Symposium, "Attention, Cognition, and the Auditory Self, 1770–1920"

August 5, 2021 from 11:45 EDT to 16:50 EDT and August 6, 2021 from 12:00 EDT to 17:50 EDT 

The event will take place on Zoom.
 

Conveners:

Carmel Raz (MPIEA)

Francesca Brittan (Case Western Reserve University)

Participants: 

Michael Auer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

Zeynep Bulut (Queen's University Belfast)

Nina Sun Eidsheim (University of California, Los Angeles)

Céline Frigau Manning (Université Lyon 3)

Brian Kane (Yale University)

Allie Kieffer (Rice University)

Youn Kim (Hong Kong University)

Nicholas Mathew (University of California, Berkeley)

Brian O'Connor (University College Dublin)

Benjamin Steege (Columbia University)

David Trippett (Cambridge University)

Danny Walden (Oxford University)

Richard Williams (SOAS)

Abstract:

Over the past decade, attention and its perceived opposite, distraction, have become sites of sustained anxiety and debate. Questions around attentive economies, histories, and cognitive modes  have surfaced across a range of disciplines from cultural studies to computer science and medicine. What constitutes focus or unfocus? How are such states produced, leveraged, or dissipated? And what is at stake in the act of attending? 

Recently developed approaches in the history of science and in literary theory, including cognitive-historical frameworks, have begun to address some of these queries. Lorraine Daston has examined the importance of attentiveness in values assigned to objects of inquiry in the modern natural sciences, while Nicholas Dames, Lily Gurton-Wachter, and Nathalie Phillips have contemplated attentive and distracted states among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers. In the domain of art criticism, Jonathan Crary and Michael Fried have dealt with patterns of cognitive absorption, spotlighting, and dispersal among historical viewers. Media theorists and economists, including Thomas Davenport, John Beck, Tim Wu, and James Williams have also weighed in, proposing models for understanding attentive investment and drain. But the fields of music and sound-studies have dealt less thoroughly with histories of cognition, and consequently with issues around the attentive conditioning of listeners and composers. Foundational work by Matthew Riley, Thomas Tolley, and James Johnson (among others) has set the stage for a sustained engagement with attention’s musical histories and with the politics and economics of sonic focus. 

Focusing on the ‘long’ nineteenth century (roughly 1770-1920), this symposium aims to facilitate such a conversation, taking as foundational existing philosophies of listening and psychologies/physiologies of hearing, while also moving into less traveled territory: historical theories of auditory perception and cognition, intersections between the sonic and ‘neural’ sciences, and overlaps among scientific and aesthetic modes of attending. 

We are interested in basic questions (what constitutes auditory attentiveness or distraction at any given moment?) as well as more focused queries, including the following: 

• What is the relationship among aural, visual, haptic, and other sensory attentions? 
• How do theories of focus write themselves into music’s generic and structural semiotics? 
• How do conceptions of medical, therapeutic, or pedagogical attention intersect with theories of auditory focus? 
• What role do race, gender, and nationality play in the construction of the attentive/distracted subject? 
• What processes of attentive conditioning police the music/sound barrier, enforcing modes of auditory selection or inclusion? 
• Is there an ethics of auditory attention? 
• How do attentive modalities construct and sustain sonic subjectivities?

Register for the event here

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE  (all times in EDT)

DAY 1: THURSDAY AUGUST 5

11:45-12:00: Introductions

12:00-13:20: Colonial Attentions  (Chair: Ian MacMillen)

• Nicholas Mathew, Omniaudience: Listening to Voices in the Specimens of Various Styles of Music     Abstract       
• Richard Williams, Colonial Concentration: Attention in Bengali music scholarship in 1885         Abstract

13:20-13:40: Break 

13:40-15:00: Attentive Sublimes (Chair: Susan McClary) 

• Celine Frigau Manning,  “They thus become insensible”: Music, Attention, and Hypnosis in the Nineteenth-Century Performances of the Aissawa Brotherhood      Abstract
• Allie Kieffer, Music and ‘Mystical Truth: William James, Joseph Segond, and Early Twentieth-Century Psychologies of Religious Experience        Abstract

15:00-15:30: Break 

15:30-16:50: Frequencies  (Chair: Brian O'Connor)

• Zeynep Bulut, Alarm will touch         Abstract
• David Trippett, Listening by number: Albert von Thimus and the Pythagorean sublime          Abstract

DAY 2: FRIDAY AUGUST 6

12:00-14:00:Technologies of Attention  (Chair: Deirdre Loughridge)

• Francesca Brittan, Attention, Instrumentality, and the Orchestration of Mind           Abstract
• Youn Kim, Attending to musical action: the psychology of music performance in the early 20th century            Abstract
• Brian Kane, Across the Great Divide: listening, techné, and telegraphy            Abstract

14:00-14:30: Break 

14:30-15:50: Techniques of Listening (Chair: Ewan Jones)

• Carmel Raz, To ‘Fill Up, Completely, the Whole Capacity of the Mind’: Listening with Attention in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland           Abstract
• Michael Auer, ON AIR: Channeling Attention in Victorian Poetry        Abstract

15:50-16:10: Break 

16:10-17:30: Epistemology & Value (Chair: Francesca Brittan)

• Nina Sun Eidsheim and Danny Walden, “Seeds, Husks, or Dried Flowers: Shaping Attentive Practices and Settler Colonial Land Ethics Through the Use of Botanical Metaphors in Ethnographies of Native American Song”          Abstract
• Ben Steege, Attending and Valuing: "A Matter of Our Utter Freedom"            Abstract

17:30-17:50: Concluding Thoughts