Spaces of the Ear: Literature, Media, and the Science of Sound, 1870-1930

Spaces of the Ear examines the concomitant emergence of new forms of acoustical embodiment across the diverse fields of literature and science in the historical period beginning with the Franco-Prussian War and ending with the introduction of early information theory in the late 1920s. In opposition to popular accounts of changes in listening practices around 1900, which typically take the disembodied voices of new media such as the phonograph and radio as true markers of acoustical modernity, the dissertation emphasizes the proliferation of new modes of embodied listening made possible by the explosion of urban and industrial noise, contemporary media technologies, the threat of auditory surveillance, and the imposition of self-observational and self-disciplinary practices as constitutive of artistic, scientific, and everyday life. In doing so, I show how distinct elements of modern soundscapes and corresponding techniques of listening informed both the key thematic and formal elements of literary modernism. In particular, I argue that modernism's often-cited narrative self-reflexivity drew on conceptions of a uniquely embodied listener and the newfound audibility of the body, and overlapped with contemporaneous scientific knowledge surrounding the physiology of the ear and the role of the body in the perception of sound. Chapter 1 focuses on the role of non-literary discourse on urban noise and the cacophony of the modern battlefield in formal developments central to late nineteenth-century literary aesthetics, taking the largely forgotten Austrian impressionist Peter Altenberg as my primary case study. In Chapter 2 I analyze the ways in which Franz Kafka appropriated elements of the modern soundscape and, in particular, ontological disorders common to the factory worker, in conceptualizing the mechanisms of the modern legal system and its epistemological and perceptual effects on its subjects. Chapter 3 again focuses on works by Kafka, this time juxtaposing scientific practices of self-observation within acoustical research with Kafka's literal and metaphorical figurations of self-auscultation and its function as a narrative strategy in "The Burrow" (1923/24). Chapters 4 and 5 sketch out a competing conception of hearing within Gestalt psychology, early stereophonic sound experiments, and literary texts by Robert Musil, which portray the modern listener as surprisingly active and confident in deciphering and navigating an increasingly complex auditory environment. In the process, the site of acoustical embodiment is displaced from the side of the subject to that of the object, engendering notions of "auditory things (Hördinge)" with physical, corporeal properties, which can be traced through space as three-dimensional entities. In the final chapter, I situate the effacement of the listener's body and simultaneous foregrounding of `auditory things' in Musil's novella, "The Blackbird (1928), against the backdrop of early information theory and non-corporeal notions of Rauschen (noise, rustling, static)

Vocal imitations and the identification of sound events

International audienceIt is commonly observed that a speaker vocally imitates a sound that she or he intends to communicate to an interlocutor. We report on an experiment that examined the assumption that vocal imitations can e ffectively communicate a referent sound, and that they do so by conveying the features necessary for the identifi cation of the referent sound event. Subjects were required to sort a set of vocal imitations of everyday sounds. The resulting clusters corresponded in most of the cases to the categories of the referent sound events, indicating that the imitations enabled the listeners to recover what was imitated. Furthermore, a binary decision tree analysis showed that a few characteristic acoustic features predicted the clusters. These features also predicted the classi fication of the referent sounds, but did not generalize to the categorization of other sounds. This showed that, for the speaker, vocally imitating a sound consists of conveying the acoustic features important for recognition, within the constraints of human vocal production. As such vocal imitations prove to be a phenomenon potentially useful to study sound identifi cation

Which words are most iconic?:Iconicity in English sensory words

Some spoken words are iconic, exhibiting a resemblance between form and meaning. We used native speaker ratings to assess the iconicity of 3001 English words, analyzing their iconicity in relation to part-of-speech differences and differences between the sensory domain they relate to (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell). First, we replicated previous findings showing that onomatopoeia and interjections were highest in iconicity, followed by verbs and adjectives, and then nouns and grammatical words. We further show that words with meanings related to the senses are more iconic than words with abstract meanings. Moreover, iconicity is not distributed equally across sensory modalities: Auditory and tactile words tend to be more iconic than words denoting concepts related to taste, smell and sight. Last, we examined the relationship between iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularity between form and meaning). We find that iconicity in English words is more strongly related to sensory meanings than systematicity. Altogether, our results shed light on the extent and distribution of iconicity in modern English

Sonic Skills

It is common for us today to associate the practice of science primarily with the act of seeing—with staring at computer screens, analyzing graphs, and presenting images. We may notice that physicians use stethoscopes to listen for disease, that biologists tune into sound recordings to understand birds, or that engineers have created Geiger tellers warning us for radiation through sound. But in the sciences overall, we think, seeing is believing. This open access book explains why, indeed, listening for knowledge plays an ambiguous, if fascinating, role in the sciences. For what purposes have scientists, engineers and physicians listened to the objects of their interest? How did they listen exactly? And why has listening often been contested as a legitimate form of access to scientific knowledge? This concise monograph combines historical and ethnographic evidence about the practices of listening on shop floors, in laboratories, field stations, hospitals, and conference halls, between the 1920s and today. It shows how scientists have used sonic skills—skills required for making, recording, storing, retrieving, and listening to sound—in ensembles: sets of instruments and techniques for particular situations of knowledge making. Yet rather than pleading for the emancipation of hearing at the expense of seeing, this essay investigates when, how, and under which conditions the ear has contributed to science dynamics, either in tandem with or without the eye

A rationale and suggestions for including sound symbolic expressive vocabulary in university-level Japanese language classroom instruction

textThe Japanese language is unusually rich in a variety of sound symbolic words. Sound imitation is used to reflect physical, audible noises relating to the actions or movements of people, animals, and things. Such words are also used to express imitation of manner to portray feelings and figurative meanings. These expressions are found in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from classical literature to daily conversation, to manga (the trendy comic books read extensively by virtually every age group in Japan). Sound symbolic vocabulary adds a vividness and flair to the Japanese language, making it colorful, creative, and psychologically expressive. These words have common structural features and syntactic functions that make them readily identifiable (though, perhaps, not at a conscious level for the native speaker) as a lexical group. And yet, despite their undeniable presence in all areas of language use, sound symbolic words have been virtually ignored in Japanese language textbooks and classroom instruction. They continue to represent, to outsiders, at least, one of the most elusive and least understood aspects of the Japanese language. In this dissertation, I frame my discussion of characteristics of sound symbolic vocabulary by first reviewing the literature on Japanese sound symbolic vocabulary and on vocabulary acquisition in L1 and L2. I then discuss the results of interviews with textbook authors and language educators concerning the teaching of sound symbolic words. Although they expressed some divergent views, for the most part they agreed that these words do play an important role and should be introduced to students in manageable increments, at a point when students have acquired enough knowledge to make learning meaningful. Imagery-based pictorial, verbal, and contextual responses to 100 sound symbolic words given by 50 Japanese native speakers are presented. I then provide suggestions for classroom instruction of sound symbolic vocabulary based on a constructivist model using metalinguistic previews and imagery-based elaboration strategies, offering a sample “snapshot” lesson. Ramifications of this dissertation should help students increase their knowledge of and ability to communicate using real-life Japanese, greatly expand their word power, and make significant progress to greater language proficiency.Curriculum and Instructio

Investigating the spatial understanding of children who are blind through the use of the child's voice

This thesis is intended to impact positively on our ability to understand and describe spatial awareness of children who are blind by investigating children’s explanations, understanding, feelings and coping strategies in their use of space in their everyday experience. It examines whether children who are blind are capable of providing reliable information that informs our knowledge of how they perceive space and how they achieve spatial understanding. The thesis also examines whether children’s voices inform the ideas, the theoretical perspectives and the positions adopted by researchers over the years that are found in the literature, in this complex field. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the theoretical understanding of children’s experience of spatiality and the diversity of environmental circumstances to which they need to adapt. The results are also discussed in terms of their implications for practice by providing practitioners with theorized evidence of practice that supports the effective learning. Taken together, the evidence suggests that children who are blind are able to verbalize their knowledge about spatial relationships using a wide range of sensory and cognitive strategies and demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of space; thus suggesting that cognitive experiments may not be the only way to study spatial processing in children who are blind

Soundscape mapping: comparing listening experiences

The perceived auditory environment is an increasingly important part of people’s everyday interactive experiences. While sound design is an established discipline in media such as video games and cinema, this is not the case in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). HCI designers are rarely trained in sound design, and may not make the most effective use of sound in the design of interactions. Even when sound is at the centre of a design it is rarely evaluated to compare the experiences of designers and listeners. This dissertation reports work conducted to develop a way of comparing sound designers’ intentions for a sound design with the experiences of listeners. Literature on methods of measuring, classifying and visualising sound was reviewed, as well as approaches to sound design in different forms of media and computing. A published method for representing auditory environments was selected for preliminary studies. The four studies addressed to the difficulties of describing auditory environments and how they might be visualised. Two surveys were conducted in order to identify attributes of sound that would be meaningful to 75 audio professionals and 40 listeners. A way of classifying and visualising sound events and their distribution in physical environments was developed and evaluated.The soundscape mapping tool (SMT) was trialled with sound designs from a range of fields within media and computing. The experiences of both the designer and listeners were captured for each of the designs using the SMT. This work demonstrated that the SMT was suitable for capturing the intentions of 10 sound designers and the experiences of 100 listeners. The trial also provided information about how the SMT could be developed further. The dissertation contributes evidence that auditory environments can be abstracted and visualised in a manner that allows designers to represent their designs, and listeners to record their experiences