IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020 - 13

John M. Picker

Ways of Hearing
Ways of Hearing.
By Damon Krukowski, Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2019, 136 pp. ($19.95 Paper).

eaders of a certain
age may recall John
Berger's Ways of
Seeing, the early
1970s BBC TV series-
turned-book that became a staple of
college syllabi for the better part of a
quarter century. Berger, a prolific
painter, novelist, and critic who died
in 2017 at the age of 90, set out in
Ways of Seeing to take on the art
history establishment - think Ken-
neth Clark's Civilisation - and what
he called its " mystification " of its
objects of study. The miniseries and
print adaptation were a distillation of
media theory for the masses, in
which Berger argued that the wide-
spread reproduction of artworks (as
well as advertisements) ended up
reconstituting the meaning of those
pieces into something political and
consumerist. For Berger, the media
of visual reproduction - particular-
ly TV and magazines - not just
fundamentally altered but newly
determined the message of what
previously had been out of-the-way,
and in many cases site-specific,
works of art.
What Berger was saying wasn't
entirely new. Walter Benjamin, René
Magritte, and Marshall McLuhan had
expressed similar ideas before him.
But he managed to popularize a ver-
sion of their radical skepticism
toward the reproduced image that

would profoundly influence readers'
understanding of what they see and
the forms in which they see it - a
version, it should be noted, that has
hardly lost its relevance with the rise
of the image-saturated Internet and
all of its memes and deep-fakes.
It is not an oversimplification to
say that musician and writer Damon
Krukowski's Ways of Hearing does
for digital sound what Berger's
Ways of Seeing did for the repro-
duced image. At the least, there are
several important parallels between
their efforts. Krukowski's book is
based on an excellent six-part pod-
cast, the modern audio-based
equivalent of the TV show that was
the basis for Berger's book. Kru-
kowski's title is an echo of Berger's,
and the design of Ways of Hearing
closely follows the earlier text as
well, as a small paperback with a
large font, its pages filled with
monochrome images credited verti-
cally in the margins. Most impor-
tant, Ways of Hearing argues for
t he s a me k i nd of skep t ic a l
approach to sound, or rather, digi-
tally-reproduced or broadcast
sound, that Berger had suggested
should be directed toward the
image. Krukowski wants us to ques-
tion what we hear, as well as what
we're no longer hearing, in the era
of digital audio.
Ways of Hearing is among other
things an account of how aspects of
sound we might not value or even
notice have gone missing in the shift

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Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2020.3036974
Date of current version: 2 December 2020

DECEMBER 2020

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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

from analog recordings and receiv-
ers to mp3s, cell phones, streaming
services, and, yes, even podcasts.
On its surface, this seems in keep-
ing with the emergence of nostalgic
trends in musical listening: the hip-
ster resurrection, say, of LPs as soni-
cally rich, visually cool artifacts of
their (grand)parents' youth. But
Ways of Hearing is not a nostalgia
trip. It's a philosophical reckoning
with what a fundamental media tran-
sition has meant for our ears and
minds. To put this another way, Kru-
kowski wants us to understand what
has been left behind in the shift
from analog noise to digital signal,
not only in the technical sense of
discarding discs and tapes for the
compressed bits that have been
shorn of arguably extraneous
sounds, but also in a humane sense,
where the absences register as lost
opportunities in shared experiences.
While each chapter takes up a
specific angle on this shift, all of
them ruminate in one way or anoth-
er on the ways that the acts of
recording music and listening to
recordings have become less social
and more isolating. In one of the
most engaging chapters for this
reader, Krukowski says many per-
ceptive things about noise, or rath-
er its disappearance in the earbud
era. He conducts an interview in
Radio City Music Hall with historian
of science Emily Thompson, who
(continued on page 82)

13
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020

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