D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 0 ∕ IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE eaders of a certain age may recall John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, the early 1970s BBC TV series­ turned­book 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 of­the­way, and in many cases site­specific, 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 image­saturated Internet and all of its memes and deep­fakes. 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 six­part pod­ cast, the modern audio­based 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 the same k ind of skept ica l approach to sound, or rather, digi­ tally­reproduced 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 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 Ways of Hearing

中文翻译：

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听觉方式 [书评]

12 月 2 日 0 2 0 ∕ IEEE 技术与社会杂志 特定年龄段的读者可能还记得约翰·伯杰 (John Berger) 的《观看之道》，这是 1970 年代早期的 BBC 电视连续剧翻书，在四分之一个世纪的大部分时间里成为大学教学大纲的主要内容。伯杰是一位多产的画家、小说家和评论家，于 2017 年去世，享年 90 岁，他在《观看之道》中着手挑战艺术史机构——想想肯·奈斯·克拉克的文明——以及他所谓的“神秘化”研究对象。迷你剧和印刷改编是大众媒体理论的提炼，其中伯杰认为艺术品（以及广告）的广泛复制最终将这些作品的意义重新构成了政治和消费主义的东西。对于伯杰来说，视觉复制的媒体——尤其是电视和杂志——不仅从根本上改变了，而且重新确定了以前被淘汰的信息，在许多情况下，艺术作品。伯杰所说的并不是全新的。沃尔特·本雅明、勒内·马格利特和马歇尔·麦克卢汉在他之前也表达过类似的想法。但他成功地推广了他们对复制图像的激进怀疑的一个版本，这将深刻影响读者对他们所见和所见形式的理解——应该指出的是，这个版本几乎没有失去相关性随着图像饱和的互联网及其所有模因和深度伪造的兴起。可以说音乐家兼作家达蒙·克鲁科夫斯基的《听觉之道》对数字声音的作用就像伯杰的《观看之道》对再现图像所做的那样，这并不过分简单化。至少，他们的努力之间有几个重要的相似之处。Krukowski 的书基于优秀的六部分播客，现代音频相当于电视节目，是伯杰的书的基础。Kru kowski 的书名与 Berger 的书名相呼应，《Ways of Hearing》的设计也紧跟早期的文字，是一本大字体的小平装本，书页充满了单色图像，在空白处垂直标注。最重要的是，Ways of Hearing 主张对声音采取同样的怀疑态度，或者更确切地说，数字再现或广播声音，伯杰建议应该针对图像。Krukowski 希望我们在数字音频时代质疑我们听到的以及我们不再听到的。《听觉方式》讲述了在从模拟录音和接收器向 mp3、手机、流媒体服务，甚至是播客的转变过程中，我们可能不重视甚至忽视的声音方面是如何消失的。从表面上看，这似乎与音乐聆听中出现的怀旧趋势相一致：比如，LP 的时髦复兴，作为他们（祖）父母年轻时的声音丰富、视觉上很酷的人工制品。但Ways of Hearing 并不是一次怀旧之旅。这是对基本媒体过渡对我们的耳朵和思想意味着什么的哲学思考。换句话说，Kru kowski 希望我们了解在从模拟噪声到数字信号的转变过程中留下了什么，不仅是在技术意义上丢弃光盘和磁带以获取已去除可以说是无关紧要的声音的压缩位，而且在人性化方面从某种意义上说，缺席在共享经验中被记录为失去的机会。虽然每一章都从一个特定的角度来探讨这种转变，但他们都在以一种或另一种方式反思录制音乐和听录音的行为变得不那么社交和更加孤立的方式。在对这位读者来说最吸引人的章节之一中，Krukowski 谈到了许多关于噪音的敏感事物，或者说它在耳塞时代的消失。他在无线电城音乐厅接受了科学史学家艾米莉·汤普森的采访，她的听力方式 不仅在技术意义上丢弃光盘和磁带，因为压缩的位已经被剪掉了可以说是无关紧要的声音，而且在人道意义上，在这种情况下，缺席记录为在共享经验中失去的机会。虽然每一章都从一个特定的角度来探讨这种转变，但他们都在以一种或另一种方式反思录制音乐和听录音的行为变得不那么社交和更加孤立的方式。在对这位读者来说最吸引人的章节之一中，Krukowski 谈到了许多关于噪音的敏感事物，或者说它在耳塞时代的消失。他在无线电城音乐厅接受了科学史学家艾米莉·汤普森的采访，她的听力方式 不仅在技术意义上丢弃光盘和磁带，因为压缩的位已经被剪掉了可以说是无关紧要的声音，而且在人道意义上，在这种情况下，缺席记录为在共享经验中失去的机会。虽然每一章都从一个特定的角度来探讨这种转变，但他们都在以一种或另一种方式反思录制音乐和听录音的行为变得不那么社交和更加孤立的方式。在对这位读者来说最吸引人的章节之一中，Krukowski 谈到了许多关于噪音的敏感事物，或者说它在耳塞时代的消失。他在无线电城音乐厅接受了科学史学家艾米莉·汤普森的采访，她的听力方式 但也从人道的意义上说，缺席被记录为在共享经验中失去的机会。虽然每一章都从一个特定的角度来探讨这种转变，但他们都在以一种或另一种方式反思录制音乐和听录音的行为变得不那么社交和更加孤立的方式。在对这位读者来说最吸引人的章节之一中，Krukowski 谈到了许多关于噪音的敏感事物，或者说它在耳塞时代的消失。他在无线电城音乐厅接受了科学史学家艾米莉·汤普森的采访，她的听力方式 但也从人道的意义上说，缺席被记录为在共享经验中失去的机会。虽然每一章都从一个特定的角度来探讨这种转变，但他们都在以一种或另一种方式反思录制音乐和听录音的行为变得不那么社交和更加孤立的方式。在对这位读者来说最吸引人的章节之一中，Krukowski 谈到了许多关于噪音的敏感事物，或者说它在耳塞时代的消失。他在无线电城音乐厅接受了科学史学家艾米莉·汤普森的采访，她的听力方式 他们所有人都在以一种或另一种方式反思录制音乐和听录音的行为变得不那么社交和更加孤立的方式。在对这位读者来说最吸引人的章节之一中，Krukowski 谈到了许多关于噪音的敏感事物，或者说它在耳塞时代的消失。他在无线电城音乐厅接受了科学史学家艾米莉·汤普森的采访，她的听力方式 他们所有人都在以一种或另一种方式反思录制音乐和听录音的行为变得不那么社交和更加孤立的方式。在对这位读者来说最吸引人的章节之一中，Krukowski 谈到了许多关于噪音的敏感事物，或者说它在耳塞时代的消失。他在无线电城音乐厅接受了科学史学家艾米莉·汤普森的采访，她的听力方式