Imperfect Sound Forever: Loudness, Listening Formations, and the Historiography of Sound Reproduction

This thesis engages critically with the historiography of sound reproduction. A significant portion of this literature has been concerned to understand sound reproduction in the context of modernity, as both acoustic consequence and contributing factor. My argument is that the relationship between sound reproduction and "acoustic modernity" has been mapped according to four prominent themes -- fidelity, privacy, rationality, objectivity -- and that each of these themes is valuable and illuminating but limited. Through a series of case studies in loudness and electrical amplification (ca. 1910s-1930s), I complement the existing historiography by demonstrating that while these themes were indeed prominent in discourses of sound reproduction, as ideals they were imperfectly achieved -- offset and altered by a variety of equally significant but often contrasting precepts and practices. The goal is not to posit these differences in terms of dualisms or dialectics (fidelity/ infidelity, privacy/publicity, rationality/irrationality, objectivity/subjectivity), but to understand them as mutually constitutive functions of what I call listening formations.;"Listening formation" is an analytical and methodological concept that promotes, if not exactly a "better" definition of acoustic modernity or a multiplicity of acoustic modernities, then a conception of the audible past that is able to hold its various practical and conceptual orientations toward sound in states of co-productive tension. In contrast to a uniform conception of acoustic modernity that is discernible in the historiography of sound reproduction, "listening formation" more readily delineates the vicissitudes of acoustic and musical culture during this period. I argue that if there is anything distinctly modern about the acoustic, or that if there is anything distinctly acoustic about modernity, the distinction has perhaps more to do with the particular logics of listening formations than the rise of a modern soundscape or modern aurality as such. By situating listening formations in relation to the wider reorientations toward knowledge, the environment and the self that characterize the project of modernity, this thesis strives toward a deeper understanding of the modern era as an acoustic phenomenon.