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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2017
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.
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6 Jonathan Sterne subverts this technology driven history of sound in The Audible Past, where he argues that technological changes in acoustic media like the gramophone or telephone are only legible because they are predicated by changes in the status of listening. See Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 19–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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9 The entire quotation from the influential media theorist is ‘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’. Kittler, Friedrich, Grammophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 23 Google Scholar.
10 Both thinkers considered their work scientific, even though it located objectivity in self-observation. For example, self-analysis was Freud's main methodology in The Interpretation of Dreams. Similarly, Edmund Husserl maintained that transcendental consciousness was possible through the phenomenological reduction.
11 Steege's shows Helmholtz's major contribution to engineer sound as direct aural knowledge.
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