Dr. Jonathan Sterne passed away earlier this year. He was, in many ways, a model scholar and colleague.

The intellectual ferment of the field now called “sound studies” is often traced to the sonic ecologists of the 1960s, but the theoretical energy of the early 2000s, generated by figures such as Ana Maria Ochoa, Alexander Weheliye, Emily Thompson, Trevor Pinch (1952-2021), and of course Jonathan Sterne, was necessary for the field to gain interdisciplinary traction in the twenty-first century. Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press: 2003) was perhaps the single-most important book in this regard.

Trained in communications, and working in departments of communication, first at Pitt and later McGill, Sterne oriented his work toward media studies, and indeed, The Audible Past is principally about mediation. It poses questions about the role of sound in the history of mediation that earlier generations of sound studies had tended to elide, especially regarding the contingent and often cultural role of the human ear in reception.  These questions opened the door for anthropologists, historians, communications scholars and ethnomusicologists in particular to think and even identify with sound studies, and many of us who were trained in the 2000s did so enthusiastically, with Sterne’s writing a lodestar.

The enduring terms and frameworks that came from The Audible Past alone are remarkable: the audiovisual litany, a critique of the chestnut that hearing and vision are ideological binaries, for example, is practically axiomatic now in sound studies. And its clever expression of the audiovisual binary’s religious undertones (see also “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality” [2011], one of many worthwhile Sternian deep cuts) further thickens the plot. Consider as well the concept of “audile techniques,” or vernacular methods of audition that emerge in response to new sound reproduction technologies, which has been used to frame countless projects in sonic histories of science, medicine, business, and technology. To revisit The Audible Past now is to witness a thinker who anticipated the central questions of an emergent field at the moment of its rekindling, with prescience and depth.

Sterne’s focus on media continued, although his second monograph—and Sounding Out!’s first book review!– MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press: 2012) saw a move toward Marxist economic analysis, the kind of methodological shift that he would pull off time and again. The book is almost certainly the most complete treatment of what was (and to some degree remains) the world’s most important audio reproduction format, and once again he introduced a concept, that of “format theory,” that is widely and actively cited (and reviewed by Pitchfork!). The book is also funny! Sterne’s revelation of the Napster cat head logo at the end of a chapter about the role of cat heads in auditory lab experiments is the sort of superb comic timing which, to put it lightly, one doesn’t find much in academic writing.

Sterne was not limited to media-focused work, however. He was responsive to current events: his 2012 “Quebec’s #casseroles: on participation, percussion and protest,” for instance, was an on-the-spot reading of the sonic tactics of local student tuition strikes. He worked ethnographically: a 1997 article, published in Ethnomusicology and called “Sounds Like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectonics of Commercial Space,” is an immersive study of music in retail space. He was an excellent editor: his 2012 The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge) is superbly curated, remaining a cornerstone assignment. More recently, he turned to disability studies, publishing Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke University Press) in 2022. The book is philosophical as well as reflexive and personal, showcasing yet more of his range. The way that Sterne allowed curiosity to lead his research in many directions suggests a scholar who was in the business for the right reasons.

Yet still this breadth and influence pales compared to what he arguably did best and most enthusiastically – mentoring students. He did not advise me formally, but when I was a graduate student he was friendly and accessible, which since his admission to hospice I have learned he was for many other people as well. Like the enduringly resonant concepts in The Audible Past and other books, bits of his advice still ring in my ears, and I pass those tidbits on to other students now. His letters of recommendation for his own students were inspired, indeed among the most thoughtful I’ve ever read. He respected his students enormously, and on their behalf wrote long, detailed letters in which they were cast as mature thinkers, and their scholarship as a serious project.

There are many scholars whom we might memorialize for their published contributions, but we should reserve a higher space for those whose mentorship commitments were as deep as Sterne’s. For all of his critical insights, he was motivated in the end not by status but by community, which the outpouring of sadness at his passing reveals above all. Farewell, then, to an architect of sound studies who, safe to say, was also widely loved.

***

PS: We encourage you to leave “Sterne stories” and other memories of Jonathan in the comments to this post.

—

Benjamin Tausig is associate professor of music at SUNY-Stony Brook University, and author of Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint (Oxford, 2019) and Bangkok After Dark: Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies (Duke, 2025).

—

REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Sterneworks!

Quebec’s #casseroles: on participation, percussion and protest–Jonathan Sterne

Sounding Out! Podcast #27: Interview with Jonathan Sterne

This is What It Sounds Like . . . . . . . . On Prince (1958-2016) and Interpretive Freedom–Benjamin Tausig

SO! Amplifies: The Electric Golem (Trevor Pinch and James Spitznagel)—Qiushi Xu 

SO! Reads: Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format–-Aaron Trammell