Francesca Brittan, PhD, associate professor of music and head of musicology at Case Western Reserve University, co-edited and contributed to The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century, recently published through University of Pennsylvania Press. The book explores the history of music and attention, examining the central role of audition in shaping our conceptions of focus and distraction. Brittan is also an affiliated faculty member in the CWRU Department of Cognitive Science.
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.
