Around 1900, the Leipzig Germanist Eduard Sievers and his students gave new value to the auditory and phonetic aspects of written documents. With considerable methodological effort and public attention, they issued a rousing call for a “philology of the ear” to replace the “philology of the eye.”

The Dutch Society for Acoustics (Nederlands Akoestisch Genootschap) received its current name in 1962, but was established as the Sound Foundation (Geluidstichting) in 1934. Right from the start, its board aimed both to disseminate knowledge about sound and to intervene in societal issues around sound. Studying and abating noise soon became a priority. Through the Sound Foundation, Dutch scientists and engineers acquired and retained a high profile in public debates about noise. But, as I will show, they were by no means the only ones defining the problem of noise in the Netherlands.

The singing and speaking arc emerged as a scientific object with the transformation of acoustics into electroacoustics around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Roland Wittje discusses the reenactment of a series of experiments with the singing and speaking arc, carried out with Paolo Brenni and Anna Giatti at the Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica in Florence.