This chapter surveys philosophical and aesthetic accounts of sound and hearing from antiquity to the first half of the twentieth century. It makes no claims for comprehensiveness but rather focuses on theories of particular relevance to literary and other artistic modernism. To do this, the chapter takes a very quick look at the ancient and early Christian periods, moves swiftly to the late eighteenth century, and then offers a more detailed (though still selective) account of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers, before focusing more closely still on literary modernism itself. Nineteenth-century sources get heavy coverage – not at the expense of their twentieth-century counterparts (I hope), but because, as I seek to show at points throughout this book, ideas originating in the nineteenth century play a pivotal role in twentieth-century thinking. This is especially the case where music is concerned, music being the topic onto which questions about sound and hearing often devolved. Brad Bucknell has shown the particularly strong appeal that nineteenth-century musical aesthetics held for twentieth-century writers, especially those for whom language, their own chosen medium, was both dynamised and chastened by music's example: as he states, ‘“music” for many writers [in this period] refers obliquely to an art which transcends referential or lexical meaning, and which has the power of some kind of excessive, yet essential, element to which the literary may point, but which it can never fully encompass.’