Details

Subject(s)

• Aural history [Browse]
• History—Methodology [Browse]
• Noise—Social aspects [Browse]
• Sound—Social aspects [Browse]

Related name

• Smith, Mark M. (Mark Michael), 1968- [Browse]

Summary note

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 fields 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 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.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (p. 405-407) and index.

Contents

• Onward to audible pasts / Mark M. Smith
• Soundscapes and earwitnesses / R. Murray Schafer
• Listening / Jacques Attali
• Breaking the sound barrier / Peter Bailey
• Art and sound / Douglas Kahn
• On noise / Hillel Schwartz
• Sound and the self / Steven Connor
• Perceiving sound in the Middle Ages / Charles Burnett
• Soundscapes of early modern England / Bruce R. Smith
• Hearing Renaissance England / D.R. Woolf
• English theories of hearing in the seventeenth century / Penelope Gouk
• Having the doctor's ear in nineteenth-century Edinburgh / Malcolm Nicolson
• Listening and silence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France / James H. Johnson
• Identity, bells, and the nineteenth-century French village / Alain Corbin
• Acoustics and social order in early America / Richard Cullen Rath
• Sound Christians and religious hearing in Enlightenment America / Leigh Eric Schmidt
• Listening to southern slavery / Shane White and Graham White
• Sight, sound, and tacticsin the American Civil War / Charles D. Ross
• Recording sound, recording race, recording property / Lisa Gitelman
• Preserving sound in modern America / Jonathan Sterne
• American noise, 1900-1930 / Raymond W. Smilor
• Shaping the sound of modernity / Emily Thompson
• Talking sound history / Mark M. Smith, Mitchell Snay, and Bruce R. Smith.

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ISBN

• 0820325821 ((hbk. ; : alk. paper))
• 9780820325828 ((hbk. ; : alk. paper))
• 082032583X ((pbk. ; : alk. paper))
• 9780820325835 ((pbk. ; : alk. paper))

LCCN

2003061331

OCLC

53887525

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