This article is interested in how a tuning of the ear toward the auditory qualities of urban life presents new encounters with the historical geographies of the city and its spaces of technological modernity. It identifies the way a heightened appreciation of the auditory domain has helped disclose different ways of conceptually approaching the experience of urbanization and technological modernity during the 20th century. The article then moves on to address contemporary practice-based responses to the auditory historical terrain, particularly where they experiment with contemporary mobile technology. It considers the way these mobile practices help to open up fruitful new methods of geographical enquiry, while at the same time calls into question why existing analyses of mobile culture necessarily denigrating the urban public realm.