“Sound & Science: Digital Histories” is an online database for the history of acoustics. It serves as a multimedia resource for historians of science, culture, and technology, along with students and other researchers.

The database provides difficult-to-access sources, such as texts, images, sound recordings, information on acoustic artifacts, historical reenactments of acoustic experiments, along with entries on the key figures, locations, artifacts, and technologies that have shaped the history of acoustics on a global scale.

The source material is presented through curated categories, while an extensible tagging system facilitates research navigation and identifies key materials used for the manufacture of acoustic artifacts, sites of knowledge production, personal networks, scientific concepts and topics, and areas of study. The print publications of research scholars can be linked back to the database using QR codes. The database also serves as a platform for multimedia essays by linking various different sources.

The database was initiated in 2015 by the research group “Epistemes of Modern Acoustics” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Since 2020, it is a collaborative project between the Media Studies Department at Humboldt University (Viktoria Tkaczyk, Martin Meier), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (Hansjakob Ziemer), the Department of Music at New York University/IRCAM in Paris (Fanny Gribenski), and Ingenium: Canada’s Museum of Sciences and Innovation in Ottawa (David Pantalony, Tom Everrett), Ottawa.

We welcome contributions from scholars in the fields of history of science, sound studies, and audio conservation.

soundandscience.net