History of Hearing/Hearing History

Richard Cullen Rath (rrath@hawaii.edu)

Draft. Please do not cite or quote without permission.

Chapter One

Introduction
Preface
"I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision."
– David Bowie, “Sound and Vision” from the album Low.

Here are a few notes I took at a writing workshop before

we begin:

what brought me to it.

The specific project, the History of Hearing, took shape when Mark Smith asked me if I
would write the book on hearing for his history of the senses series. He said it would be a
"quick, easy book." I submitted the proposal for a quick easy book, and they asked me to
broaden it to include the whole world. Years later I am still at it.

“writing for an audience.”

An audience is a wonderful thing for a historian of hearing to ponder. Will they listen? Who
are they? “When?” evokes time which is always of interest to historians. When this book is
read, either when it comes out or in the more distant future, I would like it to be somewhat
timeless, as in not dependent on the state of the field – even as it relies on and synthesizes
that. To do that I need to abstract away from the specifics enough to show the openings as
well as the coverage and perform a sort of chrysopoeia or alchemical transmutation.
Who is it that I hope to engage? Readers, that mute group, of course. I would like it to have a
life as a rough course manual for "doing" the hearing of history and the history of hearing, so
that undergraduates, graduates, and researchers can take it as a steady guide to how to go
about it.
For readers within Sound Studies, I want to show what history as a discipline brings to the
table, and for people within history I want to show what hearing and sound studies have to
offer.
Direct address: Tricky, tried in HEAS, but left door to misinterpretation open.
Also tricky, and related: Engage and decenter without alienating...a tricky balance.
A few images.
Listening to the past, historical imagination, uncertainty as a feature. What do I bring to the
table do that? I need to read about the work that is out there and synthesize it, to bring some
cogency to the whole field, need to show how it is done. Need to contain it, keep it
manageable. Order it. show where the openings and left-undones and future paths are; serve
a s a field guide for historians of hearing and hearing historians. What I need right now is a
keen analytic mind able to take in and synthesize into a whole an assemblage of various bits
(an assemblage will do?) without imposing a grand narrative. Leave open the possibilities, for
example, that something else besides an engagement with modernity is out there if we move
beyond the Eurocentric frame of sound studies in the field of history.

I most hope to write.

I most hope to write in ways that encourage people to reflect mindfully on their own worlds
and the worlds of people perhaps not part of their own words – to bridge gaps in other
words. I am eminently unqualified – though not disqualified – from doing this, as who is to
say my way of thinking is better or worse. Thus I hope to write evocatively, as an offering
rather than imperatively.

I'd most want to read.

I would most like to read a smart book that is "simple as possible but no simpler" that could
serve as a guide for how to write the history of hearing and how to hear history. It would
need to transcend the details of a synthesized review to get at "big questions" but without
being grand or pompous, something that can be returned to over time. I want to be
challenged, but by new ways of thinking about things rather than dazzled by complexity. I
want to be drawn along like a Stephen King novel, but not overlook the inconvenient things
that throw complexities and kinks into the arguments: again, the push-pull dynamic.
These are my notes-to-self. Now, on to the book proper….
Overlooking the Past
Over the past decade or so a new field has emerged in the study of history. Sensory history is
not a new idea, but only recently have historians taken it seriously as an object of study.1 For
reasons to be discussed in a moment, historians focusing on the sense of hearing have been in
the vanguard of this new field. Not everyone accepts sensory history as a legitimate field yet,
but it has compelling arguments in its favor. The study of sensory histories, particularly of
hearing, is a rewarding venture, but it comes with some novel demands on the would-be
practitioner, or even on a general reader who wants to understand what this new kind of
history has to offer to our understanding of the past.
Our approach will be from two complementary directions: “hearing history” and “the history
of hearing.” The first consists of developing methods for understanding history – considered
on many scales – through the sense of hearing. Jonathan Sterne calls one variety of these
methods “audile techniques,” such as the practice of listening to bodies through
stethoscopes.2 Another term with much overlap to hearing history is sonification, the audible
representation of non-audile data or information. The practice is growing, with everything
from cells to earthquakes to the origins of the universe getting sonified for artistic purposes,
scientific purposes, or sometimes both to the point that the boundaries are fuzzy.3
In contrast, the history of hearing is the study of how our sense of hearing has changed over

1 Lucien Paul Victor Febvre, A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, ed by. Peter Burke
(London,: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).
2 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003), 23–25, 87–136. He defines them as “practices of listening that were articulated to
science, reason, and instrumentality and that encouraged the coding and rationalization of what
was heard.”
3 Gregory Kramer, ed., Auditory Display: Sonification, Audification, and Auditory Interfaces, Proceedings
volume 18, Santa Fe Institute studies in the sciences of complexity (Reading, Mass: Addison-
Wesley, 1994); Thomas Neuhoff Hermann, Andy Hunt, and John G. Neuhoff, eds., The Sonification
Handbook (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2011); Jonathan Sterne and Mitchell Akiyama, “The Recording That
Never Wanted to Be Heard and Other Stories of Sonification,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound
Studies, ed by. Trevor J. Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012),
544–60; Ballora Ballora and Mark Ballora, “Sonification, Science and Popular Music: In Search of the
‘wow’” 19, no. 1 (201404): 30–40; Alexandra Supper, “The Search For The Killer Application":
Drawing The Boundaries Around The Sonification Of Scientific Data,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Sound Studies, ed by. Trevor J. Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012), 249–70; Mickey Hart, Rhythms of the Universe, Short, Family, Music, 2013,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3801158/; Pietro Polotti and Davide Rocchesso, eds., Sound to Sense,
Sense to Sound: A State of the Art in Sound and Music Computing (Berlin: Logos, 2008); Jacob Smith,
“Exporations in Cultureson,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, ed by.
Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press,
2013), 279–86.
time and by place and people. These two directions work best in tandem, creating a dynamic
multidimensional trajectory for the book. The path taken here is thus just one of infinite
approaches to this emerging field rather than authoritative. My hope is not for the last word,
but rather to open up the possibilities for research across the many frontiers of this field while
at the same time letting us audition what is already out there.
Hearing history (our first direction) requires us to question some visual habits and implement
some new, sound-centered ways of thinking about the past. The fields of acoustic science and
music have already pioneered many of the ways of thinking we need to adopt for our task.
The payoffs are plenty: new appreciations of people who are often marginalized by the visual
bias of most documentary evidence; different ways of thinking about time and the past,
whether on the scale of eons or moments; and bringing new understandings to traditional
documentary evidence.
Hearing history requires a skill set analogous to literacy. This sonic literacy requires
exercising one's historical imagination. That means we have to loosen our grip on “the
certain” just a little to allow room for new ways of thinking. Because we are so used to
thinking in visual terms, these skills can be a bit de-centering. None are terribly difficult to
understand, and I have made every effort in this book to explain them in terms an intelligent
general reader can follow. For example, while the visual concept of foreground and
background or figure and ground is familiar to many, the analogous audio concept of
convolution will be news to most. I have taken the time to explain these concepts as the need
for them arises, striving to explain them in the simplest possible terms but no simpler.
The second direction of approach, the history of hearing – while it is a foregone conclusion by
this point in sound studies – will be perhaps less familiar to non-specialist readers. Why
should we study the history of the senses, and of hearing in particular? To even begin, we
have to come to terms with two ideas: first, that the senses are historically and culturally
contingent, and second, that modern scholarship has a visual bias built into it which has to be
recognized and grappled with if we are to situate the importance of hearing historically. Then
there is the ephemeral nature of sound: How to write a history of that? Once we have
addressed these preliminary concerns, it becomes apparent that hearing has many histories,
as do the rest of the senses, and that not only will the methods of cultural historians work in
this field, so too might the history of hearing have something to offer cultural historians in
return.4
When I told a scholar steeped in cognitive science that I was working on how hearing had
changed over the past few centuries he was dismissive. At first glance, the senses are
biological facts. On the usual timescale of human history, they would seem to be part of the
human inheritance, changing glacially if at all. Such hardwired stuff is indifferent to the
effects of human culture and history in this common-sense view. A few hundred years is a
blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, so how could hearing possibly have a history? Yet, as I

4 I am here defining cultural history broadly, much the same way Mark M. Smith does for social
history in his “Making Sense of Social History,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 165-186.
hope to demonstrate in this book, hearing, like all the senses, does have a history – or more
precisely, many histories – which left clear traces that are not hard for historians to discern, at
least not for the ones willing to listen in as well as look back on the past.
At the outset, I need to make clear that I am not making any case for biological changes in
hearing. As far as I can tell, there have been no significant mutations or evolution in the
anatomical apparatus from the ears to the brain for the length of human history. But the
history of hearing is more than meets the ear. The body parts, nerve cells, and brain functions
are merely the tools: necessary to hearing, but not sufficient to explain it. Hearing itself is a
more complex and hazier mental and social process, shaped only in part by anatomy, neurons
and gray matter.

The Doors
In order to show how hearing can have a history, we need some examples where it has an
obvious learned or acquired component that demonstrates how one person's hearing can be
radically different from another's while sharing essentially the same biology. If the sense of
hearing can vary from person to person depending on what has been learned, it can – once set
in its social and temporal context – have a history, just like any other learned behavior.
Daniel Kish, a scientist who has been blind from birth, has found his way around since his
childhood by making clicking sounds and listening to the echoes to locate his surroundings.
He likens this to how a sighted person might catch glimpses of the world if a flashbulb went
off in a dark space, calling the technique “flash sonar” He is not alone in his skill, and he
teaches it to other blind people. Kish writes:
The first documented case of a blind person using sonar dates back to the mid-18th
century. The French philosopher Denis Diderot wrote in 1749 of a blind friend so sensitive
to his surroundings that he could distinguish an open street from a cul-de-sac. In the 19th
century, the famous "Blind Traveller", James Holman, was reported to sense his
surroundings by tapping his stick or listening to hoof beats.
Kish notes that his skill at echolocation was probably much more common before the advent
of artificial lighting, when people had to navigate the darkness as a matter of course.5 The
point here is that the world can sound very different depending on learning and context in
the individual. The same holds at a more macro level. The senses are shaped as much by
culture, social relations, and history as they are by biology and evolution.
To focus on the individual a moment more, the bridge between sensory nature – biology and

5 Daniel Kish, “Human echolocation: How to "see" like a bat.,” New Scientist 202, no. 2703
(April 11, 2009): 31. The title is a response to a famous problem in the study of
consciousness. See Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4
(1974): 435-450. See also Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?:
Experiencing Aural Architecture (The MIT Press, 2009), 36-45.
evolution – and sensory culture – where histories of hearing can be found – lies in the process
of perception, which William Blake, and later, Aldous Huxley, thought of as being doors
through which we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. Blake first wrote of the doors of
perception between 1790 and 1793 in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In a passage that
borrowed a bit from Plato's allegory of the cave and imitated the style of biblical prophecy, he
expressed a revolutionary, romantic vision of the world based on the opening of the senses:
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is,
infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narow chinks of his
cavern.
These doors normally let in some information from the senses but block out much. Mysticism
and conscious effort could open up the filters – as Blake's “cleansed” doors revealed.
Perception could also be transformed through drugs. Huxley used “the doors of perception”
as the title for a book describing his experience taking mescaline in 1953. Mescaline, he
thought, removed the barriers to perceiving the infinite which the unaltered senses provided
as a survival mechanism.6 Although perception perhaps has a brute biological aspect to it, it
remains nonetheless malleable – in the previous three examples through learning, mysticism,
and drugs – and thus susceptible to culture and historical inquiry.
A similar claim lies at the heart of Indian theories of perception, with roots at least as far back
as the second century C.E.. In a lecture at Harvard College in 1896, Swami Vivekananda laid
out Vedanta, Buddhist, and Jain theories of perception as sharing common underpinnings
derived from the Sankya philosophy. In it, the sense organs and their neural pathways are
what makes congress with sensible world possible, but that is not enough. At the other end,
the mind, variously conceived, and the will or the self then shape the raw sense data into
perception. As in western philosophy, an entrance for the will, and thus culture and history,
plays a key role in perception. The various schools of South Asian philosophy map out the
relationship of the senses to the mind and the self in different ways, but they generally share
the idea that what we perceive is shaped by the mind and the self: it is not just a mimetic
representation of what is “out there.”7
The word “perceive” comes from the Latin capere, meaning “to take, seize, lay hold of,” and
the prefix per, meaning roughly “through.”8 The doors of perception are the culturally

6 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1st ed. (New York: Harper, 1954); William Blake, The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 22.
7Swami Vivekananda, The Vedanta Philosophy: An Address Before the Graduate Philosophical
Society of Harvard University, March 25, 1896 (New York: Vedanta Society, 1901), 10; Jadunath
Sinha, Indian Psychology, vol. 1: Perception (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co.,
1934), http://www.archive.org/details/indianpsychology014878mbp..

8 Oxford English Dictionary, online. ([Oxford]: Oxford University Press, 2000), S.V. "perceive, v." and
"per- prefix".
fashioned (and perhaps chemically modified) filters – the senses -- through which we reach in
order to take hold of the world. Where there is “laying hold of” there is will and agency. And
where these exist, there lie human histories. We actively construct our senses not only now
but in the past as well, in ways that have changed over time and left their traces like changes
in every other form of human behavior have. This active shaping of perception is at the core
of how cultures themselves are shaped. In fact, a definition of culture I like is that it is nothing
more nor less than how we make sense of our worlds. The notion that we quite literally
"make sense" lies at the heart of how and why we might consider undertaking histories of the
senses.
Perceptive readers might note a hitch in this plan though. If historical actors lived in sensory
worlds of their own construction, then so must we. We in the present are implicated in the
historical processes of sensory shift. There is no place of sensory neutrality, outside of culture
or history. Awareness of such biases—denaturalizing our own perception and placing it in its
historical time and place— is a necessary first step in any attempt at a history of the senses.
We need to ask: How do our present habits of perception shape the ways we perceive the
past? Bruce Smith calls this approach to the past “historical phenomenology,” the premise of
which is that
No one—in the sixteenth century or now, in Europe or in Papua New Guinea, in a
library or in a rainforest—can know anything apart from the way in which he or
she comes to know it. Knowledge is always embodied knowledge. The qualifier
“historical” affirms that bodily ways of knowing are not universal, as perceptual
psychologists are apt to assume, but are shaped by cultural differences.”
Smith proposes writing and thinking about sound from the grammatical “middle voice”
where “the object does not exist apart from the subject....Such a way of knowing recognizes
the embodiment of historical subjects and attends to the materiality of the evidence they have
left behind at the same time it acknowledges the embodiment of the investigator in the face of
that evidence.9 In order to think about the sensory past, we need to think from within our
sensory present.
Remember, perceptual habits are not immutable, not even our own. These are not worlds we
have lost as much as worlds we have set aside. Much like an old record player and a stack of
LPs, former habits of hearing and the other senses can be dusted off and used again with a
little historical imagination.
To give a simple example, I came to the history of sound and hearing as an undergraduate.
Perhaps I was predestined as a long time musician to such a fate. In a class comparing English
and American Puritans, I found references to lightning in my secondary source readings, but
as I was working through the primary sources, I noticed they were actually writing about
thunder doing things we usually attribute to lightning, like striking, damaging, and killing. I

9 Bruce R Smith, “Listening to the Wild Blue Yonder: The Challenges of Acoustic Ecology,” in
Hearing cultures: essays on sound, listening, and modernity, ed by. Veit Erlmann (Oxford and New
York: Berg, 2004), 39–41.
asked my professor what was going on, and he said he didn't know and that I ought to look –
and, I thought, listen – further. Decades later I am still at it.
Modern scholars had translated – probably unconsciously – the audible worlds of the past
into the more familiar visual terms of our time. Scholars have long noted the visual bias of
western culture in general. Marshall McLuhan, drawing insights from historian Lucien
Febvre and economist Harold Innis, ascribed the bias to literacy and print culture. McLuhan
argued that we literate folk take in much of the world through our eyes, serially, from left to
right, using a small set of infinitely repeatable and reusable characters. By dint of these
characteristics of typography and reading he explained western science, industry, arts,
philosophy, and politics as predictable – though not, as many of his critics believe – inevitable
outcomes. Western typographic man, he claimed, had traded an ear for an eye. In more
prosaic moments, he wrote more sensibly of a shift in the ratio of the senses – away from
hearing and toward vision -- at the heart of the modern West.10 Others have taken the
invention of two dimensional perspective or some other aspect of western art as a starting
point, while others still have said, or more often just presumed, that seeing in a modern sense
preceded and naturally entailed the western mind (comprising developments in the arts,
science, philosophy, and politics) as if we could not come to these innovations without first
being able to see properly.11
The circularity of this last position is a consequence of the invisibility of vision in much the
same way a fish might be the last to discover water. This leads to a strange construction of
visuality as not having much to do with language, as if the written words on a page about
visual culture are absorbed by osmosis rather than through the eyes. Writing is often
perceived to be somehow ear-oriented (as in Jacques Derrida’s influential notion of
grammatology12) or more often, sensorially neutral: pure thought untouched by a medium.
And language, in spite of protestations about the aurality of the logos, is generally considered
only so far as it can appear on a page, so much so that linguists name the parts of language
that can be sounded but not easily written “paralanguage” which quite literally means
something beside language, not of it, like the dubious categories of parascience and the
paranormal – although clearly linguists do not intend to drag that cultural baggage into the

10 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (New York: New
American Library, 1962), 26, 28, 125.
11 Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses,” in The
Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophy of Biology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
2001), 135-156; David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Kate Flint, The
Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).
12 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1st ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
definition!13 One of McLuhan’s contributions was to bring literacy and print back into the
realm of the senses, although for the most part people “doing” visual culture have ignored
this in favor of a more manageable and less self-reflexive practice of treating writing as
unmediated by the senses at all – a phenomenon that Fredric Jameson (in a different context)
calls “the vanishing mediator” – even as they produce it for, and consume it with, the eye.
Even in the classroom, the so-called visual learner is someone who learns through images
rather than through the equally visual modality of reading.
To write a history of hearing (or any sense for that matter), we have to come to grips with the
visual biases of print culture and the rest of the modern world. But these are never more than
biases. A pre-modern world of blind people with bat-like hearing did not give way to a
modern one of hawk-eyed deaf people. Nor are the habits of the senses an iron cage, whether
for us or the denizens of the past. Absolutes need to give way to tendencies, and evidence of
people using their eyes does not negate them hearing as well. The guiding question is not
“Whether?” but “How?”

The Problems with Hearing History

A common protest to any type of aural history is the belief that, unlike a document, sound is
ephemeral, going out of existence even as it happened. Three factors mitigate this objection.
First, this comparison is misleading if not mistaken. Historians do not write the history of
documents for the most part (discounting for the moment the important work done in the
history of the book as material culture); they interpret the past, all of which has gone out of
existence as soon as it came into being, just like its sounds. And just like any other
experiences, sound and hearing can be partially recovered and interpreted from documents
and material culture.
Second, sound is not as ephemeral as we first might think. Thunder presumably sounds much
the same today as it did eons ago. Bells toll for the most part the same notes (where they have
not been muffled or replaced with amplified recordings).14 Acoustic spaces designed to
reverberate a particular way centuries ago still do so today. Or take for example the Puritan
John Gyles' description of the sound of turtles copulating, which he described as sounding
like “a Woman washing her Linnen with a batting staff” from half a mile away.15 Presumably
the turtles still make the same sounds. Gyles wrote for an audience that he assumed knew the
sound of batting staffs on laundry, a sound no longer common to life in the twenty-first
century. The turtles let us listen in not only on their amorous adventures, but on a sound
culled from seventeenth-century everyday life, one that would normally mark the hearer as

13 Oxford English Dictionary, online. ([Oxford]: Oxford University Press, 2000), s.v. “para-.”
14 For a recent controversy over recorded church bells, see Eric Felten, “Taste -- de gustibus -- Court
of a Peal: Driven Bats By the Belfry,” Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2010.
15 John Gyles, Memoirs of the Odd Adventures and Strange Deliverances, Etc., in the Captivity of John Gyles
(Boston, 1736), 26; Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, 2003), chapters 2 and 3.
being within half a mile or so of a familiar community.
The problem of ephemerality is often used to discount oral histories, with historians likening
the degradation of knowledge transmitted orally to the children’s game of telephone where a
message is written down then whispered from one person to the next, with the result at the
other end often differing greatly from the input. The analogy is flawed, however, in that it
likens the modern privacy of reading silently to oneself to the community relying on oral
histories. Knowledge transmission in Native American oral cultures took place not in this
individualistic way but communally. An example from the eighteenth century serves to
illustrate the process. At treaty negotiations, the Iroquois assigned each article proposed by
the Whites to a particular sachem and his people. When the Whites had finished speaking, the
Indian that the Iroquois assigned as orator would repeat the speech, prompted at the right
moments by the sachem responsible for a particular point. When framing their own
proposals, the Iroquois would give a stick to a sachem corresponding to each point. When the
orator spoke, he would be prompted by the appropriate sachem. That sachem, in turn, relied
on all of the people under him to get his part right. The process had a built-in accountability
system and redundancy that made it robust through time.16
Catastrophic change, on a scale that would have disrupted the transmission of knowledge
even in any literate society, did take its toll on Indigenous knowledge and memory. When the
majority of a population dies young, the redundancy and robustness break down and
knowledge is lost. In fact, the same broad process of catastrophic change did wipe out the
histories of one literate Native American people, the Aztecs, who lost not just a huge
proportion of their population, but their written records to the Spanish colonial onslaught.
But we must not exaggerate this process. Wampum belts -- and their meanings -- remain with
Indigenous nations, their stories intact to this day. The U.S. government still honors the treaty
of Canandaigua, made and recorded in wampum in 1794, by distributing bolts of cloth to the
Six Nations each year. The implications of this treaty for sovereignty and land ownership are
still being played out, based on knowledge maintained orally through time in this fashion.17
The third factor in mitigating the problem of ephemerality, and perhaps the most important

16 John Romeyn Brodhead, Berthold Fernow, and E. B. O'Callaghan, Documents Relative to the Colonial
History of the State of New-York, 15 vols. (Albany, 1853-1887), 13: 102-03; Cadwallader Colden, The
History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New-York in America (<New York>,
1727), 89; Rath, How Early America Sounded, 168-72; Pastor Waldeck, "Diary," in Hessian
Manuscripts number 2 (1776-1781), 42b; [Conrad Weiser], The Treaty Held with the Indians of the Six
Nations, at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in June, 1744 (Williamsburg, 1744), viii-ix.
17 G. Peter Jemison, Anna M. Schein, and John Mohawk, Treaty of Canandaigua 1794: 200 Years of
Treaty Relations between the Iroquois Confederacy and the United States Chief Irving Powless, Jr., Paul
Williams ... [Et Al.] ; Edited by G. Peter Jemison & Anna M. Schein ; Preface by John C. Mohawk ;
Introduction by G. Peter Jemison ; Epilogue by Doug George-Kanentiio, 1st ed ed. (Santa Fe, N.M., 2000);
George C. Shattuck, The Oneida Land Claims: A Legal History, 1st ed., The Iroquois and Their Neighbors
(Syracuse, N.Y., 1991).
for my own work, has been to carefully delineate what it is that I am studying, namely
something I call soundways:
The paths, trajectories, transformations, mediations, practices, and techniques -- in
short, the ways -- that people employ to interpret and express their attitudes and
beliefs about sound. I am not so much concerned with the underlying beliefs,
historically inaccessible as they often are, or the concrete expressions themselves
[where the problem of ephemerality does come up], so much as the ways between
them.
Soundways of this sort can readily be found in many different types of documents, textual
and otherwise, and they are no more nor less ephemeral than any other human patterns in the
past.18
Interestingly, a couple of the “flaws” of oral cultures have been reframed in the Internet Age
as features. Continuously updateable media are touted for their capability of incorporating
corrections and keeping information up to date: texts need never become obsolete. But this
feature is just a positive spin put on the “problem” of ephemerality. The fixity of knowledge
was touted by proponents of the effects of print as a wellspring of civilization itself. Second,
wide-area computer networks, with the Internet as the prime example, are connected by
many different routes, so that if any one node is knocked out, the network stays connected
and no knowledge is lost. This massive redundancy is the measure of a robust network.
Knowledge is distributed rather than centralized in the new media. But the distribution of
knowledge across a human network was precisely the “flaw” that print and literacy corrected
through the process of centralizing knowledge into authoritative editions. In principle,
massive distributed redundancy is no different from Native American communal
remembering. Perhaps the return of these characteristics of oral cultures indicates another
shift in the senses in the wind, toward some new kind of audible world. And to keep to our
promise to remember our own perceptions today, perhaps this is in part why a spate of new
books and articles on the many histories of hearing have been published in the last decade
and a half, during the very same period that fixed, authoritative knowledge in its printed
form has come in for sustained epistemological interrogation. But to keep our other vow
against absolutism, I'll point out the irony of making such claims from within a book!
Granting that a history of hearing is possible, the next question becomes “So what?” Some
scholars have made compelling cases that paying attention to senses other than vision can
further our understanding of long-standing historical problems.19 Others argue that the
senses are in fact causal themselves, though I for one remain a skeptic in this regard.20 A third

18 Rath, How Early America Sounded, 2.

19 The best examples of this approach are to be found in Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery,
Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill, 2006); Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century
America (Chapel Hill, 2001).
20 This approach is taken in Peter Charles Hoffer, Sensory Worlds in Early America (Baltimore, 2003).
My reservations are spelled out in R. C. Rath, "Sensory Worlds in Early America," William and
argument for the significance of sensory history, which guides my research, is that if we are to
understand people from the past on their own terms and they perceived their worlds
differently than we do, then we need to understand how those perceptions differed from ours
in order to understand them at all. From this perspective, sensory history, including the
history of hearing, is fundamental to doing cultural history at all.
If we accept the definition of culture as “making sense” of the world around us, then a
prerequisite for writing any sort of cultural history would be to understand how past people
made sense of their worlds. Lacking that, how can we even begin to see the world through
their eyes and hear it through their ears.
Indeed, the task of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling through the sense organs
of another is perhaps ultimately impossible to complete with any confidence of success, but if
we give up without making the attempt, we lose nearly all of cultural history in the bargain.
Instead, it is best to concede absolute certainty at the outset and proceed anyway, trying to
understand how historical actors made sense of their worlds using all the tools of the
historian’s craft and related disciplines, humbled but not stopped by the realization that we
may be wrong. In fact, giving up this certainty without giving up everything else seems to me
to be a good way in general to navigate the terrain between the poles of unobtainable
objectivity and unverifiable subjectivity: giving up absolute relativism along with absolute
certainty for a relative certainty with a healthy but not crippling sense of doubt. It is a crucial
skill in undertaking any history of hearing.
Nearly every work to date on the history of hearing in a particular time and place has
something to say on the issue of modernity, which makes it an issue central to this book as
well. Modernity is itself a vast and polymorphous term capable of application to the
eighteenth as well as the twenty-first century. It plays a central role from {chapter four}
onward. The case for modernity is nearly always framed with its antagonistic other lurking in
the background – or as likely, forever receding from the foreground while simultaneously
acting as the bogey pounding at the door. “Savagery” or “the primitive” gives way to
“civilization,” “orality” and the audible give way to literacy (and the visual), and the
underdeveloped need only to foster civil society to enter into the latest creation, the modern
liberal nation state. A balder teleology is the premodern/modern binary. The point in all of
these is that the modern needs a foil in order to exist, and sound and hearing have come into
play on both sides. While it is easy (and mistaken) to conflate premodern with preliterate,
oral, and aural, a few studies have broken out of the mold to find important roles for sound in
framing and defining the very meaning of the idea modernity.21

Mary Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2004).

21 Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of
Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); Mark M Smith, Listening to
Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Leigh Eric
Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2000).
This correlation of sound and modernity may be limiting the usefulness of hearing history in
places and times outside of the modern West and its others, where the vast majority of
sensory history thus far has been written. While we cannot ignore the questions about the
nature of modernity raised by attending to hearing, I want to raise the possibility of exploring
sonic histories for reasons other than coming to grips with the modern and in engaging with
multiple modernities in places other than the West. While the readers of this book cannot
escape our own engagement with the issue, we can do so in a way that will perhaps open
new understandings of times and places that were not necessarily tangled up in our issues at
all. Modernity may be our baggage, but we need not project it on everyone else in the process.

A Real Problem
{White, Eurocentric dominance of the field.}

Affinities
One last caveat: while this book focuses on a single sense, it is important to keep in mind the
fact that the senses work together, perhaps even as a sort of zero-sum game. When we attend
more to the audible we lose track of part of the visual, olfactory, gustatory, and haptic, but all
the senses are all in play at once, perhaps in differing ratios as McLuhan put it, but ever-
present. Our attention may shift around in the sensorium, but all the options are always there.
Thus, in writing this book I am consciously making a reduction in order to shift our attention
to the over-looked past and listen for what it might have to say. No offense is intended
toward the other senses, but there are sound reasons for limiting the general gist of the book
to hearing.
Not all the options are equal, though. We see race, and increasingly scholars are writing about
something long known, that we hear race as well. Fine examples of the latter have made it all
the way into pop culture in two movies: Spike Lee’s Black Clansmen and Boots Reilly’s Sorry to
Bother You both take the idea of listening to the construction of race in both humorous and
perceptive directions. Mark Smith notes past and present day white southerner who claimed
they could smell race, but always with the implication that this was a feature of racism more
than actual sensory perceptions. Many southerners have touched across socially constructed
racial divides, but always in private. Taste can be politely covered through the indirect means
of cuisine, but to actually taste race by going around and licking people across racial
boundaries is taboo in public.
Sensory studies scholars have long made a distinction between the “public senses” (vision
and hearing) and the rest which are private, but that distinction breaks down. On close
examination to reveal a culturally and historically contingent continuum rather than any
essential binary divide. Licking an ice cream cone outside the shop is fine. Smells invade
public space whether fair or foul. Acousmatic listening through headphones or on a
telephone, as XXX notes, {Michael Bull, geitelman?}can be a strangely intimate and private
space. Visual extensions such as optical telescopes or microscopes are private to the person
viewing. Hugs require careful knowledge of moving cultural targets to be undertaken
appropriately in public, setting aside Roman oath-taking and public testimony, both of which
involved the public grasping of one’s own or another’s testicles (patriarchy in place)

In reviewing a number of manuscripts for various publications, I have noted a trend among
sensory historians of criticizing single-sense studies as somehow developmentally and
evolutionarily prior to studies that attend to all the senses. The setting of parameters shapes
but does not determine their findings, and broadening the scope of a sensory history to
encompass all the senses is neither better nor worse than focusing on one, any more than
world history is somehow intrinsically “better” than Atlantic, national, or local histories.22
They all do different things, and the field of sound studies would simply lose its focus if it
were prescriptively compelled to consider all the senses in order to consider any of them.
There are rewards and pitfalls to each approach. A pitfall of the broader approach is to treat
the senses serially rather than as interconnected. A problem with the single-sense approach is
to treat that sense in isolation, forgetting or disregarding that same interconnectedness. The
payoff for the broader approach is that it makes it easier (though not assured) to attend to
intersensorial connections. The advantage to a more focused single sense is to center that
form of sensory attention in ways that bring out the connections to the world, to history and
to the other senses that would be missed in the pursuit of a wider sensory scope.
These criticisms derive from the field of sensory anthropology which has emerged in the past
three decades. There, the objection to any single sense study is that the senses are experienced
all together – called intersensoriality – rather than in isolation, and that treating them in
isolation is part and parcel of the western, Eurocentric approach to the senses that sensory
studies seeks to redress. David Howes has been the most steadfast proponent of this position,
staking out what has become know as “anthropology of the senses” along with historian
Constance Classen and others generally associated with the Center for Sensory Studies at
Concordia University. Howes claims that “Western philosophers and psychologists have
tended to treat the senses individually, ignoring the fact that they always act in concert.”23 As
sensorial anthropology emerged, this caveat evolved into a prescription. Howes warns that
It is only by attending to the ways in which all sensory phenomena may be
culturally coded that one can have, and relate, a full-bodied experience of

22 I am unable to give sources, since I read these studies in my capacity as an anonymous peer
reviewer. While several have since been published, the sections marking pansensory approaches as
developmentally superior to single-sense studies were excised since they were never central to
what any of the authors was doing.
23 David Howes, “Sensorial Anthropology,” in The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the
Anthropology of the Senses, ed by. David Howes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 186.
 culture.... However, it is not easy to cultivate such cross-sensory awareness,
because one of the defining characteristics of modernity is the cultural separation
of the senses into self-contained fields.... The first lesson of the anthropology of the
senses is that the senses operate in relation to each other in a continuous interplay
of impressions and values.24
In the most recent and nuanced version, Classen and Howes exchange this prescriptive force
for more subtlety, focusing on “ways of sensing,” an approach which this book shares. They
argue that the senses, considered together, are
Part of an interactive web of experience, rather than each being slotted into a
separate sensory box. The term ‘ways of sensing’, as used here, underscores the
plurality of sensory practices in different cultures and historical periods – ways –
and the processual nature of perception – sensing. We also intend the term to draw
attention to the manifold relations among the different senses, which can be called
‘intersensoriality.’25

Among historians, Mark M. Smith has championed intersensoriality in historical inquiry,

writing:
Given the initially modest amount of work on the history of the senses, relative to
other topics, initial sense-specific forays into sensory history were understandable.
Now, however, we are beginning to accumulate enough work for specific places
and times – post-Revolutionary France and modern Europe generally, for example
– where historians can profitably begin to think seriously about the interpretive
value of examining how the senses worked together, sometimes in complimentary
[sic] fashion, sometimes in tension.26
While Smith's call is open-ended and inclusive, others have taken it as a more rigid act of
setting acceptable boundaries for the scope of sensory histories.
The call for multi-modal approaches to the senses which challenge the primacy of the visual
has more than one source and goes back quite a long way, even in the Eurocentric traditions
that Howes criticizes. In his phenomenological study of listening, philosopher Don Ihde

24 David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2003), 5.
25 David Howes and Constance Classen, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (New
York: Routledge, 2014), 5; they draw their notion of ways in particular from John Berger, Ways of
Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972); my usage of ways draws from a different genealogy, laid
out in Richard Cullen Rath, “Drums and Power: Ways of Creolizing Music in Coastal South
Carolina and Georgia, 1730-1790,” in Creolization in the Americas: Cultural Adaptations to the New
World, ed by. Steven Reinhardt and David Buisseret (Arlinton, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2000), 100–
102.
26 Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), 128–26.
points out that pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles wanted people to have a “democracy of
the senses” in their perception, which led in his estimation to better thinking:
Come now, with all your powers discern how each thing manifests itself, trusting
no more to sight than to hearing, and no more to the echoing ear than to the
tongue’s taste; rejecting none of the body’s parts that might be a means to
knowledge, but attending to each particular manifestation.

Xenophanes, one of the earliest pre-Socratic writers, also noted that “It is the whole that sees,
the whole that thinks, the whole that hears.”27 Writing early in the twentieth century, French
sociologist Georg Simmel noted that “every sense delivers contributions characteristic of its
individual nature to the construction of sociated existence.”28
The idea of a democracy of the senses took root in sound studies (in contrast to its origins in
anthropology of the senses) as a response to ocularcentrism. Instead of the all-seeing eye,
proponents argued, we need to start listening to culture and history too. In this vein, Michael
Bull and Les Back, drawing on the work of journalist Joachim-Ernst Berendt, (1985: 32) have
insisted that “the dominance of visual ways of thinking in the West and academia “limits our
imagination.” They frame their work as intervening by “thinking within a 'democracy of the
senses'” where “no sense is privileged in relation to its counterparts.”29 Interestingly, they call
for this intervention while situated comfortably within sound studies. Undertaking a so-
called “single sense” study in their view is not in any way in conflict with what Howes has
called intersensoriality, in fact, by expanding the scope of cultural studies beyond the visual,
they actually help the cause. Writing as part of a moment at the outset of sound studies, the
call to listen has been taken up with gusto, and the field of sound studies flourishes, despite
the injunction of the sensorial anthropologists.
Sensory regimes are fluid and shift in time. If we prescribe a democracy of the senses or
intersensoriality in our treatment of the past, it imposes a uniformity on the subject that does
not exist, performing the same universalizing function that thinking about the senses that
thinking about them as strictly biological does. While there is much to recommend attending
to all the senses and their interplay, even in single sense studies such as this one, doing so in
the historical realm, or papering over real biases in the sensory relations today, fails as a
blanket historical methodology. Why call an oligarchy a democracy? As should be obvious

27 Philip Ellis Wheelwright, ed., The Presocratics, (New York, Odyssey Press, 1966), 7 0 [Empedocles],
32 [Xenophanes]; cited in Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd ed. (State
University of New York Press, 2007), 8.
28 Georg Simmel, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed by. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone
(London: Sage Publications, 1997), 110; also see Alex Rhys-Taylor, “Coming to Our Senses a Multi-
Sensory Ethnography of Class and Multiculture in East London.” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Goldsmiths,
2010), 10–11, https://core.ac.uk/download/files/50/1445510.pdf.
29 Michael Bull and Les Back, “Introduction: Into Sound,” in The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford &
New York: Berg Publishers, 2004), 2.
even at this early part of the book, the sensory historian and the historian of hearing are not
so much about prescribing a method as about explaining the historical shifts and eddies in the
ways the senses relate to each other (history of hearing) and attending to sonic ways of
thinking about the past (hearing history). Emphasizing all the senses all the time, besides
being impractical, covers over heterogeneous histories with an imposed (for what else is a
prescription of not an imposition?) homogeneity.
Put more simply, attending to our own approaches to culture and history as if there were no
differences in the ratios of the senses to each other in the present day risks universalizing a
pansensual regime. Doing so for the past risks covering contingent histories with an imposed
and artificial uniformity. While there is space and need for studies that factor in all the senses,
there is also room for studies like the present one that focus on a single modality without
losing the relations of that sense to all the rest, just as a musician might close her eyes to hear
better, which of course does not make her blind, tasteless, or without feeling.
Imposing a democracy of all the senses all the time has two other problems though. First is
the issue of scope: What is this sensory studies that we should privilege it as a category of
analysis? Where does it begin and end? What presumptions lie under it? Second is the issue
of parameters: If we attend to sound rather than all the senses at once, what exactly are we
doing? What are we gaining and what are we giving up in doing so?
The scope of sensory studies is seemingly transparent, at least in representational ways of
thinking: The senses constitute the front end of perception (as distinguished from the
connected process of cognition). Phenomenologists disagree, preferring to situate the sensing
of the world in the passing of experience within a relational mesh that breaks down the
(ocularcentric) notion of subject and object. But for our purposes, this is a distinction without
a difference (although in other ways the approaches diverge drastically!). The senses shape
how we perceive our worlds and consequently shape how we understand them. It tellingly
makes sense to study them. So how many are there? Five? More? Or fewer? Why do we
distinguish taste from touch and smell but not the sense of the wind brushing on our cheeks
(pressure) from the warmth of a hearth in winter (temperature), both of which fall under
touch? If we lose much of our sense of taste when we lose olfactary abilities, why are they
separate? And of course we taste with the eyes, ears (a sizzler platter please), and through
textures (touch, not taste). What of common sense? Or the M. Night Shyamalan fans' favorite,
the sixth sense? Is common sense just all the senses together, held in common?30 If so does
that mean we are limiting ourselves to common sense when we undertake to impose a
democracy of the senses on our work?
If we are to treat all of the senses equally all the time, what of everything else? Why privilege
the senses as the be-all and end-all of experience? Doing so commits us to a sort of Lockean
empiricism, where all of thought is what is filtered in through the senses. Is there nothing
outside the senses? What then is reason? Induction? Deduction? Rationalization? Cognition?

30 On the number of senses, see Phillip Vannini, Dennis Waskul, and Simon Gottschalk, The Senses in
Self, Society, and Culture: A Sociology of the Senses (Routledge, 2013), 5–7.
How are these sensorially constructed? What sort of homunculus is doing all the
constructing? And what is its sensory apparatus? If we are being democratic about the
problem, we ought not stop at the senses and give reason and everything else its due as well.
Tim Ingold argues that this is a flaw with thinking in representational rather than
phenomenological terms.31
Sarah Pink has gone some way toward addressing these issues in anthropology by proposing
that we distinguish a more traditional anthropology of the senses associated with the
Concordia school from her approach, which she calls sensory anthropology or sensory
ethnography, in which the researcher accounts for their own embodied sensing in developing
and nurturing correspondences with what she as an ethnographer proposes are the
experiences of those she studies with, checking back and forth all the time.32 This should
sound familiar, since it is akin to Bruce Smith’s conception of a historical phenomenology of
hearing sketched out above, one of the founding principles of doing this sort of work in my
estimation.
Attending to factors beyond the senses is of course done in fact, so instead of carving out
borders and boundaries that delimit sensory studies or sound studies and set them off against
one another, I would like to offer a different prescription, one that accounts for the shifting
histories, gives all the senses their due, and is vastly more flexible, useful, and unfortunately,
difficult, than the territorial approach to delimiting the subject. Rather than boundaries and
borders, I would like to propose a parametric approach based on affinities and ways. The
ways are discussed in the Classen and Howes quote as well as in more depth below. By
affinities, I simply mean to say that how we carve up our studies is based on complex and
simple factors that draw us into setting the parameter of study. Rather than arguing for them
as natural objects, I think we should set our parameters, thinking carefully about the benefits
and costs of the particular configuration, and even opting to shift those parameters while we
proceed if doing so offers some explanatory value.
Parameters require a little more explanation. As anyone who has done sound production
work knows, a parametric equalizer will give vastly different results depending on how the
parameters are set. There is no one right setting of the parameters to get a useful outcome,
although different combinations might be better or worse suited for particular functions. So
for example setting a broad and shallow midrange cut with a slight shelving boost of the bass
and treble ends of the spectrum using frequency, amplitude, and bandwidth parameters will
give the famous “smile EQ” favored in clubs. It won't, however, help a vocal cut through a
mix – that would require a narrower bandwidth boost somewhere in the midrange that the
smile EQ cuts out, as well as cutting out anything below the frequency of the human voice.

31 Tim Ingold, “Worlds of Sense and Sensing the World: A Response to Sarah Pink and David
Howes,” Social Anthropology 19, no. 3 (August 1, 2011): 313–317.
32 Sarah Pink, “The Future of Sensory Anthropology/the Anthropology of the Senses,” Social
Anthropology 18, no. 3 (2010): 331–333; Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography (Los Angeles ;
London: SAGE, 2009).
The Smile EQ is a bit like the sensory democracy paradigm, while sound studies makes
tighter cuts and boosts toward a different part of the job of mixing. Neither set of parameters
can do the work of the other.
The parameters and affinities approach allows historians to distinguish our own present-day
perceptions from historical shifts and eddies, something which the democracy of the senses
method and prescriptive intersensoriality are ill-suited to do. While in approaching our
material we need always to be aware that the senses do not operate in isolation from each
other, imposing a democracy of the senses on the temporal flow of history is a mistake. The
ocularcentrism of western thought from the Greeks through the modern and into the
postmodern is a crucial thread for understanding all the senses, not just vision. And the call
for a democracy of the senses may in fact indicate that we are in one of the eddies of that
strand, something that can only be teased out by setting aside (but not ignoring)
intersensoriality in its strong form to think about what Howes and Classen acerbically call
“the purified audiovisual worlds of modern media” that open up new realms in the visual
and audible domains (with the touch in its nascent stages) while neglecting completely taste
and smell.
The parameters and affinities approach is in line with how we experience the senses at what
may in fact be a biological level. While we are always sensing through all modalities,
attending to all that perceived data would be chaotic and harmful, symptomatic of a severe
mental illness, at least in western culture. While we perceive all at once with the full body, we
select and attend to that data as we see fit, barring intrusions like the cars that go boom, with
the parameters of our attention shifting to suit the task at hand. What is selected and attended
to is historically contingent and culturally and socially situated to be sure, but the limits on
how much of what and when seem to be a complex function of a biologically-based capacity –
although in the case of possessed people, or spiritual mediators like ministers or shamans, or
religious devotees, or drug users, or… The point is that parameters are meant to be stretched
and pushed (or contracted and pulled) while still functioning in a way generally conducive to
the task at hand in the environment at hand most of the time. Thus, it is perfectly acceptable
and useful to attend to hearing histories without always bringing in the full sensorium if the
task is to understand the role of sound and hearing in shaping those histories. In doing so, it
is helpful to remember, and crucial to attend to, the fact that we are not and never have been
purely sonic beings – although, as we will hear in the next chapter, that may not actually be
far off as it would seem – and that hearing interacts with the rest of the sensory apparatus,
especially vision.
I hope that the problems of hearing histories have been sufficiently addressed to move toward
developing the method for actually carrying them out. That is the subject of the next three
sections. The first section sorts out a way of dealing with the disjuncture between our own
sensory constitutions and those of people in the past while addressing several of the broad
questions raised above. It applies to sensory studies as a whole as well as to specifically to
sound studies. A process of shuttling back and forth in perspective from self to other and
back, from present to past and on, serves as the means toward this end. The second section
then attempts to show how thinking sonically can bring us down different avenues than those
traditionally traveled by sensory studies into a wider realm of thinking about mediation as a
sensory as well as communicative process. The third section moves back to the auditory in
formulating a sort of “initial settings” for a putatively modern soundscape so that the
shuttling has an anchor point from which to start.

The Voice of the Shuttle

[hearing simultaneous contextual layers), I would reorient as a practice of oscillation (moving
between layers of positionality) that seeks not to apply other critical listening positionalites
but instead to find greater levels of relationship between the strata of positionality. How this
greater relationship of listening oscillation comes into practice will vary from individual to
individual, but might begin through detailing specific aspects of one's positionality and then
identifying the ways in which those aspects allow or foreclose upon certain ways of looking,
kinds of touch, or listening hunger/fixity. This is challenging and detailed self-work to
undertake, though the process itself might advance from the simple creation of a list of
positionality aspects linked to listening ability, privilege, and habit.]shuttle=oscillations
We – regardless of whether “we” includes only westerners or everyone – cannot with any
certainty listen from within another culture or another time and place. How do we know, for
example, that Puritans experienced natural sounds like thunder as having will and intention
and as speaking to them from the invisible world? To be clear, this is a problem with all
experience, not just the sonic portions.33 A history of hearing has to engage with the simple
fact that we have no real objective evidence for what another's perceptual world was like, for
that is practically the definition of subjectivity. Some even make the case that the categories of
subject and object collapse in the realm of the sonic.34 At some point, in order to be
meaningful, the historian of any aspect of experience must grapple with the fact that they are
not entirely within the realm of empirical inquiry, which is what it is in part due to its
ocularcentric criteria such as observability and objectivity. That does not imply that empirical
inquiry is not valuable, only that is not sufficient in itself: It has limits, and parts of sensory
history lie beyond its horizon. If insiders and outsiders cannot with any certainty understand
each others' perceptual worlds how are historians to navigate this seemingly intractable
problem? One part of the answer is that while we cannot be sure, if we exchange the notion of

33 Richard Cullen Rath, “Hearing American History,” The Journal of American History 95, no. 2
(September 2008): 417.
34 Jacques Derrida, “The Voice That Keeps Silence,” in Speech and phenomena: and other essays on
Husserl’s theory of signs, Northwestern University studies in phenomenology & existential
philosophy; Variation: Northwestern University studies in phenomenology & existential
philosophy. (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973), 79.
proof for probability, or more accurately, uncertain possibility (which a good empiricist ought
to already be doing anyway) there is much we can still learn.
Another way of navigating this thicket is through considering an allegorical Greek myth,
“The Voice of the Shuttle.” In that story, Tereus raped Philomena and then silenced her – he
thought – by cutting out her tongue and imprisoning her in her own home. During her
imprisonment,
She had a loom to work with, and with purple
On a white background, wove her story in,
Her story in and out, and when it was finished,
Gave it to one old woman, with signs and gestures
To take it to the queen, so it was taken,
Unrolled and understood. Procne said nothing--
What could she say? – grief choked her utterance,
Passion her sense of outrage. . . .35
In the same way, if we listen to our sources more and deduce less, and learn to shuttle back
and forth between the warp and woof of our perceptions and those of others, we can begin to
hear histories otherwise silenced, often just as violently. The story can be read allegorically
for how text can say things when we have no access to hearing those things said. Considering
the old saw of text as deriving from textile, this is by no means a long shot. {revisit the voice
of the shuttle article}
The concepts of emic (roughly, an insider's perspective looking out) and etic (an outsider's
perspective looking in) can help us weave together the histories of hearing and our own
hearing of history. Lest all this talk of points of view lead the reader to suppose I am falling
prey to ocularcentrism, it helps to listen for the origins of the words. They are back
formations from “phonemic” and “phonetic.” Phonemes are the mental units of sound that
enable us to produce streams of speech from component parts. A crude analogy would be to
the alphabet. In contrast, phonetics is the study of the stream of sound out in the world. It has
no units other than what we impose upon it. When we listen, we use our phonemic faculties
to chop the phonetic stream up into something intelligible.
The usefulness of the terms lies not in their definitions but in their connectedness: One can
hold neither perspective perfectly, and there is a constant shuttling back and forth in any kind
of ethnography.36 Emic and etic foreground that shuttling, making it helpful in tracking the

35 Ovid, Metamorphoses., trans by. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Pr., 1955) cited in;
“VoS: The Myth,” Voice of the Shuttle, n.d., http://vos.ucsb.edu/myth.asp which provides an
introduction to the story.
36 The concepts were introduced in Kenneth L Pike, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the
Structure of Human Behavior (Glendale, CA: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1954); and the various
positions that developed are summarized in Thomas M Headland, Kenneth Lee Pike, and Marvin
Harris, eds., Emics and Etics: The Insider-Outsider Debate (Newbury Park (Calif.): Sage publ., 1990);
the mediating approach used here is proposed in Dell Hymes, “Emics, Etics and Openness: An
relationship between our perceptions and those we are trying to hear: to recover from this
weaving the voice of the shuttle, as it were. There being no place outside of our perceptions
from which to perceive, the back and forth between our own soundways and those of the
people we study is the best we can hope for, and it is surprisingly effective. One of the
methods is turn the ethnographers work on its head and try to understand what ethnography
looks like from indigenous perspectives. This is a slightly modified take on the well-worn
practice of self-reflection. It might rather be called “other reflection,” perceiving the world
through the eyes and ears of an other. Done well, it can induce a touch of what W.E.B. Du
Bois called double consciousness, which provided African Americans with keen insights into
white society because of their survival skill of having to always be able to think like a white
person as well as themselves.37 Of course this an imperfect and uncertain enterprise at best,
but it opens up avenues otherwise easy to overlook.

The Senses and Mediation

Historical evidence tempers claims of vision’s outright conquest of the senses. The other
senses never go out of play, and when we begin to listen, touch, smell, and taste the past as
well as look for it, a much more nuanced understanding of historical sensory milieus
emerges. Much of sensory history intersects with media history in ways that have not been
explored much. When considering media, the most profound shifts can be seen in the ways
that people worked sonic and visual media together to constitute complex communication
networks throughout history, but especially once the modern period is set in motion.
In order to make sense (again, quite literally) of media in history, we need to consider them as
processes—mediation—as much as things, attending carefully to how mediation shifted and
flowed in time. Consider the etymology of the word “media”: in the original Latin, it means
roughly “the ways between.” “Ways” always imply process and the passage of time even if
sometimes at the micro level: One thing always comes before another. A common problem
with this sort of thinking is what historian Marc Bloc called “the idol of origins,” which is to
assume that the “one thing” is the origin of “another’ rather than one more connection in an
infinite regress, “turtles all the way down.” What, then, are these ways between? They allow
the passage of thoughts, ideas, commands, power relations—in short, what we now call
information—from the relational self or selves of their origin to one or many other such
selves, whether constituted as individuals, groups, societies, networks, or nodes.
This invocation of relational selves is important for two reasons. First, they are not
individualistic constructions. Relational selves are the paragon of social construction: each

Ecumenical Approach,” in Emics and Etics: The Insider-Outsider Debate, ed by. Thomas M Headland,
Kenneth Lee Pike, and Marvin Harris (Newbury Park (Calif.): Sage publ., 1990), 120–26.
37 W. E. B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed by. Richard Cullen Rath, 2nd hypermedia edition.
(Honolulu: Digital Arts and Humanities Initiative, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 2018),
http://dahi.manoa.hawaii.edu/scalar2/the-souls-of-black-folk/index.
one is always in relation to other selves, with this web of relations constituting each. At the
same time, relational selves sidestep the problem of scholars who reify the social as an
unchanging thing in the same way the individualists do with the individual. The web of
relations for each self will be different, but in order for it to work, some of the construction of
self must align with how at least some others construct themselves for the possibility of
communication to exist.
Second, the senses play a key role in the construction of the relational self and by implication,
to the construction of media, to the point that mediation can be thought of as having an
internal or representational element—the senses that get extended and numbed to define a
particular medium—and an external communicative element, the usual domain of the term
“media.” The communicative aspects of mediation are thus entirely external to the senses and
the self, but reachable by no other means and therefore vitally connected to the sensory realm.
The senses are thus integral to our understanding of media and mediation, so it pays to
attend not only to their historical and cultural construction but to their physical limits as well.
Anyone who has ever jumped at a sudden sound while deeply engrossed in the visual realm
of reading knows the limits of sensory attention intuitively. The senses act as filters as much
as they do conduits, and the amount of sense data that can be “made sense of” at any one
time is limited. This makes ratios between the different senses somewhat of a zero-sum game.
We simply do not have a boundless quantity of attention, and to place it somewhere new it
must be diverted from somewhere else. Using this common-sense notion of sensory attention
it becomes easy to see how taking in ever-increasing amounts of information through the eyes
would numb the other senses, particularly hearing.
While there probably is some validity to such sweeping statements that quantify the senses in
a hierarchy, it is very difficult to get past anything more exact than “more or less” in
describing changes in sensory ratios. A more productive approach is to turn to the idea of
ways – in particular, soundways – and the process of mediation. For example, asking in what
ways seeing and hearing shifted along with the great transformations in media during Early
modern period of European history yields more useful results than trying to quantify and
order the importance of individual senses, implicitly or explicitly.
The approach taken here will be to focus on mediation and soundways, but always as they
relate to the other senses as well. In particular, sound and vision have a long conversation in
our history of hearing.

A Rubric
Shuttling between emic (insider) and etic (outsider) perspectives as a method for
understanding the soundways of people in other times and places will prove important in
discovering the relation of soundways – both ours and other people's – to the phenomenon of
modernity which will play a key role the history of hearing. In order to do that we need a
baseline, something to grab hold of in order to determine our own soundways. That will be
the emic starting point of the process, a sort of rubric for how we hear our worlds today, so
that when we listen for other times and places we have a place to start from rather than
thinking our categories of perception are somehow natural and universal.
Ideally we would all map our own soundways and then do our shuttling, but since each of us
has a different history and different sets of experiences, that would mean a different book for
everyone who reads it, a bit of an insurmountable problem even in the age of hypertext. The
next best thing is to put together as our first object of etic analysis: an ideal type, a modern
soundscape which even if it does not match our own ways of hearing the world will still be
familiar enough to anyone who has spent time in the modern educational system. Our ideal
type, an imaginary individual, is a western-educated person ensconced in literacy since
youth, and perhaps not quite yet fully lost to the digital age of iPods and mp3s. In other
words, just the type of person who would overlook – and under-hear – the past. Once we
map out this modern listener's soundways, we can do our shuttling with the ideal modern
soundscape as the emic, with full knowledge that to each reader – and the author too – this
ideal type is an etic construct that will differ in some but probably not all ways from our own.
The reader can then work out the implications of those differences and similarities to the
baseline for herself.
Working from this ideal type presupposes a plasticity of our perceptual system: soundways
and indeed any other ways of making sense of the world are habits, not ironclad prisons. This
plasticity is what makes it possible to understand other people's sensoria at all and may be
the underlying reason that perception varies by time, place, and culture. It is an illusion that
the ways we make sense of the world are completely a function of biology, an illusion that
blinds – and deafens – us to understanding people from the past on their own terms. The
soundscape exercise here is a way to pull back the curtain and reveal sense perception, in this
case hearing, for the historically located practice it is. I have waited until the section on
modernity to use it because we often perceive earlier ages and oral cultures however
constructed as sufficiently different from our own perceptions as not to get tangled up in
them. With modernity that changes somewhat.
Anthropologist Steven Feld has described a person's or culture's way of knowing through
sound as an “acoustemology.” In my own writing I have used the terms soundways and
soundscapes to do this same work in a historically as well as culturally specific way.38 The
rubric we will use here takes the form of a branching tree of a particular type, called an
implicational scale or an inference tree. It provides a familiar acoustemology or soundscape to
start from, on composed of soundways recognizable to any reader even if not being the
reader's own. The terms are not as important as what they explain. I provide the tree for
reference, but the explanation is required to make its meaning clear the first time through.

38 Steven Feld, “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavai, Papau New
Guinea,” in Senses of Place, ed by. Steven Feld and Keith Basso (Santa Fe: School of American
Research Press, 1996), 91–136; Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2003), 2.
Some readers might take issue that the model reifies the individual, so a word about what
that means is in order. Any notion of self built upon culturally and historically specific way is
relational if any notion of mutual understanding is to be assumed at all. In order for a way of
perceiving and constructing the world to be anything other than idiosyncratic, it must be
shared with others who presumptively understand them as well. As such, any notion of the
individual as constructed by soundways is thus relational too, so the idea of self in our rubric
is always socially mediated. In addition, this notion of relational selves sidesteps the problem
of scholars who reify the social as an unchanging thing in the same way the individualists do
with the individual. The web of relations for each self will be different, but in order for it to
work, some of the construction of self must align with how at least some others construct
themselves – what Ludwig Wittgenstein and Eleanor Rosch have called family resemblances –
for the possibility of communication to exist.39
Dividing the world into binaries as does our rubric is also a fraught proposition, eliding
shades of gray into black and white. Feel free to add the nuances back in, but that is not the
purpose of the rubric. To paraphrase Hector Barbossa, it is more of a guideline than actual
rules. Or as semanticist Alfred Korzzybski put it, the map is not the territory.40 Nonetheless
our rubric is a useful guideline or map insofar as it provides some insight (in-hearing?) into
what makes our modern listening skills tick.

39 Eleanor Rosch and Carolyn B. Mervis, “Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of
categories*1,” Cognitive Psychology 7, no. 4 (October 1975): 573–605.
40 Jerry Rossio Bruckheimer, Pirates of the Caribbean. The Curse of the Black Pearl (Hollywood, CA: Walt
Disney Studios, 2003); Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity; an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian
Systems and General Semantics. (Lakeville, Conn.: Institute of General Semantics, 1958), 58, 61, 498,
750.
[[implicational scale here]]

Silence
[[work in the silence part of silence and noise essay here]]
At a fundamental level, the soundscape can be divided between sound and silence. We will
have much to say about sound, but what of silence? It is a sort of absent absence, the quality
of the non-existence of sound which remarkably, does not seem to exist except as we make it
up. People who have experienced anechoic chambers and sensory deprivation tanks report
that the sounds of their pulse and nervous system become amplified. The experience of
sensory deprivation is so disturbingly loud inside that the Central Intelligence Agency of the
United States uses it as a method of torture.41 Sound, it seems, is an unavoidable part of life, a
proposition that resonates with the cosmic origin stories of chapter one.
Composer John Cage famously wrote 4'33'' composed of four minutes and thirty three
seconds of silence. During its performance, what is experienced is not silence. Instead, the
rustling of programs, shifting in seats, coughs, and so forth become the content of the piece
and the audience is turned into the performance rather than just consuming it. The silence is
not the absence of all sound, but the absence or withholding of the expected sound: the thing

41 Mark Benjamin, “The CIA’s Favorite Form of Torture”, n.d.,

http://www.salon.com/2007/06/07/sensory_deprivation/.
that usually makes a sound does not (in the case of the Cage piece, the piano).
The absence of expected sounds may have negative as well as positive implications. For AIDS
activists the slogan “Silence = Death” was a powerful tool in opening a global and national
conversation on AIDS. Mark Smith has carefully documented the meanings of slave silences
to planters in the antebellum U.S. South, who feared the silence of their supposed property as
much as any sounds they might make.42 If they could be heard, by this logic, their
whereabouts and activities could be known. Silence meant the loss of predictability, a key to
the control of other human beings. In addition, silencing as an activity is often construed as
oppressive, as in the silencing of the experience of Africans in the Americas through the
selection of what counts as an archive.43
Tillie Olsen called silences that had been imposed one way or another, especially on the
experiences of women, “unnatural silences.” These included censorship, , abandoned media,
purposeful deletions, and repression – sometimes direct (such as a publisher's decision that a
work is not marketable) and others indirect (by filling a housewife's or working class person's
days to the brim with other work for example). The complement was a natural silence, such
as writer's block, or a period of inactivity she likened to a field lying fallow. While Olsen's aim
was literature, it is easy to shift the focus from the visual to the audible realm in applying her
categories.
Many religious practices equate silence with the ability to tune sounds out to achieve an inner
stillness. Silence can also be a decision, a silencing of oneself that is prerequisite for listening.
Such silence creates an opening for communication with the spiritual world in many belief
systems. Quakers, as the Society of Friends are called, hold meetings where the people sit in
silence until someone is inspired to speak by an “inner light.” Trappist monks take a vow of
silence, and in Hinduism, Mauna is the inner silence of the sage. The achievement of it is
central to Yogic meditation practices. One of the Buddha's most famous sermons consisted of
him wordlessly holding up a flower. One follower simply smiled. The follower, according to
the Buddha, had received everything in that silent moment.
Several recent books have taken up silence from the premise that today's world is too noisy
and silence is something to be sought outside oneself because the noise of everyday –
particularly urban – life is deafening us and quite literally killing us. Hearing loss and heart
attacks serve as the bogeys in this story, announcing loudly the perils of the loss of silence.
While hearing loss is undoubtedly a part of life, no diachronic studies are available to
determine whether the problem is growing, receding, or simply part of aging. The heart
attack figures are stridently and uncritically quoted as authoritative from offhand remarks

42 Mark M Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2001), 68.
43 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press,
1995). Trouillot is perhaps a little less judgmental when he makes the important point that the
creation of silences is an intrinsic part of all archive making.
and dubious research used to inflate the significance of an author's quest for silence.
Logically, it would seem that if the authors wanted silence so badly they would embrace the
onset of hearing loss rather than decrying it! Often the narrative follows some sort of quest,
with the more nuanced discovering along the way silence's residence within. These
oftentimes querulous accounts attribute the noise to modern life and assume quite mistakenly
that in some golden past, the world was quieter and silence was available.44
Silence, it seems, has no inherent valence. It can be good or bad, productive or destructive,
created or sought out. Sometimes the same silence can be valued differently by different
historical actors, as in the silences of the enslaved to themselves and to the planters. Its
construction and meaning change with time and place, from one culture to another, so it is a
fertile area of inquiry in the history of hearing, just what we need: a moving target.
When placed in time, silence plays a tremendously important role. Sounds obtain much of
their meaning from the punctuated silences interspersed within and between them. Rhythms
are as much about absence as the presence of sound, whether in polyrhythmic drum patterns,
a Miles Davis solo, a paragraph (for spaces, commas, semicolons, colons, periods, parentheses
and dashes are nothing if not silences). In speech the perceived silences allow us to form
words and syllables even when phonetically (and here recall the origins of our words emic
and etic – the words and syllables are entirely phonemic constructions) there are none. Davis,
a master in the contrapuntal use of sound and silence, remarked that “I always listen to what
I can leave out.”45 This is a much more specific and useful set of information about time then
vast generalizations about circular or linear time that are often used to frame the subject.
The study of temporal shifts and cultural differences in the use of punctuated silences can tell
us much for instance about the differing uses of sound in African American history and its
significance for the history of the Americas and the world. At the micro level, for example,
one can find meaning in the sounds and silences of Sea Island boatmen rowing white masters
while singing rowing songs . Longer historical silences tell much as well. {{Chapter Eight}}
takes up both of these scenarios in detail.

Natural Sounds
Opposite silence are, of course, sounds, some human, others natural. The natural sounds for
our purposes include all the sounds arising from sources we now consider to be inanimate:

44 George M. Foy, Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence, 1st ptg. (Scribner, 2010); Anne D.
LeClaire, Listening Below the Noise: The Transformative Power of Silence (Harper Perennial, 2010);
George Prochnik, In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, Reprint. (Anchor,
2011); Robert Sardello, Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness (North Atlantic Books, 2008).
45 John Mowitt, Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002);
Prochnik, In Pursuit of Silence, 11–12; Amiri Baraka, “Interview with Miles Davis,” New York Times
Magazine, June 15, 1985, 45; cited in David Rosenthal, Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 49.
thunder, waterfalls, earthquakes, wind, waves, hurricanes, and such. Another extension of
our rubric might divide the world into animate and inanimate to include animal sounds, but
for now we will leave the animals in nature and just set aside the humans. The reasons should
become clear. The idea of animacy, whether something is alive in either the plant or animal
sense, is another moving historical target. At different times and in different places, people
have held that pretty much all sounds came from animate sources or were themselves
animate. For example, in northeastern North America during the seventeenth century,
Puritans held that the sounds of thunder and earthquakes were quite literally the voice of
God, speaking to them. The Indians whose land they invaded considered thunders to be
plural thunder beings, each with its own call. They made sounds that humans interpreted,
but the sounds were not necessarily communications with people or even about people. The
Indians considered themselves a part of the natural world while the Puritans had a quite
different relation to nature, distinct and separate, and at the same time the focus of the rest of
the world and the heavens. The Puritan separation of the human from the natural world is the
forerunner of the same distinction in our modern soundscape, even though Puritans
considered sounds we think of as inanimate to be quite alive and sentient at their source. Our
rubric would make sense to them even though they would fill out the contents differently.
Perhaps this was an area where beliefs about sound marked Puritans as significantly different
from their modern descendants The rubric would not work at all for Native Americans who
did not distinguish between themselves and nature. They considered a much wider sphere of
the world, perhaps all of it, to be sentient. In order to understand their soundways, we must
first come to a realization of our (meaning our imaginary modern person's) own soundways,
where the line between animate and inanimate is drawn differently.
If the Puritans' beliefs reflected a sort of pre-modern soundscape, that world was changing
beneath them at the end of the seventeenth century and would, for them, have an unfamiliar
ring to it by the middle of the next century – though it would be much more familiar to us.
Lightning replaced thunder as the cause of death, in line with most modern beliefs. God's
voice in it became metaphoric. The whole phenomenon was reduced in status to the physical
realm, even if the explanations were still far from current understandings of electricity. In
short, effective sounds became sound effects. The rubric, however would have been familiar
earlier as well as later, with a clear distinction between humans and nature, with humans at
the apex and center.
There is evidence that a shift is again afoot in the western system, with a trend toward the
post-human in the humanities that considers people to be continuous with the rest of the
world, so that cyborgs and thinking animals can be considered among many more fanciful
hybrid and non-human beings of literature. The post-humanists, as they call themselves,
could learn much from shuttling between Native American soundways and their own,
tapping into a long historical record that predates much of what they think is newly
theorized. Note on post humanism
Instrumental Sounds
Human sounds can be divided into vocal and non-vocal. The non-vocal sounds are made
with instruments of some sort in the broad as well as the narrow musical sense of the word.
Some of these instruments are sources, actively producing sounds: bells, guitars, loud
machinery would name a few. In some the main purpose is to make sound, while others
make sound as a byproduct, but one distinctive enough to serve as soundmarks for industry
or slavery for example. The instrumental sounds could be refined, as in the music of Bach, or
the Court Music of Akan drummers, or it might be coarse, as in the rough music used to scold
cuckolds, precede lynchings, and foment revolution from medieval Europe to the American
South to modern day Quebec and Turkey.46
In west Africa in the seventeenth century, music served as an immanent expression of state
power. A major military coup would be to capture an enemy orchestra. Drumming was
developed into a language based on the rising and falling pattern of the drum tones, which
with the use of particular phrasing enabled drummers to communicate in tone-based
languages like Yoruba or Fante. Stringed instrument players served roles as keepers of history
and storytellers who maintained the stories that were used to legitimize political power.
Africans carried into the slave trade brought these practices with them into slavery, and
revolts and lesser forms of resistance depended on them, passing the ears of the masters
without comprehension.47 Here our rubric fails us, or more accurately, show us a cultural and
historical difference, for the sounds of drumming, an instrumental sound, could carry
meaning the same way as a language in the West African instrumental soundscape, while in
European traditions it did not.
A second sort of instrumental sound does not have its own source, but shapes sounds made
by some other means. Its work happens after the sound is made. These instruments might
channel sounds, transmit them over long distances, change their volume and tone. They can

46 W. Fitzhugh 1959-(William Fitzhugh) Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia,
1880-1930, Blacks in the New World; Variation: Blacks in the New World. (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1993), 25; Mowitt, Percussion, 96–109; James Kiger, “Not the Same Old Tune,” blog,
Today’s Zaman, June 7, 2013, http://www.todayszaman.com/blogNewsDetail_getNewsById.action?
newsId=317703&columnistId=155; E. P. Thompson, “Rough Music Reconsidered,” Folklore 103, no.
1 (January 1, 1992): 3–26; Jonathan Sterne and Natalie Zemon Davis, “Quebec’s Manifs Casseroles
Are a Call for Order,” The Globe and Mail, May 31, 2012,
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/quebecs-manifs-casseroles-are-a-call-for-order/
article4217621/; Ibid.; Martin Ingram, “Ridings, Rough Music and the ‘Reform of Popular Culture’
in Early Modern England,” Past & Present, no. 105 (November 1984): 79–113; Mark McKnight,
“Chirivaris, Cowvellions, and Sheet Iron Bands: Nineteenth-Century Rough Music in New
Orleans,” American Music 23, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 407–425; Gareth Williams, “‘Samson in
Senghennydd’: Rough Music and Rough Play in Wales 1880 - 1914,” International Journal of Regional
& Local Studies 5, no. 2 (October 2009): 83–99.
47 Rath, “Drums and Power”; The best introduction to the features that distinguish African music
remains J. H. Kwabena Nketia, The Music of Africa (New York: Norton, 1974).
be electronic, digital, or acoustic. In fact the last term governs them all and the study of this
field is called acoustics. Paying attention to acoustics means listening and looking at how
sound propagates and reflects, how it can be transformed into a signal that can be further
shaped in interesting ways. Examples include the old sounding boards above church lecterns,
the shape, material, and volume of the interior of a church, microphones, amplifiers, radio,
and digitized audio.

Vocal, but not Verbal

The next step in building up our soundscape is to add voice to our rubric, but refrain for a
moment from letting it be colonized by speech. Non-verbal vocalizations would include
things like howling, roaring, or moaning. In addition, speech has paralinguistic properties
that are not part of the verbal content, just like our instrumental sounds: pitch (although in
tonemic languages like Mandarin or Yoruba, they form part of the phonemic system),
duration, loudness (stress), and timbre. Thus, like our instruments, these features of voice can
be shaped aesthetically in the form of singing or slam poetry using elements that are in
addition to the realm of the verbal. Although they shape affect and connotation, they are not
part of the denotational meaning system. In other words, the vocal but non-verbal portions of
the voice shape how we feel and to some extent what we think, but not in a linguistic fashion:
more like a painting or a piece of instrumental music shapes what we think and feel in an
open-ended way.
Allesandro Portelli points out the limits of reducing the soundscape to the writable parts of
orality:
Writing represents language almost exclusively by means of segmentary traits
(graphemes, syllables, words, and sentences). But language is also composed of
another set of traits, which cannot be contained within a single segment but which
are also bearers of meaning. The tone and volume range and the rhythm of
popular speech carry implicit meaning and social connotations which are not
reproducible in writing – unless, and then in inadequate and hardly accessible
form, as musical notation. The same statement may have quite contradictory
meanings, according to the speaker’s intonation, which cannot be represented
objectively in the transcript, but only approximately described in the transcriber’s
own words.48
Our initial challenge then is to find ways to coax the historical record into providing some
semblance of these non-denotational aspects of speech, and the non-linguistic aspects of
voice.
Not coincidentally, the rhythm, pitch, stress, timbre, and volume that characterize vocal but

48 Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” in The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and other
Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1991),
47.
non-verbal sounds also constitute the substance of music. Singing and song-like
verbalizations take many different forms. Street peddlers have sung their wares in Hong
Kong, Paris, Kolkata, London, Boston, Kingston, Persia: pretty much anywhere merchants sell
things in public.49 The words were there, for the product had to be identified in order to sell it,
but the pitch of the sales variety was in the pitch (and tone, rhythm, and volume): the powers
of persuasion were the song of the peddler's voice, not the words. Although treated as an
always already fading sound of an always earlier, pre-modern milieu, peddlers can just as
well be heard as the forerunners and first notes of market capitalism, with modern
descendants in the form of radio and television jingles.
For the hearing historian, the qualities of music are more than just musicological interest, and
they exist on a continuum from the musical proper to paralinguistic and instrumental
qualities of non-musical sounds. Here it is important to underscore that the musical
characteristics we have attended to here cut across our rubric when considered this way, with
qualities like timbre or rhythm belonging to instrumental as well as vocal sounds. They also
provide us with much more social, cultural, and historical material to work with than music
considered in isolation, with everything from drum languages to ranters and street peddlers
falling under this broader consideration of historical soundscapes.

Orality
Part of the reason for constructing this rubric is to deal with the issue of orality. In the past,
pretty much the whole soundscape was reduced to the oral, that is the portion of speech that
is mostly reducible to writing. Some effort might go into thinking about rhythms, specifically
when they are understood simplistically as repetition. A word on timbre and presence might
pass, but for the most part, orality constituted the whole soundscape and encompassed little
more than sounded linguistic expression. This has given rise to the fallacies about doing sonic
history critiqued at the outset of this introduction. By factoring the linguistic aspects of sound

49 Joseph Addison, “[London Street Cries],” Spectator Number 251 (London, December 18, 1711); Arlo
Bates, “Boston Street Cries,” New England Magazine 21 (1899): 407–11; Astley Clerk, “Kingston Street
Cries c.1927 and Something about Their Criers,” Jamaica Journal 18, no. 2 (August 1985): 11–17; R. P.
Gupta, “Sounds and Street Cries of Calcutta,” India International Centre Quarterly 17, no. 3/4 (1990):
209–219; J. Nacken, “Chinese Street-Cries in Hong Kong,” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the
Royal Asiatic Society 8 (January 1968): 128–134; D.C. Phillott, “Some Street Cries Collected in Persia,”
Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 2, no. 7, New Series (1906): 283–85; W.P.A.
Federal Writer’s Project, Dillard University Project, and Marcus Christian, “Street Vendors and
Street Cries,” Unpublished Ms. “The Negro in Louisiana” (New Orleans, 1942), Marcus Christian
Collection, Louisiana & Special Collections Department, Earl K. Long Library, University of New
Orleans, http://cdm16313.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15140coll42/id/
346/rec/15; Aimée Boutin, City of Noise : Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris, Studies in Sensory
History (Urbana, IL, USA: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Charles Hindley, A History of the Cries
of London (London: Charles Hindley, 1886); Gupta Rādhaprasād, Kolkātār Firiwālār Dāk O Rāstār
Awāj (Pedlar’s Cry and Street Sound of Kolkata) (Kolkata: Ānanda Publishers, 1984).
out of the equation, we are able to disentangle orality from that for which it has served as foil
in this form of scholarship, namely literacy. The issues and solutions are complex enough to
warrant their own chapter. The important point to take away is that while orality is
important part of the soundscape and deserves attention, we should not let concerns with the
cognitive effects of literacy determine orality to be the sole constituent of the soundscape. It
needs to be considered within the full scope of the soundscape, expanding our inquiry from
orality to aurality.

A Note on Noise
Schwartz and maybe Schafer useful here on noise

[[work in the noise part of silence and noise essay here]]

Of course there are other ways that a modern soundscape could be constructed. Our rubric is
only one, but a particularly useful one. Others have worked with the distinction between
sound and noise, or sound and “unsound” – the extremes of the frequency scale of our
hearing and just beyond, the infrasonic and the ultrasonic.50 Our rubric does nothing to
foreclose these other avenues of historical inquiry, and may even be helpful in unpacking
them. One thing that becomes clear is that the meaning and significance of noise – the ways
people think about and use it – have changed remarkably over time while still retaining
interesting continuities.
For example, a favorite way of othering anyone in the early modern era was to write about
their utterances as noise. This could be the noise of Indian languages, or the noise that
Bostonians heard in the founding of Yale College.51 The interpretation of these words as being
nonverbal was part of what made them noise to the hearers. In our rubric, indigenous and
Episcopalian speech fall into the category of linguistic sounds, but in the early modern
method of othering, they would be placed in the category we made for vocal but nonverbal
sounds like howling and roaring.
A definition of noise familiar to many engineering students as well as students of media and

50 Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books,
2011); David Hendy, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening, BBC Radio 4; (New York, NY:
Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2013); Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect,
and the Ecology of Fear, Technologies of lived abstraction; Variation: Technologies of lived
abstraction. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
51 George Percy, “Observations Gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne
Colonie in Virginia by the English, 1606,” in The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter, 1606-
1609, ed by. Philip L Barbour (London: Hakluyt Society, 1969), 2: 136, 143; Samuel Sewall, Letter-
Book of Samuel Sewall., vol. 1–2, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 6 (Boston, 1886),
2:143-44.
communications theory is as interference with a signal. Claude Shannon invented and Warren
Weaver popularized a theory of information and communication based on signals. The sound
of a voice in this case carries a message from a source through a channel to a receiver. Noise
enters the signal in the channel, perhaps even as part of channel, and deteriorates the quality
of the signal, making the message more difficult if not impossible to unpack on the receiving
end. Some form of feedback is included to indicate to the sender that the message has been
received.52

[[Figure Shannon-Weaver.vue about here]]

French economist Jacques Attali took the idea of noise as interference to be the archetypal
weapon, a threat to orderly if not repressive societies when in the hands of the people, and a
tool for repression in the hands of the state. Both the state and the people could channel noise,
shaping it into music. This treatment of noise, argues Attali, serves a prophetic function if
read carefully, as noise once channeled into music foretells the economic, social, and political
conditions that will follow. Thus the shift of music from something common to everyone in
the European Middle Ages, equally accessible to a beggar as to a noble, into a profession,
with court musicians trained in new rationalized systems of music and supported by wealthy
people foretold the shift from feudalism to capitalism.53 If he is right, we are living in exciting
times today, as the music is presently undergoing another such tectonic shift, with the rise of
digital home studios, remix culture, and a distribution channel available to anyone with an
Internet connection.
Attali's ideas about noise as a weapon have been realized recently in ways that bear out his
argument. Defense programs and police departments in many countries are actively
developing sonic weapons such as LRAD (long range acoustic device) and the comically
named MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio), which is more properly an
infrasonic device. On a more mundane level, subways and convenience stores use classical

52 Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1949).
53 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis:
U. Minn. Press, 1985).
music as a weapon to deter juvenile loitering and delinquency.54
In the past fifty years, another engineering definition of noise has become increasingly
prevalent. In this definition, noise is sound with no harmonic structure that gives it a pitch: it
is more or less evenly distributed across the frequency spectrum while pitched sounds cluster
around fundamental frequencies and their multiples (harmonics). Noise can still have certain
elements of timbre, reflected in the fanciful colors attached to differently formulated bands of
noise such as white, pink, and brown noise. Noise in this form plays a crucial role in
determining the timbre of both pitched and non-pitched instruments, including the human
voice. In no-pitched instruments such as drums or cymbals, noise is the dominant component
with no pitch band at all. The noise is not random it may lean toward the bass, the treble, or
the midrange, or it may have a pitched element in it too short in duration or too quiet in the
noise to be registered, as in a bass drum. The noise can shift over time. Running a filter that
emphasizes one frequency band (still too wide to be a note) and shifting through time is how
wind and surf sounds are synthesized. In pitched instruments, noise might provide a
percussive click at the beginning like in the sound of a jazz organ, or it might be the breath
sound in a flute, the buzz in a saxophone or thumb piano, or the gravel in a singer's voice. As
such, noise plays a defining role in how we hear.
This generative, creative thinking about noise seems to be a product of the last century as we
have learned to pull sounds apart into their components. When changing from one digital
audio format to another or compressing an audio file, digital noise gets added into the
background of the file to trick our ears into hearing frequency information that has in fact
been lost in the conversion process. Noise is getting over some of its bad reputation once we
are able to break down a signal into its components. It turns out to be everywhere except
perhaps in the sound of a (theoretically, anyway) pure sine wave.

Structure of the Book

The book is structured chronologically in order to attend to change over time in the ways
people heard.

Three E(a)ras

54 Goodman, Sonic Warfare.

In writing this book, I have come to the belief that a vague overlapping set – a fuzzy set, like a
somewhat leaky Venn diagram – of sonic processes can be limned out. The first is sonation, the
second, re-sounding, and the third is synthesis.
Sonation (verb: sounding) is all about producing sound. It is a creative, generative process,
putting sounds into the world. It is the sounding of the thing itself, a reflexive relation found
in instruments as varied as voice, bells, watermills, thunder, street traffic, drums, and
trumpets. A bell will make bell sounds. That is its function. Traffic makes traffic sounds,
thunder thunders, guitars sound like guitars and drums like drums. They make the sounds
that they are. Of course, they are not limited to this self-reflexive role, as our study of bells
(for example) clearly shows. Sonation comes from techniques other than sound for the most
part, like striking, plucking, blowing, and bowing: all actions that produce sound but are not
inherently sonic. In this sense that an action from one sensory domain – often touch –
transforms into sound, sonation is often synesthetic, crossing from one sensory domain into
another and perhaps calling into question the cultural constructiveness of separating the
senses in the first place.
In contrast, the re-sounding is focused on reproduction, on listening and receiving before
voicing and producing. The phonograph and the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth century
innovations that Sterne attributes to new audile techniques are transducers modeled on the
ear but set outside the body. For example, in a microphone-amplifier-speaker combination a
sound passes through the first “ear”, the diaphragm of the microphone, is then transduced
into electricity, which is amplified and re-sounded through the second externalized ear, the
speaker coils. Both the diaphragm of the microphone and the speaker coil are derived in their
design from the physiology of the ear. Like the speaker-microphone combination, a
phonograph also mimics the ear insofar as it “senses” – inscribes – sonic vibrations in a
medium, whether a tinfoil or wax cylinder or a lacquer or vinyl record. Unlike say, a drum, a
phonograph plays back whatever it “hears” just like the ear can hear whatever sounds are
thrown at it. A phonograph is not limited to making some inherently “phonographic”
sounds, but it cannot create new sounds on its own (at least not until it was re-purposed as a
sounding instrument in Hip Hop). In one rhetorical understanding of tympanic media, an
understanding framed by advertising and marketing, for the phonograph to have a sound of
its own would be considered a failure. Sterne makes a case for the phonograph – both in
sound studies scholarship and in the marketing of the day – as a “vanishing mediator,” an
idea we will return to below.
A third audile era may be emerging in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one of
synthesis. Synthesis builds sound from the ground up, whether from transistors and
capacitors or algorithms and bits. This is a new type of sounding, different from sonation and
resounding in that sounds can be created through settings and formulas. They may not ever
exist as sound prior to their playback, and the parameters, unlike a trumpet, do not directly
“cause” the sound to be made. And unlike re-sounding, they are not necessarily modeled on
the ear. Synthesized sounds still get played through the older re-sounding technologies in
order to be audible at all, unlike those resulting from sonation. They simply do not exist as
sounds in the first place to be re-sounded in the second place. An example would be a
sequenced digital synthesizer track in a pop song, where the algorithmically created sound
gets transduced from silent computer parameters that have no intrinsic relation to the sounds
produced beyond their mathematics. Sounds are produced anew in synthesis rather than
sonated from an action or tympanically re-sounded. An emerging practice called sonification
applies the techniques of sonation to any kind of data, from DNA sequences to tides to the
bits and bytes of software executables, whether intended to be heard or not.

~!@
[MATERIAL IS TAKEN FROM THE PROPOSAL]

A little obsolete...for current chapter layout see “current outline” below.

Chapter One “Beginnings” provides a brief survey of what we know about soundscapes from
the deep past and prehistoric times. We can begin our survey much earlier than perhaps on
might think due to some surprising turns in the science of the cosmos.
Chapter Two, “The Ancient World” explores evidence from material culture such as bells,
accounts of sound in religion and music, and early explanations of what sound and hearing
meant to thinkers from ancient to medieval times in literate cultures such as those of South
and East Asia, parts of Europe and the Middle East, and the Muslim world.
Chapter Three, “Orality,” shows how labeling non-western cultures as primarily oral often
unwittingly replicates the older division between civil and savage. An alternative, historically
situated orality is proposed, and when it is applied, orality turns up in some highly literate
spaces in addition to the so-called oral cultures where it is assumed to be prevalent.
Chapter Four, “The Early Modern Soundscape,” posits a world we have set aside, where
sounds had a power we no longer grant them. It was the “age of the ear” according to French
historian Lucien Febvre, a world difficult to imagine for a literate twentieth-century scholar,
but perhaps no longer such a stretch for residents of the twenty-first century.
Chapter Five, “Print, Sound, and Modernity,” takes up the literacy hypothesis, the idea that
print, increasing visuality, and modernization are inextricably bound together, reaching
fulfillment in the aptly named Enlightenment. Was there a shift? If so, what was the timing of
it? Did sound become less important during the eighteenth century? Or perhaps redeployed
in different ways? What was the relationship of sound and vision to the emergence of
nations? The book will also look beyond European cultures to see what can be learned about
the effects of print and literacy on non-western cultures as well.
Chapter Six, “Industry and the Pastoral” explores the sounds of industrialization and the
romanticization of the pastoral soundscape. Sectionalism, slavery, and expansion in the
United States are considered in turn, as well as the sounds of warfare in the American Civil
War and World War I. A section will discuss the sonic implications from around the world of
industrialization.
Chapter Seven, “Victorian Inventions” recounts the familiar story of the invention and
dissemination of the telegraph, telephone, and phonograph in a new way. By inquiring into
the effects of these technologies on sensory practices, namely how people hear, and vice-
versa, we gain a new perspective on these old inventions.
Chapter Eight, “Electric Soundscapes,” attends to the consequences of microphones and
amplification, broadcasting, electromagnetic recording, and modern acoustics on hearing,
particularly in the separation of sound from place. I will consider the convergence of new
sound media in terms of generative media, that is, media with latent and unforeseen
possibilities inherent to them. This in turn leads to a consideration of the questions of media
bias and technological determinism raised earlier in the discussion of the onset of print..
In Chapter Nine, “Sound in the Global Village,” I place digital and networked sound at the
forefront of the twenty-first century redefinition of intellectual property slowly underway.
New relations between sound and space are reconfiguring both public and private. The
distribution of digital media also creates the possibility of a new division like that proposed
by the literacy hypothesis, this time called the digital divide. Even after considering this,
digital and networked sounds hold out the possibility of a new age of the ear.

Current outline

1. Overlooking the Past: introduction to hearing history and history of hearing

2. Beginnings: listening in on the big bang, evolution, and the dawn of human history
3. The Ancients: Asia, the Americas, Mediterranean, and Africa
4. Orality: The cultural baggage of theories of orality
5. Print, Sound, and Modernity: print and the mediated soundscape
6. Thunder and Enlightenment: A shift toward the visual?
7. The Entomoid Hum: The role of machines in hearing history
8. Urban, Pastoral, wild: constructions of the noisy city, the quiet country, and the
howling wilderness
9. Sounds Violent: the noisy violence of race, class, and colonialism
10. Technomediation of Hearing: The shift from sounding to hearing through inventions
modeled on the ear in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
11. Sound in the Global Village: digital soundscapes