The Indefensible Ear A History Hillel Schwartz Underlying the litany of twentieth-century anti-noise polemics is the laim that human hearing is constant, involuntary, and nearly impossible to shut off. That is, the ordinary unassisted ear takes in all sounds within its individual range, whether we are awake, drowsing, or ‘sound’ asleep, and whether we want to hear them, are indifferent to them, or make every effort to ignore them. In consequence (so runs the underlying claim), the ear isa particularly vulnerable organ of perception: always in operation, unreflectively accumulative, and naively open to even the most harmful of loud, or concussive sounds. What's worse, as anti-noise polemicists repeat and repeat and repeat, the ear lacks the most rudimentary of defences: it hhas no equivalent to the eyelids that protect vision; the lips and tongue that protect taste; the nasal hairs and sneezes that protect smell; and the general mobility that protects touch and proprioception. If this were all, the polemic would hardly be modern. Most of this claim could have been, and was, made centuries earlier, with the possible exception of early twentieth-century studies showing the immediate and residual impact of night noises upon those apparently asleep. There was, however, another, new, and seemingly contradictory element to the underlying claim of the litany: that the human ear is, an active agent in its own right, not simply a well-tempered receiver. For human hearing to be constant, involuntary, and active, in a twenty- four-hour-day world devoted at once to excess and to streamlining, this ‘was the special jeopardy of the modern ear.488 ArteRWoRD, Manic and obsessive, the ear bravely, persistently, foolishly exposes itself and its cilia to fatigue, danger, discomfort, and destruction, From such a perspective, the ear is our true bodily avant garde, in all senses of the term ~ military, psychological, cultural. Militarily, the ear is our sentinel, armed only with wax, doing what it must to warn us of incom ing fire and looming disaster, and doing this often better and always more continually than the eye, Psychologically, in pairs, the ears help us determine and change direction while maintaining our balance doing what it must to keep us focused in the midst of flux. Culturally, the ear is what Cubists might have called a collagiste, what Dadaists ight have called a collector of fragments, doing what it must to welcome simultaneous caterwauling universes of sound. And like every avant garde, the ear must suffer for its causes. Taken altogether, this modern under- standing of human hearing derives from a complex convergence of sources and forces. It derives from a late nineteenth-century neuro- physiological reassessment of the ear itself as no mere passive receptacle but asa transducer and amplifier, o that the ear comes to situate itseif within a crowd of assertive verbs rather than among a series of azchi- tectonic nouns. Earlier, it was the aural labyrinth that had most intrigued and drawn to itself metaphor and myth, culminating in the labyrinthine analogies of Nietzsche, but by the twentieth century it was the energetic, transitive aspect of the ear, rather than the sheerly spatial, that would attract such physio-philosophical analogies as ‘accommodation,” ‘recruitment,’ and ‘threshold shift’ Hearing, which had previously been considered a reactive physiological function, was thus shifted much closer to, and increasingly conflated with, the mental faculty of listening. Once neurologists had found the ear to bean electrochemical transducer and an electrical amplifier, the ear had even more in common with the brain, itself newly discovered to be a hotbed of electrochemical interactions. Listening, which had been supposed to be selective and wilful, had long been contrasted with hearing, which was supposed to be indiscriminate and automatic; but turn-of-the-century studies of hypnotism, catatonia, coma, and hysterical deafness in psychiatric clinics, along with other studies of forms of attention and advertising, weakened the polarity of these traditional opposites. Listening itself might well be indiscriminate and automatic, as for example with telegraph and telephone operators, and hearing ‘might well be specific and voluntary, as with hypnotic commands, only some of which would be ‘heard’ and acted upon (the best hypnotist cannot command a person to commit suicide). So the ear, in its relentless hearing, was also a listener, therefore com- plicit in such dubious acts as ‘overhearing’, which amidst crowded THE INDEFENSTBLE EAR 489 streets and apartment buildings was perhaps as involuntary as it was inevitable. ‘The model of the telephone contributed substantially, at least in the carly days, to the conflation of hearing and listening, overhearing and ‘tistening in’. Imputing an extraordinary and dramatic effectiveness to telephone conversations, people equated being heard with being listened to; the one followed from the other more regularly and ‘natur- ally’ over the telephone than in ordinary face-to-face conversation. I suspect that this was due as much to the social fact of overhearing as to any technological mystique. On early telephones, and to this day among generations born before 1930, people tended to raise their voices when they spoke, and to shout if a connection was ‘long-distance’. For at least fifty years, the telephone was a far more insistent medium of social discourse than it is now (or maybe not, given the loud and nearly Pavlovian responsiveness of people carrying cell phones). Since one was likely to be overheard by neighbours, family, and (at public phone booths, or on cell phones) by strangers, you had to mean what you said and you presumed that what the other party heard was what you, loudly, meant. (Our modern understanding of human hearing derives concomitantly from a popular technological reassessment of the ear itself as a sensitive instrument, by analogy less with the horns of gramophones or radio antennae than with recording devices that register sounds in the first place ~ the ear as analogous not with the stationary horn or wire but with the moving needle, the microphone/telephone pick-up, the actively straining medium. Tuse that word ‘medium’ intentionally, because the modern under- standing of human hearing also derives from the mid-to-late nineteenth- century rush to hear voices from Beyond, which began first in upper ‘New York State as a rapping and tapping and soon was transported by ‘mentalist magicians, fudging photographers, and spiritualist mediums into a symphony of knockings, whispers, ethereal voices, and distant echoes overheard in parlours and theatres in North and South America, Europe and Australia. The ear was such a ‘sensitive’, another word for medium, that it could reach where legs might tremble and eyes fail, to the Other Side, across death and into the world of the timeless. Listening, in this melodramatic and spiritual scenario, was to be intent, intimate, and intrepid, as it was surely also for the builders of the first crystal radio sets who strained to hear signals through the crackling ether and the constant, almost impermeable static. Some of these amateur radio operators admitted to enjoying the static, as if the end result of listening were hearing:490 Arrenwon [sot to spe pact st nase of with campaigns mounted of a sudden at the century's end against eat pulling and ear-tugging, traditional practiccs of irate grammar-schou teachers, exasperated nanintes, bored children, and doting aunts ane uncles. As the first city-wide and nation-wide hearing tests were instituted, with admittedly subjective testing devices such as the ticking of pocket watches, public health advocates began to insist that even the outer ears, the auricles, of children not be treated as inert pieces of flesh conveniently exposed to a pinch or the rap of a pointer, lest deat. ness result. In fashion, too, the ear was reassessed and given a more active, exub- rant role, at first in sustaining longer heavier ear-tings. During the 1920s, with the bobbed haircuts and smaller Lats for women anda stecy decline in numbers of fully bearded men, the adult ear was exposed in Public, pricked up for the excitements of jazz and the wind from au rallies. ‘Big ears’, so-called by certain cosmetic companies and that new species of sculptor, the cosmetic surgeon, became a public embartass ment now that they were so visible, but they also became an icon for the involuntary rudeness of overhearing, which was increasingly a prob- Jem in a world of small cheap apartments built without the insulatior customary a century or more before ~ apartments gradually being filled with modern equipment whose sounds readily penetrated the thinner floors and walls: pianos, flush tollets, radios, vacuum cleaners, The more the ear became physically exposed, the more it seemed to intrude upon and violate, intimacies. In tandem, an anatomical reassessment of the ear was made as the inner ear began to reveal its secrets. Of all organs considered the most inaccessible, the inner ear was so tightly woven into the brain and skull and so acutely sensitive to pain, that to explore it while in lively process ‘Was all but impossible, and would remain so, really, until improvements in imaging techniques during the 1970s. Nonetheless, a series of risky oto-surgical techniques had been developed in Europe at the end of the Previous century, which revealed some of the extraordinary qualities of the cilia and the cochlea. The ecology of the inner ear was not only electrically dynamic but fluidly dynamic, at just the time when physicists and mathematicians were resuming their interest in the complex motion Of fluids in general and waves in particular. ‘The modern understanding of human hearing derives, hence and in addition, from Rayleigh’s codification of the science of acoustics and the subsequent popular scientific lectures on acoustics, which made sound waves appear at once very elusive and very penetrating in that Tae INDERENSIBLE Eak 491 they were found to travel easily around corners and through cre\ ‘most swiftly along the metal and liquid conduits increasingly employed in modern construction. And their vibrations could produce intriguing patterns, shift flames, Acoustics in popular demonstration showed itself to be not merely a science of reception but of inception and deception; the ear, by direct association, was far more than a troublesome receptacle. ‘Troublesome, I say, because the incidence of earaches in the nineteenth century was high. According to my reading in private diaries, letters, household health manuals, and outpatient clinic treatment records, 1 would guess that very few children and few adults escaped from a series of earaches. If we count illnesses called ‘catarrh’, which usually involved earache, I would guess that earache was as common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as what we today call the common cold, and it was catered to by just as many concoctions to make it go away. Soa medical reassessment of the ear, of hearing and of deafness, was in order: the earache was re-centred upon the ear. Instead of being seen as.a symptom of a larger constitutional illness, or as a side-effect of other medication or disease, it was seen as a problem related to the health of the ear itself. It would, however, take some time for the medical reassess- ment to lead to significantly better aural health or ear care, since one of the primary drugs used to treat a whole spasm of illnesses in the eight- centh and nineteenth centuries, quinine, was ototoxic - that I, the pharmaceutical most prescribed by physicians or sold by medicine men for a wide variety of aches and pains was responsible, in large or frequent doses, for severe organic injury to the ear and to hearing. The centrality of hearing itself was being reassessed at the turn of the twentieth century. We are told by cultural critics and historians (except Martin Jay) that modernity has been marked by a supreme victory of the visual over the aural in the hierarchy of the senses, but to people between 1870 and the First World War, the most amazing new elements in modem society were keenly aural in their impact and influence: the player piano, the gramophone, the telephone, the radio, the subway train, the elevated train, and, during the Great War, the loudspeaker and high-powered, extremely loud artillery. Nor should I neglect the drill press and electrical lathes that made possible all the other clacking, clicking, and crackling noises from mass-produced machines rather suddenly pervading the home, the office, anid the public thoroughfare: washing machines and vacuum cleaners, typewriters and office printing machines, automobiles and motorcycles. In this ‘Age of Noise’, as people began to call it, hearing was crucial in order to make one’s way in the world and to keep from being run over when crossing the street or the