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. Read the rest of this entry »

Soundscapes

An abstracted and tentative outline of history professor Emily Thompson‘s interesting book, The Soundscape of Modernity. Note that this is not her table of contents, but my own sense of the book’s formal arc. Maybe it’s strange to extract this outline from an already mapped out narrative of events, but there has always been something about historiography—that is, the writing of history—that makes me uneasy. Using narratives to stitch together an event makes more sense to me than using events to stitch together a narrative. The former construction seems more proud of its stitches.

1) traditional sound, space, and listening – surveys some final intersections of reverent performance spaces and music as Art with a capital ‘A’ before the opening of Boston’s Symphony Hall in 1900, the first building engineered with the new science of acoustics developed by Wallace Sabine. The strange condition of listening as “a way to worship at the temple of great art” (47) and “an elevating mental recreation which is not an amusement” (49). The relationship of these three elements—space, sound, and listening—begins to shift around this historical period.

2) sound rediscovered – The experienced (shells) and applied (proto-radar) sound of WWI. The process of listening and the concept of sound become increasingly externalized as machines come to help us understand the physics of sound. From its very inception, our understanding of the physical reality of sound is mediated. Amazingly, a formal science of sound didn’t really exist until the early 1900s.

3) noise – the new problem of uncontrollable “noise pollution” in the modern city from 1900-1933.

4) listening redefined – cathedrals and temples begin using new sound muffling technologies in order to hollow out a silent, reverent interior space by merging new technologies with classical design. The natural sound signatures that had always been ascribed to certain types of spaces become a thing of the past.

5) space redefined – “modern” architecture in late 1920s begins to hermetically seal off outside noise pollution and integrate all interior systems: acoustic insulation, ventilation, and lighting all work in concert. The advent of wholly manufactured interior environments.

6) sound redefined – newly engineered sounds that are freed from spatial restrictions by radio, phonograph, and telephone, begin to fill these hermetically sealed spaces.