This paper focuses on the sonic presence of street vendors’ in nineteenth century Ottoman soundscapes through a unique and extraordinary audiovisual media object: an album of photos and musical transcriptions of street vendors’ cries in Western staff notation. My research is conceived as a sonic history tracing several encounters of vendors with passersby on the streets, as I emphasize that sound should be analyzed as a relationship between a listener and something listened to. The paper analyzes different listening habits and subjectivities along the lines of religion, class, language, ethnicity, gender and other categories of difference. I stress the way cultural difference, especially intra-imperial difference, emerges in an urban soundscape like Istanbul. I use the term, then, in the plural, as “soundscapes”, taking into account multiple sensory experiences of a diversity of peoples. Relying on Ottoman archival material, literature in different Ottoman languages, ego-documents, travelogues, scientific writings, newspapers, letters, diaries, legal documents, musical notes, court records, I analyze four encounters and relations that itinerant sellers’ cries delineate: migration (how rural migrants listened to Ottoman urbanites, and vice versa); multilingualism and diversity; human-nonhuman encounters; and the audibility of gender. Lastly, I touch upon the romantic fascination with the practice of itinerant merchants, due to their imagined “oriental” character, originality, and anticipated extinction.