Omniaudience: On the Specimens of Various Styles of Music and Being a "Good Listener" Abstract: This paper historicizes the connection, assumed or explicitly proposed by several music scholars in recent years, between being a good listener to music and being a "good listener" in the widest ethical sense. Via the Specimens of Various Styles of Music by William Crotch (1807) -- a compendium of musical samples with an improbably sweeping global purview, which Crotch first presented in a course of lectures at the Royal Institution in London in the early nineteenth century -- I argue that much of music and sound studies remains in thrall to the problematic liberal-colonial fantasy of "omniaudience": the belief that, equipped with the appropriate technologies, one might potentially listen to everything, discriminate all distinctive voices. Bio: Nicholas Mathew is Professor of Music and Richard and Rhonda Goldman Professor in the Humanities. His latest book, The Haydn Economy, is due to appear with the University of Chicago Press at the end of this year.