![]() Hearing took on the dual role of test object and test instrument in the latter case, human hearing became a gauge by which to evaluate or regulate materials, nonhuman organisms, equipment, and technological systems. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the epistemic function of hearing expanded. Applied on a large scale, tests of seemingly small measure-of auditory acuity, of hearing range-helped redefine the modern concept of hearing as such. ![]() Hearing tests received a further boost around 1900 as a result of injury compensation laws and professional demands for aptitude testing. Since the early nineteenth century, auditory test tools and the results of hearing tests have fed back into instrument calibration, human training, architecture, and new musical sounds. This introduction frames Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality by showing how the modern cultural practices of hearing and testing have emerged from a long interrelationship. The kaleidoscopic perspective on the audiological instruments enables for a presentation of hearing beyond the passive position it has partaken within especially the field of sound studies and the field of audiology, and it propose hearing as a varied, malleable and indeed complex perceptual auditory state. As this approach has strong ties to the phenomenological research methodology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but also to contemporary research methodologies such as media archaeology and object-oriented ontology, the research project evolves as a tuning between manifold methodologies and theoretical positions, which creates different entrances for exploring the history, the epistemic claims and the auditory attention connected to the act of hearing. These sound works propose an alternative methodology for reaching conceptualizations of hearing, where the act of doing, of entering into a practical dialogue with a specific material, forms a way of thinking. The research project departs from the construction of three sound works that stage an obsolete audiometer, a row of imaginary sound therapy instruments and a set of reconstructed hearing horns within an aesthetic setting. By attending to both the discursive frames and the operative means of selected audiological instruments, it exposes how technology tunes the ear, that is how technology lets us hear and how technology frames conceptions of hearing. This thesis sets out to propose a new attention towards the term hearing by exploring the technologies which historically have been used to diagnose, normalize and even optimize the ear.
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