New book details history of sound’s claim on our attention

Loud public spaces, non-stop advertisements, intrusive media: concerns around the leeching of attention that sound familiar now began to take shape in the late 18th century, said Cornell music scholar Carmel Raz.

"These worries have only escalated over time," said Raz, assistant professor of music in the College of Arts and Sciences. "Today our attention is constantly being exploited and monetized. I think it is valuable to study earlier approaches to attention to better understand how we got to our present moment."

Auditory stimuli have a special claim on our focus, since we are unable to escape them, Raz and Francesca Brittan, Ph.D. '06 point out in their co-edited "The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century." The new collection assembles an interdisciplinary history of auditory attention, available open access from University of Pennsylvania Press.

The book's essays by scholars in music, history, literature, and other fields focus on the relationship between music and attention in different parts of the world during this period; the impact of changing technologies on listening attention; and theories of psychology, including experiments conducted at Cornell in the 1900s.

The College of Arts and Sciences spoke with Raz and Brittan about the book. Read the full interview on the College of Arts and Sciences website.