Review of Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, by Ana María Ochoa Gautier

Abstract

As the author alerts us, the project that resulted in her book, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, began with a different purpose—as a study of popular music in Colombia during the middle decades of the twentieth century. But as Ana Marı´a Ochoa Gautier started to examine the data, she tells us, she found that an earlier substrate of intellectual grounding required attention; moreover, her research into these matters coincided with the emergence of sound studies, treating sound as “a field of theorization” (207), and this field seemed to offer a fresh and rewarding perspective. As a consequence of these shifts in the agenda, Aurality is a book about speaking and listening, about communication involving the voice and the ear, as these sensory elements were understood, represented, and subjected to reform in Colombia by a remarkable group of thinkers, writers, cultural activists, soldiers, and statesmen during the second half of the nineteenth century. As such, this book brings to life a