Publication Companions
This page presents objects from our database that are mentioned in a publication and are available here for further research or teaching purposes. The authors of the corresponding books and articles have provided more source material than they could mention or illustrate in their publications. This service is therefore intended as a publication companion.
Unsound Supplies
by Fanny Gribenski, David Pantalony and Viktoria Tkaczyk
Unsound Supplies draws attention to the problematic, elusive provenance of “raw materials” that underpin the rich musical cultures of modernity. The volume comprises ten chapters, each devoted to a specific material—from African ivory to transatlantic-traded rubber, manila paper, Brazilian Pernambuco wood, tropical mahogany, Indian jackfruit trees, and steel, aluminum, wax, and shellac from [...]
2025
Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality
by Viktoria Tkaczyk, Mara Mills and Alexandra Hui
Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality shows how new forms of testing contributed not only to new understandings of hearing but to completely new ways of hearing. From diagnostic surveys of school children, to training regimes for sonar operators, to a community’s use of noise complaints to test their state’s power, this volume showcases twelve historical case studies spanning 200 years. [...]
May 14, 2024
Aural Speed Reading
by Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne
Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne, “Aural Speed Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks,” PMLA 135, no. 2 (March 2020). This essay is a contribution to the growing taxonomy of techniques of listening. It discusses the cultural imperative for aural speed reading among blind Talking Book readers, dating to the 1930s, that drove time-stretching innovations in the magnetic tape era, allowing playback [...]
January 9, 2024
Listening to the Archive
by Carolyn Birdsall and Viktoria Tkaczyk
This Special Issue of Technology and Culture asks how new technologies for recording and archiving sounds impacted on scientific research and academic infrastructures from the late nineteenth century on. [...]
April 14, 2019
