"Hearing History" is a long-needed introduction to the basic tenets
of what is variously termed historical acoustemology, auditory
culture, or aural history. Gathering twenty-one of the field's most
important writings, this volume will deepen and broaden our
understanding of changing perceptions of sound and hearing and the
ongoing education of our senses. The essays stimulate thinking on
key questions: What is aural history? Why has vision tended to
triumph over hearing in historical accounts? How might we begin to
reclaim the sounds of the past?
With theoretical and practical essays on the history of sound
and hearing in Europe and the United States, the book draws on
historical approaches ranging from empiricism to postmodernism.
Some essays show the historian of technology at work, others
highlight how military, social, intellectual, and cultural
historians have tackled historical acoustemologies. Investigating
soundscapes that include a Puritan meetinghouse in colonial New
England, the belfries of a French village at the close of the Old
Regime, the court hall of Elizabeth I, and a Civil War battlefield,
the essays vary just as widely in their topics, which include noise
as a marker of social and cultural differences, the privileging of
music as the sound of art, the persistence of Aristotelian ideas of
sound into the seventeenth century, developments in sound related
to medical practice, the advent of sound-recording technology, and
noise pollution.
This important new anthology will help us to contextualize the
past within the larger rubric of all of the senses and thus free
mainstream historical writing from the powerful but blinding focus
on vision alone.
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