Sounds of Modern History

Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe

Daniel Morat, Daniel Morat

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782384229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

Long ignored by scholars in the humanities, sound has just begun to take its place as an important object of study in the last few years. Since the late 19th century, there has been a paradigmatic shift in auditory cultures and practices in European societies. This change was brought about by modern phenomena such as urbanization, industrialization and mechanization, the rise of modern sciences, and of course the emergence of new sound recording and transmission media. This book contributes to our understanding of modern European history through the lens of sound by examining diverse subjects such as performed and recorded music, auditory technologies like the telephone and stethoscope, and the ambient noise of the city.

PART I

SOUND HISTORY IN PERSPECTIVE

1

FUTURES OF HEARING PASTS

Mark M. Smith

Consider this chapter as a meditation of sorts, one that ponders the future of sound studies. I could take the additive, enumerative approach and simply list specific topics that I suspect will emerge in the field in the next decade. And, to be sure, I will do a little of that. But I have opted to think about something a little broader, with reach, traction, and interpretive purchase—and, frankly, with much greater fidelity to the actual history and historiography of sound studies that goes beyond mere prognostication and enumeration. I would like, in short, to consider how sound studies, both as a field and as an intellectual habit, will serve the discipline of history.¹

To do this, I need to attend to a couple of matters first. For reasons that will become clear, this chapter needs to reflect, albeit briefly, on the genealogy of the writing on the history of sound, sound studies, and historical acoustemology. It also considers the current state of the “field” in an effort to suggest what writing on sound studies might look, and sound, like a decade or more from now. In the process, I stress the largely underappreciated “deep” origins of the field, trace its growth in the 1990s, and try to account for the veritable explosion of studies in the past decade. I will then argue that the “field” of sound studies is also helpfully and profitably understood as a desirable “habit” of historical inquiry. The chapter ends by considering the best metrics for evaluating the success of sound studies in future years.

The differences between sound studies as a “field” and sound studies as a “habit” are important, and warrant brief definition. By “field” I mean, simply, a fairly delimited and professionally communicable and digestible area of scholarly inquiry, replete with its own consciousness as a field and its own imperatives. Hence, the field of sound studies is not unlike the field of, say, women’s studies or visual studies, albeit less well developed at the moment. By “habit” I mean methodological, epistemological, and even ontological embeddedness—a way of examining the past that becomes second nature so that evidence is read, consciously and even subconsciously, for tidbits of the acoustic, smatterings of the auditory, gestures of silence, noise, listening, and sound. Habit is apparent when scholars who are not self-identified sound studies practitioners begin to think like sound studies practitioners, or when colleagues in, say, women’s studies or visual studies begin to excavate evidence of acoustemology and incorporate that evidence into their own work, thereby adding texture, meaning, and interpretive purchase to that work. The habit of sound studies is far less developed than the field, but I strongly suspect that a decade or so from now, scholars interested in the study of sound, especially those in the humanities, will be talking about not only the maturation of the field, but the maturation of the habit beyond their own disciplinary imperatives and inquiries.

My operative questions, the ones I will try to answer throughout, are these: How will we know when the “field” is no longer “new”? How do our colleagues working in other areas of historical inquiry use, perceive, and understand sound studies? What are the particular intellectual and interpretive dividends of a matured historiography? And what are the barriers to that maturation? Briefly, my answers to these questions are as follows: The origins of sound studies, at least as understood and practiced by historians, were to some extent, even if unwittingly, a product of a shift toward a brand of social history that stressed intersensoriality—or, at least, the importance of multisensory understanding, in which sound, silence, noise, and acoustemology generally, were framed within the larger coordinates of the senses generally. To be sure, these early efforts were modest, bereft of much interpretive power, and less than robust. But they were important not least because they tended, again perhaps inadvertently, to treat the study of the senses generally as less than a discrete “field” and more as a desirable intellectual habit of historical inquiry.

My second point, and one we might profitably think of as the second stage in the growth of sound studies, details the way in which sound studies evolved and is, in fact, still evolving. This is perhaps best characterized as a moment in which historians trained in traditional evidentiary categories began to write about sound within those same categories—those at once veining their “fields” with a habit of sound consciousness and, simultaneously, paying less attention to intersensoriality. Rather, they began profiling sound more conspicuously and almost exclusively. This trend, one that is welcome and fruitful for reasons explained below, began in the 1990s and continues now.

My last point—and the most conjectural of the arguments presented here—asks what sound studies might look and sound like a decade or two from now. This is, of course, an audacious, even silly question, one begging contradiction. But I tentatively argue that sound studies might well follow two, simultaneous tracks. The first will be the continued emphasis on what I consider dedicated sound works: works that frame their historical inquiries explicitly and unapologetically within the rubrics of acoustemology. This will constitute the continued development of the field of historical sound studies. The second track will be the related and, in fact, braided relationship between historical sound studies as a field and historical sound studies as a scholarly and increasingly public habit. Sound studies will, I venture, not only percolate into the public realm and become embedded in textbook narratives and various forms of public history (most likely in museums), but will also, ironically and perhaps poetically, return to intersensoriality, but on a much more enhanced, robust basis than was apparent in the work of early social, sensory-minded historians. And there will be significant benefits from such a course of action, if it is done properly. Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the popularization of sound studies, and applied sensory history generally, will be the continued and appropriate historicization of the topic and efforts to resist offering up a digestible, communicable, usable, but ultimately deeply misleading application of the sensate past.

In 2000, Douglas Kahn, arguably one of the pioneers of sound studies, wrote in The Australian Review of Books that sound studies were now “awake,” courtesy of the work of a host of historians from different countries in multiple disciplines. Many of them were working in relative isolation, seemingly unaware that their colleagues in different sub-specialties were also beginning to study field-specific historical problems from the perspective of acoustemology. For most of the 1990s, this was indeed the case, and, in fact, had been so since the first toe-dipping into sensory history a couple of decades earlier. Up until quite recently, sound studies had been practiced by historians (myself included) who were trained in conventional fields—such as early modern English history, modern French history, environmental history, U.S. nineteenth-century history—and they had found their way to acoustemology by applying auditory insights in an effort to better understand the particular interpretive imperatives facing their specific fields.²

One reason for this coming or “awakening,” as Kahn called it, to historical sound studies was because of the emergence of social history, beginning mainly in the 1970s. I have elaborated this argument elsewhere, but it is worth emphasizing that social history’s tendency to consider the breadth, depth, and interlaced aspects of the human experience helped create a frame of mind and nurse an investigative temper and way of understanding that helped a variety of historians go beyond an unwittingly visualist representation of the past.³

We might profitably summarize the evolution of the history of the senses, from the early work of the Annales school and social history through to the early 2000s, by highlighting four main points. First, it seems clear that early social history’s interest in what we might consider deep excavation had the effect of alerting historians to the senses generally. Second, from there, we witnessed the growth of subfield specific sound studies, works that in part grew out of social history inspired subfields, such as environmental history, that cleaved towards a history of sound in an effort to answer subfield specific questions. Third, it seems that most of the post-Annales work tended to frame itself in oppositional terms, principally in the form of reacting against what writers understood as an occularcentric way of understanding the past. Lastly, most of the work written in this period was framed within the histories of specific nation states, most notably France, England, and the United States.

Parallel to, and related to, these trends was the emergence of a way of understanding the field of sound studies that was indebted to Science and Technology Studies (STS). STS signaled an early maturation in the field by attending to sound in a nonoppositional way, by making firmer gestures toward the importance of intersensoriality, and by increasingly moving away from the study of single nation states. The first two points are apparent in, for example, Emily Thompson’s superb study, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Thompson describes her book as “a history of aural culture,” one charting “dramatic transformations in what people heard” and “equally significant changes in the ways that people listened.” Thompson’s study uses listening to give depth beyond the eye, “to recover more fully the texture of an era known as ‘The Machine Age,’” and to “comprehend more completely the experience of change.” Thompson follows Alain Corbin and the Annales school, and conceives of a soundscape as “simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment; it is both a world and a culture constructed to make sense of that world.”⁴

Thompson claims that a “soundscape’s cultural aspects incorporate scientific and aesthetic ways of listening, a listener’s relationship to their environment, and the social circumstances that dictate who gets to hear what.” Rather than focusing exclusively on how “social circumstances” dictated cultural norms of listening, Thompson is also alert to the interplay between subjectivity and experience and changes in structure and society, thus braiding the important work of social and cultural historians with emerging work by historians of the environment.⁵ She locates the shifts in how people listened to changes in sound, themselves “the result of technological mediation” in which “[s]cientists and engineers discovered ways to manipulate traditional materials of architectural construction in order to control the behavior of sound in space.” Some of these changes in sound were incidental to the rise of industrial and urban modernity, while others were a product of technological and architectural advances. Contingent on these material changes were “new trends in the culture of listening,” and Thompson uses shifts and advances in both to trace the emergence of modernity in twentieth-century America.⁶

While Thompson tends to focus on the work of scientists in their production of sound and manipulation of acoustical spaces, she remains sensitive to the public implications of the anti-noise crusades of the early twentieth century, the timing and significance of the creation of quiet zones, and municipal authorities’ reconfiguration of noise ordinances. Like the early work of environmental historian Raymond Smilor, she also situates her work within the broader understanding of how noise, and its regulation and meaning, was contested by different constituencies and social groups. Following Douglas Kahn’s admonition, Thompson tries to show that modernity must be heard as well as seen, and she does not see vision and aurality in necessary tension. Her aim, instead, is to insert listening and hearing into future investigations into the rise of modernity, and Thompson sees the interaction between materialism and consciousness as critical to investigations of the historical process.⁷

Recent work, especially work rooted in STS (though not exclusively so), suggests two new directions: first, work is increasingly sensitive to all of the senses and the relationships between them, even as it remains framed within the coordinates of historical acoustemology; and second, newer work ventures, quite deliberately, to go beyond the treatment of discreet national experiences. This tendency, one that does not preclude examination of nationally framed acoustemological histories, is apparent in the work of several historians. Witness, for example, the work of John Picker, whose superb Victorian Soundscapes gestures toward an explicitly transnational history. James Mansell is also doing similar work. Perhaps the best example of the move toward transnational historical acoustemology is Karin Bijsterveld’s 2008 study, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century, which examines the history of noise and anti-noise campaigns in France, Britain, the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands.⁸ This tendency toward transnational, comparative sound studies is all to the good for two main reasons. First, and preeminently, sound studies, like the history of the senses generally, has always been rooted in a thoroughly historicized understanding of its subject and has aggressively and rightly eschewed universalist conceits which offer bland and unpersuasive claims about the transcendental nature of the senses. Historical sound studies offer little by way of “is,” but rather, and properly, stress the highly contingent “was.” Almost with...