An Episode in the History of an Acoustic Mask
Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: In 1908, two black Cuban brothers, held a temple on Philadelphia’s North Fairmount Avenue, which appears to have combined Edinsonian sound technology with elements from the ritual repertoire of the Abakuá male esoteric brotherhood. I suggest that the technologically enriched “echo” of the Leal brothers can be analysed heuristically as the locus of a remarkable convergence between phonic and auditory ideologies underlying the mediation of the divine in the Abakuá, and acoustic transmission technologies through time and space – particularly telephony and phonography – that had begun to reconfigure the Western auditory worlds by the second half of the 19th century.
DOI: 10.4000/assr.46061
Author: Stephan Palmié
Language: English
Topic: Sound Studies and Aurality
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2981680590