“Sound turned the world on its ear around 1900. Tkaczyk takes us to the primal scenes of modern thought—with an unheard-of twist. Charcot’s tuning fork and Freud’s hearing cap, Saussure’s gramophone and Ernst Mach’s concert halls, Carl Stumpf’s interference apparatus and Otto Abraham’s parrot all reverberate in this rich intellectual soundscape, explaining how these influential new fields of knowledge emerged in tandem with new auditory techniques for speech, music, and noise. Cutting joyously across disciplinary divides, this remarkable book shows how the modern humanities truly learned to ‘think with sound.’”

Alexander Rehding, Harvard University

“Tkaczyk’s transformative Thinking with Sound shows how research on sound was central to the formation of modern human sciences in Europe and North America at the turn of the last century. Tkaczyk offers an ambitious and polymathic history, one that spans disciplines, languages, and nations. Thinking with Sound is a major step forward in the intellectual history of sound and charts a new path in the history of the humanities. It is also an inspiring book for anyone interested in new approaches to the history of knowledge.”

Jonathan Sterne, author of 'Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment' and 'MP3: The Meaning of a Format'

“As wide-ranging as it is erudite, Thinking with Sound remaps our historical understanding of the dynamic connections between bodies and minds at the turn of the twentieth century, and it demonstrates resoundingly the significance of the ear in linking the two realms. An indispensable contribution to understanding the disciplinary character of knowledge construction, Tkaczyk’s work, like that of the scholars she studies, also demonstrates convincingly the intellectual riches to be found at the porous boundaries between disciplines, where science, medicine, technology, the humanities, and the arts all come together.”

Emily Thompson, author of 'The Soundscape of Modernity'