Acoustic issues recently have become central to media studies, literature, art history, architecture and cultural theory, serving as a testing ground for anxieties and hopes about constructions of subjectivities, the historicity of the sensorium, and socio-political shifts such as globalism and digitization. This seminar will examine historical and theoretical issues raised by technologies of sound production, transmission and reception from 19th-century Europe into our global present; the dynamics of social and individual modalities of acoustic experience, and the challenges posed by sound to the hegemony of certain theoretical discourses.