The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century

An interdisciplinary history of auditory attention that demonstrates the central role of audition in shaping our conceptions of focus and distraction

Over the past decade, attention and its perceived opposite, distraction, have become sites of sustained anxiety and debate. Questions around attentive economies, histories, and cognitive modes have surfaced across a range of disciplines from cultural studies to computer science, philosophy, and medicine.

The Attentive Ear fills a significant gap in current scholarship, exploring the history of auditory attention between roughly 1800-1930. Across boundaries of time, place, culture, and class, this period witnessed a marked uptick in discourses around attention and inattention, including attempts to define the states of multifocal, singular, spotlighted, intermittent, and distracted forms of focus underpinning perception and cognition. The richness of attention as a site of historical enquiry is indicated by the breadth of the volume's essays. Spanning aesthetic, scientific, pedagogical, and philosophical pasts, they show how conceptions of focus and unfocus have shaped musical culture, including modes of auditory production, reception, and mediatization.

Featuring case studies from Europe, Asia, and North America by leading scholars of sound studies, the volume's contributors probe the origins, key theories, and experimental trajectories of attentional discourse around the globe, demonstrating the central role of audition in shaping our conceptions of focus and distraction. Though the groupings sketched above explore distinct arenas of attention's history, they also intersect, grappling with overlapping questions around the ideological valency of concentrated or distracted listening; the attentional conditioning of listeners, performers, and pedagogues; and the importance of cognitive modalities in shaping auditory subjectivities.

Contributors: Francesca Brittan, D. Graham Burnett, Tony Day, Ewan Jones, Brian Kane, Alexandra Kieffer, Youn Kim, C line Frigau Manning, Nicholas Mathew, Jacob Olley, Carmel Raz, Benjamin Steege, David Trippett, Sarah Weiss, Richard David Williams.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1512829943
• ISBN13: 9781512829945
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Length: 368 Pages