Mural by Robert Reid in Library of Congress’s Jefferson Building, ca. 1896.

At Cabinet Magazine Stefan Helmreich speaks shells and:

“puts an ear to popular science and poetry, following a history that has, first, shells singing, speaking, sighing, and echoing distant oceanic and communal pasts, and next, shells reflecting back the personal and present moment, and, then, as we approach today, delivering sounds imagined deep inside, rather than outside, human bodies. At stake are changing models of the relation between hearing, the world, and the self, with the avowedly mystical and communal gradually replaced by the secular, scientific, and individual—though, with the arrival of the blood-in-the-ears interpretation, infused anew with an element of the mythical.”

Read on for “blood music,” “eerie and eary doubles,” “ethno-conchology,” and more.