Overview
Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality argues that the modern cultural practices of hearing and testing have emerged from a long interrelationship. Since the early nineteenth century, auditory test tools (whether organ pipes or electronic tone generators) and the results of hearing tests have fed back into instrument calibration, human training, architecture, and the creation of new musical sounds. Hearing tests received a further boost around 1900 as a result of injury compensation laws and state and professional demands for aptitude testing in schools, conservatories, the military, and other fields. Applied at large scale, tests of seemingly small measure-of auditory acuity, of hearing range-helped redefine the modern concept of hearing as such. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the epistemic function of hearing expanded. Hearing took on the dual role of test object and test instrument; in the latter case, human hearing became a gauge by which to evaluate or regulate materials, nonhuman organisms, equipment, and technological systems. This book considers both the testing of hearing and testing with hearing to explore the co-creation of modern epistemic and auditory cultures. The book's twelve contributors trace the design of ever more specific tests for the arts, education and communication, colonial and military applications, sociopolitical and industrial endeavors. Together, they demonstrate that testing as such became an enduring and wide-ranging cultural technique in the modern period, one that is situated between histories of scientific experimentation and many fields of application.
Full Product Details
Author: Viktoria Tkaczyk (Professor for the History of Knowledge, Professor for the History of Knowledge, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) ,
Mara Mills (Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University) ,
Alexandra Hui (Associate Professor of History, Associate Professor of History, Mississippi State University)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 24.10cm
, Height: 2.70cm
, Length: 15.90cm
Weight: 0.712kg
ISBN: 9780197511121
ISBN 10: 0197511120
Pages: 416
Publication Date: 22 October 2020
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
That hearing norms are 'built into all manner of audio apparatus, from telephones to stereo speakers' is one of many insights in this intriguing interdisciplinary collection. Historians, having too long focused on technology's visual aspects, can surely benefit from understanding the configurational ramifications of the aural too. Testing Hearing helpfully turns our attention to consider how the power relations of listening and hearing are mediated by technologies ... the historicist volume reviewed here breaks new ground in focusing on the epistemic and politically charged issues of testing hearing. * Graeme Gooday, Technology & Culture * Comprehensive, multifaceted and absorbing, Testing Hearing is a major achievement, destined to become a classic of sound studies and beyond. * Veit Erlmann, University of Texas at Austin; Editor, Sound Studies *
Comprehensive, multifaceted and absorbing, Testing Hearing is a major achievement, destined to become a classic of sound studies and beyond. * Veit Erlmann, University of Texas at Austin; Editor, Sound Studies *
"""Highly Recommended."" -- M. Anderson, Southern Oregon University, CHOICE ""That hearing norms are 'built into all manner of audio apparatus, from telephones to stereo speakers' is one of many insights in this intriguing interdisciplinary collection. Historians, having too long focused on technology's visual aspects, can surely benefit from understanding the configurational ramifications of the aural too. Testing Hearing helpfully turns our attention to consider how the power relations of listening and hearing are mediated by technologies ... the historicist volume reviewedÂhere breaks new ground in focusing on the epistemic and politically charged issues of testing hearing."" -- Graeme Gooday, Technology & Culture ""Comprehensive, multifaceted and absorbing, Testing Hearing is a major achievement, destined to become a classic of sound studies and beyond."" -- Veit Erlmann, University of Texas at Austin; Editor, Sound Studies"
Author Information
Viktoria Tkaczyk, Professor for the History of Knowledge, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, Mara Mills, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, Alexandra Hui, Associate Professor of History, Mississippi State University Viktoria Tkaczyk is Professor of Media and Knowledge Technologies at Humboldt University in Berlin. Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University who works at the intersection of disability studies and media studies. Alexandra Hui is Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University and Co-Editor of the journal Isis.
