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.
Industry Reviews
"[Testing Hearing's] narratives are so convincing and insightful because they are rooted in long-standing interdisciplinaryÂtraditions ofÂresearch in studies of science and technology, urban studies, music an musicology, and because they draw on rigorous research in archives that have been madeÂrelevant through a focus on sound and hearing. The authorsâ are able to ask new questions about sound and hearing because they can
comfortably navigate claims and approaches at the intersections of fields of which they have intimate knowledge." -- Karin Bijsterveld, Journal of the Royal Musical Association
"This book shows that testing has long been critically embedded at the level of infrastructures...The second major intervention of this volume is its attention to the epistemic value of the aural to scientific practice. By bringing sound studies into conversation with history of science, this collection provides a new framework for analyzing the "co-creation of modern epistemic and auditory cultures" (p. 2). This broad framework aligns with a global focus, and
this breadth reveals how science happens outside of traditional testing arenas. Testing hearing takes place not in laboratories but in laundromats, on streets, in submarines, studios, stages, and
societies." -- Coreen McGuire, Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society
"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 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
"Testing Hearing explores 'the co-creation of epistemic and auditory cultures-indeed, the creation of modern aurality'...Testing Hearing has a thematic architecture, with sections focusing on the history of tests that screened human hearers 'out' and 'in'...Testing Hearing is also exemplary in its involvement of two experts in testing in the sciences, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Trevor Pinch, who offer supplementary commentaries on
the collection' chapters from, respectively, the perspective of the history of science and that of science and technology studies (STS)." -- Karin Bijsterveld, Royal Musical Association
