A machine to hear for them: On the very possibility of sound's reproduction

Although many writers have argued that the sound reproduction technologies invented in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States t ransformed cultural understandings of hearing, these technologies also embo dy prior changes in the meaning of hearing and function of the ear in ninet eenth century culture. Taking as its point of departure an analysis of the ear phonautograph (a machine that traced sound vibrations on smoked glass u sing an excised human middle ear), this essay shows how the ear assumed a n ew importance in nineteenth century life, culminating in its becoming a kin d of abstract model for sound reproduction technologies. Their physical for m, as well as their most basic mechanical function (the vibration of a diap hragm to produce sound) resulted from the interplay among researches on sou nd, the training of the deaf, the new science of otology, and the instituti ons of science and medicine during the third quarter of the nineteenth-cent ury. Based on this history, the essay argues for a new philosophy of sound that takes seriously the physiological, physical, and mechanical aspects of sound culture as dynamic-rather than static-elements within the history of sound.