Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities Around 1900

Thinking with Sound, as Viktoria Tkaczyk tells us in the acknowledgments at the end of the main text, is the culmination of a research project that has been more than a decade in the making. The clarity of purpose, detailed research, and refusal to jump to glib conclusions is evidence of a project that has been lived with and, I am sure, was difficult to let go of. Not surprising then that its final sentence is a dedication to “ our two children, whose laughter is among the most beautiful sounds I can think of.” The introduction opens 217 pages earlier in 1886, with George Ballet walking home from the theater remarking, “Now we hear those lines or that passage precisely as we did an instant before, when we were still in our seats.” These two auditory images produce matching bookends between which Tkaczyk offers a detailed history of...