Sonic Modernity

List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the Sonic Cultures of Modernity; Overture: L’Inhumaine; The Ear in History: Some Theory; Representing Sound in Literature; Defining “Modern” Sound; Or, Marvin Gaye as Theorist of Modernity; Chapter One. Theorising Sound and Hearing; Sound in Philosophy from Aristotle to Marx; Darwin, Kant (again), and Physiology; Technology, and the Dialectic of Sensory Excitement and Exhaustion; Sound in Literary Modernism; Music Amongst the Other Arts; Music, Language, and Meaning; Chapter Two. Sound and Social Life; Dorothy Richardson and Sound-space; Music as Paradigm of Sociality; Parties, City Streets, and Foreign Accents; Telephones, Radio and Gramophones; Love and the Piano; Wagner at Bayreuth; Chapter Three. Seeing Sound; Substitution and the Word; Substitution and the Image; Inter-art Translation or Equivalence; Light and Colour; Psychiatry, and ‘Neuro-grammatology’; On Musical Notation; Chapter Four. Modernising Music; Historicity and Dissonance; Pitch division, Rhythmic Chords, and Synthesizers; Precision and Preservation; The ‘phonograph effect’, and Jazz; Jazz and the Extra-Musical, and Blues; Coda: musical (un)timeliness; Chapter Five. The Art of Listening; Listening and/as Attention; Memory and Silence; Against the ‘Talkie’; Blindness and Cathected Space; Coda: Listening as Life; Bibliography; Index.