Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality ed. by Viktoria Tkaczyk et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality ed. by Viktoria Tkaczyk et al. Graeme Gooday (bio) Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality Edited by Viktoria Tkaczyk, Mara Mills, and Alexandra Hui. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 352. Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality Edited by Viktoria Tkaczyk, Mara Mills, and Alexandra Hui. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 352. That hearing norms are "built into all manner of audio apparatus, from telephones to stereo speakers" is one of many insights in this intriguing interdisciplinary collection (p. 11). Historians, having (too) long focused on technology's visual aspects, can surely benefit from understanding the configurational ramifications of the aural too. Testing Hearing helpfully turns our attention to consider how the power relations of listening and hearing are mediated by technologies. The topic of "aurality" is so novel that unlike its older lexical siblings—"orality" (seventeenth century) and "visuality" (nineteenth century)—it does not yet even register in the Oxford English Dictionary. Sympathetic readers might wonder whether the aural has already been sufficiently explored in the STS subdiscipline of Sound Studies, such as by editors Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld in Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford University Press, 2011). Yet the historicist volume reviewed here breaks new ground in focusing on the epistemic and politically charged issues of testing hearing. Accordingly, this collection is organized in an interconnected four-part structure: testing human hearers, designing, and calibrating teaching instruments, spatially managing the environments of sound testing, and testing beyond human auditory perception. In their introduction, Tkaczyk, Mills, and Hui show us how, over the last century and a half, a wide range of practitioners in music, medicine, and telecommunications have aurally tested many categories of people in diverse ways for multifarious reasons in ever more hi-tech enterprises. The editors anatomize modern aurality as the "co-creation of modern epistemic and auditory cultures" (p. 2). In that context, testing is unavoidably a political technology since it "calibrates, disciplines, and normalizes individuals, groups, populations, materials, and technologies" (p. 6). So strongly do the editors take this new aural Foucauldianism that they claim somewhat elliptically: "Hearing no longer exists without audiometry" (p. 7). While they center modern aurality on the paradigm of "normal hearing," many readers would have welcomed an explanation of how this suppositional norm emerged as an expedient statistical construct of AT&T's telecommunications efficiency drives in the 1920s (p. 9). Among the chapters most likely to interest historians of technology is Mara Mills' piece, "Testing Hearing with Speech." This chapter documents U.S. physicians' less-than-successful attempts to turn the Bell telephone into a variable amplification device that could test its users' hearing capacity at the end of the nineteenth century. Mills demonstrates that the difficulties [End Page 618] encountered with early audiometers prompted clinicians to move instead to the spoken word in diagnosing the degree and nature of hearing loss in canonical screening tests. Similarly sensitive to the limits of technologized aurality is Sebastian Klotz's analysis of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898–1899; a broad battery of hearing tests revealed more about expeditioners' assumptions than the hearing capacities of their islander test subjects. Yet the ramifications of their 'Western' methods can subsequently be found operating at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 and in the testing methods of German psychology. Further highlights from more recent times include Jonathan Sterne's study of competing epistemologies of sound in the construction of digital models of analog signal processors. As Sterne puts it: "Who gets to signal process and under what conditions is a central question of media theory, and the very question that is left aside at the moment of the listening test" (p. 181). Jennifer Hsieh's study of a state-run noise management system in modern Taiwan is equally insightful, revealing how this system "became a modernizing project that standardized the hearing of noise through an epistemology of testing" (p. 190). Especially revealing is Joeri Bruyninckx's examination of how pest control by ultrasound exploited knowledge of how many species' hearing range extended beyond the human. Similarly valuable in going beyond the immediately hearable...