The audible past: Modernity, technology, and the cultural history of sound

This dissertation is a cultural history of sound reproduction in American life. It examines the social and cultural origins, development, and deployment of sound reproduction technologies in the United States from about 1830 to about 1930, focusing especially (but not exclusively) on the telephone, phonograph, and radio. This work considers the history of the possibility of sound reproduction itself, rather than assessing the "impact" of preexisting technologies. It examines technologies of sound reproduction as social and cultural artifacts.;Using a range of primary source materials, the dissertation describes six processes, each at length and in turn, which take place over different stretches of time and in different areas of practice: the development of a practical philosophy (as opposed to a purely formal philosophy) and ideology of modernity and modernization as they pertain to sound; the changing economic and social conditions of invention and use of communication technologies; the isolation and metonymization of a particular operation---the tympanic---as a trope of sound's functioning in the world; the emergence of a set of related and transposable techniques of listening and deprivileging or relativizing of the voice as the center of sensible sonic communication; the construction of a relationship of first mediation and then transparency or equivalence between the heterogeneous social practices of face-to-face sound communication and the tympanic reproduction of sound, thereby creating a possible relationship of transposable simultaneity; and the reification of that process whereby recorded sound becomes history in and of itself, thereby affording sound a transposable temporality and an apparent though entirely conditioned autonomy of reproducibility itself. These processes are not necessarily historically sequential, nor is any one entirely a condition of possibility for another. They are, however, all interconnected and discrete elements of sound's reproducibility and the history of the possibility of sound reproduction.;To summarize, the dissertation uses the history of meanings surrounding sound reproduction as an entry point into the cultural history of sound itself. By denaturalizing sound's cultural significance, this project reconsiders the history of the senses and the privileging of vision in theory and historiography.