The noise of the time machine: The “history of sound” as a mediated experience

Abstract

Taking Jürgen Müller's (2012) article The sound of history and acoustic memory: Where psychology and history converge as a starting point, we make a critical reflection about the way in which sound has been represented in history and the many ways in which the intersection between sound and history has been understood. We centre our critique on two components of Müller's work. The first of these is a bias according to which the past is seen as a reality that can be accessed directly, as if one could travel back in time. The second is the mixture of different aspects in the definition of the historiography of sound, including levels, methods, objects and very disparate subjects under study. We suggest that the experience of the past is necessarily mediated by the conditions of the present, and the work of historiography is always subject to certain intentions. KeywordsHistorical realism, historiographical theory, history of sound, mediated experience, oral historyIn his interesting article about acoustic memory and history, Ju¨rgen Mu¨ller (2012) rightly claims that historiography should take full advantage of sound. He restores the resource of sounds as a tool to better understand the past. He underlines the fact that most historians only recur to texts, and more recently to images. Against this, Mu¨ller defends that the use of acoustic memory allows for a more trustworthy and complete image of the past. In this sense, he asks that better historiographic attention be paid to sounds, understood in diverse forms: as soundscapes from