Archaeology of sound devices: aural technologies

This article discusses some categories that may be of methodological utility for those within the increasingly wide field of what are called “sound studies”, who are interested in archaeology as an approach that allows an understanding of the development of sound and aural devices from a historical perspective. The archaeological approach, considered here from the epistemological archaeology of Foucault, allows us to read, or to “audit”, not only the routes and entanglements of technological creation linked to sound, but also to assume that each technological manifestation is a symptom and expression of a device that includes forms of knowing (epistèmès), institutions of knowledge, conceptions about sound and listening practices. From the archaeological perspective, each sound device is the product of, or denotes, an epistemic device. Through the concept of “aural technology”, which establishes a field of relationship between a technological sound device and the correlate of its aural device, we can find an interesting link that allows us to understand the processes of sound technology referred to a broader discursive and epistemic network; a network that allows us to understand, in short, technology as the field in which displacements, reticles or empowerments of specific aurality practices opérate and struggle. The article tries to explain how, from the archaeological point of view, the technological sound device deploys, conceals or unveils a dispositif for listening and understanding sound: something we can call an aural device.