A new installment of the IMS’s provocative online publication is out! This contribution is part of the issue “Musicology’s Monumental Turns” (vol. 10, no. 1, 2026), which throughout the summer, will explore the global, auditory, and literary turns in the study of music and sound.

Learning to Listen, Again
What did a Renaissance garden sound like? How does a sand dune sing, and who has listened to it across a thousand years? What did revolution sound like in 1790s Saint-Domingue, and in the German parliament in 1848? How did an Ottoman envoy hear eighteenth-century Paris, India, Iran, North Africa, or Vienna—and how did Vienna, gripped by the Spanish flu a century and a half later, hear itself? What does a scream prove in an early modern courtroom, and what does silence concede? How did the devil get into the ears of nineteenth-century Tyrolean Catholics? What do the bells of Famagusta still know about the city that held them high in the air? And what does a 1918 recording of a deaf activist’s voice ask of a field that calls itself auditory?