Dr. Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University. His interests include sound, the history and philosophy of technology, cultural studies, music and digital media. His award-winning first book, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press, 2003—now in its third printing) considers late 19th century technologies like sound recording, telephony and radio as artifacts of a broader sound culture. The Audible Past rewrites the history of early sound reproduction, and argues for the centrality of sound to our understandings of modernity.

Originally trained in cultural studies and continental philosophy, Sterne branched out into historical and documentary research. His work thus combines materials recovered from the esoteric world of archives and forgotten documents with big questions that cross disciplines, paradigms, and fashions. He strives for a balance of invention, recovery, vigor and humor in his work.

In over 40 journal articles and book chapters, Sterne covers a wide range of issues in media, technology, and the politics of culture such as: Muzak as sonic architecture; histories of television networking technologies, trains and telegraphs; the racial politics of cyberculture; and the philosophy of computer trash.

His next book, tentatively titled MP3: the Meaning of a Format, connected the cultural and institutional forces behind the development of the mp3 format in the 1980s and early 1990s with long-term trends in the development of telecommunications, psychoacoustics and cybernetics. The book is at once a study of the world’s most common audio format (more recordings exist as mp3s than in any other format or medium) and a history of hearing in a media-saturated world.

As a primary investigator and co-investigator, Sterne has supported his work (and the work of his graduate students) with grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

Sterne has been online since 1982, and he has seen cyberspace evolve from a loose network of bulletin boards to the massive internet as we know it today. Since 1994, he has been involved in producing Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, one of the longest continuously-running publication on the internet and precursor of the open-access publishing movement.

In addition to writing for Bad Subjects and sometimes other alternative media outlets like Tape Op, Punk Planet, and Other Magazine, Sterne has occasionally been interviewed in mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times,Wired Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Toronto Star, La Presse, CBC, Fox News and National Public Radio. He has delivered over 60 invited lectures in 9 countries at some of the world’s top universities.

An innovative and award winning teacher, Sterne is equally at home in the seminar room and the lecture hall. He has taught over 3000 undergraduates in his career. He is committed to creative pedagogy in and out of the classroom and his courses have had substantial online content since the late 1990s.

Sterne has played bass since he was 10 years old and has performed and recorded with several rock bands, a few jazz acts, and a school orchestra. An aspiring amateur audio engineer, he runs a small not-for-profit home studio.

His most recent band, Lo-Boy, released their first CD in spring of 2003, and is mixing their second, as yet untitled album.