Learning to Listen, Again

What did a Renaissance garden sound like? How does a sand dune sing, and who has listened to it across a thousand years? What did revolution sound like in 1790s Saint-Domingue, and in the German parliament in 1848? How did an Ottoman envoy hear eighteenth-century Paris, India, Iran, North Africa, or Vienna—and how did Vienna, gripped by the Spanish flu a century and a half later, hear itself? What does a scream prove in an early modern courtroom, and what does silence concede? How did the devil get into the ears of nineteenth-century Tyrolean Catholics? What do the bells of Famagusta still know about the city that held them high in the air? And what does a 1918 recording of a deaf activist’s voice ask of a field that calls itself auditory?

Though these questions might sound like the contents of a feverish notebook, they are in fact a sample of the papers delivered this March in Paris at the inaugural conference of the IMS Study Group “Auditory History”—four days in which musicologists, historians of all kinds, acousticians, curators, media scholars, musicians, and sound artists convened around the question that gave the conference its title: “What is Auditory History?”¹ I will resist answering that question directly, partly because my co-organizer Salih Demirtaş and I have learned that the question alone is more productive than any single answer, and partly because the papers taken together answered it better than any definition could. Beneath their dazzling variety, every one wrestled with the same underlying problem, one that animated each discipline represented in the room—call it the problem of listening.

We all know that we have no recordings in the obvious sense of sound or music before the advent of sound recording in the mid-nineteenth century. What we do have are documents of historical listening, and no listening is ever neutral: every source that records a sound records, first and inescapably, the ear that heard it—its training, its expectations, its social position, its prejudices. While there are material traces of sound, of course (a space’s acoustic, a surviving bell, musical instruments), every written record of sound is authored twice: first by the ear and then by the hand. Even musical notation, which is, as Thomas Forrest Kelly reminds us, an early technology of recording, is no exception, since a score preserves only what an ear had already been trained to value.² This applies to notation, but also to the whole written record of sound and music.

The clearest example of this listening problem is a case of a demonstrably expert listener who still failed to hear. On 18 September 1577, in the Abruzzese port of Vasto, the Dominican friar Serafino Razzi was invited to tour a great Ragusan merchant ship, reportedly the largest afloat. The ship had anchored off the port a week before, and Razzi went as a sightseer, along with the town’s sworn master, its physician, the Prior of Sant’Agostino, and a few others. Razzi was duly dazzled: he marveled at the carved and gilded ceilings, the forge, the freshwater cistern, the little onboard garden; he listened with pleasure to some twenty ship’s boys kneeling to recite the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, and the Salve Regina before their meal. He also noted the crew’s remarkable acoustic discipline for he heard no quarrels, no brawls, no noise at all, “except when the crew laboured,” at which point, to unite their forces, they all sounded together “a certain voice of theirs without meaning.” Aboard a ship, he adds, a man without a good voice is worth little—“just as in a choir singing psalms to God.”³

Razzi was no casual witness but a trained listener, a famed compiler of laude, a man who elsewhere in his writings listened attentively and critically to liturgical polyphony. His ear was, we could claim, by the standards of his century, expert. And it is precisely this expert ear that hears the work-chant’s coordination, values its vocal quality, and reaches for the loftiest comparison his sound world affords, the psalmody of divine office. Yet, at the very moment of paying the sound its compliment, he withholds the content—the words and language, the tune, the affect—the one thing that would make it a document. The nameless, unwritten chant enters the historical record as what Razzi calls a sound without meaning: its function acknowledged, words declared empty, and nothing transcribed. A work-chant, however, is saturated with meaning: it coordinates labor, binds a diverse crew, and marks them as a community. That such sound registers on Razzi’s expert ear as senza significato is not a fact about the chant but about the limits of an ear trained on psalmody and polyphony—an ear that could hear, in a sailor’s song, only the absence of the music it knew. This makes the passage so instructive for the listening problem, since the interpretation barrier is Razzi’s own categorization; even the best-trained, most sympathetic historical ear possessed no slot in which a sailors’ work-chant could register as something worth writing down, leaving one of the countless vernacular sound worlds of the early modern Adriatic to survive only as the shape of its own omission.

A music history built on Razzi’s categories inherits the limits of his ear. It will comb his chronicle for the polyphony, the organ, the named singers and pass over the sailors in silence, because the source itself instructs us that there was nothing there to hear. The auditory historian, however, refuses the instruction—without pretending to a clean escape, for the historian’s own ear is no less trained or situated. The difference is that auditory history makes that training part of its method rather than an unexamined premise. Read against its author’s ear, the Vasto passage becomes an eloquent sonic travel document: a rare direct mention of a sixteenth-century work song surviving only as its own dismissal,⁴ a suppressed sound world flickering into the record at the very moment of its suppression, and a precise demonstration of how social power is sounded—by distributing, among the people within earshot, the right to make sense.

Auditory history, however, inherits more than it invents. Ethnomusicology broke from the work-object a century ago and has long read sound as culture, latterly reaching deep into the archive: Jacob Olley’s reconstruction of listening at the court of Murad IV, from Evliya Çelebi’s seventeenth-century Seyahatnâme, is historical audition in all but name.⁵ Sound studies, too, has written the history of aurality well before and beyond the modern West: Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s account of how nineteenth-century Colombia was heard, drawn entirely from a written colonial archive in the absence of recordings, is a signal instance.⁶ If auditory history names anything distinct, it is therefore not a new object or a new period but a convergence, the meeting of historical source criticism with the insight, long held in these neighboring fields, that hearing is cultural and has a past. Its provocation runs less to these allies than to a music history still heavily organized around the work. Its wager is only that the ordinary written archive, read for the listening it performs, holds far more of that history than the discipline has yet drawn upon. Furthermore, that archive spanning chronicles, treatises, payment records, statutes, travelogues, and notated music itself has always been an archive of listening, compiled by historically situated ears whose judgements about what counted as music, as noise, as nothing, determined what reached the archive at all. We have long read these documents for the sounds they record; we are only beginning to read them for the listening they perform, including its exclusions, its condescensions, and its failures. Razzi’s ship was no exception.

Like every sound, every silence in the archive has an author, whether apparent or not. Taken seriously, this doubles the discipline’s archival evidence, for the same chronicle yields both a repertoire and an ear; a criminal deposition that never mentions music testifies to a whole acoustics of credibility; a ship’s chronicle like Razzi’s maps the edge of one listener’s auditory world. Equally so, it populates music history with its largest under-heard constituency: the listeners—expert and untrained, willing and coerced, hearing and deaf—through whom every sound we study actually passed. While Razzi offers one example, the problem persists across sources, (sub)disciplines, historical periods, and global regions. It is a condition of every tradition’s archive, on every shore, each filtered through its own historically situated ears, and what survives of any sound world is everywhere the residue of someone’s judgement about what deserved to be heard.

If this sounds like a quarrel with musicology, it is in fact a quarrel the discipline has long been having with(in) itself. Since Adler’s founding charter of 1885,⁷ and beneath it Hanslick’s formalism, music history consolidated around the musical work as a single privileged object and around the style-historical account of its making. Listening was never wholly absent (Riemann theorized musikalisches Hören as early as 1874, and Besseler built a historical typology of hearing in the twentieth century⁸), but in that lineage, the listener was studied chiefly as the apprehender of the work; the ear tuned to an already composed structure. Reception history widened the aperture without moving the center and asked how audiences received the repertoire, but not what the past heard when no music was sounding.⁹ Acoustemology—Steven Feld’s term for sound as a way of knowing, of being emplaced in a world¹⁰—proposes the more fundamental shift, and auditory history is, in part, its historiographical consequence. Acoustemology and auditory history ask how listeners heard and experienced the work, but it is mainly interested in what hearing did, knew, and excluded, in a given past—treating the work, where there is one, as a single object within a total field of audition rather than as a starting point from which to measure listening. The recent turn toward histories of aural knowledge and technique, in sound studies and a sound-minded musicology alike,¹¹ is feeling its way toward the same recognition: that audibility itself has a history, and that this history is not reducible to the history of music.

Is auditory history, then, a subdiscipline, a paradigm, a methodology, a sensibility? After the conference in Paris, I am inclined to think we can call it a discipline of second hearing—a trained habit of listening to our sources listening—and to ask of every document and every epoch: who heard this, who heard whom, how did they hear, and under what conditions? Only then, I believe, can we start asking what they heard, where it came from, and what it meant. Whether we can truly hear the past remains, deliberately, an open question. The conference, however, both diagnosed the problem and modeled responses to it. Some turned outward toward the present: Mariana López’s acoustic imaginaries offered different ways of showcasing historical sound in contemporary displays, and Sarah Lappin’s “listening site visits” asked how a vanished sonic past might be reconstructed and curated for an audience that must hear it now. Others turned toward the listeners the archive had overlooked, by quite different routes: Jessica Sternbach reading the “female ear” from Dutch domestic painting, Sarah Fuchs listening to the d/Deaf history held in 1918 recordings. Neither thread mistook its reconstructions for the past itself, and both treated the gap between then and now as the object of study rather than an embarrassment to be hidden. These four days of papers affirmed that the past can teach us how it heard—and that music history, which has long studied how its repertoire was heard, is well equipped to study everything else that was heard, too.

1. To learn more about the conference, see https://auditoryhistory.musicology.org/conference.
2. See Thomas Forrest Kelly, Capturing Music: The Story of Notation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014).
3. “Quivi non sono contenzioni, o risse: quivi non si sentono romori, se non quando faticano, peroché all’hora per meglio, dicono, unire le forze, tutti risuonano certa loro voce senza significato. Onde dicono che in nave chi non ha voce buona poco vale: come eziandio in un choro di salmeggianti a Dio.” Serafino Razzi, I viaggi adriatici di Serafino Razzi (1572–1577), ed. Monica De Rosa ([s.l.]: Edizioni digitali del CISVA, 2007), 129–30.
4. For more on “shanties before shanties,” see Mollie Carlyle, “Shanties Before ‘Shanties’? Early Work-Song Traditions in the Account of the Voyages of Brother Felix Fabri (1484)” in SOUNDSHIP (22 December 2025), accessed 13 July 2026, https://soundship.uk/2025/12/21/shanties-before-shanties-a-guest-post-by-dr-mollie-carlyle.
5. Jacob Olley, “Evliya’s Song: Listening to the Early Modern Ottoman Court,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 76, no. 3 (2023): 645–703.
6. Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
7. Guido Adler, “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft,” Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1 (1885): 5–20.
8. See Hugo Riemann, Über das musikalische Hören (Leipzig: Druck von Fr. Andrä’s Nachfolger, 1874); Heinrich Besseler, Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1959).
9. See James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
10. Steven Feld, “Acoustemology,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 12–21. See also “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea,” in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996), 91–135.
11. See, among others, Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010).