Being 'In the True' of Sound Studies

One of the main methodological problems for people who do interdisciplinary research is that different disciplines speak of the same phenomenon as if it were two or more totally different things. It is not a question of each discipline only being able to claim partial knowledge of an artifact, of relative degrees of truth, or of progress from one mistaken paradigm to a truer one. It is a case of incommensurable assumptions and worldviews simultaneously existing and producing useful knowledge.¹ Many of the central concepts in sound studies carry some degree of this problem with them, since many fields can at once lay claim to knowledge of sound, hearing, listening, or even just vibrations or signals. No single discipline can claim a monopoly of knowledge over what any of these terms means, and certainly sound studies, as an emergent formation in the human sciences, is no exception. We carry dispositions with our own worldviews, belief systems and knowledge as we create and confront our objects of study. As I complete a book manuscript on the history and philosophy of perceptual coding, the technology behind the mp3 format, I am working with two opposed sets of propositions about hearing. One comes from the humanities and one comes from the sciences. And I find myself writing as though both are simultaneously true and limited in their truthfulness. In this short reflection on the project, I hope that my personal difficulties will illuminate one of the central problems in contemporary humanistic scholarship on sound - that we are too willing to accept the pieties handed down to us from other humanistic research.²

Although I am officially writing a book about the mp3 format, a large chunk of the manuscript is concerned with a field called psychoacoustics. Every mp3 file is constructed according to a set of probabilities based on a psychoacoustically derived, mathematical model of human hearing. Psychoacoustics tracks the relationship between sound technologies and the process of audition. Though the term 'psycho-acoustic' was first applied in 1885 to the part of a dog's brain responsible for sound perception, its use in studies of humans slowly gained traction in the first half of the twentieth century, with a key moment being the founding of Harvard's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory in 1940 to conduct Speech, Hearing and Communication research during World War II.³ Psychoacoustics, along with other fields of study that melded questions of perception and physico-medical research, emerged at the moment when approaches modelled on physiology and other 'hard' sciences came to the fore in academic and industrial psychology. So its disciplinary pedigree is part experimental psychology and a very big part industrial research, combined with bits of acoustics, electrical engineering and auditory physiology. My book argues that the mp3 format is a kind of coming-out party for psychoacoustics, but perhaps my real discovery is that psychoacoustic research has conditioned the sound of almost every sonically-designed technology in the twentieth century, from telephones to speakers to cars to washing machines to mp3s and beyond. But this 'discovery' is a banal statement of fact to anybody who has worked in engineering of computers, communication technologies or recordings (or industrial design) in the past 50 years. In other words, the centrality of psychoacoustics to the history of sound technology is only news if you are in the humanities. Should I be proud or embarrassed?

Michel Foucault famously wrote that 'a proposition must fulfill some onerous and complex conditions before it can be admitted within a discipline; before it can be pronounced true or false it must be, as Monsieur Canguilhem might say, "within the true"' (Foucault 1972: 224; see also Bennett 1993). And this is my problem. While psychoacoustics governs the set of possible questions that can be posed to hearing in a wide swath of industries, sciences and engineering disciplines, critical writing on the field is surprisingly absent from the burgeoning sound studies literature, apart from a few salutary exceptions.⁴ This is for good reason: many of the key presuppositions of psychoacoustics run up against the humanist and post-humanist doxas of humanities...