound in the humanities and why that matters. I’m not sure someone starting a sonic project today has to do that kind of work or deal with that kind of problem.

The foundational status of this book may account for some of its slightly awkward moments. Neologisms such as the “Ensoniment” (as opposed to Enlightenment) take some getting used to, and continuous polemics against the “visual bias” in the humanities at times become redundant (if only because the field of sound studies has since gained so much traction). But the conceptual trajectory of the book as a whole is so well organized, one which makes such a pointed intervention not only in the historiography of sound, but of technology in general, that the reader can easily overlook these slight bumps.

The Audible Past surveys the history of––to name only a sample of the devices Sterne deals with in this book––the stethoscope, sound telegraphy, telephone, phonograph, graphophone, gramophone, headsets, recording studios, wax cylinders, and hearing aids. However, Sterne is careful to characterize the scope of his study as “a deliberately speculative history” (27). In the book’s introduction, entitled “Hello!”, Sterne acknowledges the massive task facing the historian of sound-reproduction technologies. Rather than aspiring to any claims of exhaustiveness or finality, Sterne writes, “this book uses history as a kind of philosophical laboratory” (27), an approach that requires the book to “continually move between the immediate and the general, the concrete and the abstract” (29). From long forgotten aberrancies such as the ear phonautograph (constructed out of an actual cadaver ear) to modern telephone networks, Sterne seeks to locate amid these various devices a unifying set of cultural practices and beliefs.

This is not at all to say that Sterne’s account is a reductive one. Indeed, it is his central set of theoretical concerns or “speculations” that allows this wide range of technologies to serve as a good object of analysis in a cultural history of listening. Sterne writes in the introduction, “This book turns away from attempts to recover and describe people’s interior experience of listening––an auditory past––toward the social and cultural grounds of sonic experience. The ‘exteriority’ of sound is this book’s primary object of study” (13). To historicize sound through an account focusing on technology seems, if not all too obvious, then at least problematically determined––wasn’t sound a culturally mediated object before sound-reproduction technologies? The Audible Past works in full view of these problems. To say that Sterne’s book is too speculative to be a rigorous history, dealing with too great a number of technologies in too singular a manner, is to neglect the problematic placed rightfully at its core. Sterne’s account problematizes technology’s ability to frame our historically embedded techniques of hearing things, arguing instead for the cultural roots of technology. One must rigorously work through the assumptions of a history of the senses that begins with the advent of a technological incursion into that physiological process if it is to be a good history. Sterne’s book does this, and succeeds.

The book’s first chapter, “Machines to Hear for Them,” sets up one of the central points that allows Sterne’s book to proceed analytically rather than chronologically: the social construction of “transducers, which turn sound into something else and that something else back into sound” (22). Sterne’s emphasis on “transducers” falls not only on the technical function of inscribing sound waves or transforming them into electrical current, but also on the development of a physiological theory of hearing. “The objectification and abstraction of hearing and sound, their construction as bounded and coherent objects, was a prior condition for the reconstruction of sound-reproduction technologies” (23). Moving through the history of modern physiology and otology more specifically, as well as Alexander Graham Bell and his colleagues’ interaction with these fields, Sterne argues that “the history of sound reproduction is the history of the transformation of the human body as an object of knowledge and practice” (50-51). By the middle of the 19th century, physiologists were conceiving of sound primarily as “the effect of a set of nerves with determinate, instrumental functions.” (61) This is not to rehash an old claim that a tree falling in the woods makes no sound without anyone to hear it, but rather to emphasize that the human ear defines a certain section of physical reverberations in space, and that sound as we know it is necessarily “anthropocentrically defined” (12). With this conceptual apparatus in place by the 19th century, “hearing, in other words is already an instrument” (61).

In the book’s second and third chapters, Sterne charts the development of listening practices that grow out of these physiologically-based notions of sound. If sound reproduction required a concept of sound as the effect of a set of nerves and membranes, then it also required a set of specialized practices or techniques that shaped and perfected this instrument of hearing in various social contexts. Sterne argues that specialized listening practices such as stethoscopy and telegraphy helped develop the “audile technique” that will become instrumental in practices that are later disseminated on a mass scale by developing technologies. “From roughly 1810 on, audile technique existed in niches at either end of the growing middle class. It would not become a more general feature of middle-class life until the end of the nineteenth century, when sound reproduction became a mechanical possibility and the middle class itself exploded in size and changed in outlook and orientation” (98-99). Chapter 2 deals with the use of the stethoscope by physicians, and Chapter 3, whose subject matter bleeds into the two sections surrounding it, surveys the practices of telegraph operators and the gradual dissemination of these practices through growing public telephone networks.

By Chapters 4 and 5, Sterne has accumulated enough historical and conceptual material to make his central argument about the evolution of technologies and the development of media, one that is, in my view, extremely valuable for the study of culture and technology beyond the specificity of sound studies. Sterne writes, “techniques of listening do not simply turn sound technologies into media” (177). Rather, it is through a combined network of economic institutions and individual practices that media are constructed. Chapter 4 centers in on Sterne’s useful definition of developing media as it took place in sound-reproduction technologies between the 1870s and 1920s:

A medium is a recurring set of contingent social relations and social practices, and contingency is key here. As the larger fields of economic and cultural relations around a technology or technique extend, repeat, and mutate, they become recognizable to users as a medium. A medium is therefore the social basis that allows a set of technologies to stand out as a unified thing with clearly defined functions. (182)

While the book’s first sections dealt with the development of social practices, in Chapter 5 Sterne focuses on a specific instance of the industrial or economic side of this dynamic with the commercial rhetoric of sound “fidelity” surrounding reproduction technologies: “Manufacturers and marketers of sound-reproduction technologies felt that they had to convince audiences that the new sound media belonged to the same class of communication as face-to-face speech” (25).

The Audible Past is painstakingly organized––each of the book’s sections is condensed into a series of focused arguments in the introduction which itself could serve as a standalone essay. Additionally, Sterne shows an almost overwhelming penchant for categorization: the three effects of mediate auscultation, the six elements common to medical, telegraphic, and popular listening practices, the four critiques of acousmatic theories of sound, etc. This mania for organization is what makes the book’s last two sections somewhat surprising. In the overall conceptual trajectory of the book, which traces actual technosocial practices, a discussion of the Victorian “culture of death and dying” and the aura of “voices form the dead” surrounding the phonograph and graphophone seem a bit out of place, especially when Sterne tells us that ideas bubbling up about permanent archival and perfect technological memory were fundamentally inaccurate: “The first recordings were essentially unplayable after they were removed from the machine. […] If anything, permanence was less a description of the power of a medium than a program for its development” (288-9). Similarly, in the book’s conclusion, Sterne launches a wide ranging discussion of the contemporary mania over digital technologies and the hopes invested in the possible futures supposedly enabled by them. Sterne’s interest in these two sections seems to be taking him beyond the scope of this book in a way that renders his previously solid conclusions about the evolution of technology more problematic than this book has the space to resolve. While we have surveyed several causal agents––including physiological theories, advertising rhetoric, and social relations––here we move into the utopian imagination of technology’s possible futures as itself a causal agent of technological change. This new interest seems to exceed the otherwise rigorous theoretical trajectory of the book.

These small reservations aside, The Audible Past is a rare thing. Not only is it a comprehensive and well-organized history, but the book is an equally smart media theoretical engagement with questions of technics, the social origins of media, and technological change that should find a wide audience in many different academic fields.