Speaker: Kirsten Paige
This event will be chaired by Chantal Berry
"Hydrophonics" is the title Kirsten Paige is thinking of for an article she would like to work on this summer, one that follows my recently published 19th-Century Music article, "Tectonic Microphonics". There, she would explore the history of the hydrophone as both a British physiological instrument (ca. 1850) and French instrument of war (ca. 1914). She would argue that the hydrophone inaugurated two classes of "virtuoso listeners" in the so-called "age of auscultation" that relied upon the same metaphorical and ideological matrix — the human body as cipher for the Earth and, in turn, of the nation or empire. The hydrophone was the technological suture that linked these terrains — body to Earth to nation — and bequeathed the traces of a particular world system that carried privileged aural insight into worlds beyond silence that carried the auctoritas of global oversight.
