The standard account says the West moved from a culture of hearing to a culture of seeing as it modernized. In fact sound, hearing and listening were central to modern knowledge, industry and social life. Sound recording grew out of these wider shifts and helped lock them in.
A common story casts vision as cold, distant and surface-level, and hearing as warm, inward and in touch with the living world. That contrast is a cultural habit, not a fact about the senses. How people listen is learned and changes over time.
When doctors learned to diagnose by listening through an instrument, listening became a tool for analysis at arm's length. It was not a channel of intimacy. Specialized listening techniques can produce exactly the intellectual distance usually blamed on sight.
Listening devices first taught people that sound could be held in an enclosed, adjustable, personal space. That idea of a sonic space as private property had to exist before sound could be packaged and sold as a commodity.
We often treat recording as a neutral pipe that copies a prior, authentic sound. But sounds are performed and shaped for the machine, so no untouched original exists to be copied. Treating face-to-face presence as automatically better than mediated contact is an assumption, not a given.