Hearing History: A Reader.

Hearing History: A Reader. Edited by Mark M. Smith. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Pp. xxii, 413. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 0-8203-2583-X; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8203-2582-1.)

It is hardly surprising that the history of sound has been relatively overlooked in the social sciences, given that Americans are continually engaged with the visual. In the last ten years there has been important research in many fields, and much of it is reproduced in this reader. Mark M. Smith has compiled more than twenty articles that address the changing soundscapes of modern life, ranging from the classic theories (such as Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music [Minneapolis, 1985]) to the latest research on specific times and places (including Richard Cullen Rath's excellent How Early America Sounded, which was published by Cornell University Press in 2003). Each article has been expertly abridged so that these four hundred pages cover a lot of ground and sample many different approaches. The book is divided into three sections: the first deals with theory, the second with case studies from Europe, and the third concentrates on the United States. Taken together these essays make up an excellent introduction to aural history showing not only a broad range of scholarly interests but also how research into sound and hearing can inform our understanding of the past.

While it cannot be denied that history is still a visually dominated discipline, this reader shows that historians are beginning to listen with an unprecedented frequency and keenness. Smith points out in his introduction that interest in the history of sound is partly the consequence of the rise of auditory technologies, such as sound recording and telephony, and the important role they play in our daily lives. Several essays in this volume chronicle the impact of the phonograph: how it strengthened the Victorian preoccupation with voices of the dead, how it renegotiated the dividing lines drawn between the races, and how--in the hands of anthropologists and ethno-musicologists--it helped to fix the so-called dying cultures of Native Americans in time.

The editor gives equal weight to both welcome and unwelcome sounds, and consequently noise receives as much attention as music in this volume. Thomas A. Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, preferred to live most of his life behind the protective barrier of his deafness, avoiding the cacophony of the ever-noisier city and the blight of what composer John Philip Sousa called "canned music" (p. 298). Several authors point out that noise was becoming oppressive in early modern Europe, and Bruce R. Smith shows in his survey of English soundscapes that noise played an essential part in business and pleasure, from the cries of hawkers to "the burps and belches" of the taverns (p. 93). In the last hundred years the background of unwanted sounds has become oppressive, and the dividing line between music and noise has been continually eroded. Hearing History: A Reader shows that the responses to these changing soundscapes ranged from exuberant acceptance of the modern age to calls for regulation and the development of sound-insulating technologies. In the words of Jacques Attali, "death alone is silent" (p. 10).

Historians of the South will find several essays in this reader of special interest. Shane White and Graham White explore black religious expression in the antebellum South in "Listening to Southern Slavery." They examine both black and white responses to the raucous religious celebrations of black churches, showing that tone and rhythm were often more important to slave ears than intellectual content. Charles D. Ross shows the role of sound in directing Civil War battles, and his contribution joins several others in underlining the potential of studying the ways that people listened and analyzing what they heard. The case studies presented range from France in the ancien regime to nineteenth-century New England, and each one shows how sounds were invested with significant meanings.

In his essay "Soundscapes and Earwitnesses," R. Murray Schafer argues that sounds and music can act as a mirror of a society, a means of accessing social conditions at a particular time (p. 6). The essays in this reader prove his point, covering large swaths of history and illuminating important social relationships. This densely packed volume provides an excellent introduction to the research in the history and meaning of sound.

ANDRE J. MILLARD

University of Alabama at Birmingham