| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. By Jonathan Sterne. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. xvi, 450 pp. Cloth, $69.95, ISBN 0-8223-3004-0. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8223-3013-X.)
In this engaging study, the interdisciplinary communications scholar Jonathan Sterne attempts to bring new coherence to what might be called sound studies. The Audible Past—his debut book, based on his dissertation—asserts that "the history of sound must move beyond recovering experience to interrogating the conditions under which that experience became possible in the first place" (p. 28). Thus Sterne tells the story of what he calls "Ensoniment," or the "modern organization of sound" (p. 340).	1
Sterne focuses less on the technology of sound (which has been covered by others) and the lived experience of hearing (which is perhaps impossible to recover) than on the changing "audile technique" employed by various actors in turn-of-the-century America: "a set of practices of listening that were articulated to science, reason, and instrumentality and that encouraged the coding and rationalization of what was heard" (p. 23). Sterne argues that Capitalism, cities, industries, the medicalization of the human body, colonialism, the emergence of a new middle class, and a host of other phenomena turn out to be vital elements of the history of sound—and sound turns out to be a vital element of their history. (p. 343)	. . .

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