convenes with the faculty of Creative Media & Digital Culture at Washington State University Vancouver. As part of his interest in sound, Barber developed and maintains Radio Nouspace (http://www.radionouspace.net), a web-based radio station, interactive installation / performance work, practice-based research site, and virtual museum, all focused on sound as a primary component of digital narrative, drama, and storytelling. His radio+sound art work has been broadcast internationally, and featured in juried exhibitions in America, Canada, Germany, Portugal, and Macedonia. A recent multimedia performance installation with voice is
This is the source
The creation and utilization of sound as a methodology for information representation is intriguing for Digital Humanities research, teaching, and practice. However, scholars, researchers, and artists may lack appreciation and/or ability for using sound(s) to enhance or ground their research / presentations. In response, the author created and taught a week-long course,
A reflection on a DHSI course on the role of sound in DH research, communication, and consumption.
This essay discusses the
This course evolved from previous experience at DHSI. During the summers of 2012 and 2013, I collaborated with colleagues from the Creative Media & Digital Culture faculty at Washington State University Vancouver to provide a course focusing on
Based on that observation, and a belief that sound plays an important role in arts and humanities research and scholarship, I proposed a course titled
This essay reflects on the course, its planning, implementation, and outcomes. I first situate sound as a worthy context for DH work, one that, unfortunately, has been under explored. Next, I outline, from a practice orientation, basic assumptions, and from them, daily goals, objectives, activities, and outcomes for this week-long course. The following section takes a more theoretical tone as I provide an overview of ideological approaches to sound and sound studies. This combination of theory and practice, subjective and objective, I hope, will be illustrative of my approach to this course, and provide a case study for others seeking a similar approach for their own DH research/work. My conclusion suggests that sound provides interesting opportunities for DH research, scholarship, and practice.
DH is an area of interdisciplinary, collaborative research and practice at the intersection of digital computing technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. The hybrid approach of DH involves combining digitized or born-digital materials, and methodologies from disciplines such as art, art history, archaeology, cultural studies, literary criticism, philology, and others, with computing tools like data mining and/or visualization, digital mapping and/or publishing, information retrieval, and statistics. Practices include analysis, coding, curation, criticism, databases, digitization, document analysis, geographical information systems, information digitization / visualization, multimedia publications, pedagogy, project management, text encoding, processing, and visualization. The results influence creation, dissemination, preservation, research, and teaching activities. The desired outcome is to answer or challenge existing research paradigms, as well as suggest new research questions and approaches. This essay brings sound into the mix.
Sound
is the name we give our physical, subjective experience of acoustic
energy — a sequence of pressure variations — that travel through a medium (air,
gas, water) to our ears. Sound may have a variety of sources but is usually one
object moving over or striking another, thus creating vibrations. For example,
air passing over human vocal cords and then modulated by tongue, teeth, mouth,
and lips produces the sounds we know as speech. Sound travels in all directions
from its source in waves and is heard (experienced as sound) when it interacts
with appropriate listening devices, like human ears. The higher the energy
involved with its production, the louder the sound is perceived. But, unless
preserved in some manner, all sound is ephemeral, disappearing soon after its
creation.
Regarding sound, scholar Bruce R. Smith, discussing his research of sounds
associated with London, circa 1600, notes many sounds, unless they have been
recorded, are no longer available for study, or are difficult to study. For
example, the only source for studying historical speech accents might be
impressions / depictions written by authors, travelers, or journalists
DH scholars have long been able to discuss developments in film and television
because of the ability to situate commentary alongside or directly within visual
media as it unfolds over time. But, the ability to do the same with sound has
not been widely possible until the introduction of SoundCloud in 2007. According
to Jonathan Sterne, as they become more widely available, evolving affordances
like looping an audio file; setting begin and end points; setting the volume;
tagging, commenting, annotating; close listening (via skipping around, speeding
up, slowing down, scrubbing, freezing); and comparing different channel formats
will increase opportunities for sound-focused scholarship
More specifically, Annie Murray and Jared Wiercinski describe how listening and
annotation are essential endeavors for DH scholars undertaking literary
criticism on poetry sound recordings. They present a methodology for designing a
web-based sound archive for literary criticism and propose features and
functionalities that facilitate this criticism
Despite such pioneering efforts, Allison Whitney says DH scholarship, with its
embrace of images, animation, video, or text as image for research and
information presentation, is biased toward visuals. Sound is largely overlooked
represent audio [recorded
sound(s)] across the material specificities of multiple media
(rather than reducing audio to simply sound or text). It also allows
historical evidence to be modeled and exhibited independently of the
author’s writing (e.g., audiences can navigate all audio files
collected for the history without reading the author’s
interpretations). However, any given audio file in a Scalar book can
be annotated through discrete, time-stamped commentary by the
author, and this commentary is displayed within the medium’s own
temporality. While such features are now typical in visual culture
(e.g., annotating lexia in Commentpress or tagging an image in
Flickr), few such mechanisms exist for the scholarly treatment of
sound.
Sound(s) should facilitate such intersections and comparisons as well. Imagine Smith being able to compare voice dialects using embedded sound files. Or, another DH researcher using sound(s) of speech to mark or define boundaries between research areas — between class, gender, or race relations, for example. Aural artifacts might include soundscapes, sound maps, sound collages, and remixes; digital storytelling (perhaps in transmedia projects); aural and oral histories / biographies / documentaries; curated exhibitions / installations / performances / broadcasts; or as stand alone artifacts (embedded sound, podcasts, web-based radio, archives, curated collections). However, DH scholars may lack appreciation and/or ability for using sound(s) to enhance or ground their research / presentations. In response, I proposed the
DHSI convenes colleagues from the arts, humanities, library, archives, and other
communities to share ideas and develop skills using digital, computational, and
network technologies for teaching, researching, sharing, creating, and
preserving in their disciplines. The atmosphere is informal, friendly, and
community-based. As noted, during summers 2012 and 2013, I helped facilitate
courses in building DH applications for mobile environments. From this previous
experience, I felt I could establish some descriptors for potential course
participants. For example, participants would
Based on these assumptions, my course, as planned, would assume no previous knowledge of recording and/or editing sound files. It would survey different sound genres and their use in DH projects. The course would be flexible, able to adapt to the participants' projects, and allow time for workshops and hands-on, learning-by-doing, collaborative learning experiences. As course facilitator, I outlined goals, objectives, activities, discussion, and workshops for each day of the course.
Outcomes from this course went far beyond my expectations. Where many course
participants arrived with an individual project, each left with a shared and
collaboratively constructed body of knowledge regarding the theory and
application of sound-augmented DH projects. Specifically, participants could
A brief discussion of each day's outcome(s) follows.
As the basis for the sound editing project, participants downloaded a digital sound file of the 30 October 1938 radio drama broadcast,
As a starting point for discussing auditory culture, participants considered
Steven Feld's attention to the primacy of sound as a
modality of knowing and being in the world
deep
or agile
listening proposed by Michael Bull and Les
Beck, acousmatic listening proposed by Pierre Schaeffer, and ambient
listening proposed by Brian Eno. More information in the
Sound, we agreed, provides a place in which embodied social and cultural
traces can be carried, often without the awareness of their bearers
As specific examples of auditory culture, we discussed aural / oral history, biography / documentary, and sound archives. Aural history is a method of gathering and preserving historical information through recorded sounds which provide context, background, and deep, rich information about the subject. Aural histories may include voice recordings regarding some historic event or way of life, but they are primarily composed of environmental / mechanical sounds.
With oral history, the primary audio emphasis is the human voice as a speaker tells her eye witness account, experience(s), or opinion(s) of past events / ways of life. The use of video recording includes gesture as part of the communication, thus expanding oral history beyond verbal form.
Audio biographies and documentaries may provide additional access to cultural and historical information contained in or provided by sound(s). The remainder of the day's discussion and exploration centered on the efforts of sound archives to archive and curate sound(s), either broadly defined or specifically focused. Participants explored sound archives online and discussed their relative affordances in light of their own sound-based DH projects.
The focus of this day's class was rights associated with audio files, and how these might affect their utilization in DH projects. Copyright, fair use, and creative commons were at the forefront of our discussions. The Statute of Anne (1710) established principles of an author's ownership of copyright and provided a fixed term of protection for copyrighted works (fourteen years). Since then, U.S. law has been revised to broaden the scope of copyright, change the term of copyright protection, and address new technologies. Section 107, Limitations on Exclusive Rights: Fair Use of The Copyright Act of 1976 provides exemptions, in certain contexts, to the exclusive rights built into the copyright law. Participants from Canada and the United Kingdom added their understanding of copyright considerations in their home countries, thus broadening the discussion. Creative Commons (CC) provides a model for how creative works might be shared. Essentially, Creative Commons licenses allow photographers, artists, educators, and others to license their work in advance as content for creative endeavors by others. We discussed these implications for course participants' individual projects.
Making sound files available for listening and further DH research /
presentation is important.
Course participants contributed samples from their individual or course
projects, audio biographies, found sounds, field recordings, oral histories,
poetry, and creative sound arts, to a collaborative project that was shared
with others during a DHSI-wide final-day show-and-tell session. The sound
file they created as a course artifact was a narrative of human endeavor
that, like DH, is deep and rich, broad and diverse.
Perhaps an overarching course outcome would be the realization that even in the
visual context of contemporary life, sound remains a powerful sensory input, and
a fundamental factor in many arenas of inquiry for DH: speech, writing,
literature, reading, narrative, storytelling, and listening.
Regarding the power of sound as a sensory input, film editor and sound designer
Walter Murch says sound is the earliest sensory stimulus available to humans,
switching on four-and-a-half months
after we are conceived.
Newborns rely predominately on hearing
before their visual acuity has stabilized
Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan echoes this point when he argues sound
provided the first frame of reference through which humankind attempted to
create and communicate a world view. McLuhan, with his son and collaborator,
Eric, describes two spaces, acoustic and visual, in which humankind has
contextualized itself with different results: Marshall McLuhan, with his son and collaborator, Eric, expanded the terms
Acoustic space . . . is
spherical, discontinuous, non-homogeneous, resonant, and dynamic. Visual
space is structured as static, abstract figure minus a ground; acoustic
space is a flux in which figure and ground rub against and transform
each other
figure
and
ground,
both
coined by psychologist and phenomenologist Edgar Rubin in 1915, to
explore visual perception. By figure, the McLuhans mean any object
rising from or receding into ground. Ground is surface, configurational
and comprised of all available figures technological fable
(myth)
Acoustic space is a world awash in sounds. With aural information emerging from
all directions, and with no opportunity to shut off or organize the constant
stream of sound, pre-writing humankind, the only to experience acoustic space,
according to McLuhan, perceived its world as both surrounding and inclusive, a
permeable extension of itself, and they of it
For McLuhan, The
What is the content of
speech?,
it is necessary to say, It is an actual process of
thought, which is in itself nonverbal
Speech tamed the acoustic wilderness by translating abstract thought into
communicable ideas. Storytellers produced explanations for the sounds in
acoustic space and wove them into larger narratives that helped explain the
presence and purpose of humankind. Orality provided a means to preserve and
share cultural histories and memories, a human tendency documented by Joseph
Campbell who investigated the reenactment of myths as ritualistic participatory
drama, often involving narrative, music, and/or other sound sources, by cultures
around the world
Alphabets and writing (and printing and reading), in turn, by visualizing its
sounds, incorporate and preserve speech while extending its reach beyond the
transmission range of the human voice. With the advent of writing, during the
height of ancient Greece, speech was visualized, replacing the speaker’s voice
with text. Printing and distribution of texts, encouraged humankind to see and
read (literally and figuratively) the world as a series of discrete pieces,
letters and words strung like beads on a linear continuum running from the past,
through the present, toward the future. As this emphasis on visualization
continued with film, television, and the World Wide Web, the visual was elevated
as the primary sensory input. Sound was relegated to a secondary, augmenting
role to the visual.
However, even as new visual media replaced / extended the older orality, they
incorporated its content: spoken narrative, storytelling, drama, and literature,
and various literary practices associated with their creation and consumption.
Thus, speech (as sound), with its origins in abstract thought and presentation,
is the oldest medium and the most prevalent form of human communication. It
claims a presence in most all media that follow the manuscript was first
conceived to be no more than a prompt-script for the spoken word, a
place to look to find out what to say . . . to produce the audible
word
Sound, despite its secondary relation to visual, still conveys deep, rich
information capable of prompting cognitive and emotional responses. McLuhan
likens sound to a subliminal echo
chamber
capable of evoking memories/associations long forgotten or
ignored
According to Smith, sound is pervasive. Most humans, he says, live immersed in a world of sound .
. . sound is at once the most forceful stimulus that human beings
experience, and the most evanescent
the primacy of sound as a modality
of knowing and being in the world
Experiencing sound, and the information it carries, involves listening, the
conscious processing of auditory stimuli. Gary Ferrington likens listening to
theater of the mind,
where every individual listener is her own dramaturge portal through which a deeper, often
inarticulate, consciousness can be glimpsed
seen
in the mind's eye
Michael Bull and Les Beck suggest by considering sound we open new ways of
thinking about and appreciating the social experience, memory, time, and place —
the auditory culture — of sound deep listening
or
agile listening,
both of
which involve attuning our ears to
listen again to the multiple layers of meaning potentially embedded in the
same sound.
Deep listening, they say, also involves practices of dialogue and procedures
for investigation, transposition and interpretation
In addition to deep or profound listening, we might also consider acousmatic,
ambient, or profound listening. Sound artist Francisco López uses the term
profound listening
to
denote listening without constraints in order to explore and affirm all the
information inside any sound
Ambient listening, as defined by Brian Eno, principal innovator of ambient music,
is an accompaniment to life activities, often a background or secondary
activity. Eno defines ambient music as new music
whereby compositional attention
to technological production is key an atmosphere, or a surrounding
influence: a tint
On the other hand is acousmatic, defined by Pierre Schaeffer, electroacoustic
musician-theoretician and pioneer of musique concrète, as a noise that one hears without
seeing what causes it
What am I hearing?
asks one to describe the perception itself, not
simply the external references. The acousmatic situation generally precludes any
relation with what is visible, touchable, measurable
The study of acousmatics is important for several reasons, according to
Schaeffer. Acousmatics, he says, emphasizes the subjectivities
involved in listening,
focuses attention on the sonorous
object,
what we are hearing, rather than the sound source, and
strips sound back to a state beyond interpretation
Sound is, thus, relative to our listening experience. This point is considered by
Brian Kane, in his scholarly study of Schaeffer's theory of acousmatics, as he
argues for acousmatic listening to take a central role in sound and music
aesthetics, sound studies, literature, and philosophy from a number of
methodological perspectives — historical, cultural, philosophical, and musical
Other worthwhile resources on listening include
Existing DH scholarship, as noted previously, is largely biased toward visuals
systematic enquiry
conducted though the medium of practical action, calculated to devise or
test new, or newly imported, information, ideas, forms, or procedures and to
generate communicable knowledge
and essentially undertake[s] research through
practice
In this essay, I have discussed a course entitled
My argument is that sound provides scholarly and creative opportunities for those
involved with DH. Researchers and scholars may be uncertain how to proceed,
however. This course was meant to fill the information gap. To summarize, there
are several reasons for a focus on sound . . .
In short, sound creates not only new phenomena to observe, research, interpret, and report, but more importantly, new applications for such endeavors in DH. This diversity of approaches to sound was heard by all DHSI 2014 participants during a show-and-tell session at week's end. Participants from each course shared some artifact in the DHSI central auditorium. With room lights extinguished, participants walked onto the stage where, illuminated only by glowing laptop and/or tablet screens, they added their respective aural components to a live performance of