The best books to offer an entirely new understanding of your sensory experience

The Enlightenment is often associated with intellectual changes. But the book sheds a new light on this “Age of Reason” by showing how emotions and feelings played a crucial role in this intellectually and sensorially dynamic period. Purnell tells this change by providing many interesting, and funny, episodes. My favorite, among others, is the seventeenth-century vogue for perfumes made of the excretions of the civet cat or the musk deer, and it was only in the mid-eighteenth century that floral scents became popular. This shift had to do with people’s ideas about health, cleanliness, and naturalness that changed over time. You will learn how and why people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought about the senses, how they experience their sensory world, and how our sensory experience came about over the course of a few hundred years.

What is noise? Is it about loud music? Train sounds? Well, what makes certain sounds noise depends on the context. In the late-nineteenth-century United States, for example, the sound of the locomotive, which may sound like noise to many people, was heard as a symbol of modernity and technological advancement. Thompson’s book explores such change in the nature of sound and the culture of listening with the rise of new technology in the United States during the first few decades of the twentieth century, from the street and the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society Building to Radio City in New York.

Why do certain tunes become popular and others fail? What is music that sells? In Selling Sounds, Suisman explains how the music industry has shaped the culture of listening to music and how they capitalized on it, creating an entirely new music culture in the early-twentieth-century United States. This emergence of the music industry and culture involved not just the creation of novel sounds by a genius musician, but rather commercial, technological, and cultural changes, which are still with us today. 

I like the smell of rain. But I can’t explain what it actually smells like. Afterall, olfactory sensation is the “mute sense”—the one without words. To describe a certain smell, you are most likely using a metaphor like rosy smell or vanilla-like smell. Not only does smell have few words to describe it, but it is also a sensation with still a lot unknown. Barwich’s Smellosophy is a fascinating combination of science, philosophy, and history to explore the importance of this mysterious sensation in our society. While digging into philosophical and historical questions to explore how people in the past thought about the perception of smell, Barwich also interviews neuroscientists, perfumers, and chemists to explore how the modern science, as well as industry, is trying to figure out what the nose tells the brain and how the brain understands it.

Kiechle’s Smell Detective shows how smell, the mute sense, has been in fact quite “talkative.” By going back to the nineteenth-century United States, the book discusses how cities back then smelled and how people living there reacted to it. Olfaction is actually a critical source of knowledge. Smell can tell you a lot about your surrounding environment and other people. It also gives historians clues to understand how people lived in the past. Moreover, smell, like other senses, is not a simply subjective, biological phenomenon. Sensations we experience change over time—imagine smell and sounds on the street today and hundred years ago. It is also cultural and political, too. How people understand certain sensations is a historical product—a certain “bad” small was racialized and associated with a lower class, for example. This book is an excellent way to “sniff” out the history of the senses.