Selling Sensation

This panels seeks to understand the reinvention of the American and European sensory landscape in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How, we will ask, have businesses conceived of sensations such as sound, taste, scent, and comfort as feelings that are able to be packaged and sold? How have marketers communicated the feelings or sensations on offer with a particular product? Ultimately, how have experts determined the variables that comprise a sensation, wrestled with the tension between individual sensation and general standards, and made assumptions about the kind of human body that should stand in as the universal subject—and future consumer? Ai Hisano suggests that industrial design in post-World War II United States changed how consumer products engaged with the senses. She explores how business strategies shifted to incorporate new aesthetics in product design and what that meant for consumers’ experiences. Sven Kube brings a sensory analysis to the business of sound. In the 1980s, he argues, digital synthesizers revolutionized the pop music industry in North American and Western Europe. The gap between those locations and the analog Eastern Bloc points how music producers and creators in the capitalist and communist spheres pursued innovative sounds despite different access to technology. Rachel Gross turns to the business of comfort in clothing and indoor spaces. She shows how scientists worked to measure and quantify sensations of hot, cold, wet, and other comfort variables with an eye to creating a universal set of measurements. That, in turn, would make comfort commercializable. Finally, Robert Gordon-Fogelson examines how corporations used product packaging to appeal to consumers’ senses. How, he asks, can a multisensory approach help us see how consumers in turn viewed corporations? Together, this panel’s papers attempt to make sense of the slippery categories that both historical actors and historians have used to capture deeply individual sensations in a marketplace that demands replicable feeling.