Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts by Sam Halliday (review)

Halliday has two main objectives in his book: first, to analyse the relationship between sound and modernity, and second, to analyse how sound is represented in modernist literature, film, and the visual arts. At a tangent to both these discussions is the role of modern music in literature and its significance in its own right, an issue that permeates Halliday’s study and which I will address below. In his first endeavour, Halliday is not alone. The body of scholarship on the interrelations between sound and modernity includes The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), in which Emily Thompson focuses on modern technology and its influences on aural culture in early twentieth-century America, and which is particularly perceptive when read alongside Richard Cullen Rath’s How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, NY, 2003) and Timothy Dean Taylor, Mark Katz, and Tony Grajeda (eds.), Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio (Durham, NC, 2012). While these studies focus primarily on the interrelations between technology, culture, and sound, John M. Picker, in his Victorian Soundscapes (New York and Oxford, 2003), adds to that discussion with a literary perspective on how nineteenth-century texts reflect on those interrelations and fundamentally change aural perception and the way we listen to the world around us (an argument that goes back to R. Murray Schafer, who introduced the concept of soundscape and soundscape studies in the 1970s with his landmark publication The Tuning of the World (New York, 1977)). Sonic Modernity is a timely addition to this recent surge of interdisciplinary interest in soundscape studies. Halliday places his work within this critical discourse (although he could at times have gone into greater detail on how his own arguments relate to it): he offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of sound in modernist culture and the arts, including literature, cinema, painting, and a discussion of modern music in this context.

In his introduction, Halliday outlines how sound in modernist culture is never just sound, but is always entangled with technological developments, social structures, and modernist culture, be it the silent films of the 1920s or the representation of sound in the visual arts and literature of the time. The book is structured along these sonic interdependencies, and the question of sound’s social role in particular pervades the whole book, most prominently in the second chapter, ‘Sound and Social Life’. Other discussions that Halliday highlights in his introduction and that he picks up in the chapters to follow are the often ambivalent relationship between hearing and seeing (the latter often regarded as the more objective and hence the more ‘trustworthy’ sense, while the former is traditionally linked to emotional responses to sensory impressions), and how modernist literature represents sound in its various forms, from street noises to human voices to music. This already showcases one of the book’s great strengths, namely the wide array of texts and writers that Halliday draws from in order to substantiate his arguments. These writers include canonical modernists such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, and Marcel Proust, but also lesser-known writers such as Winifred Ellerman Bryher and Henry Roth.

In his first chapter, ‘Theorising Sound and Hearing’, Halliday expands the theoretical background briefly outlined in his introduction and surveys philosophical and aesthetic theories of sound and hearing from classical antiquity to modernity. Rather than aiming for comprehensiveness, he focuses ‘on theories of particular relevance to literary and other artistic modernism’ (p. 20). Although this is a sensible approach, Halliday cannot altogether avoid the pitfall of oversimplification when, for example, sketching the development of philosophical ideas about sound from Aristotle to Marx in just four pages. Also, it is not until the section on ‘Sound in Literary Modernism’ later in the chapter that the relevance of these theories to Halliday’s main arguments becomes clear. The...