Loud public spaces, non-stop advertisements, intrusive media: concerns around the leeching of attention that sound familiar now began to take shape in the late 18th century, said Cornell music scholar Carmel Raz.
“These worries have only escalated over time,” said Raz, assistant professor of music in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Today our attention is constantly being exploited and monetized. I think it is valuable to study earlier approaches to attention to better understand how we got to our present moment.”
Auditory stimuli have a special claim on our focus, since we are unable to escape them, Raz and Francesca Brittan, Ph.D. ’06 point out in their co-edited “The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century.” The new collection assembles an interdisciplinary history of auditory attention, available open access from University of Pennsylvania Press.
Both Raz and Brittan, associate professor of music and affiliated faculty in the Department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, have worked on the intertwined histories of music, neuroscience and cognition for more than a decade; attention seemed like a logical next step, they said. The current book grew out of a conference panel on the history of auditory attention in the long 19th century.
The book’s essays by scholars in music, history, literature, and other fields focus on the relationship between music and attention in different parts of the world during this period; the impact of changing technologies on listening attention; and theories of psychology, including experiments conducted at Cornell in the 1900s.
The College of Arts and Sciences spoke with Raz and Brittan about the book.
Why did thinkers of the long nineteenth century connect sound and listening to their understanding of what it means to be a person?
The close relationship between what we hear and who we are extends far beyond the nineteenth century and well into antiquity. But the nineteenth century is a particularly interesting period in this regard.
For one, the century saw the rapid development of new technologies, ranging from the phonautograph to radio, that drastically reshaped listening habits and expectations. Moreover, the early part of the century saw the rise of a highly influential Romantic ideology in Europe pertaining to music and subjectivity, an ideology that saw in untexted music the closest artistic analog to individual emotional experience. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this idea for popular understandings of subjectivity throughout the long nineteenth century, and, in many ways, we’re still living in the world that that ideology created today.
But we were eager to also include non-European, non-Romantic understandings of auditory attention in the book. It contains, for example, a chapter that explores how an important Javanese poem, the Sĕrat Cĕnthini (1815), engages with attentive listening in the context of the Sufi concept of samā, a chapter on attention in Bengali musicology around 1885, as well as a chapter on attention and experimental acoustics in the late Ottoman Empire.
What was the importance of music in this framework?
We intentionally avoided the word “music” in the title of this book, as we were interested in casting a wider net than that which captures musical listening.
Indeed some of our chapters do not deal with music at all: Brian Kane’s contribution, for instance, explores changes in practices of attentive listening that arose as a result of the transition from wired to wireless telegraphy at dawn of the twentieth century, while Ewan Jones’s chapter compares theorizations of auditory and visual attention in the late eighteenth century by closely reading various works of art. And in his chapter D. Graham Burnett examines the rise (and fall) of the theory that human attention occurred in measurable waves, which was studied particularly intensely here at Cornell.
It was important to us, in the book, to place musical focus in the context of broader sound attentions, media histories and scientific paradigms.
What does the book share about Cornell’s place as the American center of experimental psychology in the early 20th century and the influential psychologist Edward B. Titchener?
In his chapter, “The Attention Wave: Sound and Sense in Cycles ca. 1905,” Burnett describes Titchener’s experiments in detail.
They required two students: one would be seated at a kymograph, or an electrical recording device that inscribed a line on a sheet of smoked paper on a slow-revolving drum, while the other would gradually walk away from the device while holding a ticking watch. The student at the kymograph was instructed to press a key when he could no longer hear the watch and press a key again when he could.
This experiment was supposed to map out the human “attention wave,” which referred to the then-prevalent belief that there was a kind of general cyclicity in perception, and that this could be mapped out by careful attention to the fluctuating boundaries of perception. Even though the value of these experiments was ultimately questioned, it is neat to learn of this kind of (then) cutting-edge research on attention taking place on our campus.
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