CHAPTER 5

Listening, Technique, and Attention

Brian Kane

For Cat Slowik1

Here is an innocuous sentence:

Similar to how in nineteenth-century medicine the stethoscope introduced new techniques of listening and precisely thereby produced new ways of understanding the human body, Stockhausen employed his microphones to enable new modes of listening and unlock otherwise unheard vibrations for compositional processes. (Lutz Koepnick, 2020)2

As a scholar of sound studies, I have a few shelves in my office full of books on sound, sound art, listening, sound media, audio technology, and auditory culture. I would wager that a large percentage of those books include an innocuous sentence of this variety. Perhaps the authors do not mention Stockhausen—maybe they mention some other composer, or sound artist, or even none at all—but they likely assert something about the intertwined historical development of sound technologies and listening. And when it comes to listening, they probably do exactly what this author does, which is to use the terms “techniques of listening” and “modes of listening” interchangeably.

I cannot reproach anyone for doing so since there has been little critical reflection in sound studies concerning what differentiates a mode of listening from a technique of listening. Yet I have a nagging feeling that there is something at stake in the distinction; in particular, I feel that there is something crucial to a technique that would distinguish it from a mode, orientation, or disposition of listening.

To develop this intuition, I will focus much of this chapter on Jonathan Sterne’s account of “modern audile technique,” as presented in The Audible Past (2003) and in other contemporaneous writings. I do so because Sterne has written the most extensive and detailed account of what it means for listening to be a technique. While I will be rehearsing aspects of Sterne’s argument, I do so to articulate some reasons why his account of technique—as good as it is and as much as I admire it—derails on issues of embodiment, practical knowledge, and action. As I argue, Sterne’s commitment to technique as embodied, practical knowledge leaves him inattentive to the role of attention in technique, and thus causes him to understate the complex ways that techniques are amalgams of both pure and practical knowledge. An account of technique that does not draw attention to attention cannot, I argue, be sufficient.

* * *

In The Audible Past, Sterne describes “modern audile technique” as a set of orientations toward listening that cohered in the beginning of the nineteenth century around the work of René Laennec (1781–1826), French physician and inventor of the stethoscope. The technique then developed and diffused, helping to establish “modern audile technique,” which Sterne describes as a set of orientations toward listening to the communications technologies of the telegraph, phonograph, and other audio media that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3

Before discussing the specific auditory orientations that comprise “modern audile technique,” I want to situate Stern’s thinking about the nature of technique within a broader intellectual-historical framework. In a short essay published in 2006, entitled “Communication as Technē,” Sterne notes that the ancient Greek word technē is the root for “two terms that designate some of the most important aspects of communication: technique and technology.” The knowledge that stems from technē is “embodied knowledge, not formal or logical knowledge,” that is, it is the kind of knowledge found in skills and abilities, the capacities that humans employ, cultivate, and exploit in their everyday actions. Technē designates “a practical art and practical knowledge.”4 For Sterne, technē is a matter of know-how. By making this claim, Sterne is also invoking the longer tradition of contrasting technē with epistēmē, which denotes an explicit form of knowledge or “knowing-that.”5

By defining technique and technology within the conceptual frame of the distinction between technē and epistēmē, Sterne focuses on the difference between practical and theoretical knowledge. To illustrate, he offers the example of the musician. Unlike knowing the correct number of flats in the key of G-flat—an example of theoretical knowledge, or epistēmē—the musician’s fluency with an instrument is a form of embodied, practical knowledge. As such, it requires training and habituation. In The Audible Past, Sterne builds upon the work of French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss, especially his celebrated essay on “Techniques of the Body,” to establish the groundwork for technique as a form of embodied, practical knowledge. Mauss considers practices like swimming, diving, sitting, and walking in order to observe how participants within different cultures, or even different generations within the same culture, train and condition their bodies.6 Sterne is interested in Mauss’s ideas as a way of accounting for the propagation of techniques, and how skillful users of their own bodies become habituated to sequences of actions and gestures such that that they recede to the level of tacit practical knowledge. These techniques are imprinted on the body through the manifold forces of social pressure, norms, and custom.

In addition, Sterne also relies on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who develops Mauss’s ideas on body techniques and their role in the habitus. In a passage cited by Sterne, Bourdieu writes, “One might say that arms and legs are full of numb imperatives,” full of “practical logics” that don’t follow the rules of formal reasoning but have an embodied logic.7 These “numb imperatives” are also dumb imperatives in the sense that technē, as know-how, is inarticulate; it is a form of knowledge inscribed so completely into the impressible flesh that it becomes a second skin or second nature, a tacit and habitual protocol of gestures and actions.

By focusing on technē as embodied knowledge, Sterne aims to “to develop an account of communication as a social phenomenon . . . [to] examine what people actually do when they are communicating—not what they say they are doing or what they think they are doing, but what they do.”8 Everyday communicative exchange is thus a kind of art, skill, or practical knowledge in which we are all performers. This holds not just for techniques of communication but for communication technologies as well. Technologies such as the telegraph or the phonograph are understood as concretizations of practical knowledge. Thus, “Machines and technological systems are an extension of the logic of . . . practical knowledge, and realized action hidden in technē, because they are essentially crystallized sets of repeatable activities and relationships.” It follows that techniques and technologies, although sharing an etymological root, are not equivalent. Techniques precede technologies because “technologies are crystallized bits of practical art and practical reason—they are techniques externalized and delegated to machines.”9

Sterne makes this argument throughout The Audible Past and provides an extended version of it in his book MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012). Because technologies are crystallized techniques, Sterne’s account of the origins of an audio technology is rarely a story about genius inventors, but rather an account of the practices (or techniques) that concretize into a technological object. For instance, his chapter on the phonograph presents Alexander Graham Bell and Francis Blake’s grisly ear-phonautograph—that sound writing machine that incorporates the ear of a human cadaver into its machinery—in order to investigate the various social forces that lead to the incorporation of a human ear into such a machine. Sterne brings together a set of independent cultural practices, conceptualizations, scientific discoveries, and social aspirations. The factors at work are many: the interest in visualizing or writing sound for the purposes of deaf education, linguistics, and poetics; the rise of otology as a medical discipline; the increasing knowledge of the physiology of the ear, which is tied to practices of autopsy and scientific instrumentation; the production of a scientific view about the discreteness of the senses and the mechanical nature of the ear’s operation, which permitted a conceptualization of the ear (and particularly the eardrum) as a specific type of transducer. These various factors, each in a sense independent and detachable from the rest, are articulated together and legibly inscribed in the phonograph. Sterne’s analysis of the phonograph and its process of crystallization enables him to develop a more general theory of technology, where technologies are best understood as the result of techniques that precede them.

The same argument holds for constitution of techniques, but on a different register from technologies. Just as a set of techniques crystallize into a novel technology, Sterne sees techniques as themselves crystallizations of practices (or combinations of practices) that precede them. The most extended treatment of technique appears in the two chapters of The Audile Past dedicated to an analysis of “modern audile technique.” Sterne writes,

Listening involves will, both conscious and unconscious—perhaps a better word than will would be disposition or feel.10 Orientations toward and styles of listening are part of what sociologists and anthropologists have come to call the habitus. Following Pierre Bourdieu, habitus denotes a set of dispositions, what he calls a feel for the game. The habitus is socially conditioned subjectivity . . . a mix of custom, bodily technique, social outlook, style, and orientation. . . . Modern audile technique, combines a relatively stable set of practical orientations toward sound and listening.11

In particular, Sterne identifies six orientations, common to “medicine, telegraphy, and . . . sound-reproduction technologies,” as follows:12

1. 1) Listening becomes a scientific skill, associated with rational and scientific practices of using the senses.
2. 2) Listening is separated from other senses, and constructed as a discrete activity, a distinct faculty of hearing.
3. 3) Listening, now separated, reconstructs acoustic space.
4. 4) Listening no longer focuses on the privileged cases of voice or music; rather, it attends to these as instances of a more general category of sound.
5. 5) Listening now occurs in mediated contexts, through stethoscopes, listening tubes, and so forth, whereby distant sounds become proximal.
6. 6) Finally, listening gains symbolic currency; it becomes a form of specialization, which can signal to others that the listener possesses knowledge, skill, or social status.

As I understand them, these orientations are not to be taken as sufficient or necessary conditions of modern audile technique; rather, modern audile technique can be understood as the “coming together” of these various orientations in varying degrees. They are intended to be broad enough to appear repeatedly in many distinct contexts, yet also be specific enough to identify what is particularly modern about “modern audile technique,” as opposed to some other modality of audile technique or even audile technique in general.

* * *

Across “Communication as Technē” and The Audible Past, Sterne remains consistent in his views: In the former, he explicitly theorizes technique within the technē/epistēmē distinction, while in the latter he assumes this framework to explicate audile technique. My aim is not to challenge the various orientations that Sterne articulates as central to this technique, but rather to consider how it, as a whole, relates to the issues of pure and practical knowledge introduced in “Communication as Technē.” What is the status of modern audile technique vis-à-vis pure and practical knowledge?

On first glance, the answer to the question would seem obvious: Modern audile technique is a form of practical knowledge, a kind of know-how possessed by modern listeners, or a kind of embodied knowledge of the sort that Sterne sees in everyday actions. As a combination of “a relatively ­stable set of practical orientations toward sound and listening,” modern audile technique is a matter of training and cultivation, a way of culturally forming habitual dispositions that shape the “feel for the game” of listening.13 This is why Sterne invokes Bourdieu in the passage cited above. Bourdieu often uses the metaphor of a “feel for the game” to describe the mastery of the immanent rules of a game by those who play it. This is a “mastery acquired by experience of the game” and, importantly, “one which works outside conscious control and discourse (in the way that, for instance, techniques of the body do).”14 Modern audile technique is not a self-conscious construct that historical listeners employed knowingly, explicitly, and intentionally. Rather, it is a descriptive framework employed by the historian to capture what modern listeners actually did—or so Sterne argues.15

The individual listening techniques that cohere into “modern audile techniques” are also theorized as akin to body technique or an interlaced set of body techniques. Sterne writes, “My use of the word technique in relation to listening is derived from Marcel Mauss’s notion of ‘techniques of the body.’” Mauss’s own explication of techniques of the body focused on bodily actions and ways of manipulating them, not—as Sterne himself notes—on sensory or perceptual actions: “Although [Mauss] does not include sensory activities—looking, listening, tasting, smelling, touching—these are certainly implied and even occasionally mentioned in the context of other techniques. So my argument makes a very short leap from Mauss’s list of techniques to a history of techniques of listening in modernity.”16

Let us consider what is involved in the leap from body techniques—like walking, running, sitting, and diving—to “sensory activities,” or what I will call “perceptual techniques.” From the perspective of training, the leap may indeed be small in that both body techniques and perceptual techniques must be produced through training and pedagogy (whether formal or informal, institutional or cultural). Repetition and practice are key components of training. Both body techniques and perceptual techniques are predicated on the acquisition of some particular skill. In that respect, we might reasonably imagine body techniques and perceptual techniques as located on a single continuum, differing only by degrees.

However, there are differences of kind that we cannot ignore. One key difference concerns the evidence used to judge whether a technique has been successfully acquired. While the incorporation of a body technique like Mauss’s example of diving is legible from viewing the body of the diver in action—and thus on display for all to see—the same cannot be said for perceptual techniques. For instance, how does a teacher or evaluator know that a medical student learning mediate auscultation has in fact correctly assimilated the technique? There is no immediate evidence of the student’s perception, as there is for the diver’s action. Rather, evidence is available only through the transformation (or mediation) of perceptions into actions—in other words, through the production of traces. In the case of modern-day mediate auscultation, the medical student is evaluated through testing and clinical apprenticeship; the student’s public diagnostic judgments are used as signs by which to judge whether the perceptual technique has or has not been correctly incorporated.

My qualm is not with the idea that people learn perceptual techniques—because clearly they do. Rather, my qualm is with too hastily equating body techniques with perceptual techniques. I think that perceptual techniques are interesting and important precisely because their mode of evaluation is different from body techniques. Perceptual techniques require the production of traces subsequent to the act of perception in order to be evaluated. These traces exteriorize—through action, language, symbols, or signs—the presence of perceptual techniques in mediated forms. There will always remain a potential indeterminacy about whether my perceptual technique and your perceptual technique are in fact the same technique, even if they produce identical or nearly identical traces. This raises a challenge for any cultural theorist who wants to rely on perceptual techniques as the glue that binds together a culture of perceivers. If the evaluation of such techniques necessarily contains a moment of indeterminacy, how can one maintain as a consistent object of study something like modern audile technique (in the singular), which would rely on the stability and wide diffusion of the perceptual techniques it comprises? For once we scratch at the surface, how much variation and difference will be found?

To push this argument further, we might also consider whether body techniques are not also subject to a similar issue of mediation. There is an unfortunate tendency in Anglophone scholarship to detach Mauss’s essay on the techniques of the body from the rest of his work on techniques and technology, and to read it through the influence of Pierre Bourdieu’s reception of Mauss.17 Body techniques begin to look like the site where the coercive power of culture impresses itself into the flesh, forming disciplined subjects whose bodies are the pages on which are written the annals of their domination. The connection between body techniques and techniques in general is lost, as is Mauss’s understanding of techniques as complex indices of the condition of a society or of a civilization.

Moreover, when body techniques are reduced to “numb imperatives” that forcefully and tacitly constrain the body’s actions, they miss the full valence of Mauss’s specific interest in them. As Carrie Noland argues, Mauss includes the possibility of moments of resistance to such discipline in his own theorization of body techniques. Noland, in her thorough reading of Mauss’s “Techniques of the Body” essay, makes this point by homing in on a moment when Mauss discusses a particular body technique of walking.18 Borrowing from Elsdon Best’s ethnography of the Maori, Mauss focuses on a body technique called “doing the onioni.” Mauss, citing Best, says that Maori women “adopted a gait that was acquired in youth, a loose-jointed swinging of the hips that looks ungainly to us, but was admired by the Maori. Mothers drilled their daughters in this accomplishment, termed onioni, and I have heard a mother say to her girl: ‘Ha! Kaore koe e onioni’ [you are not doing the onioni] when the young one was neglecting to practice the gait.”19

While one can read this as the moment in which the daughter is being disciplined into the habitus, it can also be interpreted as a moment when the daughter is resisting such discipline. For Noland, moments of resistance can be felt at the kinesthetic level of apperception—where the daughter both knows how the onioni is supposed to feel and yet also enjoys the feeling of resisting it, of stylizing it, of altering it. And those feelings of resistance might transform how we understand body techniques in general, opening up knots of difference within the habitus and its totalizing social formation of subjects.

The story of the Maori daughter is helpful for considering the ways that the use of the body within the habitus need not conform wholly to the categorical distinction between pure and practical knowledge. If the daughter both knows how to conform her body to the norms as well as to resist those norms, then we have a situation where action in accord with the habitus does not necessarily lead to tacit, silent habituation. The daughter both has a “feel for the game” of doing the onioni at the same time that she can distance herself from it in order to project her body’s movements along divergent paths. If the daughter both knows how the onioni is supposed to feel and yet also enjoys the feeling of doing it differently, then she also has the potential to make the difference between those two explicit.

Mauss defines a technique as “an ensemble of movements or actions, in general and for the most part manual, which are organized and traditional, and which work together towards the achievement of a goal known to be physical or chemical or organic.”20 This definition weaves together a few distinct threads. The sequence of actions that defines a technique is not random or haphazard, but organized according to its effectiveness. Techniques are acquired through teaching, passed on from to an apprentice from a master, or learned through imitation. Techniques are also telic in that they involve a moment of prolepsis as the technique is geared toward its goal. That goal is “known” in that the actor is explicitly aware of the end to which a technique is aimed. A technique is an effective action, learned from others, that has an explicit purpose.

The possibility of the articulation of technique disappears when technique is understood only in terms of habitual, “practical” knowledge. Technē, as characterized by Sterne, is tacit and skillful but unable to articulate itself, to know itself, to theorize itself; it requires the silence of drastic, effective action and risks failure when forced into the rational, reasonable, gnostic light of explication. In contrast, Noland’s reading of Mauss—which builds on Mauss’s own understanding of technique—places emphasis on the moment of kinesthetic resistance in order to show how the girl’s conscious toggling between techniques reveals the explicitness of technical knowledge. For the Maori girl knows both how to do the onioni and how not to do the onioni. Thus she has a knowledge that is not simply tacit, but both habitual and volitional, felt and understood, silent and articulate. This is a kind of knowledge that is neither wholly pure nor wholly practical, but through resistance and toggling, a kind of practically pure knowledge or impurely practical knowledge.

* * *

I would argue that knowledge of this sort—neither wholly pure nor wholly practical—is characteristic of techniques in general. In the Greek context where the word technē originates, the person who possesses a technique (the technitēs) is not the same as a person who can simply perform an action.21 The technitēs not only knows how to perform some action, but also knows the reasons why they are performing that action. Technique involves the ability to project into the future the use of a skill, the performance of an action, or the production of an object, in line with a reason or purpose. In other words, a technique is applied for the sake of some reason, aim, or goal. We can assert that technique always involves a moment of prolepsis, a projection of a project into the future, which then fixes the goal toward which an action is aimed. This is one of the reasons why technē is a mode of knowledge and more than just an act of habit.22

Although we have Mauss to thank for the restoration of the word habitus, he uses it in a sense that is quite different from the habitual, unconscious, socially shaped actions that constitute Bourdieu’s habitus. When introducing the Latin word habitus to his Francophone audience, Mauss writes,

The word [habitus] translates infinitely better than “habitude” (habit or custom), the “exis,” the “acquired ability” and “faculty” of Aristotle (who was a psychologist). . . . These ‘habits’ do not just vary with individuals and their imitations, they vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestige. In them we should see the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason rather than, in the ordinary way, merely the soul and its repetitive faculties.23

If techniques involve ensembles of organized, traditional actions, such actions constitute a Maussian “habitus” that is irreducible to a series of habituated, repetitive gestures. This is why Mauss is at pains to distinguish the habitus from “habit” or merely repetitive, habitual actions. Where the latter are unconscious acts, the former are goal-oriented instances of effective knowledge. While techniques might be learned through processes of imitation, training, or apprenticeship—insofar as “the individual borrows the series of movements which constitute it [i.e., a technique] from the action executed in front of him or with him by others”—imitation should not be understood as slavish, nor should training be understood as disciplining.24 In learning a technique, the student is also engaging an act of “borrowing,” a central term in Mauss’s theory of technique.

Borrowing is one of the ways that cultures intermix and develop; techniques are “eminently liable to borrowing,” in that they can be learned and then transported from one milieu to another. Moreover, borrowing can happen on levels from the individual to the social. Recall that the practices and techniques found in the Maussian habitus “do not just vary with individuals and their imitations . . . , they vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestige.”25 Techniques exhibit multiple features of a culture or a society all at once, “to the point of characterizing it, indeed of standing for it, so to say, like a sign. Nothing manifests the difference between two social traditions than the difference . . . between the implements and the crafts of two societies.”26 But as cultures interact, they borrow techniques from one another, hybridizing and transforming them even as they are reproduced.27 “Techniques,” Mauss argues, “are the means . . . which a society possesses to act upon its milieu.”28 Through technique, then,

the human actor identifies himself with the mechanical, physical and chemical order of things. He creates and at the same time he creates himself; he creates at once his means of living, things purely human, and his thought inscribed in these things. Here is true practical reason being elaborated.29

One would be mistaken to read this invocation of practical reason in the way that Bourdieu does. Practical reason, for Mauss, is not the same as Bourdieu’s unconscious “practical logics,” nor is Mauss’s habitus the same as Bourdieu’s habitus. It is a kind of reason that is applied, effective, and explicit. What ultimately distinguishes Mauss from Bourdieu on the question of techniques and the habitus can be boiled down to the status of the word “practical.” Mauss’s thinking about technique and its relation to modes of knowledge was influenced not only by his anthropological and sociological research, but also by his understanding of the ancient Greek discourses on technē and their influence on his contemporaries. Addressing the role of techniques in art and in science, Mauss writes, “When the arts and the sciences and their historical relations are studied concretely, the division between pure reason and practical reason seems scholastic, scarcely realistic, barely psychological, and even less sociological. . . . Indeed, it might be better . . . not to distinguish techné and epistémé.”30

An unfortunate consequence of the Anglophone reading of Mauss is that body techniques have become identified with tacit, silent, habituated action. What this leads to is a strange situation where Mauss’s readers eschew the difference between the incorporation of a technique and virtuosity. If body techniques are simply the ways that a culture disciplines the uses of bodies in conformity with its norms, then it would appear that everyone who uses their bodies in conformity with these norms would also be something of a somnambulant virtuoso. Tautologically, we are all virtuosi of the ways that we have been trained to use our bodies. However, the difference between being a virtuoso and a technitēs is that the technitēs can articulate the reasons for and ways that they employ a technique. They can teach it, they tell others why they are doing it, and they can anticipate its outcome. The virtuoso only needs experience but does not need self-awareness. By relying too heavily on the Anglophone interpretation of body techniques, one remains inattentive to the difference between technique and virtuosity. Techniques become silent habits, rather than an articulate, explicit relation of pure and practical knowledge.

By casting techniques as a form of “practical knowledge” in the narrow sense—as know-how distinct from knowing-that—Sterne reifies the categorial distinction between pure and practical knowledge and downplays the role of attention in technique. There is no attention to attention. The idea that actors in the flow of action function unconsciously, tacitly, and habitually (i.e., virtuosically) shunts attention to the side. It is as if to attend to phenomena within the midst of action is to break one’s immersive and effective relation with the world and to force a kind of impractical syncopation in one’s flow.

My argument is not that a person in possession of technique never enters into flow states or into sequences of habituated action below the level of tacit awareness and attention. There is no conflict between being a virtuoso and possessing technique, but there is a difference. The technitēs has the ability to attend to their actions and make moments of attention explicit through acts of mediation and exteriorization. They both know what they are doing and they know how to do it. The technitēs may not think of all the things they do when they are in the flow of action, but if there is a technique involved, then it can be made explicit, articulate, and exteriorized. One marker of the succession from virtuoso to technitēs is that the latter can attend to attention. To put it concisely, audile techniques are not reducible to the orientations and dispositions comprised by the habitus of listening; rather, they are conscious, intentional, explicit engagements with (and within) the habitus.31

If technique is an alloy of know-how and knowing-that—a braiding of technē and epistēmē rather than their strict separation—then it would support a surprising conclusion: that “modern audile technique” as described by Sterne fails to be a technique at all. It would not cross the line that distinguishes technique from habituated action, no matter how virtuosic such habituated action might be. For it to actually attain the status of technique, audile technique would have to avoid reifying the categorical distinction between pure and practical knowledge, or knowing-that and knowing-how. My suggestion is that the relation of technē and epistēmē should be thought of as practically pure knowledge or impurely practical knowledge, where attention is given to attention.32

* * *

To develop this suggestion, I want to consider a case study: the transition from wired to wireless telegraphy that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century. The reasons for choosing this example are twofold. First, Sterne discusses wired and wireless telegraphy under the heading of “sound telegraphy” and treats it as a central moment in his account of modern audile technique. Second, the transition from wired to wireless telegraphy offers a well-documented, archivally extensive source for reconstructing audile technique along the lines that I am suggesting—as a form of practically pure knowledge or impurely practical knowledge, where attention is given to attention. As a result, it meets the criteria for being a technique and not just an act of habituated virtuosity.

Wired telegraphy, which came to prominence in the middle of the nineteenth century, was a system of direct, point to point communication, where electric pulses were sent along long wires from station to station. Operators on a line could hear all the messages traveling up and down it, since the line formed a closed circuit. When operators needed to send a message they would break the circuit. By tapping on a “key”—a simple momentary switch—they could send pulses to all the others on the line. The pulses represented letters, numbers, and other symbols by means of a coded system of long and short durations, what we now refer to generally as Morse code. Originally the pulses sent down the line were inscribed with ink on a long thin strip of paper—by a machine called an inker—but many of the operators learned to “read” the code directly by attending to the clicking sound of the inker’s relays as pulses were received. Reading messages “by ear” was more efficient and became the normal mode for most telegraph operators. Wired telegraphy became a form of communication that, for the most part, relied on sound and on the attentive capacities of its operators. To aid them, special sounders were developed to make the clicks of the code clearer, more resonant, and directional. Often these sounders were built into resonator boxes that made the clicks more distinct and directional (see Figure 5.1).

In contrast, wireless telegraphy, which used radio waves to send Morse code, only emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, when various scientific experiments and devices were combined into a commercially workable system by Guglielmo Marconi. Early wireless telegraphy emerged as a challenge to the monopoly of the telegraph system and first took hold in maritime communication, where the freedom from wires meant that a network of vessels could stay in communication as they traveled their routes. Powerful industrial spark gap transmitters sent wideband, damped blasts of electromagnetic energy into the “ether,” which could be detected at large distances without the use of wires. Given a proper radio frequency detector and rectifier, these coded blasts could be heard using high-impedance headphones or telephone earpieces. Today, spark gaps are no longer in use. The modulated carrier wave, which is the basis of voice transmission over the air, came into use in the 1910s and 1920s.

In the transition from wired to wireless telegraphy, we have two practices that are extraordinarily close; we might even be tempted to think of them as siblings. At the pedagogical level, the manuals used for training wired telegraphers into fluency with Morse code were also used by wireless operators. Figure 5.2 is a photograph of a Marconi wireless training school in New York City, taken in 1916. It is also the image reproduced on the cover of The Audible Past and discussed in the body of the text. The setup and arrangement of the classroom are modeled on vocational schools for wired telegraphy from the nineteenth century. Morse code is written on the chalkboard in the back of the room. Students are listening to code being sent over their headphones and transcribing the messages on a pad. (There is even an old telegraph sounder on the second desk on the left.) Figure 5.3, from a Marconi training manual produced during World War I, displays a “key” for training operators to tap out their messages. Here, recruits on the right side of the tables tap out messages written on a printed sheet to operators listening on the left side, transcribing the messages on a pad.

Sterne reads these kinds of images as depicting the characteristic comportment and posture of “modern audile technique.” In The Audible Past, Figure 5.2 is preceded just a few pages earlier by another illustration (Figure 5.4), published in 1890, of a wired telegraph operator working on a train. In both cases, the comportment is similar: Heads are “turned down in concentration” and the bodily dispositions represent “a separation from the environment.”33 The operator is in the pose of relaxed, but attentive listening; they are using their specialized skill to interpret the sounds they hear; they are each being “individuated” by the use of audio technological mediation to inhabit a private sphere of sounds, a new kind of acoustic space. The main difference, argues Sterne, is that the older illustration depicts solitary headphone listening (as the train operator does) compared with collective headphone listening, “alone together” (as in the Marconi school).34 In the latter, the students attend to the same signal, but they remain atomized, individuated, and separated, possessing their own personal mediated auditory space.

For Sterne, headphones play an important role in this story. Not only are they interpreted as a technology where the dispositions and orientations of modern audile technique are crystallized, they also serve as an icon, allowing Sterne to detect the presence of audile technique from an archive of images, not sounds. Where there are headphones, Sterne infers the presence of a new configuration of acoustic space, of this new acoustic space’s availability as private property of the bourgeois listener, of the need to make new sonic phenomena into signs, and so forth.35 It is the technological common denominator that connects mediate auscultation and “sound telegraphy”—and, consequently, it is one of the planks in Sterne’s argument about how modern audile technique made its way from a specialized listening practice to the broad public.

In fact, wired telegraphers almost never used headphones except in very specific situations. Figure 5.4 depicts the use of a “secret sounder.” This was a device that was invented to cope with the problem of the publicity of telegraphic communication, the fact that the clattering of the sounders could be heard (or overheard) by others, and that its messages could be stolen. Most telegraphy happened in offices and stations. In busy locales, a telegrapher’s office might have many operators working the lines, and the room might be divided into compartments or partitions, each containing a sounder. In those cases, “secret sounders” offered a solution. Consisting of a very small electromagnetic clicker, a secret sounder could be wired into the telegraph circuit and then held to the ear. In some cases, “secret sounders” were manufactured in small, hand-held metal enclosures that could be placed against the ear (see Figure 5.5). In other cases they could be wired directly into the earphone cups of a headset. Replacing the flexible diaphragms that were normally installed in the earphone cups, a secret sounder limited the volume and spatial extension of the relay’s click.

Where there is volume, there is publicity. Since business transactions relied on the telegraph for speed, transactions in banking and the stock market were often telegraphed. This meant that rival interests could potentially intercept messages or eavesdrop on them. There are many accounts in the archives about spies hanging around outside the window of a telegrapher’s office or sitting in the front office in disguise (as a member of the public working on a telegram) to capture messages. Others might try to tap the telegraph lines with the use of inductor coils.

Messages sent on a telegraph were available to all others listening on that line, thus there was little privacy in interoffice communication between operators. The telegrapher’s office was a place of persistent overhearing, not a place where the ostensible privacy of the headphone listener was on display. Although Sterne characterizes modern audile technique as promoting the privatization of sound—where a group of headphone-clad listeners reside “alone together,” each in their own isolated sonic world—wired telegraphy never fit neatly into this scheme.36 It was a modern sound technology that put listeners together at a distance.

Wireless telegraphy, in contrast, depended entirely on the headphone. Before vacuum tubes could amplify small audio signals, high impedance headphones were crucial for listening to the tiny currents of radio waves. Early wireless telegraphy had no loudspeakers, no mode for acoustic public address, and thus no way to be publicly overheard. Many amateur radio builders, especially children, would steal the earpieces off public telephones for their home crystal sets.

The necessity of the earpiece was just one crucial difference across the technical divide of wired and wireless telegraphy. Another difference was that wireless technology brought a wholesale change to the sound of Morse code and created problems for its intelligibility. In wired telegraphy, messages are percussed on the sounder as a series of onsets and offsets. When the telegraph key is depressed and current flows through the circuit, the electromagnet in the sounder is activated, a sounding bar is pulled sharply downward, and a click results. But the same happens when the key is released, when current stops flowing, and the sounding bar moves back up to its original position. The duration of the code is marked by the onset and offset of each letter.

In early wireless telegraphy, however, messages are sent through the ether by means of a spark gap. A “spark gap” is a high voltage transformer with two closely spaced electrodes on it. When current is sent into the transformer, it is converted into a high voltage potential at one of the electrodes. When the voltage is high enough, a spark jumps the gap from one electrode to another, producing both an audible snap and a burst of electromagnetic energy in the radio frequency spectrum. By adding a little vibrating switch to the circuit, a spark gap can be used to create a continuous, buzzy tone when a telegraph key is depressed and current flows in the circuit. The “pitch” of the buzz is dependent on the tension placed on a little spring metal switch that vibrates back and forth on the edge of the spark gap. This little switch “makes” and “breaks” the circuit continuously, and—in essence—chops up a direct current into a rapid series of pulses. The sonic result is that the code sent by spark gap is marked not by the onset and offset of each letter, but by the duration that the telegraph key is depressed.

The difference between the way that wired and wireless telegraphy mark the duration of each letter is a consequence of the distinct operational technologies upon which they were based. The difference between the sounder (with its marking of duration by onsets and offsets) and the spark gap (with its marking of duration by a continuous buzz) created a gap in the intelligibility of the codes, as electrical engineer and historian James Calvert notes:

In radiotelegraph operation [i.e., wireless telegraphy], the code is received with an earphone as . . . a tone, not as clicks. This is true of the earlier spark-gap transmitters as well as later beat-frequency reception, which produces a clean tone. A radiotelegraph operator will not understand sounder clicks [i.e., wired telegraphy], and an operator used to the sounder will not be able to read tone code. The sounds are too far different for this, and each must be separately learned.37

The difference between hearing onsets and offsets versus hearing the steady state portion is not, say, perceptually analogous to seeing a visual outline versus a shaded-in portion. Although conceptually akin, they are perceptually distinct. Operators had to retrain themselves to attend to this new code. So even with the same code and the same kind of training, the same habitual acts of pressing the key, there was a gap of intelligibility between these sibling practices of wired and wireless telegraphy. This important fact is missed if we lump wired and wireless telegraphy together under the heading of “sound telegraphy.”

Other “sonic” and perceptual differences abound. Instead of the distinct, percussive clunk of the sounder, the soundscape of wireless telegraphy was layered with noise: there was the noise and buzz of the spark gap transmitter itself, which sent bursts of damped waves across the frequency spectrum; but also the electromagnetic noise caused by environmental conditions such as weather, lightning, and the sun. Wired telegraphy had its own share of environmental disturbances like the increase in stray currents caused by the aurora borealis or the occasional direct lightning strike that might cause sparking or even fuse metal components together. Yet none of these were as common—or particularly sonic—as the disturbances heard over the wireless. Weather conditions would cause loud pops, hisses, or crackles, or produce broadband static that could blot out wireless reception entirely.

This phenomenon of atmospheric energy inducing currents in electrical wires has been described by Douglas Kahn under the heading of the aelectrosonic or “natural radio.” One of his earwitnesses is Thomas Watson, Bell’s assistant in the development of the telephone. In his autobiography, Watson describes how he used to

spend hours at night in the laboratory listening to the many strange noises in the telephone and speculating as to their cause. One of the most common sounds was a snap, followed by a grating sound that lasted two or three seconds before it faded into silence, and another was like the chirping of a bird. My theory at the time was that the currents causing these sounds came from explosions on the sun or that they were signals from another planet. They were mystic enough to suggest the latter explanation but I never detected any regularity in them that might indicate they were intelligible signals.38

Reflecting on the cause of these mysterious sounds, Watson observes, “These currents were probably from the same source as the static that afflicts the modern radio. . . . I, perhaps, may claim to be the first person who ever listened to static.”39

While the pedagogy of sending and receiving Morse code was preserved from wired to wireless telegraphy, only with wireless did operators have to develop listening techniques for segregating out noisy signals from within a field of static. To make matters even more complicated, early wireless telegraphy did not use finely tuned circuits or carrier frequencies, so the sonic field was often cluttered with interference as multiple operators tapped out code simultaneously. Not only did wireless operators need to adjust their receivers to distinguish between unintentional atmospheric noise and intentional signals, they also had to track messages against a background din of other messages. New techniques were developed for distinguishing these simultaneous audio streams.

First of all, different kinds of transmitters—such as spark gap, quenched spark gap, rotary spark gap, or Poulsen arc—produced variations in the sounds transmitted. Thus, differences in timbre or register aided in segregating one auditory stream from another. Moreover, as in wired telegraphy, different operators could be recognized by their “touch” or “hand.” As Francis Arnold Collins, author of The Wireless Man, put it, “It is as easy to recognize an operator from his touch as you pick out a familiar voice in a crowd. . . . They sound much alike to you, but you will soon get to know a man’s speed, and touch of the key, whether light, strong, or hesitating.”40

In addition, operators soon developed attentive techniques for tuning in on particular messages and cutting out others. Collins offers a good description to his reader of the attentive work of the wireless operator in selecting messages through the manipulation of tuning capacitors and other controls. From out of the field of humming or clicking, an operator homed in on a particular message intended for him. “He bent quickly over the complicated series of dials and levers, turning the arrows this way and that. Instantly the wireless chatter became blurred and gradually died away, as one message seemed to leap up and drown out all the rest.”41 At the same time, a high wattage station in close proximity might simply mask all other signals entirely, effectively erasing the field’s layered depth and differentiation for the duration of its transmission. Yet, these sonic phenomena of blurring, dying away, leaping up, and drowning out are unique to wireless telegraphy.

Finally, in addition to scanning the field for distress signals or routine messages, wireless operators also employed listening techniques akin to the diagnostic and monitory modes described in Karin Bijsterveld’s work on sonic skills.42 As operators listened to messages over the ether, they simultaneously attended to the sound of received transmissions in order to monitor the state of their radios. They had to know when their own devices were not working optimally and how to diagnose and correct the situation. In order to properly adjust their transmitters and receivers they might twist variable capacitors, finely adjust the placement of inductor coils to change their amount of coupling, or manipulate the size, placement, and orientation of their antennas.

Here we see why an account of audile technique that rests on a reified distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that is inadequate for narrating a history of listening that is something other than an articulation of regimes of listening, or a historical sociology of listening.

Fortunately, there is a huge archive of firsthand accounts, amateur wireless publications, Marconi training materials, radio-themed fiction, and other sources from which we can reconstruct the cultural and individual audibilities of wired and wireless telegraphy. In the actions of telegraphic operators we see the difference between a silent, habituated practice and what it means to possess a technique: These operators in their acts of listening, manipulating, and adjusting the apparatus are also demonstrating the relation of pure and practical knowledge that is the hallmark of technique. They not only know what to do, they know why they are doing it. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that their practically pure knowledge or impurely practical knowledge of the apparatus made them into contemporary technitēs whose knowledge of the device’s operation is evinced in the very act of listening and in the physical manipulations of the technology designed to optimize their attention. To unlock these moments we need to consider the soundscape of wireless telegraphy, to consider the sonic aspects that solicited listeners’ attention, and to trace (as best we can) the inception of perceptual techniques and the acquisition of skills for developing them. In other words, we must attend to attention if we want to understand audile technique as a technique and not just a habit, orientation, or disposition.

Notes

1. 1.  I dedicate this essay to Cat Slowik, whose thinking about the history and meaning of technique has profoundly shaped my views. Some of the ideas presented in this paper were developed in tandem in our course “Audile Techniques,” taught at Yale University in fall 2019.
2. 2.  Lutz Koepnick, Resonant Matter: Sound, Art, and the Promise of Hospitality (New York City: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 51–52.
3. 3.  Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 93ff.
4. 4.  Jonathan Sterne, “Communication as Techné,” in Communication as . . . : Perspectives on Theory, ed. Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 91–98 (at 91–92).
5. 5.  While it is not unusual to define technē in contrast to epistēmē, many influential accounts of technique and technology to emerge since the turn of the twentieth century—like those of Martin Heidegger, Lewis Mumford, Siegfried Gideon, and Marshall McLuhan—have relied on contrasting technē with a different term, physis. The distinction between technē and physis captures the ancient Greek distinction between artifice and nature. If physis describes the immanent and internal properties of each thing—a plant’s or a creature’s “nature” in the sense of what it simply does and possesses by virtue of being a member of its species—technē is external and secondary, something that a creature employs to augment its powers but that it does not possess indigenously.
6. 6.  Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Techniques, Technology and Civilisation, ed. Nathan Schlanger (New York: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books, 2006).
7. 7.  Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 69, quoted in Sterne, “Communication,” 93.
8. 8.  Sterne, “Communication,” 93.
9. 9.  Ibid., 95.
10. 10.  Note the draining off of intentionality, will, explicit volition, and conscious decision for more and more tacit and affective states—for “disposition” and “feel.” I will have more to say about this below.
11. 11.  Sterne, The Audible Past, 92.
12. 12.  Ibid.
13. 13.  Ibid., 91. Emphasis added.
14. 14.  Bourdieu, Logic, 61.
15. 15.  For an even-handed overview of Bourdieu’s arguments against rational actor theory and defense of tacit, unconscious, socially shaped action, see Chapter 4 of Richard Jenkins’s Pierre Bourdieu (Hove, East Sussex, United Kingdom, 2002).
16. 16.  Sterne, The Audible Past, 91.
17. 17.  The history of Anglophone reception of “Techniques of the Body” is relevant. I believe that Mauss’s essay first appeared in English in the journal Economy and Society, 2, no. 1 (1973). The article was then reprinted in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds., Incorporations (New York: Zone, 1992) as part of an upsurge of interest in “the body” and biopolitics that was influenced by the American reception of Foucault. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s book, Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), was important in making Foucauldian discipline look like power impressed into habits, self-regulation, etc. This reading was shaped by Dreyfus’s longstanding interest in the phenomenology of embodiment and in thinkers like Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger who rejected explicit Husserlian intentionality in favor of more embodied and less self-reflective modes of action. Jonathan Crary, the editor of Incorporations and co-founder of Zone Books, employed Maussian “body techniques” in his influential book Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), which links the idea of body techniques and new technologies to shifts in observational regimes. This is an amalgam of Mauss, Foucault, and Bourdieu—but it is also promoted by Bourdieu’s own reception in Anglophone scholarship and his citation of “Techniques of the Body” as examples of practical logics that are hidden to consciousness. The Audible Past was itself modeled in many respects on Crary’s Techniques of the Observer—it focuses on techniques of the listener and their crystallization into new technologies, to a shift in auditory regimes from pre-tympanic to tympanic, etc. One cannot hold Sterne responsible for aligning Mauss, Bourdieu, and Foucault, since (I believe) it was the norm at the time when The Audible Past was written. Anglophone scholarship follows Bourdieu’s winnowing of Mauss. In contrast, I would point the reader to Nathan Schlanger’s introduction to Techniques, Technology and Civilization, which puts Mauss’s thinking about technology into context.
18. 18.  Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009), chap. 1 (at p. 28).
19. 19.  Quoted in Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” 81.
20. 20.  Mauss, “Techniques and Technology,” in Techniques, Technology, and Civilization, 149.
21. 21.  The artisan (cheiortechnês) acts without knowledge (Aristotle, in The Metaphysics, 981a30–b5).
22. 22.  Aristotle, in The Metaphysics, notes that a general sign of knowledge is the ability to teach (Aristotle 981b10). The possession of technique allows the technitēs to be a teacher to others, because they can articulate the reasons why a particular technique is being employed and to what end.
23. 23.  Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” 80.
24. 24.  Ibid., 81.
25. 25.  Ibid., 80.
26. 26.  Ibid., “The Divisions of Sociology,” in Techniques, Technology, and Civilization, 52.
27. 27.  Mauss’s emphasis on “borrowing” undergirded his critiques of purist racial theory—recall, he fought in World War I and died in 1950—and his optimism concerning technical development.
28. 28.  Mauss, “The Divisions of Sociology,” in Techniques, Technology, and Civilization, 52.
29. 29.  Ibid., 53.
30. 30.  Ibid., 54.
31. 31.  From this claim, it would follow that technē is unequally distributed. Unlike the habitus, which everyone participates in, not everyone is a technitēs. The skills and knowledge that people possess will differ quite dramatically, even as no one will have a monopoly on all the technai.
32. 32.  Perhaps we might want to think about this in terms of a dialectic of concretization, in the Simondonian sense, where theoretical knowledge is put to work in practical contexts and where challenges emerging from practical contexts solicit further theoretical knowledge. But theoretical knowledge can never fully anticipate what will happen in its materialization, and materialization solicits specific questions that can be answered only under the rubrics of novel theories.
33. 33.  Sterne, The Audible Past, 158.
34. 34.  Ibid., 165.
35. 35.  For example, “The iconography of listening to early sound-reproduction technologies, especially around ear tubes and headphones, suggests a direct line of descent from the stethoscope and the telegraph to the telephone, phono-graph, and radio” (Ibid., 98).
36. 36.  Ibid., 163.
37. 37.  James Calvert, “Receiving by Ear.” James Calvert, “The Electromagnetic Telegraph,” accessed November 26, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20120106212148fw_/http://mysite.du.edu/~jcalvert/tel/morse/morse.htm.
38. 38.  Thomas Watson, Exploring Life: The Autobiography of Thomas Watson, with Birth and Babyhood of the Telephone (New York: D. Appleton, 1926), 81.
39. 39.  Ibid., 82. Aside from the astonishing claim that he may have been the first person to hear static, Watson’s text is also an example of the way that something as simple as a long wire can function in two distinct ways electrically and produce radically distinct sonic phenomena. The telephone wire that Bell and Watson used to send messages during the day functions similarly to the wires used in wired telegraphy. Electrical currents, whether they be the long and short pulses of telegraphy or the varying amplitude waves of transduced voices, are introduced into a closed circuit where a long wire is being used as a transmission line. At the same time, the long wire acts—unintentionally—as an antenna. It induces stray electrical currents from the atmosphere. By day, the wire functions like a wired telegraph, but at night it functions like a wireless telegraph. The wired telegraph is a closed system where signals are intentionally introduced from the inside. The wireless telegraphy couples to the atmosphere, picking up energy from the surroundings and making it available for detection.
40. 40.  F. A. Collins, The Wireless Man: His Work and Adventures on Land and Sea (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1912), 13–14.
41. 41.  Francis Collins, “An Evening at the Wireless Station,” St. Nicholas, v. 39 part 2 (1912), 1111–12.
42. 42.  Karin Bijsterveld, Sonic Skills: Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920s–Present) (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).