Francesca Brittan, PhD, associate professor of music and head of musicology at Case Western Reserve University, recently published her book, The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century, through University of Pennsylvania Press.
Brittan, who is also an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Cognitive Science, explores the history of music and attention that demonstrates the central role of audition in shaping our conceptions of focus and distraction.
Book synopsis
The Attentive Ear fills a significant gap in current scholarship, exploring the history of auditory attention between roughly 1800-1930. Across boundaries of time, place, culture and class, this period witnessed a marked uptick in discourses around attention and inattention, including attempts to define the states of multifocal, singular, spotlighted, intermittent and distracted forms of focus underpinning perception and cognition.
The richness of attention as a site of historical enquiry is indicated by the breadth of the volume’s essays. Featuring case studies from Europe, Asia and North America, the volume probes the origins, key theories and experimental trajectories of attentional discourse.
