The project investigates the concepts that constitute our present understanding of sound, hearing and music in three different historic constellations. Knowledge about acoustics, which had been guided by the symbolic code of music far into the nineteenth century, began to be transformed step by step into an experimental science on hearing, which eventually reappeared in music aesthetics of the second half of the twentieth century as a reflection of music's own medial condition.

The first part of the project, analyzes the relation between physiology, psychology and the aesthetics of the acoustic around 1850. A second part, "Experimentalization of Hearing: Moscow 1920–1930," deals with the attempts to reconcile the diverging disciplines of aesthetics and scientific investigation into hearing in the early Soviet Union The third part, "Music and Media after 1945," discusses the history of composition from the perspective of medial historiography.

The methodology for this project is based on "historical epistemology" as it is understood in French philosophy of science. It further involves research in the history of media and the material culture of experimentation. The aim of the project is to show hearing as historically changing, and it hopes thereby to contribute to the current reorientation of research in the human sciences that deal with hearing, sound and music.