The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction

by Jonathan Sterne

The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound." In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, and life and death. Blending cultural studies and the history of communication technology, Sterne follows modern sound technologies back through a historical labyrinth. Along the way, he encounters capitalists and inventors, musicians and philosophers, embalmers and grave robbers, doctors and patients, deaf children and their teachers, professionals and hobbyists, folklorists and tribal singers. The Audible Past tracks the connections between the history of sound and the defining features of from developments in medicine, physics, and philosophy to the tumultuous shifts of industrial capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, modern technology, and the rise of a new middle class. A provocative history of sound, The Audible Past challenges theoretical commonplaces such as the philosophical privilege of the speaking subject, the visual bias in theories of modernity, and static descriptions of nature. It will interest those in cultural studies, media and communication studies, the new musicology, and the history of technology.

Genres: Music, History, Academic, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Technology, Class

472 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Jonathan Sterne is James McGill Professor, Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, and author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format and The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, both also published by Duke University Press, and is editor of The Sound Studies Reader. He also makes music and other audio works.

Reviews

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really excited to find this book. For a long while I have been interested in the history of the senses. The way that the five senses that are available to us have been used, felt, ignored in history--what kinds of knowledge they have been used to get or have been seen to enable, how they have entered language--"I see", "enlightenment", "that really resonated with me"--of course visual metaphors predominate.

Most writing on the history of the senses dwells on vision, and the history of modernity--the 19th century to the present more or less--is no exception; in fact, theories of how we perceive now and have been influenced to perceive through the rise of capitalism and new technologies are almost always based on vision. One reason this is the case is simply that since maybe forever vision has been "viewed" as the primary sense,so it really has a claim to priority; and another is the somewhat more contingent fact that the work of prominent scholars like Walter Benjamin who first started writing about modern experience and inspired the work of lots of subsequent scholars has a visual bias, and for most of us literary/critical people talking about hearing, smell, touch, or taste requires a vocabulary and an expertise we aren't educated for.

But Jonathan Sterne, the author of this book, IS educated to talk about hearing, and the technologies that arose in the 19th century that enabled sound to be reproduced on phonographs, etc. He talks about the way that sound is rationalized in the 19th century. For example, the stethoscope was invented in 1811 or so to bring the sounds the body makes into the world of medical knowledge. In fact, he tries to answer the question that the character Thomas Edison poses in one of my favorite novels "The Future Eve": why in the world hasn't sound been recorded before? After all, all you have to do is let the vibrations produced by a noise be transmitted somehow into groove form--and then play it back, I guess. (Can't say I would've been able to invent it myself). Sterne answers this question by examining the rationalization of sound in the 18th century--the discovery that sound travels in waves and other acoustic properties--and by examining what he identifies as a 19th century preoccupation with preservation. Canning foods, taking records of disappearing civilizations, collecting mass amounts of data--something in the air of the era made preserving things seem urgent--and sound was no exception.

I only read the introduction and a couple of chapters for a project I am working on, and although the overall project is quite smart and synthesizes mass amounts of information in all kinds of different fields, and the introduction is exceedingly well-written and full of insights about sound, passages in some of the other chapters seemed much dimmer, just not as aware of the overall stakes of the project, a bit more naive, a bit less accomplished in terms of style. But since it's rather well done overall and is the first of its kind and includes a mind-boggling bibliography of writing about sound that I am greedy to read, I say it qualifies as a classic. Challenging to read for a non-academic because of the way it frames its project in certain critical methodologies, but jam-packed with interesting facts and perspectives.

[Scott Neigh]

A scholarly history of the social and cultural origins of sound reproduction. Very much not an effort to tell a straightforward, linear story about the history of telegraphy, telephony, broadcasting, and recording, but rather draws selectively and nonlinearly from the decades before such tech was introduced and the early decades after to push readers to think differently about how our senses and how technology are integrated into the social world. He insists, for instance, that rather than the transhistorical or ahistorical way we often think about hearing – often through what he calls the "audiovisual litany", a stock, binary account relating seeing and hearing that has roots in Christian theology and that informs even lots of sound theorists and historians doing relevant work – we need to recognize that how we relate to sound is in fact historical and changes over time as the social world changes. He identifies a set of practices of listening distinct to the modern era that he calls "audible technique." It became general in the population as various sound-related technologies became mass media, and in fact *had* to do so in order for those technologies in those forms to be useful. But he also pushes back against the frequent tendency towards technological determinism that sees the introduction of a technology as singular cause and social shifts as only effects, and demonstrates that, for instance, audible technique actually existed for decades before the telephone or radio existed, and the fact that it already existed as a sort of cultural resource was part of what it made it possible for technological discoveries related to sound reproduction to take on particular social forms as mass media. Audible technique developed among physicians as part of the role the stethoscope played in medical practice beginning to take on its modern scientific form in the early 19th century, and among telegraph operators in the middle of the 19th century, and both its development in those niche professions and its generalization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were bound up with developing middle-class practices around space, home, self, and propriety. He also takes apart common cultural assumptions that treat sound technologies as things that are supposed to have a certain sort of transparency (without ever quite reaching it) for mediating sound across distance and time while otherwise not changing what already is, when in fact there is often a much more complicated set of social relationships that have cohered around sound technologies such that the "original" being recorded or broadcast would never have existed in that form without the social imperative and capacity for that specific instance of recording/broadcasting to take place. He shows how the particular forms that sound media have today, which we often assume to be inevitable consequences of the development of the technology, are better understood as social crystallizations of quite contingent initial circumstances that could easily have developed in other ways. And...yeah. I won't try to list them, but the book makes a number of other interventions to show how our senses and technology exist as they do for social and historical reasons, and they can exist quite differently as the social world changes.

Overall, it was certainly interesting. The book's approach to understanding the social world resonates with my own to a significant extent. In general, I like reading books that push me to think in new ways, which this one did. All of that said, though, not all of the specific questions that this book focuses on are necessarily directly relevant to my own interest in or work on listening, so I didn't find it quite as engaging as I thought I might when I first picked it up. Still glad I did, though.

[James Zwierzynski · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expected this book to be more situated in the space between cultural studies / critical theory and sound studies than it was; not a bad observation, but just surprising to me. The book is overwhelmingly a history of sound and sonic technologies, with supplementary theoretical insights that are foundational to sound studies. Overall, Sterne has a unique historiographic approach that works really well for establishing the type of arguments that he is trying to advance -- and I find many resonances to other adjacent fields (film theory, ethnography, etc.), I just wish that those echoes were confronted more directly within the text itself.

[Jehnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense, very academic analysis of the history of the objects used to record sound. Sterne asks great questions about how we use sound and think about the authenticity of reproduced sound. Long and detailed, but worth a consideration.

[James Carroll · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the kind of cultural history I aspire to write. A great read.

[Simon Magus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paradigm-shifting, mind-expanding. Technological determinism stood no chance. Rest in peace, Jonathan Sterne.

[Håkan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A refreshing new view on the history and politics of audio reproduction

[Gyewon · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love jonathan's writing - no jargon, no pretending, but quite persuasive. he has such a powerful skill to structure his logic very neatly and elegantly. more importantly, it leads me to rethink photographic reproduction through, and in conjunction with, sound reproduction

[Olga Nikolaeva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good and solid academic writing. Recommended to anyone interested in history of senses, technologies, music production and, in some extent, medicine. I did doubt some of his ideas but it's more of my personal understanding of a sound production than a contradiction with Sterne's ideas.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating topic...a little repetitive...but I guess that's academia for you.

[Yvonne]

Read Hello! (page 1-19) for GESM

[Cambra · Rating 5 out of 5]

50 pages in, inspired this year's halloween costume.

[Charles Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Changes in the ways in which we experience sound are intricately bound up in much larger social and cultural networks and transformations.

[Mills College Library]

621.3893 S8397 2003