I. Auditory Subjects, Sonic Material

How do cultures sound? How do sounds affect the human subject's immersion in the world? How do we critically interrogate the many ways in which sounds contribute to a culture's self-fashioning and self-articulation? How are sounds past and present produced, recorded, and received through historically changing performances, media technologies, sound archives, artistic projects, political scenarios, and everyday practices? How does the materiality of sounds attain meaning through its resonance with the human imagination, analytical reason, and interpretive fantasies? How do sounds intersect with verbal language and visual perception? The present Companion seeks to address such questions by focusing on sound in German-speaking cultures, encompassing the Middle Ages, the classical-romantic period and nineteenth-century nationalism, high-capitalist industrial modernity and its cultural avant-garde, the National Socialist regime and the Holocaust, postwar East and West Germany, and the digital culture of the present. The Companion's title highlights that practices of sound production and listening, although fundamental to human existence, necessarily emerge in such specific historical periods and geographies. Sonic practices are affiliated with, or subversive of, aesthetic values, political ideologies, and media technologies, for which German-speaking cultures offer particularly fertile, if often contested, even traumatic grounds.

The present volume reflects the wide compass of this field as well as the diversity of intellectual positions among its practitioners. Although influenced by pioneering North American scholarship, the investigation of sonic events and auditory experiences by scholars working in, or affiliated with, German cultural studies has by now developed its own academic identity, methodologies, and interests. Nonetheless, it would be difficult, and not very useful, to try to differentiate specifically German (or Austrian, or Swiss) types of sound studies methodologies and practices from what has by now become a truly transnational discipline. Hence the Companion is not primarily an introduction to the discipline of sound studies practiced in German-speaking cultural institutions and public spheres. Rather, it offers a critical, albeit necessarily selective, survey of the diverse ways in which sound is represented, interrogated, and analyzed within German-speaking cultures. From these contexts, urgent questions of theory, methodological procedures, and cognitive interests arise to provide insights into what sound studies can offer today.