This study focuses on gender in the cultural history of Iranian vocal music during the Pahlavi period. From the early Pahlavi period until the late 1940s and early 1950s, women prolifically performed two kinds of vocal music, namely āvāz and rhythmic vocal music known as Tasnif and Tarāneh. The period under Reza Shah witnessed an eventful era during which female performers appeared publicly. The same generation of female performers continued to perform both vocal performances throughout the 1940s and the early 1950s. However, as this article argues, as women were seen and heard publicly, the masculine elite musical culture reacted to their presence by deploying a gendered discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. The gender dichotomy in the performance of vocal music in Iran, as the article argues, should be read as the history of the opposition between two senses: sight and seeing and ear and listening. While disciplined practices of listening, ear, and body constituted the elite masculine culture, the feminine culture was expressed through public spectacles of sight. Scholarly writings on modern Iranian cultural history have not paid attention to the histories of senses, including the eye and sight and the ear and listening. This article hopes to situate the debates about the performance of vocal music at the cusp of the opposition between the aural and the visual in modern Iranian cultural history and open up a space for writing the history of senses in modern Iranian cultural history.