My dissertation examines the emergence of new, "modern" regimes of listening in the late nineteenth century their intersection with the musical culture surrounding Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel in the period from 1895 to 1910. I focus particularly on the phenomenon of piano pieces that imitate sounds, like bells, running water and birdcalls: these pieces, I argue, are part of a musical culture that cultivated and privileged the act of listening to non-musical sound in new ways even as, at the same time, it recognized listening as deeply problematic and mediated through the opaque and resistant materiality of the body.