Sound, Labor and Environmental History

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

This panel examines, through three case studies, the sonic environments of sites of labor. In so doing, scholarly conceptions of landscape, labscape, and workscape are brought together. Each speaker shows, from antebellum factory workers to hippie college students studying in their apartments to physicists calibrating their instruments, the central role sound and listening played in laborers’ conception of their tasks. Then, in turn, listening informed their very conception of their environment. The panelists’ papers explore the labor of producing and understanding sound, the labor of the sounds themselves, the hearing or not hearing of them, to show how laborers’ (very broadly defined) understanding of the natural and laboring environment evolved alongside technologies that produced, broadcast, and interpreted sound. Pushing against standard narratives of the ever-increasing cultural primacy of seeing over hearing in the modern era, this panel therefore shows that it was sound and the act of listening to it that primarily shaped listener-laborers’ conception of their environment. The labor of listening tells us something new.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• ‘The Factory’s Deaf’ning Sound’: Class, Technology, and the Sonic Environment in Lowell, Massachusetts” - Jeremy Vetter, University of Arizona

• Sound Affects: environments, brain work, and the backgroundification of nature - Alexandra Hui, Mississippi State University

• Ravens or Black Holes Colliding: A Sensory History of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory Environment - Tiffany Nichols, Princeton University

Chair

• Patrick McCray, University of California, Santa Barbara

Discussant

• Catherine Dunlop, Montana State University, Bozeman