Audible Past

Sterne Jonathan Sterne

Description

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 modernity: 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.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Telecommunications engineering
• Communication studies
• Cultural studies

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 13 mars 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822384250
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

The Audible Past

Jonathan Sterne

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Durham & London 2003

The Audible Past

C U LT U R A L O R I G I N S O F S O U N D R E P RO D U C T I O N

©2003 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper   Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Garamond 3 by G&S Typesetters, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For Carrie

List of Figures ix

List of Abbreviations for Archival and Other Historical Materials Cited xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Hello! 1

1. Machines to Hear for Them 31

2. Techniques of Listening 87

3. Audile Technique and Media 137 4. Plastic Aurality: Technologies into Media 179 5. The Social Genesis of Sound Fidelity 215

6. A Resonant Tomb 287

Conclusion: Audible Futures 335

Notes 353 Bibliography 415 Index 437

Contents

List of Figures

1. Bell and Blake’s ear phonautograph 32 2. Leon Scott’s phonautograph 36 3. Drawing of sound refraction from S. Morland, Tuba Stentoro-Phonica43 4. Edison’s tinfoil phonograph 47 5. Berliner’s gramophone 47 6. Early gramophone record 48 7. Early Reis telephone 78 8. The human telephone, 1897 82 9. “YouNeeda Headset”—1925 advertisement for Brandes headphones 88 10. “How Far Can I Hear with themr-6?”—DeForest advertisement from the early 1920s 89 11. Diagram of Laennec’s stethoscope 104 12. Monaural stethoscopes 105 13. Cammann’s stethoscope 112 14. Binaural stethoscopes 113 15a-b. Telegraphy — ancient and modern 139 16. Diagram of printing telegraph 145 17. Train telegraph operator, 1890 159 18. Hearing tubes in Edison catalog, ca. 1902 162 19. Advertisement for the Berliner gramophone 164 20. Students at the Marconi Wireless School 165 21. Cartoon of frustrated housewife, 1923 166