Testing Hearing

Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality argues that the modern cultural practices of hearing and testing have emerged from a long interrelationship. Since the early nineteenth century, auditory test tools (whether organ pipes or electronic tone generators) and the results of hearing tests have fed back into instrument calibration, human training, architecture, and the creation of new musical sounds. Hearing tests received a further boost around 1900 as a result of injury compensation laws and state and professional demands for aptitude testing in schools, conservatories, the military, and other fields. Applied at large scale, tests of seemingly small measure-of auditory acuity, of hearing range-helped redefine the modern concept of hearing as such. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the epistemic function of hearing expanded. Hearing took on the dual role of test object and test instrument; in the latter case, human hearing became a gauge by which to evaluate or regulate materials, nonhuman organisms, equipment, and technological systems. This book considers both the testing of hearing and testing with hearing to explore the co-creation of modern epistemic and auditory cultures. The book's twelve contributors trace the design of ever more specific tests for the arts, education and communication, colonial and military applications, sociopolitical and industrial endeavors. Together, they demonstrate that testing as such became an enduring and wide-ranging cultural technique in the modern period, one that is situated between histories of scientific experimentation and many fields of application.

Viktoria Tkaczyk is Professor of Media and Knowledge Technologies at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University who works at the intersection of disability studies and media studies.
Alexandra Hui is Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University and Co-Editor of the journal Isis.

- Testing Hearing: An Introduction
- Alexandra Hui, Mara Mills, and Viktoria Tkaczyk
- Sorting and Screening Human Hearers:
- Testing the Culturally Molded Ear
- Testing Hearing with Speech
- Mara Mills
- The Testing of a Hundred Listeners: Otto Abraham's Studies on "Absolute Tone Consciousness"
- Viktoria Tkaczyk
- Murray Island versus Aberdeenshire: Contextualizing the Cross-Cultural Hearing Tests of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, 1898-1899
- Sebastian Klotz
- Designing Instruments, Calibrating machines
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- Hearing Perfection
- Emily I. Dolan
- Opelt's Siren and the Technologies of Musical Hearing
- Alexander Rehding
- The Software Passes the Test When the User Fails It: Constructing Digital Models of Analog Signal Processors
- Jonathan Sterne
- Managing Sound, Assessing Space
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- To Hear As I Do: The Concessions of Hearing in Taiwan's Noise Management System
- Jennifer Hsieh
- Testing Spatial Hearing and the Development of Kunstkopf Technology, 1957-1981
- Stefan Krebs
- Absorption, Transmission, Reflection: Testing Materials in the Laboratory
- Roland Wittje
- World as Testbed:
- Testing beyond Human Auditory Perception
- Of Silent Sirens and Pied Pipers: Auditory Thresholds and High-Frequency Technologies of Animal Control
- Joeri Bruyninckx
- Testing the Underwater Ear: Hearing, Standardizing, and Classifying Marine Sounds from World War I to the Cold War
- Lino Camprubí and Alexandra Hui
- This Is Not a Test: Listening with Günther Anders in the Nuclear Age
- Benjamin Steege
- Afterword
- Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Trevor Pinch