The debate surrounding the introduction of new musical instruments is examined as a way to elicit norms underlying musical practice and culture. The paper details the introduction of three twentieth century instruments: the player piano, the "noise instruments" of the futurists and the electronic music synthesizer. The responses to these new instruments both among classical performers and in the realm of popular culture reveal how traditional norms of musical creativity associated with personal achievement have been supplemented with new norms of democratized leisure and how with the emergence of the noise instruments and synthesizer a new value has been placed upon "uncertainty recontrolled". The paper explores the tension between continuity and change in regard to these musical norms and values.
We tend to associate the sciences with seeing-but scientists, engineers, and physicians also use their ears as a means for acquiring knowledge. This chapter introduces this essay's key questions about the role of sound and practices of listening in the sciences, and explicates their relevance for understanding the dynamics of science more generally. It defines the notion of sonic skills, situating it in the wider literature on the auditory dimensions of making knowledge. It presents the case studies on which the essay draws, explaining their geographical, temporal, and methodological scope and the researchers behind them. Keywords Listening for knowledge • Sonic skills • Science • Medicine • Engineering Acoustic signAtures On the afternoon of July 11, 2014, Dutch Public Radio 1 broadcast an interview with science journalist Diederik Jekel. He had breaking news: American geologists had discovered a "super ocean" some 300 miles below the earth's surface. The journalist immediately added a qualification. What the Americans had actually found were some stone minerals, originating from the earth's deep layers, that included water molecules. This prompted the talk show host to ask how certain scientists could be of the super ocean's existence. The journalist explained that the CHAPTER 1
This article investigates the role of listening in the knowledge making practices of Western scientists, engineers, and physicians from the 1920s onwards. It does so by offering a two-dimensional typology of the modes of listening that they employ. Distinguishing between two dimensions allows us to make sense both of the purpose and of the ways in which scientists, engineers, and physicians have listened to their objects of study; and it also allows us to appreciate the importance of shifting between modes of listening. At the same time, we argue, understanding the role of sound in knowledge making cannot be limited to the study of listening alone; rather, we have to pay attention to how listening is embedded in broader sonic skills-including the handling of tools for the making, recording, storing, and retrieving of sounds. keywords sound studies, listening, skills, history of science, engineering and medicine Well and sorrowfully do we know the listener who is no listener at all, who passively sits through a concert, intellectually contributing nothing; waiting, like a cabbage or a stone, for something to happen to him. He hears without listening.
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