Title: "Atomic Listening: Cold War Science and the Sonic Imagination"

Abstract: In this talk, I use the Chernobyl disaster as a starting point to set sound and music studies into dialogue with the deep history of radiation and nuclear arms testing in the twentieth century. Weaving together archival documents, oral history, and musical examples, I show how scientists, bureaucrats, artists, and ordinary citizens alike turned to sound to measure and better understand the atom’s potential in the Soviet Union and United States. I position radiation as a “hyperobject” (Morton 2013): an object that is so vast and immeasurable that it defies interpretation. As something simultaneously both incomprehensible in scope and invisible to the human eye, radiation intersects with audile techniques in ways that help to illuminate changing epistemologies and political ecologies during the Cold War. Listening to the atom, I argue, challenged historical actors to recalibrate their understandings of science, empiricism, and geopolitics. I start with the thesis that radiation is itself an agent of sound and, moving from there, map a series of moments in nuclear and musical history in which a critical, affective ear to radiation might tell new stories about the atomic age. I ultimately want to end by asking what listening to the atom might teach us about our tenuous ecological present and ever-encroaching nuclear futures.

Gabrielle Cornish is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where her research explores the connections between listening cultures and political ideology in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In particular, her current book project, Socialist Noise: Sound and Soviet Identity after Stalin, traces the intersections between music, technology, and the politics of socialist modernity under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Her next project, Sounds for the End of the World: Cold War Epistemologies and the Sonic Imaginary, explores the relationship between militarized acoustic technologies, ecological disaster, and knowledge production in both the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War.  Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Musicology, and the Slavic Review, and she has bylines in Slate, the Washington Post, and The New York Times. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards from the American Musicological Society, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Fulbright Program. For the 2025-2026 academic year, she is a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.

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