Smith 1999

Smith, Bruce. The Acoustic World of early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999.

"from the listener's standpoint, there are two quite distinct ways of attending to sound: one that focuses on the thereness of the sound, on the sound-producer; and one that focuses on the hereness of the sound, on the physiological and psychological effects of sound on the listener. Both dimensions aer present all the time, and we can readily shift focus from one to the other." (7)

"Since knowledge and intentions are shaped by culture, we need to attend also to cultural differences in the construction of aural experience. The multiple cultures of early modern England may have shared with us the biological materiality of hearing, but their protocols of listening could be remarkably different from our.s We need a cultural poetics of listening. We must take into account, finally, the subjective experience of sound. We need a phenomenology of listening, which we can expect to be an amalgam of biological constants and cultural variables." (8)

silence (or lack thereof) (9)

orality vs. literacy -- Renaissance rhetoric gave primacy to orality (12)

"By and large, the artifacts that survive from early modern England ask to be heard, not seen: compared, say, to Renaissance Italy, the number of buildings, paintings, tapestries, pieces of furniture, and utilitarian objects are few. What we have, in great abundance, are verbal artifacts. Our knowledge of early modern England is based largely on words, and all evidence suggests that those words had a connection to spoken language that was stronger and more pervasive than we assume about our own culture. Can we be so sure -- especially in a culture where 'orality' and 'literacy' were reciprocally defined in ways quite different from today -- that speaking and listening were experienced as uncomplicated acts of self-presence?" (13)

Luhmann: body, psyche, media and society -- communication as "a process, not of transferring meaning, but of negotiating meaning" between these autonomous systems (16)