The Audible Past

The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of reproduction. It describes a distinctive culture that gave birth to the recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as sound and not sound. In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, and life and death. Blending cultural studies and the history of communication…