How can modernity be conceptualized through sound? How can we eavesdrop on the global history of the last 250 years by focusing on sound, specific cultural interdependencies and conflicts, meanings and social structures, technologies and forms of knowledge, the constitution of subjects and bodies, which have been drowned out in previous confrontations with modernity? In the Department of Musicology and Sound Studies at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, these questions are being addressed in a project of the German Research Foundation (DFG) "Syncopation and Volume: Probing Sonic Modernity" (2022–2024).
The DFG-funded research project "Syncopation and Volume" is based on two hypotheses: (I.) The history of sound can be reconstructed as the history of media- and culture-specific concepts of sound. (II.) Specific sound concepts are connected with distinctive conceptions of modernity. Modernity is articulated on a sonic level.
The two subprojects develop these hypotheses in the form of syncopated modernity from 1890 to 1930 (SP I) and voluminous modernity from 1920 to 1945 (SP II). Under these headings, they investigate two specific conceptualizations of sound: the conception of sound as a temporalized entity (SP I); and the spatial conception of sound as a voluminous entity (SP II). A corpus of media technologies and instruments, historical journals and manuals, cultural and fictional discourses, musical works and sound recordings serves as the basis for elaborating these two conceptualizations of sound. The term "sonic modernity" refers to a specific notion of modernity. In contrast to sociological theories of modernity, which primarily focus on aspects of politics, culture, and society (Weber, Durkheim, Luhmann, Giddens, Bauman, Reckwitz), sonic modernity probes a perspective on modernity whose starting point is the realm of aesthetics. It approaches modernity through conceptualizations of sound that can be traced historically to certain periods in which they attained a certain urgency. In this way, sound can be used as an epistemic lens or prism through which general, political, cultural, and social aspects of modernity may reveal themselves in a different light. To this end, the research project combines theory building with detailed material analyses.
Theoretically and methodologically, the two subprojects combine perspectives and analytical approaches from various fields of the humanities and sociology. This is consistent with the conviction that an investigation of modernity focused on sound requires an innovative approach. The heart of the project is situated at the intersection of musicology, sound studies, and cultural theory and aims to weave these threads together. This triangulation is achieved by employing perspectives from the fields of media studies and cultural studies. On the one hand, media technologies are examined through media archaeological approaches to explore how sound concepts are linked to historically specific medialities; that is, that sound concepts include media-technical operations (storage/coding, formatting/processing, and transmission/distribution of sounds) and are always based on elements of material and technical cultures. On the other hand, the subprojects delve into discourses, practices, economic and social structures, and the configurations of power and knowledge using perspectives taken from cultural studies to shed light on how sound concepts lend themselves to specific symbolic orders and meaning-making processes. Sound studies serve as a missing link between the fields of media archaeology and cultural studies. Sound concepts harbour the distinctive epistemological potential to connect these aspects.
Sonische Moderne 
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