Sound Studies Review

Most early music performers today believe that good intonation and solid rhythm prevailed among musicians who first performed the music. The historical record, however, reveals glaring deficiencies in both areas, except among musicians at the highest level. In fact, a great gulf lay in between a composer’s ability ‘to keep time’ and those who performed their works. Today, the study of early music recordings and steady practice with the metronome have enabled performers of early music to attain prodigious technique. But does this technique get in the way of allowing us to truly hear the music of the past? In an attempt to answer this question, this article examines the rhythmic problems and limitations of eighteenth century instruments, contemporaneous views on virtuosity, and the debates surrounding music versus speech to see how early music performance practice ‘sounded’ and was subsequently heard before the advent of the metronome and sound recordings.

Using the example of Anna Bahr-Mildenburg (1872–1947) and her one sound recording it is shown that professional singers were already making different uses of recording technology starting around 1900, well before the supposed hey-day of the medium. One of the main areas explored in this article is the extent of Bahr-Mildenburg’s experiential knowledge with sound recording and how and why that knowledge changed over time. In addition, alterations made to the singer’s voice and the influence sound recording technology had on the reception of that voice are also discussed. The article concludes that the body and the voice are closely related to the history of technology, so much so that their respective discourses are understood to be deeply connected to one another.

This article revisits Raymond Murray Schafer’s classic text, The Tuning of the World, to explore how the text ignores race and colonialism in the concept of sound imperialism. I argue that Schafer’s concept of a “soundscape” projects a theoretical and narrative perspective that ensures Europe and White European values remain at the center of the listening experience. This article contributes to current discussions on the epistemological limitations of the academic study of sound by advancing the argument that colonialism and race are ignored in the study of sound broadly defined.