As the basis for the sound editing project, participants downloaded a digital sound file of the 30 October 1938 radio drama broadcast, The War of the Worlds. Directed by and starring Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air, this is, arguably, the most influential radio broadcast of all time.[4] The challenge was to edit this hour-long performance into a coherent narrative ten minutes in length, or less. Course participants discussed the overall structure of their edited sound compositions, and how their particular perspectives on sound (many participants were working with collections of recorded poetry readings / poet interviews) contributed to the resulting artifact.

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”  [Feld 2003, 226]. This opened our discussion to different types of listening: “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 “Theoretical Framework” section, below.

Sound, we agreed, provides a place in which embodied social and cultural traces can be carried, often without the awareness of their bearers [Schafer 1977]. By carefully considering sound, however, we open new ways of thinking about and appreciating the social experience, memory, time, and place — the auditory culture — of sound [Bull and Beck 2003, 12].

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. Streaming provides content on a continuous basis. Listeners can tune in or out at will, as with traditional radio broadcasting. But, they can also pause, stop, and start the program stream at will. The stream is ongoing and particular portions cannot be heard again unless they are recorded in some manner. Downloading involves transferring a sound file from a remote computer to a local computer where it can be saved and listened to whenever desired. Podcasting refers generally to an audio episode, self-contained, sometimes augmented by text or visuals, that can be either streamed or downloaded. On demand speaks to sharing an audio file only when it is needed or desired by the listener. The listener evokes the playback process by interacting with an audio player. The audio file plays through to conclusion and then, since it is embedded in the interface, can be evoked repeatedly.

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.[5]