My project situates German modernism within the context of early twentieth-century auditory culture, emphasizing in particular the interrelations between modernist poetics and the history of scientific research on sound and hearing. In opposition to studies which foreground the disembodied voice of the phonograph and radio, my project seeks to highlight the various forms of auditory embodiment that emerged around 1900. I then show how modernism’s often-cited narrative self-reflexivity drew on conceptions of this uniquely embodied listener and overlapped with contemporaneous scientific knowledge surrounding the physiology of the ear and the role of the body in the perception of sound.