{"id":22862,"date":"2025-08-05T11:00:33","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T09:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cmb.hu-berlin.de\/Drittmittelprojekte\/ottoman-auralities\/"},"modified":"2026-02-23T16:34:05","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T15:34:05","slug":"ottoman-auralities","status":"publish","type":"dm_projekte","link":"https:\/\/cmb.hu-berlin.de\/fr\/Drittmittelprojekte\/ottoman-auralities\/","title":{"rendered":"OTTOMAN AURALITIES"},"content":{"rendered":"
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OTTOMAN AURALITIES<\/h1>\n\n<\/section>\n\n\n\t
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Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789-1922<\/h2>\n\t<\/section>\n\n\n\n
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Principal investigator:<\/strong> Peter McMurray (Cambridge)
\nSenior Researcher:<\/strong> Nazan Maksudyan (CMB)
\nFunding agency:<\/strong> UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) (replaced ERC grant)
\nProject partners:<\/strong> University of Cambridge, CMB
\nDuration:<\/strong> 2022 \u2013 2027<\/p>\n

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https:\/\/ottomanauralities.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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This project explores histories of sound and audiovisual media in the late Ottoman Empire and eastern Mediterranean (1789-1922), focusing on how sonic practices and their mediations through technical systems produced important new cultural shifts. OTTOMAN AURALITIESseeks to explore the ways in which sound\u2014including music, poetry, sound and other media technologies, urban noise, listening practices, and concepts of sonic experience\u2014played a central role in the cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire and Eastern Mediterranean. This dialogue between sound\/media studies with Ottoman history affords an opportunity both to\u00a0provincialize sound and media studies\u00a0<\/em>and to\u00a0sonify Ottoman history<\/em>. Additionally, a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean as well as the lives of ethnic minorities, women and other marginalized communities within imperial spaces makes possible a\u00a0remapping of sonic geographies\u00a0<\/em>at the margins of Europe and well beyond. A key component of the project will be an emphasis on sonic cartography, mapping both early audio recordings and textual documents related to sound and media, giving a clearer sense of the cultural and media topographies of this critical period in which telegraphy, audio recording, film, telephony and radio all emerged as important technologies that both shaped and were reconfigured through extant local cultural techniques.<\/p>\n

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\nThe Project<\/strong><\/h2>\n

A core idea of OTTOMAN AURALITIES is the notion of \u201cauralities,\u201d a study of sound, sonic culture and technologies that emerges both in dialogue with and critique of the field of sound studies (Gautier 2014). We also build upon a body of literature on global sonic cultures, either focusing on the aftermath of recording technologies (Denning 2015, Kheshti 2015) or in contemporary settings that employ ethnography as their main methodology (Feld 2012 [1982], Hirschkind 2006, Novak 2013). Two groundbreaking recent volumes of essays,\u00a0Audible Empire\u00a0<\/em>(Radano and Olaniyan 2016) and\u00a0Remapping Sound Studies\u00a0<\/em>(Steingo and Sykes 2019) exemplify these two important trajectories. Yet the historical study of sound and auditory cultures outside Europe and North America remains relatively underdeveloped. Thus in suggesting a \u201cprovincializing\u201d of sound studies, to draw on Dipesh Chakrabarty\u2019s classic term for postcolonial historiography (2000), we suggest that an emphasis on the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern Mediterranean, and the techniques and technologies of sounding and listening that were cultivated within those geographies, allows a crucial attempt to rethink notions of sonic modernity that valorize the West.<\/p>\n

The study of sound within histories of the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern Mediterranean is beginning to emerge at the intersection of musicology of the Ottoman Empire and cultural history. Histories of recorded music in the Eastern Mediterranean (U\u0308nlu\u0308 2016; Abbani 2018, 2022) and musicological works about the early Turkish Republic (O\u2019Connell 2013) add important dimensions to this history as well. The shift from the history of Ottoman art\/architecture toward a broader paradigm of visual studies in recent years (e.g., Ersoy 2015, Orkc\u0327uog\u0306lu 2020) has inaugurated a wider conceptualization of visuality not rooted in monuments or obvious works of art, per se, but rather in a greater awareness of everyday sensory experience. Nina Ergin has also written key articles on the soundscapes of mosques in Ottoman-era Istanbul (2008) and on women\u2019s sonic experiences of religious architecture (2014). Ziad Fahmy\u2019s new book (2020) on Egyptian auditory culture around the turn of the twentieth century offers an important model for what this kind of sonic history might look like.<\/p>\n

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Key themes<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Given the ubiquity of sound in most all domains of life, we offer thematic areas that will help structure research and allow the project to maintain focus yet think inclusively about whose sonic lives and experiences constituted the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Mediterranean.<\/p>\n

1. Circulation<\/strong>: While sound and \u201csoundscape\u201d-oriented projects have often conceived of sound as being connected to a particular location, this project emphasizes from the outset the circulation and mobilities of sound, as well as those people who make or perceive sonic processes.<\/p>\n

2. Space and Ecology<\/strong>: Related to the question of circulation is that of space, whether architectural (Ergin, 2008), urban (Fahmy 2020), or rural and\/or located in a broader environment (Mikhail 2013). The resonance of various religious buildings, both inside and outside, created defining sensory experiences for many Ottoman subjects and also made cultural difference audible (or intentionally not). Noise, a key dimension of urban sound, will figure prominently in the project, such as in accounts of the packs of wild dogs roaming Istanbul.<\/p>\n

3. Voice<\/strong>: Voice studies has emerged as a robust discourse at the intersection of sound studies, psychoanalysis, and the natural sciences (Eidsheim and Meizel 2019). Besides poetry, religious vocal practices play a key role in the project.<\/p>\n

4. Infrastructures<\/strong>: Media theorists have increasingly emphasized the centrality of infrastructure (Peters 2015), including both material\/inanimate infrastructures (roads, canals, railways) as well as humans involved in labor, maintenance, and societal upkeep. Institutions such as telegraphy stations, railroads, the Ottoman Translation Office (Tercu\u0308me Odas\u0131<\/em>), schools (including those for the deaf), early telephone stations, and the Sultan\u2019s court itself all offer important areas for study.<\/p>\n

5. Bodies, Gender, Sexuality<\/strong>: Focusing on sound and auditory culture allow new considerations of bodily practice, gender, and the performance of sexuality. Here related subjects of music, performance, and medicine will play a greater role.<\/p>\n

6.\u00a0Techne<\/em><\/strong>: This thematic area suggests both material technologies of this period (e.g., telegraphy, photography, gramophone, film, radio) and the \u201cnative\u201d techniques people developed to make use of these technologies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Team<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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The OTTOMAN AURALITIES-research-team consists of Dr. Peter McMurray, Principal Investigator (University of Cambridge); Prof. Nazan Maksudyan, Senior Researcher (CMB); three Post-Doc researchers: Dr. Vanessa Paloma-Elbaz (University of Cambridge), Dr. Jacob Olley (University of Cambridge) and Dr. Onur Engin (University of Cambridge); two PhD researchers: Hande Bet\u00fcl \u00dcnal (University of Cambridge), Benedict Turner-Berry (University of Cambridge); and affiliated researchers: Dr. Carole Woodall (University of Colorado); Salih Demirta\u015f (Orient-Institut Istanbul); Dr. Martin Greve (Orient-Institut Istanbul); Dr. Esther Voswinckel (Orient-Institut Istanbul).
\nIn order to secure high standards in research, our Advisory Board consists of Dr. Ziad Fahmy (Cornell University); Dr. Deniz Tu\u0308rker (Rutgers University); Dr. Martin Stokes (King\u2019s College London); Dr. Ahmet Ersoy (Bog\u0306azic\u0327i University); and Dr. Nina Ergin (Koc\u0327 University).
\nZeynep Kacmaz Milne (Cambirdge) is the Project Administrator. This transnational research project is made possible with funding from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)\u00a0 (EP\/X032833\/1).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n

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