Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality argues that the modern cultural practices of hearing and testing have emerged from a long interrelationship. Since the early nineteenth century, auditory test tools (whether organ pipes or electronic tone generators) and the results of hearing tests have fed back into instrument calibration, human training, architecture, and the creation of new musical sounds. Hearing tests received a further boost around 1900 as a result of injury compensation laws and state and professional demands for aptitude testing in schools, conservatories, the military, and other fields. Applied at large scale, tests of seemingly small measure-of auditory acuity, of hearing range-helped redefine the modern concept of hearing as such. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the epistemic function of hearing expanded. Hearing took on the dual role of test object and test instrument; in the latter case, human hearing became a gauge by which to evaluate or regulate materials, nonhuman organisms, equipment, and technological systems. This book considers both the testing of hearing and testing with hearing to explore the co-creation of modern epistemic and auditory cultures. The book's twelve contributors trace the design of ever more specific tests for the arts, education and communication, colonial and military applications, sociopolitical and industrial endeavors. Together, they demonstrate that testing as such became an enduring and wide-ranging cultural technique in the modern period, one that is situated between histories of scientific experimentation and many fields of application.

Viktoria Tkaczyk, Professor for the History of Knowledge, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, Mara Mills, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, Alexandra Hui, Associate Professor of History, Mississippi State University

Viktoria Tkaczyk is Professor of Media and Knowledge Technologies at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University who works at the intersection of disability studies and media studies.

Alexandra Hui is Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University and Co-Editor of the journal Isis.

Testing Hearing: An Introduction
Alexandra Hui, Mara Mills, and Viktoria Tkaczyk
Sorting and Screening Human Hearers:
Testing the Culturally Molded Ear
Testing Hearing with Speech
Mara Mills
The Testing of a Hundred Listeners: Otto Abraham's Studies on "Absolute Tone Consciousness"
Viktoria Tkaczyk
Murray Island versus Aberdeenshire: Contextualizing the Cross-Cultural Hearing Tests of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, 1898-1899
Sebastian Klotz
Designing Instruments, Calibrating machines

Hearing Perfection
Emily I. Dolan
Opelt's Siren and the Technologies of Musical Hearing
Alexander Rehding
The Software Passes the Test When the User Fails It: Constructing Digital Models of Analog Signal Processors
Jonathan Sterne
Managing Sound, Assessing Space

To Hear As I Do: The Concessions of Hearing in Taiwan's Noise Management System
Jennifer Hsieh
Testing Spatial Hearing and the Development of Kunstkopf Technology, 1957-1981
Stefan Krebs
Absorption, Transmission, Reflection: Testing Materials in the Laboratory
Roland Wittje
World as Testbed:
Testing beyond Human Auditory Perception
Of Silent Sirens and Pied Pipers: Auditory Thresholds and High-Frequency Technologies of Animal Control
Joeri Bruyninckx
Testing the Underwater Ear: Hearing, Standardizing, and Classifying Marine Sounds from World War I to the Cold War
Lino Camprubí and Alexandra Hui
This Is Not a Test: Listening with Günther Anders in the Nuclear Age
Benjamin Steege
Afterword
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Trevor Pinch