Sonic Piety in Early New England

Abstract This article reinterprets New England's 1720s Singing Controversy as a sensory event that altered the nature of puritan sonic piety in early New England. Far from a parochial peculiarity in the history of American music, the 1720s singing reforms were part of broader challenges to a previous way of knowing-an epistemology, or, in this context, an “acoustemology.”