Sound is a means by which the world enters the body. In contrast to the eye, which emphasizes the distinction between the self and the world, the ear brings the self and the world together. Through the eye, you see the world out there; you observe it as separate from yourself, perceive yourself in relation to it. Through the ear, you hear the world in your head; it enters inside you; you perceive the world from the inside out, as it were. More to the point, in the West the eye has been trained to see rationally—as Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler put it, “conceiving reality as made up of separate things, commodities, objects that can be modified by practical activity.” The ear, however, has not been conditioned by reason to the same degree. No matter how rationalized the production of the sound going into the ear, it remains an organ conditioned first and foremost by to emotional response.

THE INDUSTRIALIZED SOUNDSCAPE EXCERPT from Selling Sounds

Once the music industries were filling the air with music, American society sounded different than it had a generation earlier. Much of the change was attributable to the thunderous cacophony of mass industrialization and urbanization, but music mattered too. Unlike the sounds of factories, automobiles, and teeming city streets, music was a kind of sound that people actively, consciously produced and deliberately tried to control; it was not a by- product of another function, the way the noise of automobiles was an incidental effect of their use for transportation. All the clichés of about the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age notwithstanding, the significance of this clamor has long been overlooked. In the minds of many philosophers, however, from Aristotle to Marx, it is, to a greater or lesser extent, through the senses that we humans know and understand the world. Such sensory experience is culturally—and therefore historically—conditioned; what is perceived as noise by the middle class at one moment may represent industriousness or freedom of expression to the working class. The senses inform our worldview, our historical consciousness, our sense of what is or is not possible at a given time. As part of a structure of feeling, they help constitute the affective mental apparatus through which rational thought is continuously filtered. As Marx noted, we perceive and understand the world through our bodies as well as our minds; the development of our senses is part of our cognitive formation. “Man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses,” Marx wrote, and elsewhere he concluded, “The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.” And Marx was not alone in drawing this conclusion. In The Power of Sound (1880), the polymath philosopher Edmund Gurney began, “It is now generally admitted that our organs of special sense, the channels by which we keep up our constant and various intercourse with what we call the external world, have been formed in past ages by gradual processes in correspondence with stimuli which that external world supplied”….