This seminar offers a critical interrogation of changing practices and ideologies of musical listening since the Enlightenment, and the various technologies and discourses that have both shaped and reflected the development of listening habits, attitudes, and values. Incorporating topics and case studies from historical eras before and after sound capture, and drawing upon approaches and perspectives from music scholarship, philosophies of music and of listening, and the burgeoning interdiscipline of sound studies, it considers music’s inextricable entanglements with material culture alongside the ongoing fascination with sound's ephemerality, music's seeming ineffability, and the special position of disembodied sound in the Western imagination.