UC Berkeley

This dissertation traces the history of the stereophony from its emergence in the late nineteenth century to the proliferation of immersive sound formats in the present. Uncovering the origins of spatial audio, I argue that stereophony doesn’t merely transform preexisting understanding of aural space, it helps usher into being the very concept itself. I show that the very idea of acoustic space—which is to say that the ears are capable of spatial perception—has long been contested and often denied by philosophers and scientists considering aurality. Dislodging sonic spatiality from its associations with the natural world, this work rethinks acoustic space as an artifact of media technology. I argue this is because the emergence of the idea of sonic space coincided with the birth of new ideas of global space as networked space. The imagination of sonic space became the terra nova on which it became possible to imagine an embodied relationship to a global technological system, and stereo is the principal site where this imagination occurs: the place in which the multiplicity of sonic space coincides with media technology. In opposition to the familiar claims of stereo’s mimetic realism, I argue that the appeal of stereo is the ideal of immersion, which is characterized by an embodied, affective relation to media technology itself. This is a shift of emphasis from thinking of sound technologies in terms of inscription to transmission, centering the networked technology of the telephone rather than the phonograph as central to the history of stereo. At stake is the necessity of thinking through the emergence of a new orientation towards space itself: a flexible, networked, global space of information and capital accessed through the hearing body. In this genealogy of immersive media, I aim to uncover how we hear the world in stereo.The first half of my project locates the emergence of immersive sound in the nineteenth-century milieu of Euro-American imperialism and nascent global capital. The first chapter, “Sound without Scape” covers the emergence of acoustic space. It identifies a crucial rupture in aural culture, when an international community of acousticians overturned centuries of sonic thought to begin theorizing the spatial character of hearing. I argue that the production of this new realm of acoustic space functioned as terra nova for cultural fantasies of expansion and control through the key media of the telephone and the microphone. Chapter 2, “Panoramic Audition” concerns the creation of sonic perspective, which places a listener in relationship to a virtual space. This chapter covers the earliest instantiation of stereophonic sound as a telephonic novelty at the 1881 Electrical Exposition in Paris, arguing that its aesthetic appeal was rooted in its promise of perceptual ubiquity across networked space. Here, stereophonic space emerges as purely artificial technological space of colonial control, a network with the European listener at the center. The second half of the project continues in the twentieth century and the rapid proliferation of stereophonic technics developed alongside the rise of computational media in corporate research. Chapter 3, “Interface, Grid, Network,” begins in the 1930s at Bell Labs with the development of the major competing approaches to multichannel sound. Through the close reading of technical documents, hi-fi records, and early forays into widescreen cinema sound, I show that researchers abandoned the scientific goal of technologically reproducing the ordered sonic space of binaural audition in favor an aesthetic of spatial multiplicity. Chapter 4, “Sensations of Ubiquity,” covers the development of Dolby Atmos, and other so-called “immersive” or “3D” sound formats employing digital technology that creates a more complex cinematic soundscape through an exponential increase in channels and loudspeakers. I argue that the sensation of auditory immersion in Dolby Atmos is a productive site where listeners have an aesthetic experience of insensible networks of ubiquitous digital media.