List of Figures ix

List of Abbreviations for Archival and Other Historical Materials Cited xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Hello! 1

1. Machines to Hear for Them 31

2. Techniques of Listening 87

3. Audible Technique and Media 137

4. Plastic Aurality: Technologies into Media 179

5. The Social Genesis of Sound Fidelity 215

6. A Resonant Tomb 287

Conclusion: Audible Futures 335

Notes 353

Bibliography 415

Index 437

Co-winner of the Book of the Year Award, NCA Critical and Cultural Studies Division

Co-winner of the Book of the Year Award, NCA Critical and Cultural Studies Division

“Jonathan Sterne confronts what is certainly the most challenging topic in the study of auditory culture—what happened when modern technologies came crashing into ways of sound making, communicating and listening—with outstanding results. Through disciplined arguments bolstered by plenty of original research and with refreshing critiques of many cherished notions, The Audible Past forms a basis from which to address central questions of communication studies, musicology and music history, film sound and media studies, perception and culture, all those areas where listening and sound impinge upon cultural history and theory.”—Douglas Kahn, author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts — N/A

“Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past boldly stakes out a largely neglected but important topic, the history of sound in modern life.”—John Durham Peters, author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication — N/A

”Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past has come along to set the record straight on the cultural origins of sounds and systems, on machines and the mechanisms of culture. He’s come here to give us the lowdown on how the technology evolved. Think of the book as a kind of sonic map of the origins of the way we listen to things around us, as a primer for the sonically perplexed.”—Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid — N/A

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