We're used to it by now, but it's bizarre when you think about it: Concert halls were in effect "soundproofed," and so musicians and other performers needed amplification to be heard.Īs Thompson puts it, "When reverberation was reconceived as noise, it lost its traditional meaning as the acoustic signature of a space, and the age-old connection between sound and space - a connection as old as architecture itself - was severed." The epitome of this is St. New developments in building materials and electronic amplification technology combined to change the acoustical equation dramatically. But through the early decades of the 20th century, reverberation came to be seen as "noise," as something to be controlled. In Symphony Hall, Wallace Clement Sabine, the Harvard physicist whom Boston Symphony Orchestra founder Henry Lee Higginson had engaged as an acoustical consultant, was trying to get the right amount of reverberation to let the music be heard to best advantage. Her narrative bridges two towering achievements: from the opening of Symphony Hall in Boston in 1900 to that of Radio City Music Hall in 1933.
The Victorians were keenly interested in keepsakes of the dead, and so Thomas Edison hoped that the phonograph would be sought after as a way to record final utterances.Įmily Thompson's book "The Soundscape of Modernity," covers a shorter time span and concentrates more on architectural acoustics. Like our own time, the period covered by these books is one of new technologies coming and going sometimes the "killer ap" turns out to be not at all what an inventor intended. Sterne doesn't exactly draw a straight line from the physician to the kid with the hissing headphones beside you on the train, but he runs a pretty securely plugged-in extension cord. We take talking on the phone so much for granted that we don't realize people once had to "learn" to communicate by telephone. The physician and the telegrapher had each mastered what Sterne calls "audile technique," a capacity for sorting out sounds, for active listening, as distinct from "hearing" of earlier centuries. What was originally noise became, to their practiced ears, meaningful sound. They decoded messages by listening to the clatter of the telegraph key. But early on, it became apparent that the best telegraphers worked by ear. Electrical telegraphy was first considered a visual medium - after all, the messages would ultimately be printed and read. Auscultation was the first modern medical technique of gathering data on patients, a conceptual forerunner of X rays, magnetic resonance imaging, and other (visual) technologies.
He focuses on (oops, he tunes in on) two 19th-century developments: mediate auscultation (the medical practice of listening to patients' bodies through a stethoscope) and telegraphy. Modern ways of hearing prefigured modern ways of seeing." This fragmentation is like similar phenomena in other modern media and art forms - such as flashbacks that cinemagoers once had to learn to "read," or photo montage and stream-of-consciousness literature.Īnd indeed, in "The Audible Past," Jonathan Sterne argues that ears had to cope with this fragmentation first: "Even if sight is in some ways the privileged sense in European philosophical discourse since the Enlightenment, it is fallacious to think that sight alone or its supposed difference from hearing explains modernity. Instead of an audience that, as one, laughs or cries or sits enraptured, we have collections of individual auditors, each with his or her own headset. But the myriad forms of sound recording and amplification make it a fragmented soundscape. Nowadays, however, we have a soundscape that is as much a "built environment" as is a city skyline. Anyone who was wool-gathering during the second act simply missed it. They happened in a specific time and place, and when they were over, they were over.
The aural experiences of yore were often communal - a congregation listening to a sermon or a choir, or an audience listening to a play. And each further suggests that our experience of our aural environment - in which sound, like light, heat, or water, can be turned on or off with the flick of a switch - is a hallmark of modernity. Two thoughtful new discussions of the culture of listening - of what our modern world sounds like, and what we listen for and hear - make a strong case for the primacy of ears. Forget what you think you know about ours being a visual culture, in which sight is the privileged sense.