The Edinburgh Companion To Literature and Sound Studies - Helen Groth (Editor), Julian Murphet (Editor) - Edinburgh Companions To Literature and The - 9781399502306 - Anna's Archive

The Edinburgh Companion to
Literature and Sound Studies
8496_Groth & Murphet.indd 1 07/11/23 1:42 PM

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Edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol Helen Groth and Julian Murphet
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecl

The Edinburgh
Companion to
Literature and
Sound Studies
Edited by Helen Groth and Julian Murphet

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK.
We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the
humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high
editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance.
For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
© editorial matter and organisation Helen Groth and Julian Murphet 2024
© the chapters their several authors 2024
Cover image: The Scream of the Leaders © Rachael Clegg
Cover design: Stuart Dalziel
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

The Tun – Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by

IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and
printed and bound in Great Britain.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 3995 0230 6 (hardback)

ISBN 978 1 3995 0231 3 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 3995 0232 0 (epub)
The right of Helen Groth and Julian Murphet 2024 to be identified as the editor
of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003
(SI No. 2498).

Contents
List of Figures viii
Introduction1
Helen Groth and Julian Murphet
Part I: Literature, Listening, Sounding

1. The Sound a Sentence Makes: On Poetry, Judgement, and Hearing 19
Astrid Lorange
2. The Limits of Listening: Riotous Women, Imperial Structures, and
Sonic Archives 32
Helen Groth
3. PIANO/Forte: Writing Audible Space, Jane Austen, Dorothy Richardson,
and Others 45
David Toop
4. Oralities, Literacies, and the Xenophobic Fallacy 59
Richard Cullen Rath
Part II: Literature, Music, Performance

5. Notes to Literature: Scores as Musical Reproduction in the Literary Text 81
Tamlyn Avery
6. Sound Agonistes: Music and the Economy of Sacrifice in Sound Studies 99
Miranda Stanyon
7. Shakespeare’s Vibrant Theatres 115
Bruce R. Smith
8. ‘Imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds’: Rap, Patter, and Hyper
Diction in Musical Theatre 129
Tamsen O. Wolff

vi contents
Part III: Literature, Voice, Acousmatics

9. ‘Let it resound’: ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ as Sonic Witness 145
Noelle Morrissette
10. Sound Media, Race, and Voice 154
Sam Halliday
11. The Acousmatics of Prison Writing 167
Julian Murphet
12. Aural Anxiety and Rurality in Women’s Second World War Writing 182
Imogen Free
Part IV: Literature, Media, Coded Sound

13. Sound Technology and US Fiction in the Postwar Era: The Ethics and
Aesthetics of Cross-Racial Listening 201
K. C. Harrison
14. Coded Sound: Reading in the Age of Networked Media 216
Justin St. Clair
15. Media Affordances of Literary Audio: Interrelations of Format and Form 228
Jason Camlot
16. OH-EE-OH-EE-OH-EE-AW-EE-AW!: Sound Descriptors in the Books
of Tarzan as Facilitators of Presence 250
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Part V: Literature, War, Industry

17. An Auditory History of Early Modernity: Listening to Enlightenment and
Industry in Britain, 1700–1900 267
Peter Denney
18. ‘This is/not was’: The Violence of Circulation and the Sonics of
Submerged Language 284
Andrew Brooks
19. Shriek and Hum: Industrial Noise and Productivity 302
David Ellison
20. A Critical Poetics of Warfare 316
Mark Byron
21. The Great War: Sonic Fragments in Literature and Sound Studies 336
Michael Bull
Part VI: Literature, Sonic Epistemology, Language

22. Sonic Epistemologies 351
Holger Schulze

contents vii
23. The Cultural Poetics of a Buoyancy Sound from Amazonian Ecuador 366
Janis Nuckolls
24. Havoc Ornithologies 382
Jody Berland
Notes on Contributors 406

Index411

Figures
Figure 5.1 Page from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Oxford University Press. 84
Figure 5.2 Excerpt from Harriet Monroe, ‘Rhythms of English Verse, II’,
in Poetry.87
Figure 5.3 Page from Ezra Pound, Canto LXXV. New Directions. 88
Figure 5.4 Excerpt from Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem (1920). 91
Figure 5.5 Johnson’s ‘To Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Upon Hearing His
“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”’. 92
Figure 7.1 Thomas Morley, ‘It was a lover and his lass’, in The first booke
of ayres. Or Little short songs, to sing and play to the lute,
with the base viole (London: William Barley, 1600), sigs B3v–B4.
Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library,
Washington DC 124
Figure 15.1 MsC 14, Gerry Gilbert fonds in the Contemporary Literature
CollecDon, Benne@ Library. Photos by Deanna Fong. 241
Figure 20.1 Front cover of Zang Tumb Tumb (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di
Poesia, 1914). Public domain. 323
Figure 20.2 ‘Après la Marne, Joffre visita le front en auto’ (After the Marne,
Joffre visited the front in an automobile), in tavola parolibere
(free-word table) (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia, 1915).
Public domain. 324

Introduction
Helen Groth and Julian Murphet
I t is probably no surprise that in a recently published volume entitled Keywords in

Sound, neither writing nor literature scores an entry of its own.1 The field-defining
collections and readers that make ‘sound studies’ visible as a disciplinary formation
tend to treat writing as a minor territory within its domain.2 Yet, this material often
makes abundant use of many of the most significant literary resources for transcribing
sound. Indeed, we will want to say by the end of this Introduction that sound studies
is literary through and through – but not before admitting a disciplinary deficit that
demands attention here. For it is obvious that other disciplines have enjoyed a dis-
proportionate sway over the field in its historical crystallisation. Even leaving aside
acoustical engineering as the most important parent discipline, the relative impor-
tance of musicology, architecture, media history and theory, urban studies, sociology,
history, design, and so on, in the categorical articulation of sound studies inside the
humanities tells an important story about institutional priorities and rates of internal
development. Although it is now a few decades old and sports a large and expanding
bibliography, including several dedicated journals, sound studies is defined by a spread
of cognate disciplinary enterprises for which sound – the mechanical propagation of
acoustic waves through a material medium – can be said to have a more direct bearing
on the core elements of research (physics, built space, resonance, signal processing,
social organisation, and so forth) than it has tended to in literary studies.
Recent research in various national literatures has made a strong claim for a more
central role in the direction of sound studies, relative to these other disciplines.3 Start-
ing with Garrett Stewart’s important 1990 volume Reading Voices: Literature and the
Phonotext – which reminded us of how profoundly written text is related to the pat-
terning and articulation of vocal sounds – there has been an accelerating expansion of
the corpus of serious work dedicated to unearthing literature’s fundamental engage-
ments with acoustics and listening, theoretically and historically. Anna Snaith’s recent
collection Sound and Literature brings together many of the leading voices in this inter-
disciplinary space and builds on the major achievements of R. Murray Schafer (The
Soundscape), Jonathan Sterne (Audible Past), John M. Picker (Victorian Soundscapes),
Sam Halliday (Sonic Modernity), Julie Beth Napolin (The Fact of Resonance), Matthew
Rubery (Audiobooks), and Patricia Pye (Sound and Modernity in the Literature of
London), in their efforts to fashion a usable methodology with which to examine lit-
erary texts for meaningful sonic information.4 More recent work has considered the
deep sensitivity of lyric form to sonic textures of speech,5 the acoustic dimension of
literary tone,6 the sonic colour line as manifest in literary texts,7 and the untold history
of the talking book.8 Snaith’s crucial collection Sound and Literature marks a decisive
move forward in this direction.9 Our own previous collection, Sounding Modernism,

2 helen groth and julian murphet
attempted to map some of the implications of this research for modernist studies.10
Work will continue to appear that challenges the disciplinary boundaries keeping sound
studies separate from literary history and analysis; but the question remains as to what
these boundaries take for granted.
As R. Murray Schafer once dramatically put the central problem, ‘all visual pro-
jections of sounds are arbitrary and fictitious’, and that includes paradigmatically the
glyphs and ideograms with which literate cultures have presumed to encode the spo-
ken languages of humankind.11 The entire history of Western metaphysics is vexed by
this arbitrary and fictitious suturing of the ‘great divide’ between orality and literacy,12
by signs that supplement spoken discourse only to expose it to the ‘dangerous’ vicis-
situdes of dissemination, anonymity, and the posthumous trace.13 ‘Literature’ is a con-
cept in which these ancient tensions and contradictions, between sound and silence,
presence and absence, speech and text, are dialectically compounded and mutually
ramified. For that very reason, it seems to us that literature is an inescapable lens
through which to view the study of sound itself, since literature is the institutional
home of sound’s coming to be thought, its first awkward transcription into symbolic
forms – entirely arbitrary and wildly different from language to language – that defied
its ephemerality with the fiat of written signs and offered it up to analysis and evalu-
ation millennia before the invention of technologies capable of recording its actual
wavelengths. As a storage medium, writing has never shied away from its relationship
with the sounds it can only represent by ‘misrecording’ them.
Let us take one of the simplest and most beautiful invocations of the literary con-
tract in the history of any language, the ‘Introduction’ to William Blake’s 1794 vol-
ume, Songs of Innocence:
Piping down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’

So I piped with merry cheer.
‘Piper, pipe that song again.’
So I piped: he wept to hear.
‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;

Sing thy songs of happy cheer!’
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.
‘Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read.’
So he vanished from my sight;
And I plucked a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen,

And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.14

introduction 3
Blake’s fable traces the origins of literature in song and the origins of song in music;
and it propounds a benign fiction of each medium’s happy dependency on the others.
The child in the cloud, a divine muse vouchsafing the vision, first hears the spontaneous
rural music of an undisciplined shepherd, piping ‘songs of pleasant glee’, which he then
asks to be directed at a specific subject – a lamb. When music turns to subject matter,
to specified theme and motive, it heightens its ability to move the auditor: the angel
weeps where before he simply laughed. But this still seems too limited; the child next
asks for the pipe to be put aside and for the voice to be enjoined in song. Preserving its
melody, its pitch, rhythm, volume, and spatial location, but transposing the tune into
lyric measures, the shepherd now deepens the sonic engagement with his theme. He sings
‘the same again’, but with the radical difference that language makes to sound. Con-
ceptual, connotational, poetic, tonal, and sprung with the difference-engines of address
and diction, language fleshes out melody with all the articulations of voice. Again, but
at a higher level, the angel weeps. The final step is the most consequential and flushed
with the injunction of radical egalitarianism: ‘sit thee down and write / In a book, that
all may read’. We note immediately the necessary change: the songs will no longer be
issued where they were conceived and sung, they will be mediated by the primitive tech-
nology (a rural pen and basic ink, along with implied paper) that makes transcription
possible. The songs will no longer be directly presided over by the angel, who vanishes
the moment the pen is plucked; neither will they sound spontaneously in the meadows.
But they will vastly extend their reach; ‘Every child may joy to hear’ them, because the
preceding stages are implicit, sublated in the last, still vouchsafed by the divine goodwill
that smiles over their production. When we recall that this parable is illustrated by an
accompanying, illuminated engraving of shepherd, flock, pipe, and floating child, we can
fully take the measure of Blake’s lesson: paper is a multimedia, and literature is always
already sounded by the ritual, musical, and lyrical processes where its origins lie coiled.
Blake’s lyric insists on the historicity of literature and of humanly organised sound,
and the historicity of their overdetermined intertwining. It also corrects our tendency
to construe writing and reading as necessarily silent. Throughout antiquity and most
of the Middle Ages, as Paul Saenger has demonstrated, writing and reading were far
from silent activities, and it was only under the habitus of specific monastic com-
munities that a silence of the text became normative in scholarly circles.15 As Blake
reminds us, the nursery is the one place where that cone of silence has never dropped,
and legion are the stories of the ways in which literature has bloomed again and again
into voice: Shakespeare’s theatre, Dickens’s public readings, radio’s literary broadcasts,
the recorded book, poetry slams, and so forth. Lyric poetry alone, one of literature’s
immemorial pillars, seems indissociable from the larynx, tongue, teeth, and lungs of
the poet who writes it, and its rhetoric as well as its decorous formal architectures
are ineluctably embedded in the sonic textures of voice.16 And as Garrett Stewart has
bravely shown, even the most print-based and ‘post-oral’ of all literary forms – the
sprawling Victorian or modernist novel – is secretly animated by ‘transegmental’ drifts
and phonemic stutterings at the level of the phonic signifier in ways that baffle any
merely ‘linguistic’ reading.17 The silence of literature has in some senses been grossly
exaggerated, and the phonetic alphabets of many Western languages are a constant
reminder of how literature is a study of sound at the most radical level, decompos-
ing spoken words into units of sound in order that they can be rebuilt into enormous
edifices of song, like Homer’s Iliad, Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
(texts notoriously composed by blind men, and at home in the auditory realm).

And yet, it is just as false to imagine the problem solved by issuing these salutary
correctives. For literature is silent on the whole, and has staged a marked if neces-
sary retreat from the pastoral dances and rituals that presided over the ‘birth of
tragedy out of the spirit of music’.18 Silent reading is an accelerator making possible
greater and more intensive literary engagement, and it reaches speeds where even
the internal ear, that imaginary hallucinator of sounds evoked by the text, simply
fails to be engaged. The institutions of literature have long been predicated on these
unavoidable facts, which weaken the links between written signs and sounds. Justin
St. Clair writes that ‘the relationship between literature and sound is fundamen-
tally dislocatory: the “there” of textuality is necessarily at a remove from whatever
soundscape a specific passage records [. . .] Literature, in other words, is inherently
acousmatic.’19 Blake’s ‘sit thee down and write’ implies an alienating passage of
sound through the symbolic, and the symbolic has no sensory field; it is a purely
intellectual, structural domain, where arbitrary signifiers are related to each other
out of formal difference alone. The symbolic arises from structural linguistic differ-
entiation and sets its semantic possibilities dancing in the abstract realm of sense, but
nothing of the sensory remains in this sublime palace of meanings. Indeed, the very
phonemes out of which an alphabetical written language is composed are nothing
but symbolic registrations of the ideas of sounds, a fully intellectualised abstraction
of something the speaker feels to be embedded in and specific to the individual word
being spoken – even if it is not. For the deeper lesson of literacy is that even spoken
discourse, in all its apparent harmony with things and its charismatic immediacy,
is beholden to the same symbolic processes that writing makes explicit: difference,
deferral, arbitrariness, dislocation, supplementarity. The spoken word is not what
it says it is, and writing clinches this unspoken truth of all language: none of it is
what it declares itself to be. It is a symbolic tool-kit, a medium, and like all media,
it facilitates certain ratios between signal and noise, sense and nonsense, according
to the precision of its use.
Writing arose between three and four millennia ago, eventually to become the
exclusive storage medium of all literate cultures. It peaked in power after the inven-
tion of the printing press (the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’) and established an insuperable
monopoly over the entirety of social and cultural information until near the end of
the nineteenth century, when new media, mechanical and electronic, began to emerge.
This monopoly obviously includes any information about sound as such: its variet-
ies, its physics, its pitches, timbres, dynamics, and tones. When we consider musical
notation as an aspect of print’s data monopoly, then written music too – scores with
their staves, notes, time signatures, and directions about tempo and volume – is liter-
ary through and through, and the history of Western musical evolution is unthinkable
without the impact of writing on its many internal developments. But it is clearly with
written discourse that the relationship between text and sound comes most dynami-
cally into definition, not just in the fact of phonetic script, but more generally in an
ever evolving lexicon about sonic phenomena. Of course, because writing is a human
medium designed to serve human ends, there has historically been no question but
that the sonic phenomena subject to written analysis were confined to the band-
width of human auditory perception: sound frequencies between approximately 20
and 20,000 hertz. But within this relatively narrow range, literary specialisation and

introduction 5
adaptation proved extraordinarily versatile in developing vocabularies of audition

that progressively unearthed more and more sonic data, refining and sophisticating
the human understanding of sound.
The adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and nouns associated with sound in any of the major
language groups are prodigiously various and highly specific, second only to visual
language in their range and depth of detailed verbal analysis. In addition to these
official lexicons of sound, the phonetic languages have proven immensely adaptive to
sonic phenomena through their mimetic capacity for onomatopoeia, though even here
the law of arbitrary sign creation prevails (the number of different ways of registering
the calling of a cat or the crowing of a cock is infamous). When literature turns its
attention to the world of sound, then, it has immense resources to draw upon, even if
there is always a necessary symbolic sundering of sound from sense. Perhaps the most
sensitive ear ever to record sound in written language was Henry David Thoreau’s, and
his prose resonates with a suggestive soundtrack like no other:
When other birds are still the screech owls take up the strain, like mourning
women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise
midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without
jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers
remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves.
Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the wood-
side; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark
and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are
the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in
human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating
their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgres-
sions. They give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which
is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one
on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new
perch on the gray oaks. Then – that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another
on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and – bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from
far in the Lincoln woods.20
The most irresistible conclusion to be drawn from this superlative recreation in lan-
guage of a screech owl’s hooting is that literature cannot leave sound alone, but must
draw it up into itself, metaphorising and personifying it, infusing it with other sen-
sations and affects, relating it to other writers’ works, filling it in with signification
and sense. This is the distinctive difference made by literature’s storage monopoly
over auditory experience relative to later media: it does not treat sounds in isolation
from other phenomena but situates them in a larger context of embodied perception
and reflection and commits itself to a general phenomenology and psychology of
experience. There can be no thoroughgoing objectivism or ‘scientism’ of auditory
description, because, given over as it is to the symbolic, language must expose sound
to sense, even as it ineluctably does the reverse by virtue of its phonologic opera-
tions. Alexander Pope’s famous advice to poets about ensuring that these two orders
are made imaginarily adequate to one another is not simply a classicist prejudice; it

virtually corresponds to the condition of all efforts to render sounds inside a sym-
bolic medium:
True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,

As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.
’Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence,
The Sound must seem an Echo to the Sense.
Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows;
But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore,
The hoarse, rough Verse shou’d like the Torrent roar.
When Ajax strives, some Rock’s vast Weight to throw,
The Line too labours, and the Words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the Plain,
Flies o’er th’unbending Corn, and skims along the Main.21
Literary ‘voice’, an indispensable category of all serious composition, is situated at

this aesthetic juncture between sound and sense. Voice is an ethical infusion of living
character into impersonal textuality that draws the better part of its persuasive power
from the acoustic illusions of an embodied speaker that the writing is at pains to con-
jure via various literary techniques. Stephen Benson has observed that ‘to think in any
way of literary narrative as requiring, or involving, or as predicated upon voice, phan-
tasmically or otherwise, involves the imagination of sound, of the sound of a voice’.
Elspeth Jajdelska has convincingly shown how the ‘birth of the narrator’ in Western
literary forms was historically tied to the establishment of roles for the implied reader
and writer in seventeenth-century European fiction, roles that relate intimately to this
formal category of voice.22 And this does not even scratch the surface of the many
ways in which script written to be performed – play texts, speeches, orations, and any
other written prompt for speech or song – imbues itself with cues and keys aligning it
with sound and sound with sense. That construction we call ‘Shakespeare’ is in fact
mostly cobbled together out of actors’ recollections of their performances at the Globe
and Blackfriars, and it is impossible to divorce this consecrated textuality from its
qualities as sounded, spoken, projected, and played in the Elizabethan theatre, with-
out grossly distorting its meanings.23 In all of this immensely various and polyphonic
archive of written sound, of course, the general law of all media applies: in order to
make these signals clearly (signals underscored by rules of pronunciation and phonetic
spelling in Western languages, and therefore by official dictionaries and an extended
educational apparatus), there is also an inevitable amount of ‘noise’ (unwanted fluc-
tuations of medial materiality interfering with the signal) that goes along with them.
Literary ‘noise’ includes misprints and errata, mispaginations, faint ink, acidic paper,
tears, and other accidentals of the printing process which frustrate literary automa-
tisms and return the reader to a confrontation with the arbitrariness of the symbolic. It
has not yet sufficiently been theorised in relation to literature and sound, but the noise
of the literary mode of production should give pause to any straightforward account
of acoustic signs.
It was that artificial, semiotic dimension of literary soundscapes that became excru-
ciatingly apparent after the invention of the phonograph and other mechanical record-

introduction 7
ing technologies at the turn of the twentieth century. Just as the camera had directly
imprinted the shadow of the visible real on a sensitive photographic plate, the pho-
nograph too had the frequency curves of actual sounds inscribed upon it by a needle
in wavelike configurations. Not symbolic approximations or significations, then, but
isomorphic recordings or reproductions of sound were made possible for the first time
by this technology; at a stroke the literary monopoly over sonic transcription looked
weak and its symbolic apparatus sieve-like. ‘The dream of a real visible or audible
world arising from words had come to an end’, writes Friedrich Kittler. ‘The histori-
cal synchronicity of cinema, phonography, and typewriting separated optical, acous-
tic, and written data flows, thereby rendering them autonomous.’24 For the first time,
sound appeared as what it really was: the real itself. Freed from the arbitrary gridwork
of the symbolic, sound could be heard to ‘form the waste or residue that neither the
mirror of the imaginary nor the grid of the symbolic can catch: the physiological acci-
dents and stochastic disorder of bodies’.25 Noise, Milton’s chaotic ‘universal hubbub
wild / Of stunning sounds and voices all confused’,26 no longer had to rely on mere
description for evidence of its immense kingdom on earth – it could be reproduced on
its own terms in ways that made language redundant. From that moment onwards,
the preponderant mediation of sound has shifted from wax and shellac grooves to
electromagnetic signals on tape and via radio to digitised strings of computational
data; domains in which the literary sign looks decidedly archaic and extremely ‘low-
res’. When it is recalled how effortlessly literary signals can be repackaged and dis-
seminated as media software (talking books, recordings of live performances, radio
broadcasts, MP3 files, and so forth), it seems futile to imagine that literature could
simply stand its ground against the new media behemoth. What options did the liter-
ary mode of production explore in response to this massive data breach and loss of
cultural legitimacy?
First of all, as David Trotter, Debra Rae Cohen, and many others have expertly
shown, the new sound media could themselves be reappropriated as ‘content’ within
the mutated literary space of so-called modernism.27 Nor would this appropriation be
merely static, since all such media absorption is ineluctably enmeshed in a complex
competition for attention within an increasingly crowded media ecology. Fredric Jame-
son has postulated the aesthetic law that whenever one medium appears inside another
it is always to set off the ontological primacy, the superior power and prestige of the
host medium; and that one of the most consequential effects of literature’s becom-
ing just one medium among others is that it, too, could participate in this Darwinian
struggle for survival.28 So, when literature represents a new sound medium transmit-
ting a recorded or broadcast signal, it will want to do so with the full arsenal of
its ethical and associative symbolic machinery, and supplement its relatively deficient
reproductions of sound with a rich and supple rhetoric of valuation, and an evocative
phenomenology, that compensate the reader for the silence of the literary soundtrack.
‘Literary texts can act as sonic archives,’ recounts Anna Snaith, ‘representing and pre-
serving not just historical soundscapes but what Sam Halliday calls the “para-sonic”:
the physical, political, cultural frameworks or situations in which sounds are produced
and received.’29 This is why everybody’s favourite literary phonograph, the typist’s in
Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, is so immensely provocative: it takes the para-sonic seriously
and elevates an otherwise trivial acoustic episode into a world-historical symbolic
event in which a recorded sound is emblematic of a vast civilisational collapse.

Second, literature can experiment with its own means of production to simulate
or take as points of departure some of the new features of sound’s reproducibility.
The Futurist practice of playing with fonts and sizes, the general avant-garde prin-
ciple of treating paper as a multimedia, incorporating musical staves and notations
as epigraphs, the genre of artist’s books and the use of illustration more generally, the
printing of mathematical and scientific formulae in works of fiction, even something
as basic as the use of Arabic numbers in a poem (something we believe Ezra Pound
to have pioneered in his early Cantos) – all attest to a will to bend the literary text
outwards, to open it up to new kinds of sonic texture and acoustical energy specific
to the modern soundscapes of the changing media ecology. Without abandoning its
fundamental symbolic modus operandi, literature could learn to become more directly
‘reproductive’ in relation to the signals and noises all around it. There are thus dis-
tinctly ‘noisy’ modern texts, like Louis Zukofsky’s epic ‘A’, Gertrude Stein’s Tender
Buttons, and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, that defy standard approaches to the symbolic
inscription of sound by virtue of their flagrant efforts to become sound-worlds unto
themselves, internally diverse but consistent sonic environments unlike any others.
Third, literature can adapt itself to be wired (or wireless) for sound. The history of
recorded authorial readings, broadcast readings, and literary texts specifically written
for radio (for instance) is long and surprisingly rich, and many are the literary artists
who have sat before a microphone and mediated their writing for auditory dissemina-
tion across the new networks of reproducible sound.30 Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein,
Alfred Döblin, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, Lorine Niedecker, and
W. H. Auden are only a few who subjected their literary labours to the technical
specifications of broadcast radio; and legendary adaptations like that of H. G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds by Orson Welles, or the BBC Radio 4 Classic Serial adaptations
by major actors and directors of everything from The Aeniad to I, Claudius, have
cemented the century-old relationship between literature and mediated sound. The
market in audiobooks is today valued at over US$5 billion and expected to expand at a
compound annual growth rate of 26.4 per cent from 2022 to 2030, when it will reach
$35 billion per annum. Ease of access across multiple platforms and sites of audition
makes this manner of consuming literature increasingly attractive, and writing is being
ritually embedded into the daily commute or walk in ways unimaginable to previous
generations of readers. When this phenomenon is added to the strong contemporary
revival of live literary events like poetry slams and open mikes, alongside the more
industry-inflected author readings at literary festivals and bookshop Q&As, the image
becomes clear of at least a partial return to literature’s oral roots, a systematic detour
of the written word through auditory channels, forums, and storage/playback devices
that defamiliarise ‘literature’ in provocative and productive ways.
The emergence of sound studies as a disciplinary sub-formation happened at an
oblique angle to this contested history of literature’s adjustment to a century of medi-
ated sounds. On the one hand, it seemed to understand the ineluctable relationship
of sonic phenomena to verbal signs and the literary record (a scan of Schafer’s The
Soundscape is a confrontation with an extensive literary archive); but on the other, it
made a determined effort to take the real of sound seriously, and not to lapse back into
simple symbolic registrations of acoustics. Situating its analyses and explorations at
sites generally unavailable to literary method, sound studies has revelled in the noisy
everyday cultures of late modernity as well as the more distant rural and peripheral

introduction 9
soundscapes where recorded sounds feature less prominently; it has delved deeply into
sound design, the acoustic properties of materials, buildings as conductors, sonic digi-
tisation, the public problems and economies of noise, the racialisation of sound across
colour lines and contested urban territories, sound’s politicisation more generally, its
agency in an antagonistic social field and in warzones, and its complex constitution of
social memory and ritual space, among many other important topics.31 The ubiquity
of sound waves, within and beyond the range of human hearing, is a subject with vast
implications for science and technology, for the humanities, for social science, and for
the health sciences. So, it is no wonder that literature should have taken a back seat
relative to other powerful vectors in the establishment of a disciplinary formation
strung across the intersection of these many faculties and competing concerns.
For all that, however, there is no question that – doubtless due to the uniquely
evanescent and trace-less nature of most audio phenomena – writing about sound has
tended to be, well, writerly. The pre-mechanical, pre-electronic tradition of writing
sound in printed signs has never truly been abandoned, least of all in sound studies,
where the very best thinkers in the field have raised their literary art to a very high
level indeed, tracking elusive, imponderable sounds and committing them to symbolic
inscriptions that take their energy from the linguistic, grammatical, syntactic, and tro-
pological dynamics built into the very medium of written language. It is an art of the
sentence, writing about sound, and of the flow of sentences one to the next in peri-
ods and paragraphs that seek to capture the significance of acoustical events in ways
that mere recording never could. We can put it this way: machines and technological
media learned how to reproduce and store sound waves as signals and in code; but
the fundamental relationship of heard sounds to the lived, embodied, social, cultural,
historically changing matrices of human existence is finally irreducible to these signals
and codes. Without writing about sound, without its literary inscription, it lies inert as
sonic information, capable of making direct and affective impact on human sensoria
during playback, but lacking the complex weave of phenomenological interrelatedness
with other kinds of information that literature takes as its raison d’être.
In the work of David Toop, Douglas Kahn, Steven Connor, Salomé Voegelin, Bran-
don LaBelle, Michel Chion, and others, writing about sound is an art form, and a
literary art form at that. It requires extraordinary control over the technical means
of literary production, a precise attention to the shifts in tone, voice, and diction that
make palpable to readers the kinds of association the sounds at issue will need to gen-
erate in them – as affect, as percept, and as concept. Here is David Toop listening to a
CD on headphones in a public library in Whitechapel, East London, with the recorded
voice of Janet Cardiff in his ears, telling him where to go:
I am leaving myself behind. My radar, the detection system that alerts me to safety
and location, seems to be switched to low intensity readings because I am in three
places at once: inside Cardiff’s urgent narrative which unfolds like an old-fashioned
crime novel; in step with her voice of guidance, which safely walks me over danger-
ous roads, along narrow pavements and secret alleys; then in my own sense of the
here and now, thinking about her work and the ideas it stimulates, observing the
strange juxtapositions of Dickensian London and the upsurge of services aimed at
the financial sector, what lain Sinclair calls the ‘money lake’. To be directed and
informed by this voice is a noirish feeling and parental at the same time. I respond

as a parent, having guided my child across roads enough times; simultaneously as a

child, my small hand in my mother’s hand. Then as a child again, I think about the
noir voice, a voice-over, maybe Veronica Lake or Barbara Stanwyck, drawing me
into darkness. Confused. I follow like a lamb.32
There is no doubt that writing about sound, at its very best, is writing raised to a
new intensity of awareness, attention, and resonance, as it follows paths the merely
visual tends to preclude, into the winding corridors of memory and association, prior
writing and multi-temporality, palimpsestic spaces and lucid apperception, where the
sentence form can luxuriate in a freedom and reflexivity that advances the art of writ-
ing. There are sensory ecologies calling out for maps that can only be written in signs,
in paragraphs that take wing from the phenomenological into the philosophical, by
way of the biographical and the political. Sounds have histories, and histories can-
not be recorded without the rhetoric of temporality that literature has made its own.
The very anachronism of writing in a media ecology dominated by digital code and
computation is its secret advantage to a study of sounds – because sounds are always
embedded in the spaces, the communities, and the temporal trajectories we create
for our kind, speaking to each other all the while, singing, infusing our existence
with rhythm, harmony, and vocal timbres that reach deep into our animal prehistory
even as they carry us into the polyphonic future. Without writing, without literature,
sound is simply data, and data does not a culture make. This Companion is offered in
the hope, not of lighting up a subdisciplinary hinterland between literary and sound
studies, but of illuminating the literary qualities of sound-writing itself and the sonic
properties of all writing.
Each part of this Companion builds on the claim that literature is an inescap-
able lens through which to view the study of sound itself. Part I, ‘Literature, Listen-
ing, Sounding’, clusters four chapters that rethink literary modes of listening. Astrid
Lorange reads Divya Victor’s ‘Frequency (Alka’s Testimony)’ as an implicit poetic
rendering of the ambient methods of ‘acoustic jurisprudence’ departing from the tran-
scription of voice that drives the interpretive juridical protocols of ‘forensic listen-
ing’. Victor’s poetic capture of the ‘ambient and contextual sounds of the courtroom’,
Lorange argues, gestures towards alternative frameworks for justice. Like Lorange,
Helen Groth’s chapter considers selective audition and the limits of listening. Groth
turns to the Australian Waayni writer Alexis Wright’s magisterial novel Carpentaria
to rethink the limits of listening in conjunction with creative and theoretical responses
to riotous activity. Wright transforms the ‘house of fiction’ into a resonant space that
demands a different form of listening from her readers: an active attention to voices,
sounds, and noises that jar and disturb the peace of literary histories that have failed to
hear the voices of first nations peoples. Sustaining this focus on listening, David Toop
asks: ‘Who is the listener? What is the listener? The listener is still, quiet, ambiguous,
blank, full or empty, desirous or indifferent, perhaps nothing? Or, the listener is every-
thing.’ Drawing on Peter Sloterdijk’s account of the attitudinal shifts that characterise
intimate listening, Toop considers how novelists, such as Austen and Richardson, cre-
ate ‘worlds of auditory containment’ that rarely slip outside themselves. In the final
chapter in this part, Richard C. Rath considers how soundways beyond speech – as in
the ways people interpret and express their attitudes and beliefs about sound – offer
a richer context in which to situate specific oralities. Highlighting what he terms the

introduction 11
‘xenophobic fallacy’ that ‘often frames sonic difference as the absence of reason’, Rath
considers the ways indigenous soundways structure speaking and listening in dialogue
with recent work by Peg Rawes and others that centres the concept of hungry listening
to dismantle the racialised narrative methods that have long shaped oral history.
Part II of the Companion shifts focus to the conjunction between literature, music
and performance. Tamlyn Avery explores this interaction in her analysis of scores as
musical reproduction in modernist texts by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Hope Mirrlees,
and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Extrapolating from these readings, Avery argues that
the textual and visual materiality of musical reproduction – not just the mimetic rep-
resentation of its sounds – was far more crucial to modernism’s soundscape than has
previously been recognised. Miranda Stanyon shares Avery’s interest in music’s uneasy
place in both literary and sound studies: a discomfort that she reads as symptom-
atic of the prevailing sacrificing of music as a foundational gesture of contemporary
sound studies, and one that has significantly shaped ‘literary scholars’ engagements
with music. Stanyon then offers an illuminating antecedent of this exclusion from liter-
ary history in Milton’s Samson Agonistes: a poem that intertwines sacrifice and sound
and, in the process, asks the reader to hope and listen for an ‘affective, communal,
and spiritual-political concord that mirrors the workings’ of both audible sound and
literary language. Bruce R. Smith’s chapter turns to what he suggestively calls the ‘full
panoply of sounds present in performances of Shakespeare’s plays’. Taking inspiration
from the ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies, Smith attends to the physical proper-
ties of sound, the beingness of sound, understood as ‘acoustic vibrations of all kinds:
not just phonemes but noise, shouts, sound effects, instrumental sounds, and sounds
made by spectator/listeners’. The final chapter in this part shares Smith’s focus on the
complex sonics of performance. Tamsen O. Wolff analyses a set of vocal practices that
recur across the canon of musical theatre which she calls ‘hyper diction’ – defined as
the ‘rapid, cadenced, highly enunciated rhyming speech’. Taking the heightened and
underscored text of Hamilton (2015) and The Mikado (1885) as her principal case
studies, Wolff explores the relative intelligibility of this mode of vocalisation at the
level of both narrative and performance.
A focus on voice unites the chapters that form Part III of this Companion, begin-
ning with Noelle Morrissette’s reconsideration of the ‘Black National Anthem’ – ‘Lift
Every Voice and Sing’, as an act of sonic witnessing. Taking inspiration from James
Weldon Johnson’s idea of his hymn as ‘a breathing line of poetry that could not be
contained on the page or in a single individual’, Morrissette reads ‘Lift Every Voice
and Sing’ as animated by the ‘physical experience of sound’ of collective vocal per-
formance and constitutive of an embodied lyricism. This lyrical mode, she argues,
would be fully realised in Johnson’s later sermonic poems where ‘modern lyric finds
its spiritual expression not in religion per se, but in the embodied, breathing lines
of poetry shared between its performers’. Sam Halliday diverges from the liveness
and immediacy of vocal performance to examine the mediation of racialised voices.
His chapter traces the epistemological limitations of the acousmatic across a range of
early twentieth-century fiction by African Americans that meditate on both ‘Black’ and
other racial voices. Central to Halliday’s analysis is a consideration of musicological
forms ‘wherein Blackness is adduced by white writers as a component of Black music’:
a racialised mediation that Halliday considers in conjunction with associated texts in
which ‘race is putatively heard’. Julian Murphet’s chapter takes a more optimistic view

of the epistemological capacities of the acousmatic in the context of the uncomfortable

place prisons occupy in the history of the science of sound. Turning to the long tradi-
tion of prison writing, Murphet’s chapter explores the fact that for centuries writers,
who have also been prisoners, have transformed the acousmatic properties of prison
sound into ‘testimonials of terror, torture, resilience, and resistance, as well as rare
utopian promises’. Writers have left a detailed record of the dramatic changes in the
relationship between the experiences of imprisonment and sound over time, Murphet
claims, one that deserves more critical attention than it has yet received. In the final
chapter in this section, Imogen Free is also concerned with the acoustic registrations
of violent experience. Free explores how the wartime stories of Rosamund Lehmann
and Jean Rhys move beyond the soundscape of the London Blitz transporting their
readers into rural settings that offer little refuge from the anxiety-inducing noise of
war. Through a series of close readings of both Lehmann and Rhys, Free traces the
figure of the echo as a subtle registration of an alternative soundscape of women’s
civilian experience of the Second World War.
Media and technology are the sonic coordinates of Part IV of this Companion.
K. C. Harrison offers a comparative ‘resonant reading’ of the work of three pairs of
authors across three decades, from the 1940s to the 1970s, who engage with sound
technologies at the moment that they are also exploring ethical questions in relation
to racial identity. Drawing on recent work by Jennifer Lynn Stoever and, more par-
ticularly Jessica Teague, Harrison’s interest lies in bringing calls for an ethics of listen-
ing back to the page. This approach shapes her analysis of the racialised aesthetics of
three white authors – Carson McCullers, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon
– alongside the formal innovation and ‘canny concern for the power relationships
governing the production and dissemination of Black artists’ work’ in the writing
of Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, and Ishmael Reed. Justin St. Clair is also concerned
with the literary mediation of sound, teasing out the complex aurality of texts that
compel readers to ‘acknowledge the disjuncture between the printed text and its inev-
itably sounded transduction’. The digital age, St. Clair argues, is the most mediated
in human history, proliferating forms and content for novelists to remediate. This
avid mediation has only intensified ‘the sounded gulf between the written and the
read’, St. Clair contends, a shift marked by contemporary fiction’s enlisting of ‘extra-
textual strategies for processing the media aurality’. St. Clair then reads Mark Z.
Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) as ‘a case study in coded sound’, elaborating
on the novel’s complex mediality and engendering of networked strategies of reading
that ‘allow readers to process sound that resonates beyond the graphical limits of the
page’. Jason Camlot considers the ‘media affordances of literary audio’ in his chap-
ter’s consideration of the significance of a range of audio media technologies for the
form literary sound recordings have taken over the past century. Through a series of
closely observed case studies, Camlot explores how these various sound media have
shaped our relationship to literary performance, events, community, and the concept
of ‘the literary’ itself. In so doing, Camlot also offers new concepts and categories
for analysing not only sonically mediated works, but also the increasingly complex
ontological poetics that has arisen from our attempt to understand ‘the nature of a
historical literary sound recording for use in our digitally mediated present’. In the
final chapter in this cluster, Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard turns to the sonic mediation
of presence in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan books. Acknowledging the overt white

introduction 13
supremacism and imperialism of these popular literary works, Grimshaw-Aagaard

draws attention to the sound descriptors that orchestrated the immersive reading
experience Burroughs created for readers. Aagaard argues that Burroughs’s media-
tion of a geographically unmoored jungle through ‘fear constructed through sound’ is
‘akin to the application of sound design to horror films and survival-horror computer
games, where sound is used to complement the dark recesses and limited visual hori-
zons’ of these imaginary worlds.
Part V turns to literature’s historical registration of the sounds of war and industry,
drawing together a series of case studies that range from eighteenth-century fiction to
contemporary writing. Peter Denney examines fictional registrations of social shifts in
the value of sound in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moving from
eighteenth-century coffee houses and pleasure gardens to nineteenth-century factories
and streets, Denney elaborates on how the narration of the varying acoustics of these
key sites created a space for writers to explore, negotiate, and flout conventions in the
process of fashioning new sonic identities and the auditory environments they inhabited.
Andrew Brooks’s movement between past and present is guided by the poetic remedia-
tion of the legal transcript of Gregson vs Gilbert, a 1783 English court document (the
only remaining archival record of a massacre that took place on board a British slave
ship transporting human cargo from the African West Coast to Jamaica in 1781) in
M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!. Brooks’s chapter asks the question, ‘What is the sound of
a story that cannot be told but must be told?’ – a question that draws attention to the
presence of sound in written documents that we presume are silent and issues an invi-
tation to open our ears to forms of speculative listening, to the songs sung, languages
spoken, and screams of anguish that expose the limits of the archive as a mechanism of
both preservation and destruction. Brooks argues that poetry’s specific attunement to
transformations of time and space makes it uniquely suited to explore the space between
record and speculation, language and sound, word and silence. David Ellison takes the
title of his chapter ‘Shriek and Hum’ from the American anti-noise campaigner Julia
Barnett Rice, who argued that the hum of industry had transformed into an ear-piercing
and harm-inducing shriek in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Ellison traces
the alignment of shriek with the selectively injurious character of industry, as opposed
to the less familiar emergence of hum as a capacitating ground for ‘higher’ feeling and
thought. Moving through a series of written encounters, both literary and non-literary,
Ellison contends that the critical and persistent distinction between industrial and
machine noise – shriek and hum – was first modelled in writing about automata. Mark
Byron’s chapter moves the focus of this section from the sounds of industry to those
of war in his consideration of the critical poetics of warfare. Byron’s approach to how
poetry represents war ‘within its form’ is formal and driven by the underlying question
of whether there is an ‘identifiable poetics of warfare’. Byron responds to this question
by examining a range of poems, spanning from classical antiquity to the present day,
that prosodically materialise the sounds of war. Michael Bull’s analysis of the sonic
fragments of the First World War is more specific in its attention to a single event and
the epistemological challenges the multimedial record of the war poses for the scholar
of sound. Bull defines sonic warfare capaciously as ‘any sound that is filtered through,
understood, experienced as a consequence of war’ to open up a wide-ranging analysis
of ‘the myriad of sounds and experiences of war’ through a metonymic analysis of two
material artefacts: the shell and the bullet. Moving from the striated markings on a

shell case to the trajectory of the bullet, Bull interleaves historical and literary records
to model a sonically sensitised reading of the war that draws on the cognate critical
repertoires of both literary and sound studies.
The ultimate part draws the Companion to a close with three chapters that approach
sonic epistemology from the cognate disciplinary domains of musicology, linguistics,
literary, and animal studies. Holger Schulze considers two forms of sound knowledge –
‘corporeal tacit and explicitly formalised’ – in a chapter that ranges across multiple
forms of creative ‘sonic’ activation. Schulze examines how contemporary sonic epis-
temologies build on earlier and tacit forms of knowledge to define and formalise
practices of activation and listening that open up otherwise obscure or inaccessible
experiences. His chapter culminates in a series of experimental works that draw on ear-
lier engagements with sonic epistemology, such as Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening –
a work which Schultz describes as ‘an inextricable amalgamation of performance and
meditation, instrumental practice and listening training, musical score, performance
description, and multisensory poetry’. Janis Nuckolls approaches the concept of sound
knowledge from an anthropological linguist’s perspective in a chapter that considers
the cultural poetics of a buoyancy sound from Amazonian Ecuador. Nuckolls’s chapter
analyses the various cultural and contextual semantics of the Pastaza Kichwa ideo-
phone polang: an imitative word with various meanings communicated by unusual
sound qualities – including extremely variable pitch, loudness, segmental lengthening,
and unusual stress patterns – that ‘allows for poetic indeterminacy and principled
creativity’ that resonate with Pastaza Kichwa ways of life. Jody Berland concludes
the Companion with an extended consideration of modern literature’s interpretation
of birdsong. Whilst conceding that literary writing has done so in ways that typically
reaffirm the existing divide between human and bird, Berland moves beyond conven-
tional critiques of anthropocentrism in a chapter that asks whether it is anthropo-
centric to hear the utterances of bird as music, rather than a biologically determined
behaviour, a question that inspires a series of close readings of literary portrayals of
birdsong that consider the possibility of ‘a more hospitable recognition of the com-
municative and aesthetic capacities of non-human species’ and the need for human
cultures to be more attuned to them.
Notes
1. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, eds, Keywords in Sound (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2015).
2. Anna Snaith’s recent collection is the notable exception here: Sound and Literature (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Michael Bull and Les Back, eds, The Auditory
Culture Reader, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2020); Jonathan Sterne, ed., The Sound
Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2012); and Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, eds,
The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Sterne’s
collection is relatively generous towards literary practices but makes no separate case for
literature as a medium of sound.
3. Special mention should be given to the international reach of Michael Alan, ‘Translating
Whispers: Recitation, Realism, Religion’, SubStance 50, no. 1 (2021): 10–26; Aleksandra
Kremer, The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World
War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021); Alexandra Magearu, ‘Subaltern
Aurality: Listening to Algerian Women’s Voices in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian

introduction 15
Cavalcade’, Women’s Studies 50, no. 4 (2021): 295–316; Radomil Novák, ‘Sound in Lit-
erary Texts’, Neophilologus 104, no. 2 (2019): 151–63; A. Sean Pue, ‘Acoustic Traces of
Poetry in South Asia’, South Asian Review (South Asian Literary Association) 40, no. 3
(2019): 221–36; Lucía Martínez Valdivia, ‘Audiation: Listening to Writing’, Modern Phi-
lology 119, no. 4 (2022): 555–79.
4. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World
(Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, [1977] 1994); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural
Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); John M. Picker,
Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Sam Halliday, Sonic Moder-
nity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2013); Julie Beth Napolin, The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative
Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020); Matthew Rubery, Audiobooks, Litera-
ture, and Sound Studies (London: Routledge, 2011); and Patricia Pye, Sound and Modernity
in the Literature of London, 1880–1918 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
5. Zoë Skoulding, Poetry and Listening: The Noise of Lyric (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2020).
6. Judith Roof, Tone: Writing and the Sound of Feeling (New York: Bloomsbury Academic,
2020).
7. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening
(New York: New York University Press, 2016).
8. Matthew Rubery, The Untold History of the Talking Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2016).
9. Snaith, Sound and Literature.
10. Julian Murphet, Helen Groth, and Penelope Hone, eds, Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and
Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2017).
11. Schafer, Soundscape, 127.
12. See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London; New
York: Methuen, 1982). See also the chapter in this volume by Richard C. Rath.
13. Derrida’s work on Plato, Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss, de Saussure, and other phonocentric
sceptics of the written sign remains important to any responsible work on literary sound
studies. See especially Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
14. William Blake, Songs of Innocence (New York: Dover, 1971), 4, 34.
15. Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997). See also Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (Toronto: Vintage,
1998), especially the chapter ‘The Silent Reader’.
16. See in particular Skoulding, Poetry and Listening; and Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), especially 173–85.
17. Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990).
18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music (London: Penguin,
1993).
19. Justin St. Clair, ‘Literature and Sound’, in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed.
Michael Bull (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 353–61 (355).
20. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 195.
21. Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism’ (c. 1709), ll. 362–73, in The Poems of Alexander
Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John
Butt (London: Methuen, 1968), 155; original italics.
22. Stephen Benson, Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction (Aldershot: Ash-
gate, 2006), 9; Elspeth Jajdelska, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator (Toronto:

Toronto University Press, 2007). See also Jarmila Mildorf and Till Kinzel, eds, Audionar-
ratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016).
23. See Bruce R. Smith’s chapter in this volume.
24. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-
Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 14.
25. Ibid., 15–16.
26. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ll. 951–2, in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John
Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern
Library, 2007), 354.
27. See David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 169–217.
28. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Lon-
don: BFI, 1992), 62, 84, 140–3.
29. Snaith, Sound and Literature, 5–6, quoting Halliday, Sonic Modernity, 12.
30. See Debra Rae Cohen, Jane Lewty, and Michael Coyle, Broadcasting Modernism (Gaines-
ville: University Press of Florida, 2013).
31. See Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone,
2010); Jean-François Augoyard and Henri Torgue, eds, Sonic Experience: A Guide to
Everyday Sounds, trans. Andrea McCartney and Henry Torgue (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2006); Georgina Born, ed., Music, Sound and Space: Transformations
of Public and Private Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Marie
Thompson and Ian Biddle, eds, Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); Seán Street, Sound Poetics: Interaction and Personal Identity
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology,
Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA; Lon-
don: MIT Press, 2017); Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck, eds, Sound Souvenirs: Audio
Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2009); Salomé Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound, rev. edn
(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021); Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare Sound, Affect, and
the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacy:
Voice, Species, Technics (or, How to Listen to the World) (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2017); Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, and Whitney Trettien, eds, Digital
Sound Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); and Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic
Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
32. David Toop, ‘Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory’ (c. 2004), in Sound, ed.
Caleb Kelly (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011), 207.

Part I:
Literature, Listening, Sounding

1
The Sound a Sentence Makes:

On Poetry, Judgement,
and Hearing
Astrid Lorange
W hat sound does a sentence make?

In the classroom, I invoke the sound of a sentence to try to teach students
to tune their ear to their own writing. ‘An ear will snag’, I say, ‘on a sentence that
is agrammatical, that loses its subject. Read each sentence aloud one by one and if
the ear snags, work on it until it sounds right.’ To sound right, I suppose I mean, is
to sound complete. In this sense, the sound of a sentence is the sound of a promise
being fulfilled: the sound of grammar adhering to its own rules. But this is only half
the lesson. In that same classroom, we discuss what it means to tune the ear to the
sound of a broken rule, a sound that contains within it a different kind of promise.
And so, the question remains the same, but the answer requires a reorientation
of thought.
What sound does a sentence make?
In her 2021 collection Curb, Divya Victor writes a recent history of racialisation
in the US post 9/11 – specifically, the operations of white supremacy in marking
Brown people as the target of anti-Muslim violence as well as recruiting them as
vectors of anti-Blackness.1 Curb works both with and against official documents –
migration papers, legal proceedings, news reports – in order to consider the different
inscriptive gestures that underwrite the broader processes of racialisation and racist
violence. In one poem, ‘Frequency (Alka’s Testimony)’, a preface describes the fatal
assault of Divyendu Sinha in New Jersey in 2010 while he was out walking with his
wife Alka and their two sons. In a second contextual paragraph, Victor sets up the
poem to come:
Three years after the death of her husband Divyendu Sinha,

Alka Sinha appeared at a Courthouse in New Brunswick to
offer testimony in response to the Court’s sentencing of the men
who were responsible for his death. She began her testimony
by playing a recording of Divyendu’s voice-mail greeting. She
closed it by walking away from the podium. His recorded voice
& her living voice were buried together in a soundscape of this
courtroom. The duration of her entire testimony, documented
in these ten sequences, was eight minutes.2

20 astrid lorange
Before the ‘ten sequences’ comes a single page with an excerpt of the court transcript
in which Alka Sinha asks for permission to play the voice-mail greeting. And then, the
poem itself, one sequence per page. The first reads in its entirety:
f The hollow, wind-blown plunge of dry bamboo /or a

pair of pencils shifting in a circular tube
f The breathy fret of ten or fewer sheets of heavy duty

cardstock or one sheet of vinyl being moved a short
distance in a vertical, swift act /or camera shutter
f A distant click of a camera shutter /or the snap of thin

plastic (from left of witness)
f The soft lift of plastic, followed by a sharp click

of plastic, followed by deeper thud of plastic against wood
or wood-like material (such as Formica)
f A series of stuttering shutter snaps in quick succession /

or a rash of plastic scraping plastic3
The poem continues, with each sequence comprising a series of discrete sounds – each
preceded by an ‘f’, a symbol that denotes frequency, that is, the measure of an event’s
repetition over time. Each sentence across the ten sequences corresponds to a moment
of the testimony, or rather, a moment captured in a recording of the testimony that is
played back to Victor’s listening ear. The sentences register the noise of the courtroom
that accompanied – even conditioned – the eight minutes of testimony that the poem
focuses on and yet redacts: sounds of furniture, stationery, recording equipment, bod-
ies. The sequences differ in length, with some comprising two sentences and others up
to six.
Despite the use of silence – the silence of Sinha’s redacted testimony as well as the
silence registered by negative spaces on and across the pages – the poem invites a mode
of reading acutely attuned to each sound that renders the poem a resolutely cacopho-
nous text. This tension between presence and absence, between recognisable sounds
(‘The wispy slide of two or three fingers over a page’4) and speculative accounts of
unrecognisable sounds (‘Something slippery but light being gathered up (like sheets of
ice) very close to witness’5), moves a reader between the documentary traces generated
by the sentence hearing and the more imaginative space in which the operation of law
finds its legitimacy and naturalises its violence. A play of presence and absence names
the affective tonality of grief, as well: across the sounds scored by Victor we hear the
voice of the dead (‘The hum enveloping the flesh of a human voice recording’6), as well
as sounds which connect the noise of the courtroom to the sounds of home, of inti-
macy, of mourning: ‘The tap of something metallic but light being placed down (like
a demitasse spoon)’;7 ‘The short rattle of wooden beads of garland of dried flowers
(behind witness).’8 These sounds, at once orienting and disorienting, build an archive
that derives from the courtroom and its capture in an audio file, and yet is in excess
of the time and space of the courtroom: the archive maps the relations between the

the sound a sentence makes 21
sentence hearing as a specific moment in time and space and the countless moments
that mark life, death, and the law. The ‘f’ that precedes each line, and that is mirrored
by the title of the poem, marks each sound as its own discrete phenomenon; it also
links them through the suggestion of repetition, and through the subsequent associa-
tion between repetition and perception that is called frequency. But what, precisely, is
being repeated? And what is being perceived?
My guiding question – what sound does a sentence make? – invites inversion in
the case of this poem. Here, each sound makes a sentence. Strikingly, Victor does not
reproduce the testimony’s content. We do not read – hear – the voice-mail greeting,
nor the language of Alka Sinha’s grief.9 We do not know what Sinha says about her
husband, or the men who killed him, or the criminal justice system in which the narra-
tives of testimony and judgment are performed. Instead, we read – hear – the acoustic
environment in which she stood and spoke; the echoic space of the court; the warm
hum of human bodies; the particular tones of wood, paper, pen, tape recorder; the
shrillness of plastic. For the duration of the poem, we are instructed to tune in to the
background of this (absent) speech event, to approach what James Parker calls ‘acous-
tic jurisprudence’, that is, ‘an orientation towards law and the practice of judgment
attuned to questions of sound and listening’.10
In order to attempt such an experiment in acoustic jurisprudence, we might first
of all consider the role that sound and listening play in the legal event known as the
sentencing hearing, and how Victor’s poem provides a critical reading of the sentence
as a legal tool that transforms a verdict into punishment. In what follows, I argue
that Victor’s poem offers a critique of ‘forensic listening’ resonant with Lawrence Abu
Hamdan’s formulation of that concept, as well as an engagement with Parker’s notion
of ‘acoustic jurisprudence’. I conclude by positioning Victor’s poem at the intersection
of a conversation between sound studies and literary studies on the question of how
to critically engage with the law from the outside, so to speak. To imagine law from
the outside is to imagine a world in which the law is otherwise: perhaps to imagine an
abolitionist horizon, as I will suggest in the final movement of this chapter. This world,
imagined otherwise, returns us to the classroom scene I opened with, and to the sound
of a broken rule. What is the sound beyond a sentence?
In New Jersey, as in other US jurisdictions, a sentencing hearing follows a verdict. The
hearing provides an opportunity for the prosecution, defence, and victim/victim’s family
(in that order) to speak directly to the judge to appeal for an increased/decreased sen-
tence. As a rule, these hearings allow for more emotional/affective forms of testimony:
the idea is to persuade the judge towards a harsher or softer punishment by speaking
to, for example, the goodness of character or the impact of a crime on victims and their
families. But there is a limit to the terms of persuasion, or rather, a code that delimits
persuasion. In a case in California, a victim impact statement which included a montage
of photographs accompanied by the ‘stirring’ music of Celine Dion was questioned for
its ‘prejudicial’ capacity to move the judge.11 In this case, the affective capacity of music
was a point of contention despite the fact that the sentencing hearing allows for – even
depends on – affective forms of testimony. The impact that Dion’s ballad could have on
the judge was deemed too great – beyond the reasonable means by which a judge might
be persuaded. As James Parker argues, the complicated relationship between sound and
judgment is inadequately studied, such that the role of sound, speech, and music in
the criminal justice system can be at once overlooked and overdetermined.12 In the

22 astrid lorange
Californian case, the question of whether ‘stirring’ music might move a judge too much
can be understood in relation to the act of sentencing itself. To sentence means to trans-
late a crime into its appropriate punishment; sentencing is, as Jordy Rosenberg writes,
‘that precision-weapon on violent equivalence’.13 If a judge might be moved towards a
harsher sentence by a stirring song, thereby perverting an otherwise putatively norma-
tive process of converting a verdict into a sentence, then the question of what sound a
sentence makes might be answered in an unexpected way: a sentence might bear the
uninvited trace of Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’.
The vexed question of what precisely is – or ought to be – heard in the courtroom
raises itself in legal debates. In defence of victim impact statements, a widespread yet
nonetheless controversial fixture of criminal proceedings across the US, Paul G. Cassell
makes the argument that they cannot be said to unfairly impact judge’s sentencing
decisions. If an impact statement affects a judge’s decision, he claims, insofar as it
adds necessary context to the crime under consideration, such an impact on the final
sentence is merely in accordance with the severity of the crime.14 Moreover, he argues,
the inclusion of victim impact statements (including the inclusion of statements from
a victim’s family, as is the case in Alka Sinha’s testimony under discussion here) works
to educate the defendant on the effects of their crime, provide necessary therapeutic
benefits to the victim/victim’s family, and ‘create the perception of fairness at sentenc-
ing, by ensuring that all relevant parties – the State, the defendant, and the victim – are
heard’.15 On this last point we might dwell for a moment: the statements ought to be
included, argues Cassell, for their part in creating the ‘perception of fairness’, here
understood in terms of an equal opportunity for all parties to speak and to be heard
speaking. We might ask what the difference is between the ‘perception of fairness’ and
justice, or between the capacities to speak and be heard speaking that the state, the
defendant, and the victim have when they enter the courtroom. The same reason that
Cassell believes in victim impact statements – that they contribute to the project of jus-
tice by allowing for the full human impact of crime to be communicated to the judge
for the purpose of sentencing – is cited by their critics, who argue that intense emotions
risk troubling the objectivity required of a judge in the process of sentencing. In other
words, for both, ‘emotion’ is an unpredictable but unexamined factor in the pursuit of
justice, where justice is understood as the allocation of appropriate punishment. The
role that sound and music play in modulating emotion beyond an appropriate level is
gestured towards but, as Parker argues, never fully confronted in legal discourse. For
this reason, the problem of Celine Dion remains a problem of the law as such. In what
follows, and as I read Victor alongside Parker’s call for an acoustic jurisprudence, I ask
what an alternative idea of justice might look and sound like, and how we can think of
the poem as a social object in which one is instructed towards novel reading and media
practices that come to bear on documents of everyday life.
The book Curb is accompanied by a website on which invited artists’ work is pub-
lished.16 This work responds to, or corresponds with, the poems collected in the physi-
cal book. One artist, Carolyn Chen, includes a short audio piece (a minute or so of
ambient ‘dead air’ captured on a sound recording) titled ‘Frequency (Alka’s Testimony)’
with a link to the original poem’s source material.17 The link directs a reader to
YouTube, where an eight-minute video of the courtroom on sentencing day shows Alka
Sinha delivering her victim impact statement while the judge, guards, lawyers, and wit-
nesses listen (or not) in a small courtroom.18 The video is captured from the perspective

of a witness, positioned behind Sinha, and was published on YouTube by Mast Radio,
a New York-based community station dedicated to South Asian news, culture, and
politics. Partly because of the positioning of the person filming (directly behind Sinha’s
speaking body) and partly because of the recording device (we might assume a smart-
phone, held sideways to capture in landscape, moving with the body that holds it),
the background noise competes with the sound of the speaking witness. The shuffles,
coughs, clicks, and bangs of bodies and objects appear louder and more defined than
the muffled voice of Sinha, whose already soft speech is further obscured by her own
body blocking the camera’s microphone. To witness this video, and its unbalanced
audio track, alongside the poem is to gain a different perspective on the ‘background’
that occupies Victor: it is, in fact, the foreground.
In ‘Frequency (Alka’s Testimony)’, Victor considers the affective weight, not of
a voice-mail greeting capturing the ghostly voice of a murdered man, nor the sound
of his wife’s grief in speech, but of the environment in which the hearing of such
testimony took place, the background noise against which witnessing occurred. This
shift of emphasis from foreground to background, from the content of speech to the
extraneous noise against which speech is discerned – echoed, as I note above, in the
recording itself – in turn shifts a reader’s attention away from evidence presented and
towards the conditions in which the judge hears. It draws a reader’s attention to the
hearing subjects in the courtroom in addition to the judge, who, as Robert Cover
writes in ‘Violence and the Word’, include ‘police, jailers or other enforcers’ whose
affirmation of the sentence after it is imposed (for example, by restraining a prisoner,
or releasing her from restraint) is a necessary aspect of the sentence’s legitimacy.19
In Victor’s poem, we apprehend the bodies of the different people whose combined
effort constitutes sentencing as a legal process. A judge hears testimony whose affec-
tive weight guides the conferral of punishment, assists in the translation of one form
of violence into another; a judge is heard by state actors who enforce the hearing by
formalising its judgment through their own practice of hearing.
What is the effect of this shift in attention, this instruction away from the testimony
and towards a testimonial acoustics? On the one hand, this shift refuses the terms of
translation between violence and violence that the act of sentencing facilitates. There
can be no equivalence, the poem suggests, between the violence that murdered Divy-
endu Sinha and the violence the state imposes as a form of punishment on the men
who murdered him. The refusal of this equivalence is mirrored in the poem in the
refusal to reproduce Sinha’s testimony as well as details of the sentences imposed,
in the refusal to make a comparison between these two speech acts and the logic of
interpretation that binds them, the collective listening that affirms them. The poem, in
other words, does not ask its reader to perform their own judgment – to impose their
own sentences in response to Alka Sinha’s testimony. The reader is asked to withhold
such judgment and to consider instead the poetics of sentencing, that is, the material
relations that formalise the state’s capacity for violence, and the processes through
which various speech acts and interpretative protocols become naturalised in and as
‘justice’. The shift can also be read as a study of the courtroom as the site in which law
becomes material: it is, in other words, a shift in genre. Against a romantic representa-
tion of judgment, the poem is a reminder of that which conditions judgment and which
comprises the vast majority of the court’s proceedings: waiting, adjourning, stalling,
clarifying; boredom, alienation, disruption.20

24 astrid lorange
Let us return here to the title of the poem, ‘Frequency (Alka’s Testimony)’ and to
the symbol ‘f’ that opens each sentence in each sequence. Frequency refers to the num-
ber of times per second a sound wave repeats itself: frequency is what makes a sound
perceptible or not, and within the perceptible range of sound, changes in frequency
are registered as pitch. Frequency is therefore not only about the rate of an occurrence
– repetition – but also about how repetition correlates to intensity, variability, and leg-
ibility. We can read ‘frequency’ in its broader sense as evoking, in this poem, the utter
singularity and specificity of the death of a man alongside the broader phenomenon
of racialised violence in the wake of 9/11. The lives and deaths of the men murdered
in acts of such violence who are remembered at the beginning of Curb – ‘This book
was made to witness the following irreducible facts: these men once lived; they are
loved; the United States of America is responsible for the force of feeling and action
that ended their lives’ – are related by a logic whose repetition signifies the violence
of racialisation and the culpability of the racial state. Each moment indexed in the
poem captures a minor sound amplified first by the amateur video recording from
which Victor transcribes it and then by the critical shift that the poem inaugurates in
which the background becomes the foreground. Each sound, which in the act of legal
interpretation would be rendered outside the range of what is audible or perceptible,
contributes to the actual conditions in which the law acquires, as Abu Hamdan says,
‘its performative might’.
But a reader might also see – hear – in each ‘f’ the symbol ‘forte’, which in music
notation denotes loudness (or, as the Italian suggests, strong playing). Or does it? As
David Fallows writes, when the symbol first appeared in the sixteenth century it was
a way of returning a musician to the normal volume after a period of softer playing.
By the eighteenth century, the symbol indicated loud playing against a new category
of normal, and by the twentieth, it was one in a series of standard relative values of
loudness.21 In other words, forte is loud, but not as loud as one can go – and it is
louder than ‘normal’ but is also always implicated in the measure of normal. If for
‘frequency’, there is an accepted range of audible sounds, and for forte there is an
ill-defined yet implied notion of loudness qua normal, then between the two readings
of ‘f’ we might think of the poem as emphasising each of these sounds as its own sig-
nificant sonic event as well as an instruction to broaden the range of listening beyond
the legal terms defined by hearing and towards an attunement to what is ambiguous,
excessive, disruptive, extraneous, perhaps even imagined.
In this poem, which takes place in the margins of a sentence hearing, there is, para-
doxically, no record of the sentence that dominates the legal act in question. But there
are a series of discrete sentences, each an index of a single sound that inhabited the
space of the courtroom that day. And so, the sound of these sentences might be read
in two ways: each sentence describes a sound captured by video recording equipment;
each sentence transforms audio into poetry, sound into language. The poem’s alterna-
tive translation of the hearing is in excess of the evidential imperative that produces an
official court transcript: the transcript is the official document through which the law’s
processes become realised, the medium through which the judgment is captured in the
event of its being-heard. This poem, on the other hand, takes as its source an unofficial
capture of the courtroom, a document which, in its own kind of witnessing, provides
an alternative account to an official transcript in the form of an extra-legal record of
the sentence hearing. The poem, therefore, is a twice-removed document.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan traces a history of the recorded voice as an object of study
for the law. This history, as Abu Hamdan tells it, begins in 1984 with the Police and
Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) in Britain, which ordered for audio equipment to be
installed in police interview rooms. This Act, reproduced in similar terms elsewhere
across the world and ostensibly designed to mitigate against police misconduct (forced
confessions, for example), initiated a new era of ‘forensic listening’ in the criminal jus-
tice system: ‘[PACE] exponentially increased the use of speaker profiling, voice iden-
tification, and voice prints in order to, among other things, determine regional and
ethnic identity as well as to facilitate so-called voice line-ups.’22 The advent of this
mode of forensic listening, he explains, emerged as part of an ‘epistemic and techno-
logical shift which gave rise to new forms of testimony based on the analysis of objects
rather than witness accounts’. However, he clarifies, ‘[i]n the case of forensic listening
there is no clean shift from witness account to expert analysis of objects because the
witness account and the object under analysis become the same thing. The voice is at
once the means of testimony and the object of forensic analysis.’23 From the 1980s on,
the recorded voice became an increasingly important object of criminal investigation
and legal interpretation; at the same time, the recorded voice as an object for analysis
indexes the speaking body, whose presence in the courtroom before a judge serves
as another critical scene of listening. The ‘bodily excess of the voice’ such as ‘pitch,
accent, glottal stops, intonations, inflections, and impediments’ – ‘non-verbal affects’,
as Abu Hamdan calls them – ‘[does] not escape the ears of the judge and of those
listening to a trial in the space of the courtroom’.24 In other words, the emergence of
forensic listening practices especially attuned to the recorded voice as a technological
object can be understood in relation to a ‘regime of listening’ already present in law.
In this regime of listening, testimony is heard both as speech and as a speaking body
liable to betray its own speech content. Listening to a witness, therefore, requires lis-
tening for and against affect, for moments in which speech is undone by non-speech.
As Abu Hamdan points out, the regime of listening within which technologically
mediated forms of forensic listening prevail today posits a theory of voice at odds with
phenomenological approaches dominant in sound studies for around half a century;
he cites Don Ihde’s influential Listening and Voice, from 1976, as a landmark in the
field, for which sound is an irreducibly multiple phenomenon which cannot be fully or
finally known.25 And yet, of course, in practice, the voice remains elusive for law as it
does for sound studies, precisely because the voice is social. A judge is not impervious
to a Celine Dion song, and a witness does not speak only before a judge but in a court-
room that functions in the broader institution of the justice system. Forensic listening
cannot provide a theory for the affective weight of the pop ballad; it cannot account
for the social relations that co-produce the actors in the courtroom and that condi-
tion not just what is permissible as speech but the speaking and listening subjects of
law. This contradiction – an emphasis on voice (Abu Hamdan says that ‘the law itself
operates as a speech-space in which those within its range of audibility are subject to
its authority’26) and an inability to hear the social context in which the voice speaks
and is heard – puts Abu Hamdan’s inquiry in touch with James Parker’s work, which
investigates this inability to apprehend sound in the operation of law.
For Parker, acoustic jurisprudence brings attention to sound and listening (and, as
he explains, specifically to the term ‘hearing’ that is carried in the word acoustic from
its Greek root and that is central to the operation of law), as well as to the practice

26 astrid lorange
of judgment. ‘Sound’, he writes, ‘is a condition of the administration of justice, an

inalienable part of the legal world.’27 His book stages an encounter between sound
studies and legal theory to address this lack, taking a specific case (the trial of Simon
Bikindi, the Rwandan musician) as its primary focus. Parker’s aim is to show what
acoustic jurisprudence looks like in practice – when we move from the general cat-
egory of ‘law’ to the specific instance of law’s inscription. For Parker, acoustic jurispru-
dence ought to be understood as an attempt to hold law accountable to the task it sets
itself: that is, the task of good judgment. Jurisprudence, he writes, ‘is a practice, a craft,
and a virtue: a way of attending to and taking responsibility for the full range of tech-
niques by which legal institutions make the world amenable to judgment’.28 Acoustic
jurisprudence, therefore, tunes this attention to the role that sound and listening play
in shaping such techniques and in affecting the capacity for judgment. As such, for
Parker, the aim is to work within law, to consider how judgment may be done better.
While this aim differentiates Parker’s project from my own, I am interested in consid-
ering Victor’s poem as an engagement with acoustic jurisprudence – an experiment in
scoring the courtroom as a site of intensive sonic practices and in scoring the sentence
hearing as a legal performance in which the ambient sound of the room carries the
trace of what becomes judgment.
Consider ‘Sequence 4’. We begin with a sentence that describes a sound relative
to Sinha’s talking body: ‘The click of a ballpoint or gel pen (in front of witness).’ The
sentences continue, documenting the chorus of minor bureaucratic gestures that are
not only audible but amplified in the recording. Some are straightforward descriptions,
such as the one above. Others are more complex, giving explicit and intimate detail:
‘The finite pat of placing a flat, narrow, light, small object on to a desk or table’; ‘The
bone-snap or knuckle-crack quick & blunt / sound of a thick stack of papers folded at
the midriff.’ The final sentence offers two alternative sources of the same sound: ‘The
scrape of a taping knife against a wall / or a page turning back & forth & back again
like the sound of a double take.’29 Here, the sound of a page suddenly flipping – the
sound of a double take – is intrusive enough to resemble the sound of a blade scoring
a wall. If the rest of the sentences in this sequence register the more mundane gestures
that comprise law’s operations – the sounds of pen and paper; sounds of listening and
being distracted – the last sentence carries a slightly different weight. Here, it is sug-
gested, we hear an instant in which what is being heard is cross-referenced with what
is expected to be heard, or where what is being heard contradicts what has previously
been heard. By scoring the sound in this way, Victor makes it ambiguous (the sound
could be this or that) as well as emphatic (the sound of a double take is dramatic, like
a blade on a wall). In this final sentence in the sequence, Victor reminds us that every
act of hearing contains the possibility of mishearing.
But it is not just the shift from ballpoint pen to the more enigmatic double take
that interests me. It is also the syntax itself, and how each sentence describes not just
a sound contained in the recording of this hearing but rather a kind of sound, a sound
that instructs the reader to identify and to identify with. ‘The click of a ballpoint or
gel pen’ is not – or not only – a description of a single pen under examination by the
poet. It is a genre of sound, a sound one knows by having heard it before. The listen-
ing that Victor undertakes, and that her poem transforms into a score for its reader,
is a listening that appeals to the social field through which sound travels and becomes
legible through recognition. This kind of listening works against the presumptions that

underscore forensic listening, that is, that the ‘true identity of the sonic object under
investigation’ can be apprehended.30 Instead, it highlights the conditions in which lis-
tening takes place: the broad and collective archive of sounds from which our practices
of listening emerge and to which specific instances of listening refer, transforming the
archive in turn. Victor’s syntax invites a reader to imagine each sound – to conjure
it, perhaps via memory, as an index of their own body’s gesture: ‘The bone-snap or
knuckle-crack quick & blunt / sound of a thick stack of papers folded at the midriff’ –
and to build, via layering, a sense of the courtroom’s sonic environment and therefore
a sense of what shaped, and was shaped by, the sentence hearing as an act of judgment.
Victor’s poem suggests an acoustic jurisprudential approach to understanding this act
of judgment in terms that exceed the legal case. But it does so by refusing to reproduce
the content of the hearing and registering instead its context.
On this point, we might say that Victor departs from acoustic jurisprudence as
an orientation to law, since her attention is not focused on judgment, good or bad.
Her focus is the many minor gestures – note-taking, double-taking, cross-referencing,
paper shuffling; thinking, listening, not listening, daydreaming, fantasising; waiting,
standing, sitting, leaning – as well as the many different materials, instruments, tools,
and apparatuses – pens, paper, air conditioners, video cameras, audio recorders,
tables, chairs – that comprise the courtroom as a site in which judgment takes place.
That is, her focus is on the social, material, and technical relations that inhere in and
as the law, that mediate the giving and hearing of testimony. The background noise,
as the recording itself testifies, is not extraneous, nor separable from the evidence
that becomes the official document of a legal process. Robert Cover describes the
legal interpretation in its normative operation as follows: ‘The context of a judicial
utterance is institutional behavior in which others, occupying preexisting roles, can be
expected to act, to implement, or otherwise to respond in a specified way to the judge’s
interpretation.’31 In other words, judgment depends on a sentence being heard by those
who gather in the courtroom; the judge cannot act without others. All the working,
witnessing, testifying bodies, whose actions make the courtroom not just a place of
law but also a worksite, as well as a place where one might express grief and anger or
might find themselves suddenly in custody or out of it, participate, willingly or not, in
this institutional behaviour. The poem offers a way of reading the act of hearing that
provides evidence against this normative function of law. It does so by describing to its
reader the minor, easily unheard sound of law’s institutionality which, while integral
to the normative function of judgment, nonetheless becomes abstracted in the process
and redacted in the court transcript. The sound of the social is not the extraneous noise
against which the sound of evidence is heard and evaluated but conditions what comes
to be heard and evaluated as evidence. To listen to this sound – to listen to that which
becomes the site of abstraction – is to listen to the process through which the law pre-
sumes its own legitimacy and therefore its own naturalness. It is to hear the sound of
a sentence present itself as justice.
On this point – the concept of justice – I will conclude my argument. My claim is
that the poem, in instructing readers away from one mode of listening and towards
another, asks a reader to consider precisely what constitutes justice. The sentence hear-
ing becomes, in Victor’s poem, a site for a speculative kind of hearing: ‘The short rattle
of wooden beads or garland of dried flowers (behind witness)’; ‘The tap of some-
thing metallic but light being placed down (like a demitasse spoon).’ They are at once

28 astrid lorange
kind of sounds – the sound we know to be small, firm objects rubbing against each
other; the sound we know as metal on wood – and imagined sounds – beads, flowers,
spoons. They imply hands, fingers, mouths, the rising and falling of breathing bodies;
and, therefore, they also imply anxiety, grief, anticipation, rage. These sounds, each
emphatically distinguished, appear in lieu of testimony. As a result, a reader cannot
know the terms on which the judgment in question occurs. They cannot hear Sinha’s
impact statement, nor the evidence provided by the men who awaited sentences that
day. They cannot hear the judge in the act of interpretation; they cannot hear the
courtroom workers ratifying judgment. They cannot hear the people gathered to bear
witness, recording the scene for a local radio station. They do not know what hap-
pened after Sinha spoke, nor how her words impacted the judge. They do not know
what happened when the judge spoke to hand down the sentence: not how Alka Sinha
reacted, nor the young men. But they might consider the courtroom, available to them
as a sequence of sounds, and the institution of law that each sound indexes. They
might think about what it means for one act of violence to be translated into another,
for the law to manage that translation wholly. They might wonder about a world,
not yet our own, in which violence is met differently. They might think about the
forms of speaking and listening that would accompany such a world, and the forms of
testimony that would come to document it. They might ask about poetry, and about
the role of the poem in bridging the world we have and the world that is yet to come.
They might finally return to this poem – Victor’s poem – and wonder what it has to say
about justice, if not about the criminal justice system.
By refusing to reproduce Alka Sinha’s testimony, Victor does not deny Sinha’s
desire for a particular outcome. And by refusing to reproduce the outcome of the
hearing, Victor does not erase nor protect the men who faced a judge that day. These
people – real people – are implied by the poem, which acknowledges the event it
documents without restaging it in narrative form. Through this double play of refusal
and recognition, the poem opens a space for a conversation it gestures towards with-
out naming. We might call this a conversation about transformative justice, a political
framework that seeks to find ways to respond to violence without a different kind
of violence including the forms of state-managed violence that comprise the crimi-
nal justice system and the prison–industrial complex. As Cover describes it: ‘Legal
interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.’32 In its normative function,
the law oversees ‘the social organisation of legal violence’ in response to transgres-
sive behaviour.33 In this sense, the question of violence is not merely inseparable from
but foundational to legal interpretation and the process of judgment. Transformative
justice seeks to abolish the systems and structures that would organise society in this
way: it seeks to build a world where there is the possibility of collective healing in the
wake of a violent crime.34
‘Poetry doesn’t talk about the world,’ writes Sean Bonney in a discussion of Amiri
Baraka, ‘nor does it create meaning, but rather aims at meanings not yet articulated,
meanings not catered to in the currently available aesthetic and social networks.’35
Or, as Joshua Clover puts it, ‘The real situation is the basis of poetic truth.’36 In other
words, and to paraphrase Clover: there is no poetry external to the material condi-
tions under which it is written; poetry’s attunement to time and space, its capacity
for formalisation, allows for the relations inherent to the material conditions of its
own writtenness to be apprehended; this formalisation of material relations might be

another way of describing poetry’s aim at meanings not yet articulated. My insistence
that poetry names a mode of reading as much as a mode of writing or a particular liter-
ary form/genre foregrounds the poem as a dynamic site where we can study the ever-
changing conditions in which we live and die, where we can negotiate a vocabulary for
those forces that distribute life and death. Can Victor’s poem offer an entry point to
study the conditions in which the death-dealing operations of the state function? Can
it offer a place from which we as readers might ask what meanings await in the pursuit
of transformative justice? This chapter has attempted to argue ‘yes’ to these questions,
even if the poem under examination extends such invitations only indirectly. But in
returning, with each sentence, to the scene of judgment, and in refusing the objectifica-
tion of the courtroom’s sonicity to evidence or the noise that distracts from it, Victor
directs her readers to a confrontation with the sentence hearing as a site of violence.
What sound does a sentence make? Here in the poem, the answer is none. And so per-
haps we must end with a different question: what sound does a poem allow us to hear?
For the poem we are reading here, we might get even more specific: what is the
sound of the poem if it makes the judge’s sentence inaudible? What do we hear in
place of the sentence? We hear what is not there, that is, the sound of a different form
that justice might take – something that Fred Moten calls the ‘extra-grammatical’
or the ‘extra-legal’.37 Only that is not quite right, either. Because there is something
there: there is a litany of sounds, each amplified by the poem’s use of symbols bor-
rowed from sound and music. There are the sounds of the courtroom, the sounds that
score the law. These sounds are made by the social, material, technical, and ritual
conditions through which legal interpretation emerges and becomes legitimised, even
naturalised. In the absence of the sentence itself, we are instructed to consider, in our
reading, the complex apparatus that maintains and affirms state-managed violence.
To be attuned to this apparatus – to hear its constituent sounds, to imagine the room
in which such sounds move between bodies, falling inside and outside of the official
record depending on whether they are considered evidence or the noise that prohibits
it – is to be reminded that everything could be configured differently. Between each
sound sequenced is a beat in which we can hear the sounds not yet legible, the sounds
of the meanings not yet articulated.38
Notes
1. Divya Victor, Curb (New York: Nightboat Books, 2021).
2. Ibid., 116.
3. Ibid., 118.
4. Ibid., 122.
5. Ibid., 127.
6. Ibid., 119.
7. Ibid., 125.
8. Ibid., 124.
9. In the artists’ book version of Curb, a special edition of twenty copies by Victor, designed/
printed by Aaron Cohick, and published by the Press at Colorado College in 2019, the
voice-mail greeting was reproduced as text at the end of the poem (the text occupies the
last page on its own). The reproduction of the greeting in this limited edition, and its omis-
sion in the Nightboat version of the book, was a conscious decision on Victor’s part. Divya
Victor, email to author, 12 April 2022.

30 astrid lorange
10. James E. K. Parker, Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2.
11. Colin Miller, ‘California Supreme Court Accepts Enya, Rejects Celine Dion for Background
Music in Victim Impact Statements’, Evidence Prof Blog, 11 December 2007, https://law-
professors.typepad.com/evidenceprof/2007/12/a-jury-convicte.html.
12. Parker, Acoustic Jurisprudence, 29–30.
13. Jordy Rosenberg, ‘Trans/War Boy/Gender: The Primitive Accumulation of T’, Salvage, 21
December 2015, https://salvage.zone/trans-war-boy-gender/.
14. Paul G. Cassell, ‘In Defense of Victim Impact Statements’, Ohio State Journal of Criminal
Law 6, no. 2 (2009): 611–48.
15. Ibid., 612.
16. ‘About this Site: Curb(ed)’, Curb(ed), 2021, https://divyavictorcurb.org/About-Curbed.
17. ‘Carolyn Chen’, Curb(ed), 2021, https://divyavictorcurb.org/Carolyn-Chen.
18. Mast Radio, ‘Alka Sinha Speaks on Loss of Her Husband, Sentencing Day, 10/18/2013’,
YouTube, 8:09, 19 October 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nOioczgp1I.
19. Robert Cover, ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal 95 (1986): 1601–29.
20. Thank you to Dr Diana Shahinyan for her comments on a draft of this chapter, in which
she suggested ‘genre’ as a way to understand this shift from foreground to background. Dr
Diana Shahinyan, email to author, 14 April 2022.
21. David Fallows, ‘Forte’, Grove Music Online (2001), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/978156159
2630.article.10014 (accessed 5 April 2022).
22. Abu Hamdan, ‘Aural Contract: Forensic Listening and the Reorganization of the Speaking-
Subject’, Cesura//Acceso, no. 1 (2014): 200–24 (202).
23. Ibid., 203.
24. Ibid., 205.
25. Ibid., 211.
26. Ibid., 212.
27. Parker, Acoustic Jurisprudence, 33.
28. Ibid., 39.
29. Victor, Curb, 121.
30. Abu Hamdan, ‘Aural Contract’, 216.
31. Cover, ‘Violence and the Word’, 1611.
32. Ibid., 1601.
33. Ibid., 1628.
34. Mingus Mia, ‘Transformative Justice: A Brief Description’, TransformHarm.org, https://
transformharm.org/transformative-justice-a-brief-description/.
35. Sean Bonney, ‘Notes on Militant Poetics 2.9/3’, Blackout, 15 June 2018, https://my-blackout.
com/2018/06/15/sean-bonney-notes-on-militant-poetics/.
36. Joshua Clover, ‘“An Archive of Confessions”: A Conversation with Joshua Clover, Curated
by Kristina Marie Darling’, Tupelo Quarterly, 14 June 2017, https://www.tupeloquarterly.
com/editors-feature/an-archive-of-confessions-a-conversation-with-joshua-clover-curated-
by-kristina-marie-darling/.
37. Fred Moten, ‘Jurisgenerative Grammar (for Alto)’, in The Oxford Handbook of Critical
Improvisation Studies, Volume 1, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (New York:
University of Oxford Press, 2016), 128–43 (131).
38. I am indebted here to Andrew Brooks. See ‘Fugitive Listening: Sounds from the Undercom-
mons’, Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 6 (2020): 25–45.
Select Bibliography
Abu Hamdan, Lawrence, ‘Aural Contract: Forensic Listening and the Reorganization of the
Speaking-Subject’, Cesura//Acceso, no. 1 (2014): 200–24.

Bonney, Sean, ‘Notes on Militant Poetics 2.9/3’, Blackout, 15 June 2018, https://my-blackout.
com/2018/06/15/sean-bonney-notes-on-militant-poetics/.
Clover, Joshua, ‘“An Archive of Confessions”: A Conversation with Joshua Clover, Curated
by Kristina Marie Darling’, Tupelo Quarterly, 14 June 2017, https://www.tupeloquarterly.
com/editors-feature/an-archive-of-confessions-a-conversation-with-joshua-clover-curated-
by-kristina-marie-darling/.
Fallows, David, ‘Forte’, Grove Music Online (2001), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.
article.10014 (accessed 5 April 2022).
Moten, Fred, ‘Jurisgenerative Grammar (for Alto)’, in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Impro-
visation Studies, Volume 1, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (New York: University
of Oxford Press, 2016), 128–43.
Parker, James E. K., Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015).
Victor, Divya, Curb (New York: Nightboat Books, 2021).

2
The Limits of Listening: Riotous Women,

Imperial Structures, and Sonic Archives
Helen Groth
W hat does it mean to listen to a novel? To eavesdrop, to summon voices out of

the silence of words on a page; to retrieve exiled or excluded voices and sounds
neutralised by the omniscient description of a familiar narrator; to surrender to a
world-building voice that renders selected characters and sounds more audible than
others? We listen as we read voices, sounding out the words in our minds or with our
tongue, throat, breath.1 Or we listen as a talking book sounds out words, registering
the rhythm and tonality of another’s voice.2 Listening to an audiobook might happen
in either immersive, distracted, or casually interested modes. Speeding up or slowing
down, the reader moves in and out of focus, depending on what else is happening in
the social space of reading – domestic tasks, the incidental noise of a fellow commuter,
a child’s cry – to name just a few of a legion of potential everyday distractions.3 The
histories of reading and listening, as Matthew Rubery and Christopher Cannon note,
are intertwined and enduring, extending from the ‘oldest known English poem – Caed-
mon’s hymn – composed and sung by an illiterate goatherd’, then captured in ‘a differ-
ent and related aurality in the alphabet in which the poem was eventually recorded’,
to the recent promotion of audiobooks claiming that ‘listening is the new reading’.4
Julie Beth Napolin concludes her recent study of resonance with a series of reflec-
tions on potential methodological trajectories for literary sound studies. She suggests
that new work in this field should focus on the space where ‘form-seeking sound [. . .]
clings to memory’: ‘Pursuing sounds that cannot, as graphemes on a page, be empiri-
cally heard yet still register ways of hearing.’5 Applying this resonant method to Joseph
Conrad and William Faulkner, Napolin elaborates on how ‘listening becomes sensible
[. . .] as the effect of colonial displacement’.6 Faulkner’s summoning of histories of
dispossession of first nations peoples, slavery, and the ravages of American imperial-
ism in Absalom, Absalom! calls out to be read ‘for resonance’, to quote Napolin:
‘Words vanish but later strike what Faulkner calls “the resonant strings of remember-
ing”.’7 The voices, noises, shouts, and cries of what Faulkner names ‘the soundless
Nothing’ disrupt the narrative and are sounded again and again through remembering
and returning to a beginning that is never simple: a beginning that is part of a sonic
sequence begun long before the modernist novel took form.8 So defined, resonance is
a deeply political and inter-relational critical practice, dependant on forms of listening
that register the inaudible and audible dimensions of literary sound. This approach
to literature’s selective displacements and memory lapses, as well as its technological
enhancements and dependencies, places a particular kind of acoustic pressure on the

the limits of listening 33
Anglo-American novel’s historically global epistemological claims and world-building

ambitions. Conceived along these lines, literary sound studies methods articulate with
a decolonising project that continues to rethink and listen differently to historical liter-
ary forms.9 The decolonising impetus driving this understanding of literary listening,
however, must extend beyond the prevailing transatlantic focus of this field.
Australian Waayni writer Alexis Wright’s magisterial novel Carpentaria listens
closely to the noise of white settler violence, limning a fictional world that channels
the resonance of the ancient song lines traced by traditional owners of a country never
ceded.10 In an early essay Wright locates listening at the centre of her creative practice
in an account of her grandmother’s influence on her imaginative life:
She was our memory. She was what not forgetting was all about. It was through her
that I learnt to imagine. Imagine what had been stolen from us. I also learnt from
the images she gave us of our country. The other thing she had encouraged me to do
was listen. I also learnt to be silent through all of the times we walked around the
bush together. Also, to be silent when other people spoke and told stories at night.11
Wright’s evocation of scenes of childhood listening transition into an account of her

preliminary reading for Carpentaria, summoning a chorus of voices that converge in
her mind as she begins to shape the contours of her novel. Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel
García Márquez, Eduardo Galeano, Octavio Paz, Elie Wiesel, Ralph Ellison, James
Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Frantz Fanon are just some of the voices Wright con-
jures. These affiliations between ‘people who had been colonised, people who had suf-
fered at the hands of other people’, constitute a sonic archive for Wright that resonates
with the ancient library of Country on which her grandmother drew. Listening and
reading, voices and print, intertwine and reverberate, as Wright reflects on the process
of writing in the face of the global climate crisis: a process that refuses formal ‘strait-
jackets’ and ‘limits’. Instead, her fiction models the critical and collective inhabiting of
narrative structures required to amplify the resonance of first nations voices.12
Reflecting on the limits imposed by the philosopher who ‘neutralises’ listening as a
form of understanding (the philosopher who always hears but cannot listen), Jean-Luc
Nancy speaks of the ‘keen indecision that grates, rings out, or shouts between “listening”
and “understanding”’.13 This sonic irritation in the space between listening and under-
standing can be thought of as both a limit and a space or site that only increases in volume
and density – an unassimilable zone that resists the neutralising force of a certain mode
of philosophical understanding. Diverging slightly from Nancy’s acoustic epistemology,
to speak of literary sound is to address both literature’s world-building capacities and the
intrinsic porosity of those worlds. Listening as a mode of critical attention accordingly
emphasises the aesthetic abstraction of the sonorous in forms of writing that are, in turn,
preoccupied with the in-between spaces of sonic connectivity.14 Taking this concept of
listening as a point of departure, the first and second parts of this chapter place recent
approaches to literary listening in dialogue with contemporary claims for listening as
the foundation for a communicative ethics in social justice contexts – exemplified in this
instance by theoretical and creative responses to the gendered and racialised rhetoric gen-
erated by the 2011 London Riots. The third part of the chapter turns to Alexis Wright’s
Carpentaria: a novel which radically reconfigures the often-violent intimate histories of
domestic spaces by placing sustained pressure on the epistemological limits of listening.

34 helen groth
Listening in the world Carpentaria builds is a contingent and implicated process, but also
an inherently comparative and resonant one. Wright’s work asks her readers to listen to
what they have not been trained to hear: a challenge that exposes and moves beyond the
assumed limits of literary listening.
Literary Listening and Sonic Connectivity

Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s recent study of the ‘sonic color line’ examines how a ‘limited
range of listening practices’ have privileged white listening as ‘the standard of citizen-
ship and personhood’.15 Stoever’s ‘sonic aesthetics’ analyses modes of listening that
racially encode spaces, voices, bodies, and soundscapes, such as the noisy chaos of the
inner-city as opposed to the quiet order of leafy, well-manicured suburban streets.16
She traces two cognate analytical trajectories: one attends to the way Black writers
and musicians have ‘radically challenged the mobilisation of sound by white power
structures’, and the second argues for the centrality of the ‘trope of the listener’ in the
Black literary tradition through close readings of listening scenes: a critical process
that consciously diverges from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s influential claim that ‘black
literature’s “ur-trope” is the “talking book”’.17 This shift from talking to listening
exposes the acoustic dimensions of literary writing, its segregating structures, as well
as its connective impulses.
In Wayward Lives Saidiya Hartman confronts the segregating audition of the
sounds of the American slum as she moves readers through the streets and domestic
interiors of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward in the year 1900, pointing out what they
could hear if they chose to listen:
What you can hear if you listen: The guttural tones of Yiddish making English into
a foreign tongue. The round open-mouthed sounds of North Carolina and Virginia
bleeding into the hard-edged language of the city and transformed by the rhythm
and cadence of northern streets. The eruption of laughter, the volley of curses, the
shouts that make tenement walls vibrate and jar the floor.18
Hartman’s prose defies generic categories. It is aesthetically and methodologically

‘wayward’ in its resistance to the limits of archival forms and conceived of in resonant
acoustic terms. Hartman describes her writing thus: ‘I have pressed at the limits of
the case file and the document, speculated about what might have been, imagined the
things whispered in dark bedrooms, and amplified moments of withholding, escape
and possibility, moments when the vision and dreams of the wayward seemed possi-
ble.’19 This pressing at archival limits draws on literary techniques, as Hartman makes
clear: ‘I employ a mode of close narration, a style which places the voice of narrator
and character in inseparable relation, so that the vision, language, and rhythms of the
wayward shape and arrange the text.’20
Returning to the sounds of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, Hartman’s use of the condi-
tional statement – ‘What you can hear if you listen’ – opens up a space that reverberates
with sounds that have been historically misheard as an ugly cacophony with no story
to tell: an opening that reveals the habituated mechanisms that structure listening as an
intentional act of understanding, as well as a ‘close’ mode of narrative signification that
illuminates the non-aural aspects of auditory experience.21 There is a sonic beauty in the
hectic blurring of vocal rhythms, cadences, accents, that Girl #’s wanderings through

alleyways and tenement rooms allows us to listen to if we choose, whilst making it clear
that these sounds exist whether we listen or not. Like all the wayward women whose
histories Hartman recreates, Girl # is an intentional agent, a maker of forms, a writer of
her own life; and we, in turn, are both listeners and readers, following the acoustic traces
and the multiple histories resounding within the written text in an ongoing process of
confronting our own auditory limits and failures.
Jack Halberstam’s evocation of wildness as a mode of critical practice in his preface
to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons resonates with Hartman’s
wayward acts of listening: ‘Moten and Harney want to gesture to another place, a
wild place that is not simply the leftover space that limns real and regulated zones of
polite society; rather, it is a wild place that continuously produces its own unregulated
wildness.’ This fugitive zone is precarious, vulnerable, and of the present. It defies risk
and futurity: a riotous movement (a term Hartman uses also) that Harney evokes in
his account of the London Riots of 2011 as a patterning of voicing and listening where
it becomes impossible to distinguish between ‘the request, the demand and the call’;
instead one is enacted in the other: ‘I think the call, in the way I would understand it,
the call, as in the call and response, the response is already there before the call goes
out. You’re already in something.’22 Immersed in the present noise of rioting, the norms
of propriety and accord fall away, calls and responses reciprocally form and reform
in wild abandon, never complete, open and vulnerable, creatively resisting structures
that seek to incorporate and rationalise. Listening in this mode of collective being or
thinking together critically reveals arbitrary structures and coercive desires, as Moten
elaborates in relation to the improvisatory cacophony of jazz: ‘we hear something in
them that reminds us that our desire for harmony is arbitrary and in another world,
harmony would sound incomprehensible. Listening to cacophony and noise tells us that
there is a wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.’23 Cacophony is
revelatory in these instances for Moten, exposing the structures (including literary ones)
that we normatively inhabit, structures that both limit and enable listening.
Leah Bassel writes very differently of an applied politics of listening in the context of
the London Riots of 2011 and with an eye to infrastructural necessities. Initially turning
to Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler to source the critical vocabulary for her concep-
tion of a disruptive politics of listening with the potential to resist norms of intelligibility,
Bassel elaborates techniques for listening to the stories of the young Black rioters that are
local, specific, and explicitly anti-aesthetic in practice (if not in theoretical derivation):
‘rather than exploring a grand theory of listening, I explore the micropolitics of listen-
ing as a social and political process, that can create a responsibility to change roles of
speakers and listeners and thereby disrupt power and privilege’. Listening disrupts ‘easy
essentialisms’ and ‘Manichean’ dualisms, according to Bassel, by eschewing aesthetic
modes of ‘interpretation without legislation’.24 And yet, narratives and literary forms of
interpretation remain central to Bassel’s political understanding of listening as a ‘vital,
creative practice’ for amplifying and diversifying the relative audibility of voices.25
Riotous Girls and the London Riots

The shooting of Mark Duggan by police in Tottenham triggered what became known
as the 2011 London Riots.26 In the wake of the riots, the failure of legal processes
to hear the voices of the Duggan family, and the media’s discriminatory coverage,
revealed the often-violent consequences of extracting order from chaos. One of the

36 helen groth
striking features of the media coverage was ‘the hypervisibility of women’ – of riotous
girls and troubled mothers in particular.27 Two of the many responses to the London
Riots exemplify this gendered structural inequality in ways that resonate with Alexis
Wright’s critical interrogation of the institutionalised failure of white ears to hear the
stories of disruptive Black women in Carpentaria. The first is American journalist
Raven Rakia’s call for the riots to be understood through the historical lens of colonial
inequality. The second is the South African novelist Gillian Slovo’s verbatim play The
Riots, performed in London in November 2011.28
Situating the London Riots in a global context, Rakia dismantles the labelling of the
2011 London uprisings as a ‘consumer riot’ by yoking images of young Black looters
breaking and taking property (televisions and the like) to the historical breaking and
taking of the Atlantic slave trade and the continuing colonial gaze that insists on read-
ing Black rioting as a symptom of the ‘political backwardness of black communities’.
Rakia then moves to another Black community, summoning images of the occupation
of Newark by the National Guard during the 1967 riots, of snipers hidden on rooftops
to shoot and kill Black people running in the streets below or ‘coming out of their
homes’. Both these riots took place where people lived, close to home, in familiar streets
and neighbourhoods. They also share a common resistance to economic policies that
enforce mobility and precarity: a perpetual state of ‘contingency, risk, flexibility and
adaptability’, to invoke Harney and Moten once more.29 Murmuring and rumbling,
these riots are heard as a disruptive idiom, of speech ‘breaking from propriety, on the
run from ownership’, but they are also distinct social spaces that entertain possibilities
of alternative forms of habitation and inhabiting.30
Gillian Slovo’s verbatim play The Riots: From Spoken Evidence (2011), which
also informed her later novel Ten Days (2016), thematises and performs the limits
of listening as an intentionally reparative process of creative assemblage.31 Nicholas
Kent, the artistic director of London’s Tricycle Theatre, commissioned Slovo to cre-
ate a play in August 2011 with the aim of trying ‘to make sense of the looting and
mayhem by talking to as many people as possible’.32 The Riots accordingly gathers
testimonies, interviews, letters, and other evidence into an intentionally dissonant
chorus of conflicting accounts of activists, victims, police, politicians, and a small
number of rioters. Amidst the largely male chorus of The Riots, an eighteen-year-old
girl called Chelsea Ives speaks through a letter written to Slovo from her cell in Hol-
loway Prison:
Hi my name is Chelsea Ives and I have recently just turned 18. I’m the girl that got
shopped by her mum due to the riots. I read your article in the prison newspaper
so I thought I’d share my views on the things that involved me for your theatre
and because the whole country knows who I am. I think it’s terrible what the news
have said about me, they made it look like I’m a disruptive low-life teenager from a
council estate. The public seem to automatically place me in an unnamed catorgory
for thick, low-lifed individuals which is not me at all. I havn’t even had a chance
to speak for myself. It just feels like I shouldn’t even have legal advice, because it
seems the Judge has already made up his mind about my sentence due to the help
and support of the media. The public just need to know I’m only accountable for
my actions and not everyone else’s and I’m sorry.33

Ives’s repentant assertion of her difference from the criminalising categories into which
she has been forced turns on the claim that she is from a good home; an insistence echoed
by one of her mother’s public revelations that she had reported her daughter to the police:
Chelsea just got caught up in the moment, as many did. She is accountable for her
actions. It was fun at the time for them but I can’t imagine it was much fun for the
victims or normal people watching. People label everyone involved as from broken
homes, council estates, no future, nothing. That’s not her. We are not on benefits,
we have a dinner table we sit round. She is not from a broken home. We work.
Everything was done fairly. It could have been a lot, lot worse and she has to deal
with it the best she can.34
This mother–daughter exchange captures the moment after the radical joy and wild-
ness that Harney and Moten describe. The ‘fun’ must be repented, the riotous Black
girl shamed and punished in a social system that remains unchanged by the riots. Both
Adrienne and Chelsea Ives perform this brutal structural necessity, whilst calling atten-
tion to the inherent category errors and stereotypes that manufacture the false coher-
ence of an emergency narrative requiring quick solutions and repentant scapegoats.
Chelsea Ives’s refusal of her characterisation as an anonymous ‘low-life’ simul-
taneously echoes and unsettles her mother’s aspirational location of her around the
family dinner table in a home and with a future secured by hard work. Chelsea’s letter
to Slovo calls attention to the nominative force of a legal system that fails to listen
to a different version of her story, one that is also negated by the future her mother
envisages: a story that potentially recognises the difficulty of performing what Judith
Butler describes as the ‘fantasy of the individual capable of undertaking entrepreneur-
ial self-making under conditions of accelerating precarity’.35 Promoted as a ‘theatri-
cal inquiry’, Slovo’s play attempts ‘to recover and make visible Tottenham’s complex
“geographies of grievances”’.36 In this social space, Chelsea Ives’s testimony draws
attention to the particular vilification directed at young women in the wake of the
riots: a facet of the riots that Rachel Clements highlights in her reading of Slovo’s play
alongside a sequence in Fahim Alam’s documentary Riots Reframed (2013). Alam’s
film includes Paul Gilroy interpreting the ‘footage of a police assault against a young
woman’ as an instance of ‘a known script’ in ‘which violence against a woman’s body
proves to be the tipping point for collective disorder’.37 Gilroy further elaborates on
this ‘known script’ in an article published the same year that addresses the haunting of
the events of 2011 by the rumoured targeting of Black women during the riots of 1981
and 1986: precedents that led the Duggan family to select women to front the initial
family-led protest outside the Tottenham police station where the explosive footage of
a policeman striking a young Black woman was filmed.38
The other precedent that Gilroy identifies is the pathological construction of
Black families, especially female-headed households, as part of a broader sociological
accounting for the earlier riots. Gilroy contrasts this gendered focus on ‘bad moth-
ers’ in the 1980s with the pervasive emphasis on individuation and privatisation that
characterised media coverage of the 2011 riots which framed ‘the disorders as a brisk
sequence of criminal events and transgressions that could be intelligible only when
seen on the scale of personal conduct’: ‘Society had been abolished long ago. It was

38 helen groth
no surprise that black communities, already riven into the two great neoliberal tribes
of winners and losers were internally divided.’39 And yet, Adrienne Ives’s defence of
her home and daughter suggests that the stereotypical construction of Black domestic
life Gilroy sees as largely a feature of an earlier sociological response to the riots still
haunts her version of the neoliberal typologies he names.
As Rachel Clements argues, an explicitly colonial context for the riots emerges
from Alam’s decision to listen seriously to his fellow rioters and not the police: a
creative choice that amplifies the voices that Slovo acknowledges she had difficulty
capturing, despite the intentionally polyphonous narrative she constructs. To quote
Clements on the cumulative effect of Keir Elam’s tactical listening:
Pointing to the military and colonial roots of looting as word and idea, multiple
interviewees argue that the state apparatus of police, army and politicians con-
tinues to teach the cliché that ‘might is right’ while simultaneously enacting and
loudly performing their own self-righteousness.40
Slovo, by contrast, risked reinforcing the narrowly defined ‘Us and Them’ binary that
she had intended to dismantle by telling the story of the riots from ‘both’ sides: a cre-
ative decision that she and numerous critics ascribed to her preference for the novel
form. To quote Esther Adley’s review of the play in The Guardian, ‘Slovo, who more
frequently writes novels, is a skilled plotter’ and yet, Adley concludes, the voices of
the rioters she had hoped to amplify are largely absent from the plot she constructs.41
In Slovo’s plot, Chelsea Ives’s letter is enlisted (along with other imprisoned rioters)
to reiterate her un-naming by a system that normalises her gendered racialised stereo-
typing as a criminally riotous Black girl.
Wayward Women and Listening in the House of Fiction

In the opening chapters of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria Angel Day, the defiantly way-
ward wife of one of the central protagonists, Norm Phantom, starts a ‘riot’ in the dump
on the outskirts of the small racially segregated town of Desperance where the novel is
set. Clasping a discarded statue of the Virgin Mary, ‘Angel Day, a queen herself’, claims
traditional ownership of the land in a voice that sends shock waves across the town
dump, stirring up memories of ‘tribal battles from the ancient past’ and summoning the
voices of the old people who knew where the lines in the dirt were drawn:
Living in harmony in fringe camps was a policy designed by the invader’s govern-
ments, and implemented, wherever shacks like Angel Day’s swampside residences
first began to be called a community. The old people wrote about the history of
these wars on rock.42
War, not riot, is the name given by the old people and their descendants to the violence
that ensues:
It is hard to determine how sides were forged, but when the fighting began, the
blood of family ties flew out of the veins of the people, and ran on the ground just
like normal blood, when face and limbs are cut like ribbons with broken glass, or
when the body has been gouged with a piece of iron, or struck on the head over and

over with a lump of wood. Angel Day did not fight because she was still hugging
onto her statue and encouraging the human explosion to take hold. It was like sink-
ing an anchor: ‘What about the traditional owner?’ She was still screaming about
her esteemed rights.43
The morning after the war, Angel and her husband Norm awaken to the palpable
silence left behind by their departed neighbours, who have moved under cover of night
through the streets of Desperance to the other side of the town:
People were complaining to each other about the weight of their ragtag belong-
ings, while children zigzagged all over the street with their laughter and cries being
heard everywhere. What did it matter to hush all the little children since that many
dogs in tow, stirred up by the scraping sticks, joined in the racket by running up
and down the fences of white people’s homes barking their heads off or leaping
up and throwing themselves against the tin walls while trying to get over the fences,
and equally with the town dogs inside doing the same, trying to get out? None of
this racket worried their owners. Nor did the straggle-taggle give one iota to the
peace and quiet of the town. Whatever! Nevermind! As if the town with all of its
laws and by-laws for inhabitation did not exist. It was as if they could not care
less whether the town folk, woken up with all the noise, switched on every single
light in their houses in the middle of the night, and stood silently in the front yards,
gobsmacked, comprehending they were in the middle of a riot.44
To be ‘in the middle of a riot’ in this carefully constructed scene, is to be guided through
the white folk’s silent registration of the illusory hold the town’s ‘laws and by-laws’
have over the traditional owners of the unceded stolen land they unlawfully inhabit.45
Wright’s subjunctive formulations deftly overturn the structures of propriety and accord
on which white property rights rest, whilst rendering absurd conventional understand-
ings of rioting as criminality. The bemused omniscient narrative voice remarks on the
townsfolk mis-hearing a war as a riot, whilst also registering their uneasy listening to the
irreverent riotousness of the Pricklebush mob as they move from one side of the town to
another – laughing, crying, scraping sticks, children running joyfully down quiet mani-
cured streets – all wildly indifferent to ‘the peace and quiet of the town’.46
Angel Day’s open rebellion is vociferous, and defiant. Repainting the statue ‘in the
colour of her own likeness’, her ‘Aboriginal Mary’ becomes the irreverent centrepiece
of her domestic life. Initially looming over the marital bed that her husband Norm
soon relinquishes, then assuming pride of place in the home where she bears the two
sons that will eventually be murdered in police custody, this ‘brightly coloured statue
of an Aboriginal woman who lived by the sea’ confronts all who enter the structures
Angel Day builds with the constitutive creative force of their author and architect.47
These homes are Angel’s ‘story place’, the sovereign spaces over which she defiantly
and notoriously presides – to enlist Wright’s characterisation of the construction of the
overarching shape of Carpentaria:
The idea of the novel was to build a story place where the spiritual, real and imagined
worlds exist side by side. The overall aim of the novel was to create a memory of
what is believed, experienced and imagined in the contemporary world of Indigenous
people in the Gulf of Carpentaria.48

40 helen groth
Wright builds her ‘story place’ through resonance and connection to country, each
chapter amplifying a different voice and soundscape: a deliberate acoustic sequencing
that avails itself of the novel’s formal capaciousness, whilst swapping out one of the
genre’s foundational architectural metaphors – Henry James’s ‘house of fiction’ – for
the idea of creating a ‘place of fiction’. Wright’s shift from house to place is a vital
one that signals an accompanying move from seeing to listening. James theorised the
formal architecture of his novels thus:
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million – a number of
possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced,
or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by
the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size,
hang so, all together over the human scene that we might have expected of them a
greater sameness of report than we find.49
At each window of this vast multi-faceted edifice stands ‘a figure with a pair of eyes,
or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique
instrument, insuring to the persona making use of it an impression distinct from every
other’.50 James’s formal ambition for the novel is polemically vast and excessive, to
quote Anna Kornbluh’s spatial elucidation of this passage: ‘The planar distortions and
dimensional disjunctions of the house of fiction exceed what already exists, spatial-
izing openings to the inexistent.’51
Wright’s theory of fiction is equally or more formally ambitious and architectural
in its challenging of the solidity of the cultural foundations and capacious reach of
the European novel that James imperiously assumes. In a recent essay on first nations
and refugee writing, Wright attends to the narrative structures that have rendered
inaudible the ‘million’ possible stories that could be or should have been told: a cul-
tural legacy that James’s vision of the novel’s infinite capacities simultaneously fails
to register and constitutively models at a formative moment in the genre’s theoretical
history. Developing on Rebecca Solnit’s metaphor of ghost libraries from her essay
on ‘A Short History of Silence’, Wright expands on the potentially infinite number of
voices that have been silenced, of windows and doors that remain closed in the history
of storytelling: ‘What are we to do with the ghost libraries that belong to the voiceless-
ness of the greater force of humanity, including the increasing number of people who
are losing their homes and livelihood because of global warming?’52 Security of place
is crucially linked to the survival of story; forced mobility, censorship, and precarity
destabilise and suppress the possibility of piercing through the edifice of audibility, as
Wright argues in the same piece:
If the stories that live in all of us were accused of being too reckless for the nation,
too dangerous for the country’s ears with assimilatory ideals, or of threatening a
narrow view of the world, what would we do? I hope that we would cultivate our
memory by continually whispering stories in our mind as Aboriginal people con-
tinually do, and that we would be brave, just as our people took great risks to keep
the spiritual law stories strong in secret gatherings held in the middle of the night
outside missions and reserves where they had been institutionalised under state
laws, and were punished for practicing Aboriginal law.53

To return to Julie Beth Napolin’s model of resonance with which this chapter began,
Wright’s image of multiple whispering voices engages with the idea of speaking in
forms that cling to memory: forms that demand constitutive forms of listening that
cannot be limited to ‘graphemes on a page’.54 Hartman’s acoustic method of press-
ing at the limits of the archive also aligns with Wright’s theory of listening as an
opening onto different worlds and histories that cannot simply be ‘assimilated’ by the
neutralising syntax of inherited structures of understanding and worlding. Listening
in this sense of creative practice requires attending to the stories that cannot be read-
ily ‘empirically heard’, an acoustic registration to which the novel is uniquely suited.
Stories find form in Carpentaria through a vital and continuing connection to place
mediated by one of the novel’s foundational world-building devices: a wildly expan-
sive mode of free-indirect narration designed to open the reader’s ears to stories
whispered or wilfully misheard.
Home as both place and a medium for the sounds of ‘experienced and imagined’
voices is given literal form in Carpentaria in the Phantom house, which is moulded
around a ‘long curving corridor’ resembling the ‘shape of a cochlea inside an ear’:
Inside this ear the sound grew louder as it travelled, jumping the puddles of water
seeping under the tin, just as Norm said it would, in the unfolding years of the
house he had designed to have its own built-in alarm system.55
Curving and vibrating, this house is a resonant perpetually protean assemblage that
forms and reforms around the various characters that move through its spaces and
temporarily inhabit its rooms: its walls absorbing and mediating the sounds of ‘a par-
ticular, active, voiced land’, to quote Jane Gleeson-White, that counters the extractive
dis-placing violence of colonialism.56 Viewed through this lens, the Phantom home can
be read as a metonym for the novel’s formal acoustic ambition.
Wright may enlist the familiar devices of the European novel – a complex character
system that accommodates the multiple perspectives of a family and its adversaries –
but this inherited techne is redistributed and reconfigured by the inherited song lines
and narrative cosmology of the Waanyi country that transfigures and transforms the
process of reading Carpentaria into a critical encounter with the imperial structures
that continue to shape and limit how we listen to literary texts. This is not a rehash of
familiar canon formation debates in the context of thinking through new approaches to
literary sound studies. What Wright’s work offers instead is a complex ambitious inter-
rogation of listening that compels us to think of alternative futures through the medium
of fiction. To listen in literary form for Wright is to calibrate the audible and inaudible
dimensions of place as part of a critical process that vigilantly attends to the inherited
structures of registering and filtering sound that we necessarily and inevitably inhabit.
Notes
1. Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of
2. Matthew Rubery, The Untold History of the Talking Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

42 helen groth
3. This point references Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne’s work and recent essay, ‘Aural
Speed-Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks’, PMLA 135, no. 2 (2020): 401–11. Leah
Price’s work on casual reading practices underlies this point as well. See Leah Price, What
We Talk about When We Talk about Books: The History and Future of Reading (New
York: Basic Books, 2019).
4. Christopher Cannon and Matthew Rubery, ‘Introduction to “Aurality and Literacy”’,
PMLA 135, no. 2 (2020): 350–6 (350).
5. Julie Beth Napolin, The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 212.
6. Ibid., 5.
7. Ibid., 213.
8. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (London: Vintage, [1936] 2005), 8.
9. Anna Kornbluh’s recent work on the novel informs this interpretation of the novel as a
social space. There is, however, a crucial point of difference that locates this chapter in
the domain of the interpretive humanities rather than aligned with the political formal-
ism Kornbluh so eloquently defends. To speak of literary sound is already to think about
overlapping worlds and social spaces and question the integrity of those worlds. See Anna
Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2019), 12.
10. Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (Sydney: Giramondo, 2006).
11. Alexis Wright, ‘Politics of Writing’, Southerly 62, no. 2 (2002): 10–20 (11).
12. Alexis Wright, ‘A Self-Governing Literature. Who Owns the Map of the World?’, Meanjin
(2020): 92–101 (100–1).
13. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2007), 2.
14. This analysis is indebted to Wai Chee Dimock, ‘A Theory of Resonance’, PMLA 112, no.
5 (1997): 1060–71.
15. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening
(New York: New York University Press, 2016), 5.
16. Ibid., 17.
17. Ibid.; Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary
Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxii.
18. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous
Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 7.
19. Ibid., xv.
20. Ibid., xiv.
21. This reading is indebted to Igor Reyner’s perceptive analysis of Pierre Schaeffer’s theory
of listening as an intentional act in ‘Fictional Narratives of Listening: Crossovers between
Literature and Sound Studies’, Interference Journal 6 (2018): 129–42.
22. Jack Halberstam, ‘“The Wild Beyond” with and for the Undercommons’, preface to
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
(New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 7.
23. Moten, cited by Halberstam, ‘“Wild Beyond”’, 7.
24. Leah Bassel, The Politics of Listening (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 3–7.
25. Ibid., 44.
26. As the ensuing analysis of the riots has shown, the riots quickly moved beyond the spe-
cific violence of Duggan’s death. See Clive Bloom, Riot City: Protest and Rebellion in
the Capital (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Krishnan Kumar, The Idea of English-
ness: English Culture, National Identity and Social Thought (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015);
and David Lammy, Out of the Ashes: Britain after the Riots (London: Guardian Books,
2012).

27. Kim Allen and Yvette Taylor, ‘Placing Parenting, Locating Unrest: Failed Femininities,
Troubled Mothers and Riotous Subjects’, Studies in the Maternal 4, no. 2 (2012): 1–25 (5).
28. Raven Rakia, ‘Black Riot. The Difference between Riots and Protests Has More to Do with
Who and Where than What’, The New Inquiry, 14 November 2013, https://thenewinquiry.
com/black-riot/.
29. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 76.
30. Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 131.
31. Gillian Slovo’s The Riots was commissioned and directed by Nicholas Kent, the artistic
director of Tricycle Theatre, London.
32. Quoted in Terry Stoller, Tales of the Tricycle Theatre (London: Methuen, 2013), 42.
33. Chelsea Ives, quoted in Gillian Slovo, The Riots (London: Methuen Drama, 2021), 50.
Spelling as in the original.
34. Quoted from Simon Freeman and Benedict Moore-Bridger, ‘I’ve Been Unfairly Made a
Scapegoat for the Violence Says Jailed Olympics Girl’, Evening Standard, 10 April 2012.
35. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2015), 16.
36. Rachel Clements, ‘The Riots: Expanding Sensible Evidence’, in Performances of Capital-
ism, Crises and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe, ed. Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 153–70 (157).
37. Ibid., 162.
38. Paul Gilroy, ‘1981 and 2011: From Social Democratic to Neoliberal Rioting’, South Atlantic
Quarterly 112, no. 3 (2013): 550–8 (551).
39. Ibid.
40. Clements, ‘Riots’, 166.
41. Esther Addley, ‘Burn Britain Burn: Gillian Slovo’s The Riots’, The Guardian, 23 November
2011, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/nov/22/gillian-slovo-the-riots-play.
42. Wright, Carpentaria, 26.
43. Ibid., 27.
44. Ibid., 32.
45. Honni Van Rijswijk provides a lucid analysis of Carpentaria, the British juridical fiction of
terra nullius, and the Mabo judgment in ‘Stories of the Nation’s Continuing Past: Respon-
sibility for Historical Injuries in Australian Law and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria’, UNSW
Law Journal 35, no. 2 (2012): 598–624. Jane Gleeson-White also writes extensively on
Native Title and Country as it pertains to Wright’s Carpentaria in her unpublished thesis,
‘Nature in the Twenty-First Century’ (University of New South Wales, 2016), and, more
recently, in ‘Valuing Country. Let Me Count Three Ways’, Griffith Review, special issue
‘Writing the Country’, 63 (2019): 171–91.
47. Ibid., 38.
48. Alexis Wright, ‘On Writing Carpentaria’, HEAT 13 (2007): 7.
49. Henry James, ‘Preface to The Portrait of a Lady’, in Henry James: Literary Criticism (New
York: Library of America, 1984), 1:1075.
50. Ibid.
51. Kornbluh, Order of Forms, 35.
52. Alexis Wright, ‘Telling the Untold Stories. On Censorship’, Overland (2019): 16–21 (20).
This essay is excerpted from Alexis Wright’s 2018 Stephen Murray-Smith Memorial Lecture,
which was delivered at the State Library of Victoria.
53. Wright, ‘Telling the Untold Stories’, 18.
54. Napolin, Fact of Resonance, 212.
56. Gleeson-White, ‘Nature in the Twenty-First Century’, 227.

44 helen groth
Select Bibliography
Bassel, Leah, The Politics of Listening (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Butler, Judith, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Cannon, Christopher and Matthew Rubery, ‘Introduction to “Aurality and Literacy”’, PMLA
135, no. 2 (2020): 350–6.
Dimock, Wai Chee, ‘A Theory of Resonance’, PMLA 112, no. 5 (1997): 1060–71.
Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
(New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).
Mills, Mara and Jonathan Sterne, ‘Aural Speed-Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks’, PMLA
135, no. 2 (2020): 401–11.
Moten, Fred, Stolen Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
Nancy, Jean-Luc, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press,
2007).
Napolin, Julie Beth, The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2020).
Rubery, Matthew, The Untold History of the Talking Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2016).
Stewart, Garrett, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990).
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New
York: New York University Press, 2016).
Wright, Alexis, Carpentaria (Sydney: Giramondo, 2006).
———, ‘Politics of Writing’, Southerly 62, no. 2 (2002): 10–20.
———, ‘A Self-Governing Literature. Who Owns the Map of the World?’, Meanjin (2020):
92–101.

3
PIANO/Forte: Writing Audible Space,

Jane Austen, Dorothy Richardson,
and Others
David Toop
W ho is the listener? What is the listener?

The listener is still, quiet, ambiguous, blank, full or empty, desirous or indiffer-
ent, perhaps nothing?
Or, the listener is everything.
First, a pleasant scene, extracted from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (published
in 1814):
A young woman, pretty, lively, with a harp as elegant as herself, and both placed
near a window, cut down to the ground, and opening on a little lawn, surrounded
by shrubs in the rich foliage of summer, was enough to catch any man’s heart. The
season, the scene, the air, were all favourable to tenderness and sentiment. Mrs
Grant and her tambour frame were not without their use; it was all in harmony,
and as everything will turn into account when love is once set going, even the sand-
wich tray, and Dr Grant doing the honours of it, were worth looking at.1
Pivotal in this passage is the musical term ‘harmony’, which serves to reconcile oth-
erwise disparate phenomena within a romantic frame both sexual and picturesque.
The harp is significant as auditory pheromone, object of displaced desire, if only by
implication. Both harp and young woman are placed judiciously, objects in relation.
Daily, Edmund attends the Parsonage, where this scene is set, ‘to be indulged with
his favourite instrument; one morning secured an invitation for the next, for the lady
could not be unwilling to have a listener, and everything was soon in a fair train’. The
lady is Mary Crawford, later destined to reject Edmund on the grounds that she will
never dance with a member of his chosen profession, a clergyman: ‘They had talked,
and they had been silent; he had reasoned, she had ridiculed – and they had parted at
last with mutual vexation.’2
But this is far into the future. During the season when a harp forms the centrepiece
of a seductive scene, its music is, at best, ambient in relation to the proximity of a
window affording the best possible outlook, a small lawn encircled by suitable shrubs,
with sandwiches at hand. An impression of stasis is illusory; subtle movements and
soundings – the virtue of liveliness – animate what might otherwise resemble the kind
of tableaux vivants described in Goethe’s Elective Affinities, in which paintings are

46 david toop
silently enacted by living bodies wearing suitable costume (after solemn music has
established an atmosphere of expectancy):
The figures corresponded so well to their originals, the colours were so happily
chosen, the lighting so artistic, you thought you had been transported to another
world, the only disturbing factor being a sort of anxiety produced by the presence
of real figures instead of painted ones.3
Both, however, are united (in harmony, perhaps) in contrivance, a theatre of idleness
masking the anxiety of real bodies undergoing unseen tensions that become apparent
within the broader narrative.
The entirety of the Mansfield Park scene might be described, following Manuel
Delanda’s lead, as an assemblage. Working from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
initial use of the term agencement, Delanda identifies a misdirection in the English
translation, a tendency to imply a product rather than a process.4 As quoted (in Assem-
blage Theory), Deleuze and Guattari’s simplest definition is as follows:
What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heteroge-

neous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages,
sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of
a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy.’ It is never filiations which are
important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but con-
tagions, epidemics, the wind.5
The harp is, in fact, silent, at least in Jane Austen’s account, a description compli-
cated by Austen’s famous use of free indirect style. If the harp is silent, or simply not
described in auditory terms, its music insufficiently relevant to the assemblage, then
we might also ask who is describing this scene with such a familiar air of complacency
tinged with mockery. Pious Edmund, it should be noted, regarded the harp as his
favourite instrument; moreover was attracted to the harpist, but nothing is said about
enthusiasm or lack of it for the music of the harp. Can this be presupposed? In Jane
Austen, perhaps not. For Austen, player of the pianoforte herself, music could be a
source of joy, a conduit to personal and collective liberation, momentary or otherwise.
Equally, music can have a ghostly presence in her novels, at times an inconvenience
whose true purpose is to display female accomplishment to the marriage market or to
be applied to room acoustics as a social lubricant, a decoration.
Consider Anne Elliot, in Persuasion, happy to play and made happy by playing,
and by contrast, the Miss Musgroves, for whom instruments exist as elements of silent
assemblage, a true furniture music, artfully or perhaps artlessly disordered:
To the Great House accordingly they went, to sit the full half hour in the old-fash-
ioned square parlour, with a small carpet and shining floor, to which the present
daughters of the house were gradually giving the proper air of confusion by a grand
pianoforte and a harp, flower-stands and little tables placed in every direction.6
The portraits on the wall look down upon the scene in dismay. Accordingly, the young
women obliged to perform music, or who resist doing so, or do so only reluctantly,

piano/forte 47
or enthusiastically but badly, can be understood to harbour deep ambivalence to the

existence of music within such constraining, disempowering society. Music was to
some degree a mask, as in Mansfield Park: ‘The evening passed with external smooth-
ness, though almost every mind was ruffled, and the music which Sir Thomas called
for from his daughters helped to conceal the lack of real harmony.’7
Music, then as now, was also work. As Lucy Worsley writes in Jane Austen at Home:
The idea that women of the gentry didn’t ‘work’ is long since debunked: they either
performed ‘work’ that society deemed virtuous, like playing the piano or reading
improving books, or else they discreetly carried out – and this was the case in the
Austen family – much of the actual labour needed to keep the food on the table
and the clothes clean.8
At the outer edges of functionality, music has no inner existence for them, or is with-
drawn from them, except in its potentiality for temporary physical release through
dancing. Then the body can become enfolded with music; otherwise, the body belongs
to another.
From its position close to an early eighteenth-century window cut down to the
ground (a French window, perhaps?), the harp looks ahead more than a hundred
years, anticipating the elusive irony of Erik Satie’s Musique d’Ameublement (1917),
particularly the extremes of its ritualistic style in which music is reduced to the func-
tionality of chairs, the decorative nature of interior furnishings such as wall coverings.
Satie’s amusement was to compose a dampening mask for the inconvenience of cutlery
clatter. Think of the inadvertent scraping of a knife on a porcelain plate, how close it
comes to the timbral resistances typical within much contemporary music. If the harp
is at rest, just another instrument within the assemblage (an assemblage containing
many assemblages), there is implicit noise from Dr Grant, masticating the sandwiches,
and audible productivity from Mrs Grant’s tambour. Although Mrs Grant is not audi-
bly drumming, the circular frame on which she performs her embroidery has a con-
voluted history which allies it to frame drums, particularly those large circular drums
inscribed with cosmic images associated with northern shamanism, and to the kanjira,
the daf, the tar, the tambourine.
Tambour beading or embroidery arrived in Europe in the early eighteenth century.
Its origins are thought to lie in Ari (hook) work from India, exported to the Persian
Gulf across the Middle East to France and England. Hence, A Turkish Woman, a
1773 painting by English-resident Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman, shows an exotically
dressed woman of European features intently embroidering fabric stretched on a large
circular frame. The effect closely resembles the popular Orientalist theme of Asian
women playing tambourine, exemplified by Jean-Étienne Liotard’s Turkish Woman
With a Tambourine, 1738. The connection between music and embroidery extends
beyond the circular frame, the tambour. ‘The technique [of tambour beading]’, writes
Grace Victoria Bentley, ‘is so named for the tautness of the fabric when it is stretched
in the frame, which is necessary for the hook to pass through the fabric cleanly without
catching the weave. The stitch should also produce a satisfying thrum noise when the
tension is correct.’9
Imagine Jane Austen then as a twenty-first-century artist, sound designer, sound
artist, or composer, assembling minimalist elements of an installation designed to

48 david toop
articulate those studied conditions of the romantic picturesque within which work of
varying degrees of seriousness may take place. Yet in the context of Austen’s writing,
the descriptive aspect of this passage is unusual. As is frequently noted about her writ-
ing, she devoted little attention to describing objects, spaces, or appearances in detail.
For John Wiltshire, in The Hidden Jane Austen, this absence of visual description is
counterbalanced by a finely drawn aural dimension. ‘Jane Austen’s is not a highly
visual world’, he writes, ‘but it is, by way of compensation, an intensely and intricately
aural one.’10 This spatiality is frequently achieved through what he calls the ‘recurrent
tactic or motif’ of a protagonist overhearing the talk of others. The ethically perilous
act of overhearing implies both an overlapping of auditory spheres in which intent is
diverted and an excess of hearing. Eavesdroppers will often overhear what they are
reluctant to know. ‘It is through overhearing,’ writes Wiltshire, ‘since it invokes simul-
taneous proximity and relative distance, that intimate spatiality is brought into play
and the determining physical conditions of the genteel social life that is her subject
are implied.’11
A Black Word
The nothing of conversation has its gradations, I hope, as well as the never.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park12
Dorothy Richardson described great novelists as enclosed in a world of people:

‘Human drama, in a resounding box. Or under a silent sky.’13 For Austen sceptics,
words spoken in Pride and Prejudice – ‘Miss Eliza Bennet, let me persuade you to fol-
low my example, and take a turn about the room. – I assure you it is very refreshing
after sitting so long in one attitude’14 – epitomise the triviality of this genteel social
life, entrapped in its architectural boxes. What purpose could there be in walking
around a room other than the obsession with walking for health so evident in Austen’s
novels? Air, fresh or otherwise, and walking, are avoided only by the hypochondriac
valetudinarian – ‘without activity of mind or body’ – Mr Woodhouse in Emma. In
an overhearing, overheated world of eavesdroppers both deliberate and hapless, a
world of little privacy, a world in which a man and a woman were carefully observed
for fear of wayward intimacies, to walk was to circulate the sense of a conversation,
body occupied, eyes free to avoid the discomfort of unmitigated ocular interrogation.
Words are caught in isolation here, an innocuous thought floats adrift there, the total-
ity distributed among other guests piece by incoherent piece. ‘“Your gallantry is really
unanswerable”’, says Emma to Frank Churchill, only recently perceived by her as
‘silent and stupid’, saying nothing worth hearing. ‘“But” (lowering her voice) “nobody
speaks except ourselves, and it is rather too much to be talking nonsense for the enter-
tainment of seven silent people.”’15
‘From a psychoacoustic perspective’, writes Peter Sloterdijk,
the shift to intimate listening is always connected to a change of attitude from

a one-dimensional alarm- and distance-oriented listening to a polymorphously
moved floating listening. This change reverses the general tendency to move from
a magical, proto-musical listening to one revolving around alarm and concern – or,

piano/forte 49
to put it in more enlightened terms: from uncritical participation to critical aware-

ness. Perhaps history itself is a titanic battle for the human ear in which nearby
voices struggle with distant ones for privileged access to emotional movedness.16
In microcosm, this might be a description of an underlying ferocity, the ebb and flow
of struggle, characterising Austen’s ‘genteel’ social worlds. They are worlds of auditory
containment, rarely slipping outside themselves. In this sense they illustrate Sloter-
dijk’s conception of intimacy and sociality as spheres and bubbles with origins in the
enclosed foetal ear, a ‘regime of sonospheric common spirits’.17 ‘It is the constitu-
tive listening community’, he writes, ‘that encloses humans in the immaterial rings of
mutual accessibility. The ear is the organ that connects the intimate and the public.’18
The impression given by Austen through her technique of free indirect style is that
a character within the novels is always speaking or listening. In their suggestion of the
novel unfolding itself in the absence of an author’s controlling hand – an anticipation
of both stream-of-consciousness and the ‘passive writing’ of spiritualists – they might
be considered as antecedents to writers such as Ivy Compton-Burnett, Virginia Woolf,
George V. Higgins, and Henry Green, all of them experimenting with dialogue, either
spoken aloud or ‘silent’ voices in the head, as the predominant framework of narra-
tive. The limitation of this method is chilly inflexibility, a sphere tightly enclosed to
the point of claustrophobia. In his introduction to a Henry Green collection, Sebastian
Faulks notes the risks:
As real feeling eddies beneath the surface of brilliantly simulated emotion, Green
begins to see what dialogue, unmediated by a narrator, can achieve; his interest in
this technique was to take him in one of his later novels, Nothing, into a rather
austere place, where fewer readers wanted to follow.19
Either in remorse for the relentless back-and-forth volubility of his own characters, or
to taunt the reader, Green ends a section of Nothing with a momentary pause: ‘They
hardly spoke again that day, a kind of blissful silence lay between them.’20
‘A faltering voice . . .’
But for the author whose concern is listening to a broader spectrum of auditory space,
not restricted to sounding/responding of the human voice and its directed specificities,
deep intimacies become imaginable through microaudial relationality. To read of acts
of listening is an intensification of reading as an act of listening: words on fire in the
mind, even in silence. ‘One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks,’ wrote Virginia Woolf
in Jacob’s Room, ‘though no one sits there.’21 Silence is an awaiting absence, fragile
and beckoning, becoming filled yet never full. Piano becomes forte. John Wiltshire
identifies a similar subtlety of close listening to sound in space, and its consequences
for internal reflection, in Jane Austen’s Persuasion:
Both enjoy their debate, but they are talking quietly so as not to disturb Went-
worth’s writing at the desk, till they hear a noise from his ‘perfectly quiet division of
the room.’ (‘Division’ suggests both contiguity and separation: he is equally present

50 david toop
in the same space, and cut off.) It is at the precise moment when Anne speaks ‘with
a faltering voice’ that Wentworth drops his pen. Anne is ‘startled at finding him
nearer than she had supposed; and half inclined to suspect that the pen had only
fallen, because he had been occupied by them, striving to catch sounds, which yet
she did not think he could have caught.’22
‘Alas, the piano’

Robert Walser’s ‘little novel’, as he called it, And now he was playing, alas, the piano,
was written in 1925. The first line of this prose miniature, less than three pages – ‘And
now he was playing, alas, the piano, making it sound like a deep and intimate promise,
which isn’t at all the way to start a novel’23 – suggests profound conflict between the
act of writing and the voice of a piano. Silence is one thing, deep with longing, loss,
the unspeakable, but introduce a piano, and the reciprocal saturation of what we call
feeling into the vibrational phenomenon we call resonance becomes a miasmic fog
through which a writer peers only hopefully, struggling to keep pen or pencil in sight.
The pianoforte occupies a similar position of stress in Jane Austen’s novels.
Describing the role of accomplishments required of a young woman in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century England and Europe (Japan, also, he might have noted), Arthur
Loesser lists the pianoforte, to a lesser degree the harp and guitar, as respectable female
accomplishments to be set alongside framing pictures in shellwork, embroidery and
needlework, embellishing cabinets with a tracery of seaweed, filigree and varnish work,
making wax flowers, and cutting out paper ornaments. These occupations indicated
the status of a wealthy man, whose vigorous occupations contrasted with the enforced
idleness of his wife and daughters. The epitome of this is Lady Bertram, in Mansfield
Park: ‘She was a woman who spent her days in sitting nicely dressed on a sofa, doing
some long piece of needlework, of little use and no beauty [. . .]’.24
For both Loesser and the men who expected such activities to fill time, the so-called
minor arts were frivolous, an occupation of time designed to waste hours and days in
order to defend empty time against more dangerous pursuits (music was anomalous
in this schema, a major art if played by men, rendered minor if made by women). ‘It is
questionable’, Loesser writes, in Men, Women, and Pianos, ‘how much these feminine
activities were enjoyed, intrinsically, by the families in which they operated; yet they
were in great demand.’25 The question remains open: why in such demand if they were
so pointless? All of this seems to accept, on Loesser’s part, the proposition that the
work of men carries far more significance than the work of women. From this point of
view, quiet and idleness might be understood as counterparts in the pursuit of pointless
accomplishments, but in Austen’s world, they are more likely to represent an impos-
sible dream. As Lucy Worsley writes, ‘No wonder, despite the powerful myth that
genteel females had plenty of leisure time, that Jane thought it a “luxurious sensation”
to “sit in idleness over a good fire in a well-proportioned room.”’26
The room is a recurrent motif, mapped by air both empty and full: voices and piano-
forte, the vigorous movement of dance, conversational polyphony, the high spirits of
whist contrasted with the sobriety of a nearby table where silence prevails, an occasional
scrape of violin bow on string, the nearly imperceptible sounds of a needle through
fabric, pages turned by a reader, pen scratching at paper, all in pursuit of passing time.

piano/forte 51
It is certainly true that pleasure is mixed with a certain degree of pain when the young
women of Austen’s novels are prevailed upon to play the pianoforte but perhaps this
should be understood as an example of Austen’s satirical wit, directed at the burden
of obligation rather than the object itself. ‘I am going to open the instrument, Eliza,
and you know what follows’, says Miss Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, speaking as if
she were John Cage addressing David Tudor during a rehearsal of 4′ 33″.27 A hint of
threat is evident in this opening of the instrument’s lid; instrument of torture, perhaps?
Elizabeth reluctantly takes to the pianoforte, performs pleasantly but only adequately,
then gives way to her sister Mary. Whoever is occupying the roving eyes and ears of
Austen’s observer at this moment, their judgement is harsh:
Mary, who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in the family, worked
hard for knowledge and accomplishments, was always impatient for display [. . .]
Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application,
it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have
injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.28
The critique is devastating, spiteful enough to be a candidate for Nicolas Slonimsky’s

Lexicon of Musical Invective, yet its concise dissection of personality as a hindrance
to musical excellence seems strikingly modern.
Mary’s enthusiasm for musicking, if not music itself, is undermined by a lack of
self-awareness, leading to some unattractive, presumably visible mannerisms, yet she
is occupied contentedly in the performance of music, centred within a listening sphere.
So she finds a place that might otherwise not exist for her. Writing of the piano as an
emblem of social status among the nineteenth-century middle classes, Mary Burgan
describes it as a lifeline: ‘Without a piano, women with pretensions to gentility are
deprived of the exercise of their special training, of any leading role in family recre-
ation, and of one of their few legitimate channels for self-expression.’29 This accords
with a pragmatism underlying the supposedly romantic trajectory of Austen’s novels,
in which music may be a pleasure to be stolen but its true purpose is apparitional,
resonating and delineating spaces in which actions can progress, a shadow that should
never overshadow the imperatives of life. As Emma says to Miss Fairfax, in Emma,
‘I could not excuse a man’s having more music than love – more ear than eye – a more
acute sensibility to fine sounds than to my feelings.’30
Distant Sounds
Sounds of visible near things streaked and scored with broken light as they moved,
led off into untraced distant sounds [. . .] chiming together.
Dorothy Richardson, Honeycomb31
‘Places and sounds weigh on people’, writes Alain Corbin in A History of Silence.
‘Behaviour and choices feel its subtle influence. These impressions have marked so
many authors that they have constantly returned to them, and evocations of space have
become an expression of their inner state.’32 Silence, like noise, is a hopelessly prob-
lematic term, so overcome with meaning and misunderstanding as to be meaningless.

52 david toop
Yet from out of silences – of thought, quiet existence, spaces, contemplation, unvoiced
anger, loneliness, poverty, wordlessness, unspoken love, private ecstasies and the close
listening that forages out into worldliness, its teeming liveliness – Dorothy Richardson
conducted her lifelong experiment with the ineffable, the unspeakable, how to hear it,
to think it, and the question, how to speak of it? As Annika J. Lindskog wrote in her
study ‘Dorothy Richardson and the Poetics of Silence’:
It may seem ironic that a novel verbose enough to cover over two thousand pages
should have silence as one of its central themes. Yet Dorothy Richardson’s thir-
teen-volume novel Pilgrimage constantly reverberates around different aspects of
silence. Not only is silence represented on the page – in the form of ellipses, gaps,
and blank spaces – but it is also a constant presence in the protagonist Miriam
Henderson’s explorations of her existential condition.33
Pointed Roofs, the first part of Pilgrimage, was described by a reader at Duckworth
as ‘feminine impressionism’, a judgement that was either faint praise or an insightful
example of the publisher looking for a selling point. Written between 1912 and 1957
with ten of them published by Duckworth, the sequence of linked novels begins with
Richardson’s central character, Miriam, teaching in a German school for girls. The
events of Pilgrimage mirror the course of Richardson’s own life. To some degree they
can be considered autobiographical, though this raises a constant, perhaps redundant
question of how closely the fiction corresponded to actual events, characters, and feel-
ings, and how much memories are transformed over time, given the time lag of twenty
or more years between experiences and writing.
What is certainly true is that Richardson, on her own initiative, left the family
home in Barnes, London, in 1891, aged seventeen, to teach at a finishing school in
Hanover. Her father aspired to become a gentleman, invested badly, and plunged the
family into poverty. With the added complication of her mother suffering headaches
and depression (she committed suicide in 1895 while on holiday with Dorothy in
Hastings), Richardson felt the need to help in some way but also wanted to escape a
suffocating home life. According to her biographer, John Rosenberg, she acted well
and had a good ear for nuances of speech and sound, ‘making her an excellent mimic,
as there was “not on earth a speech sound” she could not imitate. She played the piano
well, and she thought of becoming a musician or an actress.’34 Family troubles ended
those ambitions, though it is clear that virtuosic listening would become a key element
of her writing style. Her involvement with the Quaker faith, the Society of Friends,
was also a guiding principle of what might be called her listening practice. Quaker
emphasis on silence was a way of allowing, as she wrote, ‘our “real self” – our larger
and deeper being, to which so many names have been given – to flow up and flood the
whole field of the surface intelligence’.35
A Patch of Dull Crimson

On intermittent days in the German school, Miriam has access to a piano where she
can develop her technical ability. These private sessions are intensely emotional, some-
times to the point of ecstasy or tears:

piano/forte 53
Then when the mood came, she played [. . .] and listened. She soon discovered she
could not always ‘play’ – even the things she knew perfectly – and she began to
understand the fury that had seized her when her mother and a woman here and
there had taken for granted one should ‘play when asked,’ and coldly treated her
refusal as showing a lack of courtesy.36
Despite, or because of, its significance as an early twentieth-century modernist text,

Pilgrimage continues to dwell on the troubled relationship between women and pia-
nos, as if in continuation of Jane Austen. The piano still looms, monstrous furniture
music, and yet for Miriam, sound is an active force, sufficiently powerful to sweep
away the contrivances of music reduced to social artifice or forced entertainment. The
ear of the body is active in foraging for sound fragments, its resonation of space, with
music vibrant within the widest spectrum of hearing. During a concert at the German
school, Miriam is sensitive to subtleties of performance psychology, a patch of dull
crimson she observes on the pallid cheek of a performer, the slight shame she feels in
hearing heavy fortissimos from the hands of a self-conscious English woman, then an
Australian singer, whose expressive bravura, not a note in tune, shocks Miriam ‘out
of all shyness’ and into another world: ‘The longer sustained notes presently reminded
her of something she had heard. In the interval between the verses, while the sounds
echoed in her mind, she remembered the cry, hand to mouth, of a London coal-man.’37
After the concert she goes to bed content, wrapped in music, its capacity to take her
beyond herself, into new spaces, unknown states, and deep memories, conceived as a
transfiguration: ‘The theme of Clara’s solo recurred again and again; and every time
it brought something of the wonderful light – the sense of going forward and forward
through space. She fell asleep somewhere outside the world.’38
Years later, Miriam, always on the edge of destitution, listens to the two young
women with whom she shares lodgings, her silent irritation expressed in vivid thought
streams: ‘Thin hard fingers of women chattering and tweaking. They go up sideways,
witches on broomsticks, and chatter angrily in the distance. They cannot stop the sound
of the silent crimson blossoming roses.’39 They attempt to reason with her, why not earn
half a guinea for occasional public performances playing piano accompaniment for the
séances of Madame Devine? ‘Where is the harm, child,’ one entreats, ‘in your sitting up
at a piano, even behind a curtain; in a large room in Gower Street [. . .] playing, with
the soft pedal either down or up, the kind of music you play so beautifully?’40 Is it that
spiritualist séances are wrong? Nothing that happens on the other side of the curtain
should concern her, she is advised, yet her refusal seems based on morality, can it be
right to earn money so easily? ‘I had made up my mind’, says Miriam. ‘I wanted them
to see me tempted and refusing for conscience sake.’41 The reader who thinks back to
Miriam’s anger, 850 pages earlier, will understand her conflict, a reaction against musical
performance as duty, leading her to a sense of personal integrity: ‘Of course you can only
“play when you can,” said she to herself, “like a bird singing.”’42
Conventions of the novel – identifying characters or who is speaking, creating a
coherent map, linking one scene to another, establishing a timeline, moving towards
resolution – are largely ignored in Pilgrimage. To read this sprawling examination
of the self is to be perpetually disorientated. To enter is to join a flow, to become
sensorily attuned to Richardson’s acute perceptions, her intensities and minutiae, her
clouded recollections. ‘The sound of the pen shattered the silence like sudden speech’,

54 david toop
she writes in Deadlock, as if echoing the dropped pen in Persuasion. ‘She listened
entranced. The little strange sound was the living voice of the brooding presence.’43
This microaudial drama, as much as any greater turbulence, seems to be the point of
Pilgrimage. The most intimate acts of listening connect us with the web of connections
that structure a life. She recalled spaces in which she had lived through the distinctive
texture of their sounds, or questioned how long these auditory memories would linger.
How fugitive they are, vibrations growing more distant, less distinct, like smoke seep-
ing into air until mixed out of existence.
Miriam’s frequent use of auditory space to invoke quiet rooms in which she could
think and write are pre- and post-echoes of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay of 1928, A
Room of One’s Own. Poignant as it may seem, to have the use of a simple room like
this, despite oppressive heat in summer and fireless cold in winter, was for Miriam
(or Richardson) the apex of life as an impoverished but independent woman. What
such a refuge promised was ‘[f]reedom for thought, when it made its sudden visits, to
expand unhampered by the awful suggestions coming from the [. . .] surroundings.’44
Woolf herself refers to the potential of micro-sound as a warning signal, the intimate
acoustic sphere of a house allowing, in the case of Jane Austen, a degree of privacy for
her art: ‘At any rate, one would not have been ashamed to have been caught in the act
of writing Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that
she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in.’45
In a small room with Miss Holland, their privacy protected only by a curtain divid-
ing the space, a window rattles. Miss Holland cannot abide rattling windows. Miriam’s
response is non-committal, addressing only the tone. ‘In the actual communication
there was a fresh source of division. She loved rattling windows; loved, loved them.’46
Miriam hears outer sounds acutely; Miss Holland is oblivious. Cats squeal, curses and
blows rise up from the street, thick distorted voices, children’s voices ‘shrilling up,
driven by fear’, but even at their worst, she thought, they were ‘life, fierce and coarse,
driving off sleep; but real, exciting’. More intolerable than these courtyard noises were
the sounds she heard close to, the intimate sounds from Miss Holland, invisible but
audible behind the curtain. Miriam imagined these sounds collecting in the room, wait-
ing for her to come home. Then in the morning, awake with the splutter of a match:
‘To hear, with senses sharpened by sleep, the leisurely preparations,’ Richardson writes
in The Trap, ‘the slow careful sipping, the weary sighing, muttered prayers, the slow
removal of the many unlovely garments, the prolonged swishing and dripping of the
dismal sponge. All heralding and leading at last to the dreadful numb rattle of vulcanite
in the basin.’47 This is vindictive listening provoked by an excess of unwonted intimacy.
‘Yet the worst to bear was the discovery of the hatred these innocent sounds could
inspire’, she writes. ‘Still there unchanged, pure helpless hatred, rising up as it had risen
in childhood, against forced association with unalterable personal habits.’48
‘And the doors with their different voices in shutting or being slammed-to by the
wind’, she writes in Dawn’s Left Hand:
Would she remember Flaxman door-sounds after she had left? Glancing at the door
which ended the long strip of her half of the room she tried in vain to remember
its sound. Yet, when she first settled in, it must have impressed itself and played its
intimate part in the symphony of sounds belonging to her life with Selina.49

piano/forte 55
For Annika J. Lindskog, silence in Pilgrimage is a strength, a means of self-discovery

that acts as enabler, communicator, and revelation of truth: ‘Yet, silence in Richardson’s
text also often represents the unknowable: those aspects of existence that move beyond
language and that even when grasped and briefly held by Miriam seem to remain hid-
den from the reader.’50
A Dutch Concert
For Richardson, listening, stillness, making sound, constructed auditory spaces whose
architecture was infinitely fluid, opening to infinity, closing to the smallest extent in
which a body can be matter in the material world. Recuperating from a breakdown in
1908, she lived for a time with a Quaker family in a farm at Windmill Hill, Sussex, a
period recorded in Dimple Hill, the eleventh volume of the Pilgrimage series. Here, in
the deep country stillness, away from the roar of the sea, she was able to place sounds,
move within them, examine them as if masses or entities:
Yet sounding, even while, as one paused to look, the stillness seemed complete.
Offering if, free from an urgent errand, one should step out into it, small near and
distant sounds, clear, measuring the height of the sky, making denser the enclosed
stillness of this many-roomed, strangely deserted house.51
‘Hearing is a model of understanding’, Michel Serres wrote in Genesis:
It is still active and deep when our gaze has gone hazy or gone to sleep. It is con-
tinuous while the other senses are intermittent [. . .] I begin to fathom the sound
and the fury, of the world and of history: the noise.52
This ubiquity of hearing, through which understanding emerges, resolves itself into the
satisfactory conclusions of Jane Austen. For Dorothy Richardson, writing during the
early years of the social, political, and artistic convulsions we now call modernism,
the nearest outcome to a satisfactory conclusion was some degree of self-understanding
(appropriate to the century of psychoanalysis).
Richardson is often described as a pioneer of stream-of-consciousness literature.
She found the term asinine, despised it. Passages of seemingly disconnected imagery
are abundant throughout Pilgrimage, though not consistently so. They arise at those
moments when she struggles to articulate sense impressions, feelings, experiences,
through the medium of words. In this respect she was right to despise the term. Her
writing was not an exercise in automatism or glossolalia, more a deep engagement
with phenomena. Living in a boarding house, she revelled in the cacophony of fellow
occupants:
Eighteen Americans. I used to go down to meals just to be in the midst of the noise.
You never heard anything like it in your life. If you listened without trying to dis-
tinguish anything it was marvellous, in the bright sunshine at breakfast. It sent you
up and up, into the sky, the morning stars singing together.53

56 david toop
The effect reminded her of a so-called Dutch concert, in which a group of people try to
sing different songs simultaneously. ‘It’s always spoilt’, she complained:
People begin it prepared not to hear the whole effect [. . .] some laugh because they
are prepared only to laugh, and the unmusical people put their fingers to their ears,
because they can never hear sound, never anything but a tune.54
Jane Austen, an author she admired, also brought innovative stylistic experiment to
the problem of how to set down an authentic account of aural fragmentation or the
overloaded complexity of what Serres (and William Faulkner before him) calls ‘the
sound and the fury’. In Emma, Austen described a strawberry-picking expedition. As
the party leads off, the talking begins:
Mornings definitely the best time – never tired – every sort good – hautboy infinitely
superior – no comparison – the others hardly eatable – hautboys very scarce – Chili
prefered – white wood finest flavour of all – price of strawberries in London –
abundance about Bristol – Maple Grove [. . .] – glaring sun – tired to death – could
bear it no longer – must go and sit in the shade.55
This broken speech, so evocative of group conversation in movement, is both authen-

tic to the experience and experimental (for its time, 1815) in its effect upon the page.
For Richardson, there were precursors with which she would have been familiar.
One was the ‘concentration’ method of Sigmund Freud, through which the patient
would be asked to concentrate on a specific symptom, then urged to recall memories
which might unlock its cause. Freud would press his hand to the patient’s head, assuring
her that the memories would come. But then Frl. Elisabeth intervened. ‘Freud was still
given to urging, pressing, and questioning, which he felt to be hard but necessary work’,
Ernest Jones wrote in his biography of Freud. ‘On one historic occasion, however, the
patient, Frl. Elisabeth, reproved him for interrupting her flow of thought by his ques-
tions. He took the hint, and thus made another step towards free association.’56
Though it lies outside the scope of this essay, the spiritualist practice of passive
writing can also be considered of relevance to the development of impressionistic tech-
niques in literature. ‘Passive, or automatic, writing’, writes Alex Owen in The Dark-
ened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England, ‘involved
simply holding a pen over a blank sheet of paper, clearing the mind of unpleasant
thoughts, and allowing the spirits to guide the hand.’57
Both Austen and Richardson were highly attuned to time, transience, contingency,
and relationality. They wrote of money and property, of course, but these were essen-
tial to survival in a world hostile to their gender and status. The essential subject, or
at least its beginning, was the silence out of which listening forages for sound. ‘You
always think people’s minds are blank when they are silent’, says Miriam during an
argument in Revolving Lights:
It’s just the other way around. Only, of course, there are many kinds of silence. But
the test of absolutely everything in life is the quality of the in-between silences. It’s
only in silence that you can judge of your relationship to a person.58
FORTE becomes piano.

piano/forte 57
Notes
1. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Richmond: Alma Classics, [1814] 2016), 51.
2. Ibid., 215.
3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1809]
1971), 191.
4. Manuel Delanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 1.
5. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II (New York: Columbia University Press,
1987), 69.
6. Jane Austen, Persuasion (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, [1817] 2000), 30.
7. Austen, Mansfield Park, 147.
8. Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen at Home (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2018), 3.
9. Grace Victoria Bentley, The History and Development of Tambour Embroidery, blog of The
Costume Society, https://costumesociety.org.uk/blog/post/the-history-and-development-of-
tambour-embroidery (accessed 5 March 2022).
10. John Wiltshire, The Hidden Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014),
125.
11. Ibid.
12. Austen, Mansfield Park, 72, from a conversation in which never is described as a ‘black
word’.
13. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Dimple Hill (1938)’, in Pilgrimage 4 (London: Virago, 2002), 416.
14. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, [1813] 2007), 50.
15. Jane Austen, Emma (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, [1815] 2000), 298.
16. Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres 1 (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2011), 479–80.
17. Ibid., 493.
18. Ibid., 520.
19. Sebastian Faulks, ‘Introduction’, in Henry Green, Loving, Living, Party Going (London:
Vintage, 2005), 7–14 (11).
20. Henry Green, Nothing (London: Vintage, 2008), 45.
21. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (London: Penguin, [1922] 1992), 31.
22. Wiltshire, Hidden Jane Austen, 162.
23. Robert Walser, Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912–1932 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2005), 39.
24. Austen, Mansfield Park, 16.
25. Arthur Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History (New York: Dover, 1990), 268.
26. Worsley, Jane Austen at Home, 120.
27. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 22.
28. Ibid.
29. Mary Burgan, ‘Heroines at the Piano: Women and Music in Nineteenth-Century Fiction’,
Victorian Studies 30, no. 1 (1986): 51–76 (51).
30. Austen, Emma, 160–1.
31. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Honeycomb (1917)’, in Pilgrimage I (Urbana; Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1979), 416.
32. Alain Corbin, A History of Silence (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 17.
33. Annika J. Lindskog, ‘Dorothy Richardson and the Poetics of Silence’, Pilgrimages: A Journal
of Dorothy Richardson Studies, no. 5 (2012): 7–34 (7).
34. John Rosenberg, Dorothy Richardson: The Genius They Forgot (London: Duckworth,
1973), 11.
35. Dorothy Richardson, ‘The Quakers Past and Present (1914)’, quoted in Lindskog, ‘Dorothy
Richardson’, 10.
36. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Pointed Roofs (1915)’, in Pilgrimage I, 58.
37. Ibid., 47.

58 david toop
38. Ibid., 50.

39. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Interim (1919)’, in Pilgrimage 2 (London: Virago, 2002), 419.
40. Ibid., 418.
41. Ibid., 419.
42. Richardson, ‘Pointed Roofs’, 58.
43. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Deadlock (1921)’, in Pilgrimage 3 (London: Virago, 2002), 133.
44. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Dawn’s Left Hand (1931)’, in Pilgrimage 4, 196.
45. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin, 2000), 68.
46. Dorothy Richardson, ‘The Trap (1925)’, in Pilgrimage 3, 430.
47. Ibid., 500–1.
48. Ibid., 501.
49. Richardson, ‘Deadlock’, 194.
50. Lindskog, ‘Dorothy Richardson’, 34.
51. Richardson, ‘Dimple Hill’, 438.
52. Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1995), 7.
53. Richardson, ‘Deadlock’, 123.
54. Ibid.
55. Austen, Emma, 289–90.
56. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1961) 158.
57. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian
England (London: Virago, 1989), 79.
58. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Revolving Lights (1923)’, in Pilgrimage 3, 389.
Select Bibliography
Austen, Jane, Emma (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, [1815] 2007).
Green, Henry, Nothing (London: Vintage, 2008).
Owen, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England
(London: Virago, 1989).
Richardson, Dorothy, Pilgrimage (London: Virago, 2002).
Serres, Michel, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1995).
Sloterdijk, Peter, Bubbles: Spheres 1 (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2011).
Wiltshire, John, The Hidden Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Woolf, Virginia, Jacob’s Room (London: Penguin, [1922] 1992).

4
Oralities, Literacies, and

the Xenophobic Fallacy
Richard Cullen Rath
I n Eurocentric work undertaken mostly by white scholars, oral cultures have

served largely as a foil for the visual and the literate. In what I will call the classic
theory of orality, the oral mindset exists in an ahistorical state of nature resulting from
the supposed ephemerality of sound and the consequent unreliability of oral histories.
This ephemerality is overstated, based on an understanding of oral culture as indi-
vidualistic and limiting the understanding of sound to speech. In fact, oral cultures
tend to remember things communally rather than individually, and their many error-
checking strategies and productive redundancies make orality as practised rather than
as hypothesised much more robust than its classic theorists admit. As well, acoustic
spaces were designed to sound in particular ways that are as telling of a culture’s his-
tory as any other document.1
Ephemerality, however, is a prerequisite for the classic theories of oral culture
because it erases any meaningful histories and requires approaching the subject of
oral culture through deduction instead. In the complementary theories of literacy and
orality, printed or written knowledge caused a shift in the ratio of the senses away
from hearing and towards more visual ways of perception. Literate modes of thought,
shaped by the reduction of speech to its silent visual representation on the page,
emerged as the figure to the ground of oral culture.2 A key turning point in theories of
modernity is the advent of mass print culture, where literacy affected even those not
able to read through its saturation of the culture. Even the illiterate were versed if not
knowledgeable in the print-based – and thus more visual – ways of perceiving central
to navigating the Western world from roughly the eighteenth century onwards.
Writing from a non-BIPOC frame,3 my book How Early America Sounded stands
as an explicit critique and response to the limits of what I am calling ‘classic orality’ by
setting it within a perceptual-historical frame rather than in a theoretical one. Broad-
ening the scope from the oral to the aural to consider soundways beyond speech can
help reveal a richer context in which to situate specific oralities as well as opening up
new documentation possibilities. By soundways, I mean
the paths, trajectories, transformations, mediations, practices, and techniques – in

short, the ways – that people employ to interpret and express their attitudes and
beliefs about sound. I am not so much concerned with the underlying beliefs, his-
torically inaccessible as they often are, or the concrete expressions themselves so
much as the ways between them.4

60 richard cullen rath
In the book, I treat both white and BIPOC peoples through the same set of method-
ologies. In one notable case, I found that seventeenth-century New England Puritans,
perhaps the most literate population on earth at the time, had a thriving oral culture
throughout the seventeenth century, belying a central tenet of those who argue for a
literate mind as possessing a different cognitive set from oral cultures.5
Classic theorists of orality deduced its qualities from the presumed properties of
sound – its ephemerality, its presence, its local nature. Onto these they projected ways
of thinking – concrete not abstract, interpersonal and subjective rather than detached
objective reason, present-oriented rather than having history. In the leading classic
theory of orality, Walter Ong corrected the seeming cultural chauvinism of such a list
by adopting a stance of cultural relativism (while skipping the inconvenient neces-
sity of differentiating cultures), arguing that thinking primarily through the ears in
an oral culture was different from rather than inferior to thinking more visually in a
print-based one. Nonetheless, this created a homogenous category of people – oral,
ear-based, and pre-literate or illiterate – out of a vast but ever-receding swathe of the
world that did not experience the perceptual, cultural, and historical shift in the ratio
of the senses from ear to eye that believers in the classic theories attributed to the rise
of print and literacy.
Designating a culture as innately ‘oral’ or sound-based has its own long history. It
is an example of what I am calling here the ‘xenophobic fallacy’, in which an author’s
home culture has a specific history, while the rest of the known world is lumped
together as an undifferentiated other sharing a set of common characteristics. Despite
Ong’s halfway cultural relativism, authors writing from this space hold two sets of
beliefs about the sonic other: first, the latter is inferior and developmentally prior, and
second, this homogenous other sounds different from and incomprehensible to – or
at least in need of explication to – the home culture. In making these two assump-
tions, the xenophobic fallacy often frames sonic difference as the absence of reason.
For example, Ong limits oral culture to being capable of concrete thought, but not
the abstraction made possible in literate culture by offloading things that have to be
remembered in oral culture to the printed page.6
Even though Ong sought to counter the belief in orality’s inferiority to more visual
literate modes of thought, that belief inevitably creeps back in over time because of a
process that linguists call ‘taboo, euphemism, and pejoration (TEP)’7 that is central to
understanding the xenophobic fallacy. While Ong’s culturally relativist definitions kept
the taboo topics of racism and colonialism at bay for a moment, eventually they crept
back in to the meaning. Then, the new term, orality, has through its usage become a
euphemism for colonialism and racism again because the taboo topic remained unad-
dressed. At that point, classic orality underwent a process of pejoration, still under
way, as it fell from favour as a way to describe its subject communities – who are
nearly always BIPOC and stand in some relation to some form of colonialism. Another
example would be highway signs locating roadside places equipped for the acts of uri-
nation and defecation. The euphemism ‘facilities’ might hide the taboo topic at first,
but because urination and defecation still happen there, the term ‘facilities’ becomes
offensive to some and has to be replaced by a new term, say ‘rest stop’, where the
euphemism starts out well but again becomes increasingly associated with the taboo
that takes place there to again need replacing in an endless cycle of taboo, euphemism,
and pejoration. In the xenophobic fallacy, the taboo we have been skirting is that this

oralities, literacies, and xenophobic fallacy 61
cultural chauvinism concerning the perception and production of speech sounds might
actually be a form of racism, usually effected against historically colonised peoples.
Discussing Western culture as racist has of course happened voluminously for many
years, but nearly always causes defensiveness and even aggression in some quarters.
Indeed, when I have brought in the taboo subject of racism underlying the long his-
tory of literacy’s other in presenting this work at a talk, several audience members
denounced me as a ‘self-hating white man’ and accused me of rewriting history to
emphasise only the bad. While the xenophobic fallacy is not inherently racist, it can
and has enabled racism to be ported back into the belief systems discussed below, and
bringing the fallacy into the range of hearing, or, if you prefer, into the light, disables
that process.
This essay airs out the TEP cycle to consider an encouraging trend in newer
work that corrects the xenophobic fallacy at its source by approaching BIPOC oral
cultures (note the plural) in their cultural and historical specificities rather than as
one homogenous lump. The approach works just as well on non-BIPOC communi-
ties and belies the notion that literate cultures have no oralities of their own. The
airing out needs to be explicit to prevent it from finding its way back in. Long-term
theoretical advances in race studies and gender and sexuality studies combined with
powerful social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and the
consciousness-raising around missing and murdered Indigenous women and around
LGBTQ+ rights have cut through these taboos, opening up new discursive terrain
to intervene in the millennia-old xenophobic fallacy that feeds the TEP cycle even as
reactionary forces such as the anti-critical race theory movement in the United States
threaten this progress.
The rising generation of BIPOC scholars, along with some older writers, have
taken the idea of oral cultures out of the hands of mostly white theorists. Many BIPOC
authors write about orality as insiders, a very different valence from classic orality
studies. This newer work reveals rich, variable, historically situated phenomena where
previously Eurocentric scholars had derived homogenous universals.
To give just a few examples to get the reader started (there are new ones nearly
daily), Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has made it a point to write first in Gikuyu,
his native language. He developed a theory of orature to account for the differences in
his storytelling from Western styles and what happens to the differences en route from
spoken Gikuyu to print and then to English. More recently, he has expanded orature
into the digital age in his discussion of cyberture, meaning the engagement of orality
with digital networked media. Roger Abrahams, in tune with other Black folklorists,
has long mined the specificities of African American oralities. Black and white sociolin-
guists have also marked the histories of creolised languages, as have Pacific linguists.8
Classic orality’s cousin, oral history, has suffered related problems even while
avoiding some of the former’s methodological flaws. Oral histories, being voice-based,
are intrinsically a function of sound and hearing. In seeking some sort of objectivity
to claim equal footing with paper archives, oral historians controlled as much of the
interview process as possible to keep things consistent. Most transcriptions and record-
ings were in a question and answer format that shaped the results in important ways
and took place with individuals in isolation rather than embedded in a community
context.9 Newer work by insiders to the communities they study has scrapped much of
the semi-scientific trappings in favour of emic (roughly, ‘insider’) approaches.10

Nonetheless, oral history – with its emphasis on particularity and listening – holds
promise as a corrective to the universalism and ahistoricism of classic orality, espe-
cially when undertaken by community members rather than outsiders. Nēpia Mahuika
(Ngāti Porou), critiquing the field from a Māori perspective, calls for an end to the
split between the category of oral history, which tends to shy away from Indigenous
histories, and the category of oral tradition, into which most Indigenous cultures get
placed. Oral history must also make some accommodations, such as privileging voices
from within the community as being authors rather than data (in most versions of oral
history, interviews are data that the author ‘collects’ rather than being authorial voices
from within the community), and a focus on listening in a community context instead
of relying primarily on interviews with individuals.
Two projects from the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Hawai’i
illustrate Indigenous approaches to oral histories. First, the Mānoa North Shore Field
School led by Kānaka Maoli11 anthropologist Ty Tengan situates oral histories from
within communities as much as from outside. He and his students conduct oral inter-
views with kūpuna (elders, ancestors, starting point) in a community setting, with one
of the goals being to give back the knowledge of what they learn to the community
they learn from, in the process strengthening university–community ties and giving
students a sense of what the university aspires to, a Hawaiian place of learning. Sec-
ond, also in line with the university’s aspirations, the Center for Oral History, directed
by Daviana Pomokau McGregor, takes a leading role in the community in finding and
sharing na mo’olelo (stories, histories, with the implication of their being spoken, from
the root mo’o ʻōlelo, ‘succession of talk’).
In North American Indigenous studies, Waziyatawin Angela Wilson (Dakota)
wrote an oral history in both Dakota and English, doing the important work of docu-
menting the sounds of her community’s endangered language, accompanied by a series
of glosses to partially explain the material in context to non-Dakota readers. Besides
providing a way in for outsiders to at least a partial understanding of Dakota processes
– including the sounds of its language – the book serves as a media-shifted archive of
a specific Dakota community’s history and culture through the sounds of their voices.
Melissa K. Nelson (Anishinaabe/Cree/Métis (Turtle Mountain Chippewa)) lays out
part of the oral histories of Anishinaabe and other Indigenous women who have other-
than-human relations (including but not limited to sexual relations) with elements of
their environments from sticks to bears to the wind to the stars. These stories come to
her as sound and listening in its cultural context that is at its best still mostly irreduc-
ible to print and transcription. She argues that ‘published oral literature is contradic-
tory, at best. These “postcolonial literatures” have been spoken, performed, recorded,
translated, transcribed, published, interpreted, forgotten, reinterpreted, remembered,
dismembered, misinterpreted, and re-written many times in different contexts and
times. They are fragments of orality’, which she ‘re-presents’ as ‘messy storyscapes’
she understands in the medium of sound first rather than neatly packaged as oral
traditions. This is a nice inversion of the usual claim that orality is fragmentary and
unreliable rather than print.12
Dylan Robinson, a xwélmexw writer of Stó:lō descent, explains the connection
between sound studies and oral history, musical practice, and legal discourse as a
function of what he calls ‘hungry listening’ and the settler practice of ‘inclusionary’
collaboration with Indigenous people. ‘Hungry’ is drawn from the Halq’eméylem (the

xwélmexw language) word for ‘settlers’ and is drawn from their first direct contact
with Stó:lō people (smallpox had preceded them), when they appeared as physically
starving and hungry for gold, too. Thus, ‘hungry’ means ‘a settler’s starving orienta-
tion’. Purposely discordant, the second word is drawn from the Halq’eméylem word
roughly translated as listening, but indicating the Stó:lō people’s soundways, markedly
different from Western ones, as he demonstrates throughout the book. ‘Listening’ is
uncomfortably and purposively juxtaposed with ‘hungry’ to indicate that the ‘posi-
tionality of listening’ does not reduce settler logics to ‘white’, since the author asserts
that his stance is a hybrid of both the ‘hungry’ and the ‘listening’ side of the equation.13
More than an epistemic metaphor, Indigenous soundways structure speaking and
listening not from outside the Western gaze but from inside what Peg Rawes calls
the ‘sonic envelope’ of hungry listening. The trouble with much oral history is that
while the voice may be that of the interviewees, the sonic grammar or envelope of
their speech remains within the traditional methodology of oral history. Although
mostly concerned with the relations between Indigenous and classical Western musics,
Robinson’s discussion of what he calls ‘inclusionary’ sonic collaboration is applicable
to the shift that Mahuika says is necessary to bring classic orality and classic oral
histories together into a methodology that BIPOC scholars can use to document their
own soundways instead of being studied by outsiders. In contrast, Robinson’s idea
of inclusionary collaboration is when classical composers working with Indigenous
collaborators strive to include an Indigenous voice or voices but continue to structure
their compositions in a Western musical grammar. Instead, Mahuika advocates having
insiders structure orality’s sounds, and the ways they shape Indigenous oral histories
forms the ‘sonic envelope’ of the hybrid orality/oral history.14
Bringing hungry listening outside the realm of Indigenous North America, the WPA
Slave Narratives – which are often cited as first-person sources – are actually transcrip-
tions made by anthropologists, folklorists, and other fieldworkers which then went
through further editing, mostly by white scholars far upstream from the actual sounds.
Were the depictions of Black English the actual sounds of the speakers? Or merely the
fulfilment of the fieldworkers’ and their supervisors’ expectations? Lori Ann Garner
approaches the question through a comparison of interviews collected by African
American fieldworkers – as was the case for most of Florida – with those collected by
white workers. The Florida interviews reveal fewer ‘dees and dems’ while holding truer
to the grammatical patterns of Black vernaculars. The transcriptions in these cases were
no different from a written representation of a white southerner saying ‘floor’ with the /
R/ left unsounded in speech, then writing the ‘r’ when spelling it. Black interviewers
heard the white-expected ‘dees’ and ‘dems’ as ‘these’ and ‘them’. Some scholars con-
sider the ex-slave narratives to be all but useless for discovering much about the sounds
of the dialects the formerly enslaved interviewees spoke regardless of their other histori-
cal value, but Garner shows the value of an insider approach even on these sonically
unreliable written sources.15
The classic theory of orality seems irredeemable on its own. Why revisit a discarded
theory, then? For three reasons: first, the underlying problem that begat it – the xeno-
phobic fallacy – is alive and well. Second, these underlying principles can be traced
through Western high culture at least as far back as the founding era of the Greek city-
states. And third, the whiteness of sound studies has rightfully come under fire during
the past few years.16 The rest of this essay is in three parts. First is a section on the

development of orality as a concept. The second part explains how the xenophobic fal-
lacy came to poison what was meant as a corrective to the idea of culturally relativistic
‘primitive’ societies. The third part traces the sonic history of the xenophobic fallacy
from its origins in ancient Greece through to the present.
Orality and Consciousness

Julian Jaynes’s 1976 The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind provides an ideal place to begin despite not being the usual first suspect in a
discussion of orality. Jaynes was a cognitive scientist, not a literary theorist, anthro-
pologist, or historian, and he developed his theory after the introduction of the main
theories of orality discussed below. He did so largely in isolation, neither citing nor
being cited by the others. But in setting out his case, he makes clear the stakes and the
theoretical moves that often stay below the surface in the other accounts.
Jaynes proposed that ancient humans were not conscious in the way that we are
today.17 Consciousness as we experience it now, he claimed, is a function of the left side
of the brain, the rational, logical, speech-producing side, as opposed to the intuitive,
creative, speech-comprehending right side. Even today, everyday judgement, learn-
ing, and performing of tasks proceeds for the most part with little intervention of the
conscious mind, but we are – well – unconscious of the parts outside, so consciousness
has played a misleadingly great role in thinking about all these issues. Nonetheless,
consciousness does play an important part in what makes us human today, and it was
a cultural-historical development, according to Jaynes, not an evolutionary one.
He asserted that the Greeks of the second millennium bce drew much more on the
right side of the brain, which they experienced as voices giving them instructions to
execute. The voices would be classified as auditory hallucinations today because they
were not rooted in the self. Jaynes thought that the ancient Greeks and others had
no conscious self to which to attach the voices. They were bicameral, meaning that
they drew on both sides of their brain in dealing with the things that today we resort
to the left hemisphere for, which in the theories of 1970s cognitive science controlled
language, self, and consciousness.
He found evidence for the older way of being in the Iliad, a tale told for hundreds
if not thousands of years before being written down sometime in the eighth century
bce. The epic recounts the events of the Trojan War. In the poem, warriors and kings
hear and follow the instructions of different gods. Jaynes argued that the lexicon of
consciousness is curiously absent, along with intent and volition. When faced with a
difficult situation, the gods tell X to do something and it is done, much like the sub-
ject and verb of a sentence determine the fate of the object. Nothing resembling our
process of deliberation or agency, both hallmarks of modern consciousness, appears to
take place, giving the Iliad an odd and slightly surreal or unbelievable feel to present-
day readers.
In contrast, the Odyssey, according to Jaynes, documents the breakdown of the
bicameral mind resulting in the dominance of the left hemisphere we know today as
consciousness emerging. The epic tells the story of Odysseus’ return home from the
Trojan War, a travail of ten years during which he faces a disrupted and unfamiliar world
in which the gods became absent characters to think about and contend with rather
than immanent voices to blindly obey. The Bronze Age in Europe was tumultuous,

and old ways of navigating the world failed to work any longer. People became
unmoored from their habitual social mores and were cast adrift. The quest for a new
way of being in the world runs as a theme throughout the story as an echo of the historic
task of creating consciousness that the Greeks accomplished as the first millennium bce
proceeded, in Jaynes’s theory.
For Jaynes, Odysseus’ journey is an allegory for the process of coming to conscious-
ness, with the left brain colonising the voices of the gods/right brain and then inter-
nalising them as a part of the emerging self. Consciousness, he argued, is a linguistic
metaphor, like a map, built up from representations of the world which, unlike in the
Iliad, he finds throughout the Odyssey. He thought that we can still find the remains
of the older way of thinking in untouched primitive societies (which, amusingly, we
could not know of without ‘touching’ them) and the struggles of schizophrenics. Crit-
ics found the idea of unconscious humans difficult to grasp, but precisely this incred-
ibility helps us. The move Jaynes made from a prior condition (without feature X of
modernity) to a more familiar subsequent condition (with X) is a hallmark of classic
orality theories. Jaynes has many detractors, and the fate of the theory, which is not
the point here, remains open.18
Historians of the senses, and particularly of hearing, might be able to provide a way
of salvaging the explanatory possibilities of the voices of the gods while jettisoning the
tendentious developmental model of consciousness implicit in Jaynes. The Greeks of
the Iliad may have had a different ratio of the senses, privileging hearing things in the
mind’s ear in much the same way we now privilege seeing things in the mind’s eye.
Rather than (visual) lines of thought, the Greeks may have conceived their worlds –
quite consciously – as more of a 360 degree field of surrounding sounds. This is a
difference in sensory modality, not consciousness. Much as we imagine visible things
outside ourselves, they heard imaginary sounds as coming from outside themselves.19
Once we attend to sense ratios, placing the visual at the apex of consciousness becomes
merely one historical possibility among several. Different modes of consciousness still
need explaining, perhaps even more so, but the explanations can be made by stretching
out and exercising our modes of consciousness rather than theorising, as Jaynes did,
their absence.
Once we return from the tangled briers of consciousness, the territory looks more
familiar. Since the groundbreaking work of Milman Parry in the 1930s and his student
Albert Lord’s 1960 The Singer of Tales, scholars have considered the formulation and
transmission of ancient Greek poetry through the lens of orality.20 Parry and Lord
argued that Homer, or some aggregate of writers that we have come to assemble under
his name, recorded oral strategies of construction and performance as part and parcel
of the tales. Anyone who has ever had a song stuck in their head knows the power of
these sonic strategies in aiding memory. In societies where writing was not widespread,
these methods were all the more important as one of the main conduits for everyday
people to learn and engage with socially significant information.
The oral strategies of singers and storytellers acted as recipes, formulas which made
possible what seem to modern people to be great feats of memory. Close examination
of the Homeric epics reveals the use of rhyme, rhythm, repetition, and melody. In
effect, the ancient Greek singer of tales would spontaneously create the actual words
he sang by taking a theme and repeating short metrical expository rhymes to a stock
remembered melody. The actual phrases came, like the melodies, from a common

memorised pool. Themes would be repetitively varied and expanded upon to tell the
story. In this view, the epics of Homer are just one particular telling which through the
power of writing has come to be canonical.
The epics had most likely been in circulation for centuries before being transcribed.
The version that has come down to us is only a single instance, so Parry and Lord could
not rely upon the texts alone to make their case for their orality. They undertook exten-
sive fieldwork in Bosnia, interviewing the people they thought were the ‘purest’ progeni-
tors of the ancient songs. What they uncovered was a system of formulaic improvisation
that recreated the stories anew each time while retaining the gist. The result was that
the same story could be told again and again, varied in the details and adjusted for the
context of the telling. The notion of purity that Lord and Parry attributed to the Bos-
nian singers is ahistorical, relying on a structuralist model of branching and corruption
from an apocryphal pristine original. Scholars from the late nineteenth century through
the post-structuralists criticised this family tree genealogical approach to language and
culture. They argue instead for a wave model (nineteenth century) or a rhizomatic one
(post-structuralist) that, much like real families, intermix and intersperse constantly from
multiple origins.21 The family tree model is, however, what buys them a link between the
orality of the Homeric epics and that of twentieth-century Bosnian folk singers.
During the same time period that Lord was refining and extending Parry’s ideas,
Eric Havelock argued for a broader evidential base for ancient Greek orality in his
1963 Preface to Plato.22 He makes the case that education before the advent of literacy
was the province of the poets, who used the methods outlined by Parry and Lord to
teach. According to Havelock, learning through oral poetry led to something akin to a
different consciousness, not altogether distant from Jaynes’s ideas that followed later.
Havelock turns to Plato, who thought that poetic learning seduced students with its
rhythms and repetitions and led to a herd mentality: people followed the poets because
they sounded good. For Plato, poetic teaching was dangerous demagoguery that needed
to be expelled from both education and government, replaced by logic and rational
thought.23 Socrates, in a discussion with Phaedrus that Plato reconstructed, ripped into
the practice of writing, which Plato preferred to poetry. Socrates told Plato the story
of the ancient Egyptian god Theuth’s invention of writing. Theuth showed writing to
another god, Ammon, and recommended giving it to the people. ‘“This invention,
O [divine] king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their
memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”’ Ammon,
presumably reflecting Socrates’ position on the matter, responded:
this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use
it because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced
by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of
their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of
reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom,
for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know
many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with,
since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
Writing, commented Socrates, was only useful for reminding the reader of something
already known. He told Phaedrus that it could defend itself no better than a painting
could because it is fixed in place.24

The visual nature (‘like a painting’) of writing, in other words, stopped the work-
ings of experience, time, and relationships intrinsic to sounded speech and froze them
in place unnaturally in a way that sounded language did not, and indeed could not.
Socrates concluded that the written word was the illegitimate offspring – and the spo-
ken word the legitimate heir – of language and wisdom. A learned speaker would
know when to speak and when to remain silent, and could defend ideas and make
whatever point needed to be made in the best way to suit the context. For Socrates,
and presumably the ancient Greek poets, the sound form of words was truly the sound
form, but we must not lose the irony of his thoughts coming to us only through the
writings of Plato.
Orality and Literacy

What happens if we generalise from Parry’s, Lord’s, and Havelock’s ideas? The result,
which achieved currency in the 1960s and beyond, is the classic theory of orality intro-
duced above. Orality provides the necessary precedent that makes hypotheses about
literacy work. The literacy hypothesis deduces cognitive characteristics of orality dis-
guised as historical observations. It reflects a hypothetical modern/pre-modern split that
has been a part of the Western intellectual tradition for centuries and has repeatedly
come under fire for its racist assumptions only to return cloaked in a new terminology.
In 1962, Marshall McLuhan argued that Europeans and, later, European Americans
increasingly came to a hypervisual way of thinking, first as a result of writing technolo-
gies and later as a result of print. In effect, he took the findings of Parry and Lord and
projected them onto literacy by paying attention to how writing and print affected what
McLuhan had earlier labelled the ‘sense ratios’ of sound to vision. By dint of us taking
in much of the world serially through our eyes using a small set of infinitely repeatable
and reusable characters (as I presume you are doing now), McLuhan derived Western
science, industry, arts, philosophy, and politics as predictable if not inevitable outcomes
of literacy.25
In 1963 anthropologist Jack Goody and literary critic Ian Watt took the first foray
into generalising from literacy to a teleological pre-literate set of ‘oral’ cognitive capac-
ities. They drew on scholarly precedents strikingly similar to McLuhan’s, though with-
out reference to the latter’s recently published Gutenberg Galaxy. They combined a
discussion of orality and literacy among the Greeks with two things: first, a discussion
of how forms of media could have the ability to restructure consciousness, and second,
the results of Goody’s fieldwork with the supposedly oral culture of the Vai people
of Northern Ghana. Goody would later expand that fieldwork into two influential
and highly contested books.26 Goody’s critics pointed to other fieldwork with the Vai
people that uncovered all the cognitive strategies which Goody argued they lacked,
from list-making to abstract thought, concluding that while there were differences in
the ways oral and literate people went about tasks, they do not entail any cognitive
restructuring.27
A few years after Goody and Watt’s article, literary critic Walter Ong, a student
of McLuhan’s, undertook the challenge of generalising the findings of Lord to all cul-
tures where an absence of literacy prevailed and extending the range of the theory by
deducing features of the oral mind from the properties of sound itself and then imag-
ining it as a foil for some quality ascribed to literate minds: oral cultures are additive
in the sense of accreting meaning through addition, as opposed to the neatly nested

subordination of written thought epitomised by the writers’ outline. Ong’s conception

of orality is aggregative rather than analytic, so stock phrases – he uses ‘the brave sol-
dier’ and ‘the beautiful princess’ – rather than single words. He contrasts it with the
analytic qualities of literate culture. Ong’s orality uses redundancy as reinforcement,
and it is conservative rather than innovative, placing a value on keeping things the
same because of having no written records, only an individual’s (not a community’s)
memory to rely on. And so the list goes on to make a total of nine derivations of orality
from the qualities of cognition, sound, and hearing. In a scathing critique, Jonathan
Sterne called Ong’s comparison of so-called oral cultures to so-called visual ones ‘the
audiovisual litany’. Sterne uses the phrase to underscore Ong’s theological background
as a Catholic priest doing something akin to creating a liturgy to believe in, as opposed
to Ong’s stated goal of deducing cognitively equivalent categories.28 Sterne’s essay has
become somewhat of a stock response to any mention of classic orality, but its reifica-
tion obscures another problem than crypto-Catholicism, namely the way the xeno-
phobic fallacy creates a homogenous category of oral culture by failing to differentiate
any cultures beyond his own with everything else transmogrified into a category rather
than a vast pool of diversity, difference, and cultural and historical specificity.
The Xenophobic Fallacy

The cultural chauvinism of classic orality has a long history and a much broader scope
than this or that medium combined with the xenophobic fallacy. It stretches back at
least to the Greeks and got honed by a fetish for science and a Cold War love of devel-
opmental, evolutionary models that served to directly compete with Marxism’s own
developmental model.29 Tracing that genealogy is important to understanding oral
culture as a historical category. Our ultimate goal here is not to dismiss the historical
West or the global North, but to reveal the xenophobic fallacy that allows racism’s
and colonialism’s ancestors to keep returning as the result of the xenophobic fallacy.
Only once we address the fallacy can we pursue historically grounded understandings
of oralities.
Western scholarship has long marked its others: first as ‘barbarian’, then ‘savage’,
then ‘primitive’, then ‘oral’ and its cousin, ‘developing’. Each of these terms started
out as a neutral label for outsiders, but because of a categorical error built into the
definition – the xenophobic fallacy – each gradually folded all sorts of prejudices into
its successor until it too had to be replaced. We find this binary of insider/outsider at
least back to the Athenian notion of ‘barbarian’. It first occurs in the Iliad. There, the
Athenian Greek word barbarophonos meant ‘rough voiced’. It referred at first to the
language of the Carians, who allied with the Trojans against the Athenians in the Tro-
jan War. It meant approximately ‘the people whose speech sounded like “bar bar bar”’
to the Athenians. The geographer Strabo (64/63 bce–c. 24 ce) argued that the usage
‘was at first uttered onomatopoeically in reference to people who enunciated [Greek]
words only with difficulty and talked harshly and raucously’.30 The earliest reference
to barbarians that I have found comes from the same period that Jaynes and Havelock
mark as a transformative period in the Greek thought. During this time, the meaning
of ‘barbarian’ broadened to become a reference to any non-Greek. As we defined the
xenophobic fallacy, there were two categories, ‘Greeks’ and ‘Everyone Else’.31

Plato, writing in the historical voice of the Stranger of Elea, a follower of Parmenides
(who was active early in the fifth century bce), pointed out the error in the Greek usage
of ‘barbarian’ that is at the heart of the xenophobic fallacy:
It was very much as if, in undertaking to divide the human race into two parts,
one should make the division as most people in this country do; they separate the
Hellenic race from all the rest as one and to all the other races, which are countless
in number and have no relation in blood or language to one another, they give the
single name ‘barbarian’; then, because of this single name, they think it is a single
species.32
In much the same way, the classic theories of orality take literacy, and by implication,
the Western intellectual tradition, as one exceptional category with a civilisation and a
history, and everyone else is elided into orality.
Aristotle wrote that Greek male citizens, by dint of their reasoned speaking (logos),
became the only political animal. Hearing made logos possible, ‘for rational discourse
is a cause of instruction in virtue of its being audible’. Other animals, as well as some
people, had ‘mere voice’ as one translation puts it, or ‘bare voice’, a phrase that has
gained considerable theoretical currency. The word for bare voice, phoné, should look
familiar from our rough-voiced (barbarophonos) Carians of the Iliad. Logos sat at the
conjuncture of voice and language, translatable as both speech and reason. According
to Aristotle, free Greek male citizens alone possessed the faculty of logos. In contrast,
phoné was the sound without real language or reason. Some dependent people, like
women, slaves, or barbarians, were able to apprehend logos, but they did not possess
it. Theirs was bare voice, more a sonic expression of feeling than reasoned articulation,
but with comprehension enough, conveniently for the citizen men, to take instructions.
Similarly, calling people barbarians placed them outside of logos and denied them the
capacity for reasoned speech, locating barbarians in the xenophobic ‘everyone else’
category.33 As the Romans rose and conquered Greece and much more, ‘barbarian’
changed its scope again, coming to mean anyone not Greek or Roman. This definition,
meant to take in all that was uncivilised, also began to falter when it became obvious
that many of the barbarians within the Roman Empire were as ‘civilised’ as the Greeks
and Romans. The rise of Christianity and the fall of Rome further complicated mat-
ters, and the terms ‘heathen’ and ‘infidel’ came into widespread usage to distinguish
Christians from the ‘everyone else’ category.34
Another word, silvātĭcus – meaning ‘of or belonging to the woods’, with the con-
notation of wildness evolving into it – began to take hold to solve the insider/outsider
problem. The barbarians of previous generations became ‘people of the forest’. The
forest was an uncultivated place, and culture, cultivation, and civilisation were all
caught up in one another. Silva, the root of the word, implied ‘a crowd, mass, abun-
dance’. As the idea spread throughout the Christian world, it shifted in spelling and
meaning, so that by the fourteenth century, Middle English had the word ‘savage’.
When referring to land, it meant uncultivated, to animals, not domesticated, and to
people, uncivilised. Savage people were fearless and violent, perhaps reckless, frenzied,
or even mad, and most of all, not Christian, thus again reinserting the xenophobic fal-
lacy into Christianity’s understanding of anyone outside the realm.35

As in barbarism, sound played a central role in determining who was civil and who
was savage, falling out along the xenophobic category of ‘us’ and ‘everyone else’ in
much the same way as the Greeks distinguished logos and phoné. Seventeenth-century
New England Puritans understood themselves to have landed in a ‘howling wilder-
ness’.36 What was a wilderness that it howled? With twentieth-century notions of wil-
derness as a place devoid of people, the reader may first think of wolves, wind, and
storms, but the Puritan notion was different. In part because they had not yet displaced
them – the dispossession being a central and necessary component of creating today’s
artificial wilderness spaces and their imagined soundscapes – the Puritan wilderness
was teeming with human life. In short, what howled in the Puritan wilderness were
those they considered savage, the Indigenous peoples whose land they were invading.
A note on wilderness opens up the meaning of howling wilderness and connects it
to the ideas of savagery and sound once it is associated with the howling part of the
stock phrase. The wilderness was a savage place outside of belonging, where one was
no longer properly possessed by Puritan Christianity and its God. The distinctions of
social class and good and evil on which Puritan society depended for order fell away
in the wilderness. It was a place where will – possibly the root of the word – replaced
this order. It belonged to wild savages, who, not under the sway of the Puritan God,
were by definition evil and of the devil. Far from realising the violence of their own
incursions, English settlers across Eastern North America understood themselves as
besieged by the wild and savage forces enveloping them. Like weeds on the edge of
a cultured field, the wild was forever invading them rather than vice versa. To be
clear, this self and other perception allowed settlers to justify their own violence: the
wilderness served as a great screen (pardon the anachronistic metaphor) onto which
they could project their own violence and give themselves a terrible and violence-
reinforcing fright by attributing it to the Indigenous peoples whose land they were on.
The wilderness howled for New England Puritans and other English settlers in many
ways. Native Americans, construed as ‘hellish fiends’, howled in the poet Michael
Wigglesworth’s imagination. Serving as a Narragansett captive during Metacom’s War,
Puritan Mary Rowlandson spoke of the Narragansetts as ‘a company of hell-hounds’
she described primarily through their non-linguistic (to her) sounds of ‘roaring, singing
and dancing, and yelling’ that evoked ‘the howlings and Torments of the pitt beneath’.
Travelling Narragansett parties met each other on the trails with ‘an outrageous roar-
ing and hooping’. When her master’s child died away, mourners came not to grieve
with the mother, but to ‘howl with her’. Not to make xenophobia a purely white phe-
nomenon, Recollect Missionary Chrestien Le Clerq reported that Micmac people of
eastern Canada thought the French sounded like ducks and geese to them since they
all talked over one another, unlike the Micmac emphasis on listening and turn-taking.
Savages were the opposite of civil during the age of exploration and the Enlighten-
ment. Even the noble savages of Montesquieu and Rousseau were no more than the
negative definitions of the worst of civilisation. The point is not that savages were val-
ued as good or bad, but that because of the xenophobic fallacy, they served as a foil for
the civil rather than carrying any meaning of their own. This should be familiar since
it is the same figure/ground dynamic that inserts the xenophobic fallacy into the classic
theories of orality and literacy. Actual explorers tended to speak of Native Americans
in more specific terms. John Smith, for example, referred to the Powhatan Indians as
‘savages’ but would go beyond generalisations to provide specific observations about

particular peoples (along with massive fabulations in other places, lest we mislabel
him as a reliable source). Nonetheless, explorers and their contemporary pundits both
called Native Americans ‘savages’ far more than they used ‘Indian’ or the Indigenous
names. Although actual experience with Indigenous peoples complicated the picture,
exploration, Christianity, an insatiable drive for wealth, and a superiority complex all
went together in sounding the Indigenous people of the Americas and elsewhere as
savage, leaving opportunities for colonialism and exploitation rife as well as righteous.
Critics of this reading of the term ‘savage’ have argued that it is anachronistic to
impute the negative values (the taboos of the TEP cycle) since it just meant ‘people of
the forest’, but this misses the slow tidal shifts in TEP processes.37 ‘Savage’ may have
begun as a somewhat neutral way of referring to forest people, but it picked up its nega-
tive connotations from the failure to examine the xenophobic fallacy, pushing ‘savage’
from euphemism to pejorative over time. In the Virginia colony, a tenuous proposition
for its first few decades, our unreliable reliable narrator John Smith described Pow-
hatan ceremonies as ‘howling devotions’ made by ‘devils’. William Strachey, another
early Virginia leader, only heard ‘shouting, howling and stamping their feet’ in a simi-
lar ceremony he witnessed. Our ubiquitous ‘hello’, a linguistic artefact of telephony,
meant a loud greeting in the wilderness rather than the polite answer to a point-to-
point audio signal. In a sort of folk etymological assemblage, seventeenth-century Eng-
lish usage remixed hello with howling and hollering, and perhaps hailing, as when
Smith was about to be captured by the Powhatan war leader Opechancanough and he
heard a ‘halloing of Indians’.
Back in New England, where second- and third-generation Puritan missionaries
experimented with turning Indigenous converts into subservient second-class worship-
ers, minister John Eliot collaborated on a Massachusetts-language Bible translation
with the English- and Massachusetts-speaking Sassamon. Eliot reduced his vital col-
laborator to ‘Printer John’ on the title page in a move both civilising – by dint of the
Christian name – and silencing – by dint of the reduction of Massachusetts speech to
print and having Sassamon occupy that role as ‘printer John’. Eliot’s phonetic scheme
for pronouncing the language relied on a similar reduction, this time of the sounds of
Massachusetts to Latin orthography. This even though the Massachusetts language
had a number of phonemes that simply do not exist in the European languages Eliot
knew. This sort of micro-colonial practice of subsuming the sounds of one language
into the Procrustean bed of another, and then lopping off all the sounds which did not
fit, recalls Robinson’s idea of inclusionary collaboration, where Western music incor-
porates rather than converses with the Indigenous music of collaborators.
Racism steeped in cultural chauvinism sat at the root of TEP as barbarism devel-
oped into savagery. It took a darker and more visual turn in the nineteenth century,
as the xenophobic fallacy got folded into biological racism and some of the worst of
European and US colonial endeavours. Although there is not much of a sonic element
(perhaps future research can find it), a quick review is necessary to set up the return
of the ear with the introduction of classic orality as the corrective. Here, the histori-
cally conscious self was the ‘Caucasian’ race and the semi-homogenous others were
the ‘Negroid’ and ‘Mongoloid’ races. One set of theories made a hard distinction
between the capacities of the races, like Aristotle’s differentiation of logos and phoné,
while a second took a developmental approach, arguing that the non-white races
were simply at an earlier stage of development than the ‘Caucasian’ race.38 This latter

version provides a handy moral justification for colonisation and proselytism, and its
heirs persist in developmental models today.
In the twentieth century, two new strands of anthropology, pioneered in the United
States by Franz Boas and his students, and in Europe by the structuralist movement,
adopted a stance – at first partially and with much hedging – of the newly minted idea
of cultural relativism, meaning that cultures were all different but equally valuable,
and they needed to be studied in their specifics through research in the field. As part
of this set of innovations, the term ‘savage’ was retired because of its by-then-obvious
racism. Here we seem to have a hint of the cultural if not historical specificity recent
BIPOC scholarship has established as necessary to understand orality, although the
approach was still decidedly etic, or outsider-led. In place of ‘savage’, the anthropolo-
gists used the more-neutral-at-first notion of ‘primitive’ to evacuate the racism from
the older term. Both European and US anthropologists understood history as faintly
audible and receding into silence in so-called primitive societies, so they sought to
record elders first and capture hints of what their critics have called the golden past.
These faint echoes of the past were offset by a deep dive – in the structuralist case,
quite literally – into the idea of deep structure. What the structuralists found was a
sort of universal ‘primitive mind’ which manifested in countless and varied present-
day expressions. Thus, anthropologists ported the xenophobic fallacy back in, covered
over by a patina of cultural relativism.39
The rise of fieldwork-based anthropology incorporated the new sound recording
technologies of the early twentieth century to capture the voices of the newly minted
others, ‘primitive’ people. These early recordings were utterly decontextualised. The
machines required a set if not yet a studio to make successful recordings. A speaker
would have to converse with the attached recording horn (later the microphone) in
an artificially quiet isolated setting.40 This may have been part of the origins of oral
history’s tendency to pull interviewees out of their community context and record
them alone.
Once racism had been imported into the idea of the primitive by way of the xeno-
phobic fallacy, it required a new euphemism, which brings us back to Ong’s notion
of orality. Ong thought of his formulation as emancipating orality from the cultural
baggage that had attached itself to ‘primitive’ in the same way that ‘primitive’ had
distanced itself from ‘savage’. Changing the name to orality but leaving the xenopho-
bic fallacy intact means that the taboos of racism and colonialism will yet again find
their way into whatever the new euphemism is unless the taboos of the TEP process
are directly and uncomfortably confronted, as happened in the cases of classic orality,
savagery, and barbarism before.
Conclusion
In fact, there are no such ‘oral’ people as McLuhan, Ong, and Goody posit. This does
not mean there is no such thing as orality. What it means is that there are as many
oralities as there are peoples. As discussed at the beginning, oralities must be carefully
situated in their historical and cultural contexts. And the xenophobic fallacy must be
recognised as an uncomfortably still-present practice that keeps reimporting racism
and colonialism into the new terms through the TEP process. The xenophobic process

makes this happen through its tendency towards reducing heterogeneous cultures into
a single homogenous other. This has led to some confusion, as many white scholars
still think of oral culture as a unified thing with a universal set of qualities. Thus, white
theorists can speak of the orality while at the same time scholars from within cultures
that have substantial and specific histories use the same term, and the two are able to
speak past each other with neither realising they are speaking and meaning different
things. Simply criticising oral culture without addressing the xenophobic fallacy can
quickly lead to conflict and misunderstanding.
Nor are oralities and literacies (for they also are plural) mutually exclusive. Oralities
are alive and well, not only in BIPOC cultures and communities, but in the white
Western world. Standard English pronunciation still pulls a great weight in the United
States as does Received Pronunciation in Great Britain. The sounds of these dialects
become the unmarked case, considered as just ‘English’ rather than an orality com-
bined with global power relations. In another example, a situated orality is emerging
in a distinctive form in gaming. Players speak to each other over an audio channel as
part of gameplay since their hands and eyes are too busy to type or read. The speech
patterns are informal but reflect white, straight, male, and cis-gendered as a tenuous
norm with strong emotional responses evoked if, for example, a woman or a non-
native speaker out themselves through their voices. These spaces are still working out
their protocols but racism, sexism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, and homophobia
are all rampant and on the surface. As they become suppressed into taboos, we can
expect the TEP process to start its cycle. It will be interesting to listen for whether the
xenophobic fallacy creeps in to this new configuration of orality when the world is
increasingly globally connected as it is in the gaming universe.
Orality remains alive and well despite the onslaught of print and literacy, and,
being part of the human condition, it is not limited to this culture but not that one
(with the possible exception of the deaf community). The purpose of this critical essay
is to historically situate the myriad oralities in place and time to jettison the xenopho-
bic fallacy, not to besmirch the Western intellectual tradition but to take part in the
hard work of continuing to decolonise the academy.41 Once that process is engaged, it
becomes clear that classic orality as it is conceived in the Western intellectual tradition
is a flawed concept and that Europeans and their American descendants have their
own thriving oral cultures too. The classic theories of orality asserted that the need
for deduction rather than evidence derives from the ephemerality of sound and speech.
Historical work on sound studies belies this, as does the newer scholarship on oral-
ity by BIPOC authors working from within cultures rather than seeking to penetrate
them. Without overtly addressing the xenophobic fallacy, the taboo items – in our dis-
cussion, mostly racism, colonialism, and their ancestors – will creep back in. Centring
the work of BIPOC authors goes a long way towards correcting it, but to take hold
and grow, white scholars and their kin will need to confront and reject the racism that
the xenophobic fallacy continually and unconsciously reintroduces through the TEP
process. This goes well beyond rejecting particular terms such as orality or civilisation
to attend to the underlying pattern of lazily constructing an all-encompassing other as
a coherent category. The belief in a singular literacy and a singular orality is hubris:
exceptionalism that needs to be checked and replaced with myriad oral and literate
cultures set in their own contexts and histories.

Notes
1. Richard Cullen Rath, ‘Hearing American History’, The Journal of American History 95,
no. 2 (2008): 417–31.
2. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2012).
3. The term ‘BIPOC’, which seems to have been coined on Twitter in 2013 but has come
into prevalence more recently, since about 2019, stands for ‘Black, Indigenous, and People
of Colo[u]r’. See Sandra E. Garcia, ‘Where Did BIPOC Come From?’, New York Times,
17 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-bipoc.html. The term is meant as
a unifying umbrella for anti-racist, self-determination, and decolonising work that is set
on its own terms rather than in reference to the oppression that the term is deployed to
oppose. In contrast to ‘non-white’, BIPOC distinguishes the component groups rather than
defining them by a lack or absence. If one writes about a particular group, South Asians,
African Americans (although there is some criticism that this term should be replaced by
‘Black people’), or Diné (Navaho), then the more specific term is used instead. There is a
mistaken belief that the coordinating conjunction ‘and’ grammatically subordinates People
of Colour to the experiences of Black and Indigenous people. This holds within some
anti-racist work as well as among advocates of more traditional terminology. For a start-
ing point, see the Wikipedia entry for BIPOC within the definition of ‘People of Colour’
at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color#BIPOC_2. In a coordinate clause, which
BIPOC is, all the components are equal. To make the claim of inequality hold any sway, the
phrase would need to be ‘Black and Indigenous, and (then) People of Colour’. Time will tell
whether usage overcomes grammar in privileging the experiences of Black and Indigenous
people over other People of Colour. Germane to this essay, BIPOC is a set of umbrella
terms comprising an umbrella term. Except when using it as a unifying term in decolonial,
antiracist, and self-determination solidarity work, the most specific term that a people call
themselves is preferred to the umbrella term: e.g., it is preferable to write ‘Dakota’ when
speaking of Dakota people rather than ‘Sioux’ (imposed name), or Native American, or
even the currently preferred umbrella term, ‘Indigenous’. This somewhat future-proofs
one’s terminology, as specific names age much more gracefully than umbrella terms.
4. Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2.
5. Ibid., 3.
6. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London; New York:
Methuen, 1982), 48–56.
7. John Algeo and Carmen A. Butcher, The Origins and Development of the English Language
(Boston: Cengage Learning, 2013), 235.
8. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Litera-
ture (London; Portsmouth: J. Currey; Heinemann, 1986) (orature); Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o,
Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (New York: Columbia University Press,
2012) (cyberture); Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African
American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Pantheon, 1992). The best entry point
for pidgin and creole studies is the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (Amsterdam:
John Benjamins).
9. For an introduction to oral history ‘classic’ methodology that emphasises the aural
throughout, see Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds, The Oral History Reader, 3rd
edn, Routledge Readers in History (London; New York: Routledge, 2016).
10. For an introduction to the ideas of ‘emic’ used here and ‘etic’, used below, see Dell Hymes,
‘Emics, Etics, and Openness: An Ecumenical Approach’, in Emics and Etics: The Insider–
Outsider Debate, ed. Thomas M. Headland, Kenneth Lee Pike, and Marvin Harris (Newbury
Park: Sage, 1990), 120–6, along with the other essays in that volume.

11. Cynthia Kanoelani Kenui, ‘Na Kānaka Maoli: The Indigenous People of Hawai‘i’, in
Diversity in Human Interactions: The Tapestry of America, ed. John D. Robinson and
Larry C. James (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 93–110.
12. Nēpia Mahuika, Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective, Oxford
Oral History Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/
oso/9780190681685.001.0001; North Shore Field School, https://northshorefieldschool.org/
(accessed 26 June 2022); ‘Center for Oral History, Ethnic Studies (ES), UH Mānoa, Hawai’i’,
Ethnic Studies (ES), UH Mānoa, Hawai’i, https://ethnicstudies.manoa.hawaii.edu/center-
for-oral-history (accessed 27 June 2022); Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, Remember This!:
Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives, trans. Wahpetunwin Carolyn Schom-
mer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Melissa K. Nelson, ‘Getting Dirty: The
Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures’, in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous
Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2017), 229–60 (40), https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373162.
13. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
14. Ibid.; Peg Rawes, ‘Sonic Envelopes’, Senses and Society 3, no. 1 (2008): 61–76.
15. Lori Ann Garner, ‘Representations of Speech in the WPA Slave Narratives of Florida and the
Writings of Zora Neale Hurston’, Western Folklore 59, no. 3/4 (2000): 215–31; Toniesha
Taylor, ‘Saving Sound, Sounding Black, Voicing America: John Lomax and the Creation of the
“American Voice”’, Sounding Out!, 8 June 2015, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/06/08/
john-lomax-and-the-creation-of-the-american-voice/; Sterling A. Brown, ‘On Dialect Usage’,
in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Oxford; New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 37–9. The rest of this book remains an excellent starting
point for using the WPA Narratives well.
16. Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, ‘Canonization and the Color of Sound Studies’, Sounding Out!
(blog), 6 August 2018, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/08/06/canonization-and-the-color-
of-sound-studies/; Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, eds, Remapping Sound Studies (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Marie Thompson, ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in
Sound Studies’, Parallax 23, no. 3 (2017): 266–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1
339967.
17. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).
18. The quickest way to catch up on critical responses to Jaynes is ‘Book Reviews’, Julian Jaynes
Society (blog), https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/articles/book-reviews/ (accessed 22
June 2022).
19. Edmund Carpenter introduces the idea of acoustic space in an ethnocentric reading of
Inuit sensory ways in Eskimo Realities (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973),
33–5 and ‘Eskimo Space Concepts’, Explorations 5 (June 1955): 131–45. The most
explicit, still ethnocentric, but also still useful for opening up the idea of acoustic space is
Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, ‘Acoustic Space’, in Explorations in Commu-
nication: An Anthology, ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1960), 65–70, https://archive.org/details/explorationsinco00carp. On the accuracy
of Inuit maps, see Robert A. Rundstrom, ‘A Cultural Interpretation of Inuit Map Accuracy’,
Geographical Review 80, no. 2 (1990): 155–68.
20. Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry,
ed. Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).
21. For the origins of the family tree model and the wave theory critique, see William Labov,
‘Transmission and Diffusion’, Language 83 (2007): 344–87; Winfred P. Lehmann, ‘August
Schleicher’, in A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics,

Indiana University Studies in the History and Theory of Linguistics (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1967), 87–96; and Guus Meijer and Pieter Muysken, ‘On the Beginnings
of Pidgin and Creole Studies: Schuchardt and Hesseling’, in Pidgin and Creole Linguistics,
ed. Albert Valdman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 21–45. The ideas are
also still being played out in post-structuralist theory drawing the idea of genealogy in
Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader (New York: Pan-
theon, 1984), 76–100; and the rhizomatic model of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London; New York: Continuum, 2004).
22. Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press, 1982).
23. Plato, ‘Republic’, trans. Paul Shorey, in Plato in Twelve Volumes (London: William Heine-
mann, 1969), vols 5–6, books 2, 3, 10, Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.
edu (hereafter PDL).
24. Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, trans. Harold N. Fowler, in Plato in Twelve Volumes (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1925), 9:274–76, PDL.
25. McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy.
26. The initial theory is laid out in the groundbreaking and influential article by Jack Goody
and Ian Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History
5, no. 3 (1963): 304–45; Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977); Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and
the Oral, Studies in Literacy, Family, Culture, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1987).
27. The relevant literature is ably and concisely covered by Daniel Chandler, ‘Biases of the
Ear and Eye: “Great Divide” Theories, Phonocentrism, Graphocentrism & Logocentrism’
(c. 1994), http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel//Documents/litoral/litoral1.html (accessed 20
July 2023). For rejection of Goody, see Carol Fleischer Feldman, ‘Oral Metalanguage’, in
Orality and Literacy, ed. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 47–65 as well as the rest of the essays in that volume; and Sylvia
Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1981).
28. The initial work is Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cul-
tural and Religious History, The Terry Lectures A Clarion Book (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1970); summarised in Ong, Orality and Literacy, 36–56. For ‘the litany’, see
Jonathan Sterne, ‘The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality’, Canadian Journal of
Communication 36, no. 2 (2011): 207–25; and Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cul-
tural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 14–18.
29. Giovanni E. Reyes, ‘Four Main Theories of Development: Modernization, Dependency,
World-Systems, and Globalization’, Nómadas: Critical Journal of Social and Juridical Sci-
ences 4, no. 2 (2001): 109–24.
30. For barbarophonos, βαρβαροφώνων, see Homer, The Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), book 2, l. 867; Walter Leaf, ‘Commentary on the
Iliad’, in The Iliad, ed. Walter Leaf (London: Macmillan, 1900), commentary to book 2, l.
867; Thomas D. Seymour, ‘Commentary on Homer’s Iliad, Books I–III’, in Homer’s Iliad:
Books I.–III. (Boston: Ginn, 1891), commentary to book 2, l. 867; Henry George Liddell
and Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, s.v. βαρβα^ρό-φωνος; Henry George Liddell
and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon, s.v. βαρβαρόφωνος φωνή; Georg
Autenrieth, A Homeric Dictionary for Schools and Colleges, s.v. βαρβαρό – φωνος; Strabo,
trans. A. T. Murray, book 14, chapter 2, section 28 (all the above from PDL); and OED
Online, https://www.oed.com, s.v. barbarous.
31. This can be tracked through its 335 occurrences in PDL.
32. Plato, ‘The Statesman’, trans. Harold N. Fowler, in Plato in Twelve Volumes (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), 12:262, PDL; emphasis added.

33. Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (London; Cambridge, MA: W. Heinemann;

Harvard University Press, 1944), 1253a–55, quote from 1260a, PDL; Aristotle, ‘De
Sensu’, in The Parva Naturalia, trans. John I. Beare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908),
437.a.12 (on hearing and reason). For the theoretical and political implications of bare
voice, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7–8.
34. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civili-
zation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America:
Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton for the Institute
of Early American History and Culture, 1975), 3–14, 43–57.
35. ‘Savāğe’, in Electronic Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
2001), http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/; Charlton Lewis, A Latin Dictionary Founded on
Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary; Latin Dictionary (New York: American
Book Co., 1890), s.v. silva (all of the above from PDL); OED Online, s.v. sylvan n. and
adj., savage adj. and n.1.
36. Unless otherwise noted, this and the following three paragraphs are distilled from Rath,
How Early America Sounded, 145–52. All primary source references can be found there in
the notes on pp. 213–15.
37. For a negatively valued analysis of the civil/savage binary, see Jennings, Invasion of America.
For the observation that actual explorers were more specific and particular than armchair
pundits, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). For an excellent summary of recent arguments
about savage and civil that overestimates the neutrality of the term ‘savage’ in seventeenth-
century North America, see Thomas G. M. Peace, ‘Deconstructing the Sauvage/Savage in
the Writing of Samuel de Champlain and Captain John Smith’, French Colonial History 7,
no. 1 (2006): 1–20.
38. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983); Walter D. Mignolo picks up on this idea in an American
context in The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). On biological racism, see George Mosse,
Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: H. Fertig, 1978).
Although it spends little time on orality per se, the best starting point for understanding
the connections between sound and racism in the nineteenth-century United States remains
Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2001).
39. Regna Darnell, The History of Anthropology: A Critical Window on the Discipline in
North America, Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2021).
40. Sterne covers the artificiality of early ethnographic recording in Audible Past, 311–24.
41. While some of the newer works have been discussed, the classics Thiongʼo, Decolonising
the Mind and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples (London: Zed, 1999) remain touchstones and excellent starting points for this work.
Select Bibliography
Carpenter, Edmund and Marshall McLuhan, ‘Acoustic Space’, in Explorations in Communica-
tion, an Anthology, ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon Press,
1960), 65–70, https://archive.org/details/explorationsinco00carp.
Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya, ‘Canonization and the Color of Sound Studies’, Sounding Out!
(blog), 6 August 2018, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/08/06/canonization-and-the-
color-of-sound-studies/.

Jaynes, Julian, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1976).
Mahuika, Nēpia, Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective, Oxford
Oral History Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/
oso/9780190681685.001.0001.
Nelson, Melissa K., ‘Getting Dirty: The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures’,
in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 229–60, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373162.
Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London; New York:
Methuen, 1982).
Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. Harold N. Fowler, Perseus Digital Library
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 9:227–79, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu.
Rath, Richard Cullen, ‘Hearing American History’, The Journal of American History 95, no. 2
(2008): 417–31.
Steingo, Gavin and Jim Sykes, eds, Remapping Sound Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2019).
Sterne, Jonathan, ‘The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality’, Canadian Journal of Com-
munication 36, no. 2 (2011): 207–25.
Thompson, Marie, ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies’, Parallax 23, no. 3
(2017): 266–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1339967.

Part II:
Literature, Music, Performance

5
Notes to Literature: Scores as Musical

Reproduction in the Literary Text
Tamlyn Avery
Music, Modernism, and the Material Text

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into
the ear of man. [. . .] Whether you are [. . .] like Helen, who can see heroes and
shipwrecks in the music’s flood; or like Margaret, who can only see the music; or
like Tibby, who is profoundly versed in counterpoint, and holds the full score open
on his knee [. . .] such a noise is cheap at two shillings.1
U nder the guise of the Schlegel siblings’ attendance at a symphonic concert in

London, chapter 5 of E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) offers a masterclass in
musical listening. Although scholars have foregrounded Helen Schlegel’s late Romantic
literary ‘reading’ of Beethoven’s Fifth as indicative of modernism’s anti-traditionalist
reconfiguration of music’s archaic social forms,2 Tibby’s actions here touch on deeper
crises of meaning regarding modernism’s internalisation of sound. Tibby’s historical
formalism diverges from his sisters’ listening habits; he practises what in music the-
ory is called structural listening by retaining a critical distance to the musical object,
approaching meaning through a historically informed intellectual analysis of struc-
ture and form, blocking out all sensual responses to musical sound. Tibby’s structural
listening inadvertently comes closest to reflecting how modernism perceived music
within the commotion of modernity. If musical scores are reproductions that illumi-
nate ‘the differing implications of the ideals of sound, notation and rendition respec-
tively’,3 this is what Tibby hears as he mutes the ‘noise’ of a musical text that has been
reduced to memorable ‘tunes’ valued at two shillings (which is all Mrs Munt, his Eng-
lish aunt, hears). He seeks a ‘true reproduction’ of Beethoven’s Fifth by embracing the
‘ideal of silent music-making’: the sole means of transcending ‘the utter destruction of
the sensual phenomenon of music through mass reproduction’, according to Theodor
Adorno.4 To liberate the commodified artwork and the listener from their alienation,
listening must turn inwards and the music fall silent.
As a symbolic figure in modernist literature and the contemporary philosophy of
sound, the reproduced musical score activated a mode of structural listening whereby
the information the artwork communicates is approached critically and logically, rather
than sensually and affectively. For Adorno, solving the riddle ‘What is the relationship
between musical notation and writing?’ was essential to resolving the theoretical question

82 tamlyn avery
mark overhanging the status of music and literature within a modernising print culture.5
That question reoriented music’s status as predominantly a sounding, non-signifying
art that literature jealously aspired to emulate. Although for millennia, Western music
and literature had been intrinsically linked under the Hellenic interart of oral mousike,
the development of writing systems in both arts is said to have gradually severed that
bond.6 The modernisation of those writing systems, including the development of more
sophisticated reproductive capabilities for inscribing, printing, and disseminating texts,
led to subsequent formal innovations that only widened that imaginary chasm.7 From
the 1860s, interart hybridity was further revolutionised by the expansion of the grand
opera and Richard Wagner’s totalising vision of the artwork of the future, reconfigur-
ing literary innovation’s association with the sounding arts. By 1873 Walter Pater could
claim that ‘all art constantly aspires to the condition of music’, apprehending the mod-
erns’ aspiration to achieve ‘the perfect identification of matter and form’ that instru-
mental music alone ostensibly produced.8 Pater’s axiom exemplifies how ‘instrumental
music’ tended to mystify aesthetics that used ‘semantically oriented theories developed
to describe meaning in the representational arts’.9 Concerned that unlike other artforms,
poetry had no ‘undefiled language’ distinct from its functional usage, Stéphane Mallarmé
also considered musical notation a pure ‘means of mystery’, as he and other French sym-
bolists devised a concept of verse-music that might ‘depict, not the thing, but the effect
it produces’.10 Classical music, broadly defined, was thus seen to stand ‘for what cannot
be put into words’, by mimetically ‘transmitting meanings directly to the listener, and
transcending language by communicating through form’.11
Modernism’s tendency to privilege musical composition as a metaphor for disrupt-
ing writing and reading practices was symptomatic of a recent crisis of cultural aes-
thetics catalysed by the evolving soundscape of modern noise. Music was now to be
read, and literature listened to. Internal to this transition towards a materialist view of
music was a need to rethink the properties of sound, driven by the understanding that
art internalises the forces of production. Noise mediates the political, and thus
maps onto subversive social categories which music and literature attempt, with
limited success, to contain. Noise is feminized; it is nationalized; it is racialized; it
is heard as a symptom of colonial disruption, changing urban demographics, tech-
nological intrusion into the home. The process of ordering noise musically, then,
takes on the project of hierarchizing it.12
As part of that musical project, concepts of ‘dissonance and rhythm circulated as ways
for modernist art to enhance the interactive exchange between a text and the sub-
versive or abject cultural presence of noise’.13 Composition was another influential
concept to that end: as a symbol of abstract sounds that exist, on one level, only in the
mind itself, the musical score offered literature additional metaphoric possibilities for
regulating the artwork’s internalisation of noise.
One intriguing response to the crises of representation incited by industrial moder-
nity’s noisy soundscapes was to infuse literary typescripts with the visible, mate-
rial, and textual reproduction of music: the score. Reproductions of musical scores
regularly appeared in modernist literature;14 less frequently than verbal ekphrasis or
mimesis, yet pervasively enough to indicate a coherent textual strategy that coalesced
with modernism’s objective to make it new by reimagining, remediating, and relating

notes to literature 83
various traditions, techniques, and technologies. The reproduction of actual scores in

places where they are generically novels – in poems, or novels – shifted the emphasis
from music as sheer sensuality to more perplexing questions of how texts communi-
cate sound in similar and distinctive ways to literature, certainly after it had deserted
what Forster called the ‘tape-worm’ of narrative. A. J. Carruthers advises that musi-
cal notation in literature addresses ‘sound’ as much ‘as silence, or the withdrawal of
sound from silence’, signalling moments of crises of representation.15 For it is ‘when
musical ekphrasis fails, when poetic descriptions of musical sound fail to produce or
adequately grasp their sonic object, that staves begin to crop up’ to provide ‘analo-
gous substitute[s] for musical metaphors and allegory on the one hand, and the purer
description of sound on the other’.16 Mark Byron likewise finds that literary scor-
ing exposes ‘complex relations between artworks and between artistic media’ whilst
unsettling ‘the status of the literary text and its intersection with the musical score’.17
Because the score’s representational system also features mimetic limitations – its semi-
otics represent but can never reproduce the live sounds of the Real – its appearance
in the literary text forms a concentrated image of the historical pressures, anxieties of
form, and crises of representation that interartistic innovation could not resolve.
In what follows, I consider how Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Hope Mirrlees, and
Georgia Douglas Johnson incorporated reproductions of scores to rewrite the social
history of forms in which they worked. For these authors, to address the question of
whether literary scores as ‘notional experiments are really meant to be sounded, or
(also) sighted’18 was to rethink music’s position in modernism as a source of abstract,
immaterial, or pure sound. Given how other technologies within modern communica-
tion systems including the telegraph, phonograph, and typewriter have shaped our
understanding of modernism and sound,19 I argue that the textual materiality and
optics of musical reproduction, and not only the mimetic or ekphrastic representation
of its sounds, have been more crucial in shaping modernism’s soundscape than previ-
ously recognised in either literary or sound studies.
The Musica Practica of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Increasingly, the modernist artwork recognised how the musical score and the liter-
ary text may both depict an imagined ‘sequence of sounds ordered in time’; however,
musical and literary sign systems organise such sequences ‘according to different cri-
teria’.20 Even at its most surrealistic, symbolistic, or nonsensical, literature remains
dependent on denotation. It thus ‘determines sets of semantic correspondents that
are utterly foreign to the musical score’, which operates ‘a code for ordering sounds
in time according to certain of their physical characteristics’, without a clear ‘codi-
fied semantic function’, Eric Prieto explains.21 Because ‘there can be no literal contact
between music and literature short of the actual superimposition of the two’, as in
vocal music, ‘the only relationship that can obtain between music and literature is a
metaphorical one’.22 Literary scores were used to formulate the ‘modern’ phenomenol-
ogy of novel reading and musical listening within a modernising discourse network
through another order of superimposition, by destabilising habitual reading practices
and ontologies.
Although before the twentieth century, the interplay of notes and letters in litera-
ture already illustrated the aesthetic repercussions of a modernising print culture,23

84 tamlyn avery
it was only after 1900 that literary scores formed a coherent collective responsive
to the mounting pressures of mechanical reproduction upon artistic production. The
modernist literary score insisted that music exists not only as the notes musicians play,
or the sound-making that spectators consume, but as a third ‘inaudible’ category of
music that we ‘grasp’, not by observing a ‘performance or hearing, but’ through a
method of ‘reading’ Roland Barthes called ‘musica practica’.24 Although unlike Tibby
Schlegel or Adorno, we need not ‘sit with a Beethoven score and get from it an inner
recital’, in ‘reading’ music, we are no longer ‘receiving’ or ‘feeling’ music but ‘writing
anew’ that ‘inaudible music’, now ‘rediscovered, modified according to the movement
of the historical dialectic’, manoeuvring the reader into ‘the position of an operator,
who knows how to displace, assemble, combine’, and ‘structure’ meaning.25 A clear
example of literary modernism’s facilitation of such musica practica is James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake. Although it is written in prose constructed of paragraphs, sentences,
words, letters, and punctuation – not composed in staves, clefs, time signatures, notes,
or symbols and letters belonging to music’s language conventions – Joyce described
that novel as ‘pure music’ because it demanded comparable deconstruction to musical
scores.26 Adorno noted how the ‘new art’ movement Joyce represented could be distin-
guished by its non-discursive prose, which instigated ‘the transformation of commu-
nicative’ language of everyday reporting ‘into mimetic language’.27 Similarly, Jacques
Derrida chose the French word portées – referring to both reaches and musical scores,
words united only in homophony but which under closer inspection cast the other’s
meaning in new light – to describe what ‘Finnegans Wake represents with respect to
all the culture, all the history and all the languages it condenses’, which is that even
under ‘the ruse of the invented word’ language always retains ‘the greatest possible
Figure 5.1 Page from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Oxford University Press.

memory’.28 Joyce’s prose reaches for the ‘pure music’ a score represents, as it disas-
sembles the functional denotation of syntax used for interpersonal communication, to
simulate the immediacy of the mind’s processing and how the psyche constructs reality
through language and association.
Yet, if Finnegans Wake is a novel and not ‘pure music’, what of that one curi-
ous instance, following a series of sound-images and onomatopoeias, when words
settle into the configuration of musical staves and notes (Figure 5.1)? This song –
Joyce’s original composition – appears in chapter 2 of book 1, as the apotheosis of the
many flagrant rumours that have been circulating throughout Dublin until this point
regarding the moral misconduct of the protagonist Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker;
rumours that are here given musical expression by Hosty.29 The score intersects with
the analytical procedures demanded by the novel’s dense tapestry of musical mimesis,
allusions, and ideograms; one reason why Joyce has been a key figure in theorising
how when ‘twentieth-century novelists’ adopted musical influences, they viewed musi-
cal inference ‘as a source of models for rethinking the plot-based forms that have
traditionally governed the novel’.30 This includes the semiotic interplay of notes and
letters suggested by the protagonist’s initials, HCE, a musical cryptogram akin to J. S.
Bach’s signature motif BACH (in German musicology referring to the notes B♭–A–C–
B♮).31 ‘The Ballad of Persee O’Reilly’, along with the score of the ballad ‘Little Harry
Hughes’ and the medieval neume of ‘Gloria’ in the ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Scylla and Charybdis’
sections respectively in Ulysses, are just three examples of over 3,000 song references
throughout Joyce’s oeuvre,32 suggesting his preoccupation with hybrid verse-music
forms that interfuse notes and letters.
In bringing musical semiotics into the cryptic fabric of the novel’s linguistic sign
system, Finnegans Wake’s literary score forms a concentrated image of the novel’s
methodology of combined structural listening and musica practica: of historical for-
malism and textual deconstruction. Although Joyce’s score does not presume musical
literacy, its appearance clearly disrupts how the narrative encasing it is to be read, dis-
entangling the ‘differing implications of the ideals of sound, notation, and rendition’.33
In parsing the score’s intricate ‘codology’, Zack Bowen and Alan Roughley observe
the difficulties in imagining the ballad’s full harmonic progression and thus the song’s
mood. Given only the melodic line is supplied, the score obstructs adaptation and
performance.34 The lyric’s transhistorical periodisation mirrors the possible harmonic
structure underpinning the melody, which passes through modern musical keys and
early modern modes. Beginning in A major, the song modulates halfway through the
fourth bar (‘and curled up’) into the tonic A harmonic minor key, as suggested by the
otherwise redundant G♯ marking in that bar, which the key signature already includes.
The final five bars modulate again into what appears to be the Aeolian scale, a minor
mode without any sharps also beginning on A, first popularised in sixteenth-century
street music. Although the melody ends on the tonic, it is unclear whether the song
ends in the minor or returns to the original major key, provoking tonal ambivalence
and historical indeterminacy. The melody does not reflect the essence of any particu-
lar musical period, paralleling how the Miltonic dialectic interspersed with ‘modern’
neologisms and syntagms produces an etymologically unplaceable language peculiarly
outside of history. The da capo sign in the final bar indicates that the reader should
return immediately to the anacrusis with which the piece began, and repeat the mel-
ody, this time mapping the additional strophes supplied beneath the score onto the

86 tamlyn avery
same melody. The simple melody lends itself easily to mnemonic conservation for its
possible reproduction as performance. Nevertheless, the harmonic indeterminacy, the
incompatibility of the melodic notes and the lyric’s rhythms as the strophe progresses,
and the absence of any tempo marking (although the jaunty rhythms and 6/8 time
signature imply liveliness) all indicate that the literary score on various levels resists
performability.35
As Finnegans Wake’s language aspires or reaches towards the effects of musical
scoring, in Derrida’s sense, the text draws awareness to how musical and literary lan-
guage construct and convey history, memory, and myth in the mind. Of Ulysses, Josh
Torabi argues that Joyce ‘[entwines] the mythic and contemporary, to convey music in
language, and present the inner psychological and out-urban reality in all its minutiae,
in an encyclopedic attempt to faithfully evoke the universal form of the mundanity of
everyday life’.36 The anti-Semitic ballad ‘Little Harry Hughes’ that Stephen sings in
response to Bloom’s rendition of ‘Hatikvah’, sung with ‘defective mnemotechnic’, sug-
gests how ‘Joyce introduces musical notation to detract from the meaning of the lyrics
and therefore cement the well-established view that “Ithaca,” for all its rigorous scien-
tific discourse, leads the reader astray as we focus on the wrong details.’37 This assess-
ment clearly applies to Finnegans Wake’s literary score, too. Joyce looked to the novel,
rather than Wagnerian drama, as the ideal form through which to ‘[reject] romantic
historicist notions of myth’,38 as he widened the possibilities of that form by adopting
musical properties including scoring whilst refusing the idealisation of ‘pure music’.
Joyce’s literary scores demand more active conceptual processing of their hybrid sign
system on the interpreter’s part, whilst ultimately provoking indirection, misreading,
and an unclosed framework of meaning. Joyce, it seems, looked to musical composi-
tion as a model of how ‘to organize noise’ and ‘its homologous social elements’,39 and
disorganise them, by recognising that musical scores, like literary texts, mediate history
as distorted, fragmented images of an unrecoverable past.
Pound’s Notes Containing History

Due to sound’s ephemerality, musical texts require extra-musical elements to signify
abstract sonic phenomena, including some use of lettering and words, leaving it depen-
dent over time on analogous critical hermeneutics to literary interpretation, and raising
issues of reproduction.40 Because musical texts are densely mediated, how one ought to
interpret the information they contain is not always clear, leaving the passive ear and
mind open to ideological interference. Structural listening formed one hermeneutics of
difficulty that could potentially expose ‘all the relations, all aspects of context, con-
trast, and construction that lie hidden beneath the surface of the perceptible sound’.41
Because the ‘difficulty of accounting for music in language [made] music appealing to
the modernist writer, not just because difficulty itself was perceived as a virtue, but also
because music seemed to enable more active modes of interpretation’,42 this explains
why musical composition also became an important model for the poet and composer
Ezra Pound, who in 1917 decreed that poets ‘who will not study music are defective’.43
Pound’s statement reflected a growing musicological consensus on poetry’s rela-
tionship to the compositional principles of musical reproduction. As Figure 5.2 illus-
trates, his co-editor Harriet Monroe pre-empted Pound’s sentiments in promoting a
classification system for scanning ‘poetic rhythm on the basis of musical notation’,44

Figure 5.2 Excerpt from Harriet Monroe, ‘Rhythms of English Verse, II’, in Poetry.
advising that poets probe ‘the elements and laws of that verse-music which must be an
instinct with them’, rather than adhere to the iambs, anapests, and trochees that had
hitherto constrained English verse.45
Like Monroe, Pound sought a systematic poetics derived from musical composi-
tion, later defining music as ‘a composition of frequencies, microphonic and macro-
phonic’ that are governed by the temporal laws of what he called absolute rhythm
and Great Bass.46 Pound’s intervention into the metaphysical properties of sound-
making emphasised the materiality of textual composition as the regulation of sound
frequencies in music and poetry.47 Because poetry shared music’s temporal attributes,
it should be understood as ‘a composition of words set to music’, not reduced to some
‘metaphysical’ definition, as in vers libre. Pound noted how poetry ‘“dries out” when
it leaves music, or at least an imagined music, too far behind it’, meaning it should
‘be read as music and not as oratory’, not ‘that the words should’ congeal into ‘a sort
of onomatopoeic paste’.48 Amending vers libre’s idealised conception of verse-music,
Pound sought a materialist poetics to examine the technical operations that connect
the internal ideation of the ‘thing’ to the external ‘effect’, as those operations convey
an artwork’s passage to conception.
This contextualises why The Pisan Cantos (LXXIV–LXXXIV) visually discon-
cert the typographical conventionalisms of words and notes to rethink their semiotic
functions. Pound’s theoretic intervention applied most clearly in Canto LXXV. It is
composed of seven lines of poetry, followed by a reproduction of a musical score
(Figure 5.3): a two-page photocopy of his associate Gerhart Münch’s violin study of
the French medieval composer Clément Janequin’s polyphonic choral work ‘Le Chant

88 tamlyn avery
des Oiseaux’, an adaptation which Münch based on Francesco de Milano’s arrange-

ment for solo lute (c. 1475). Like Joyce, Pound reproduces a musical work that is
deeply mediated, and thus demands more active inspection of its provenance, com-
position, and reproduction, whilst rebelling against literature’s two-dimensional sur-
faces without ever transcending them. Münch composed the piece for violinist Olga
Rudge to perform as part of a concert series Pound co-organised, held in Rapallo in
1933.49 Some of these programmes juxtaposed avant-garde music with early modern
and medieval counterparts, whilst others focused on a historic composer’s entire oeu-
vre, to reveal a composer’s or period’s concealed essence.50 This programming derived
out of similar concerns over mimesis and musical reproduction expressed by Adorno –
known to Münch, if not to Pound. Writing of Guido’s revolutionary ‘merging’ of letters
and notation within the neumic stave, Adorno argued that
the most precise score retains, as an image, an element of neumic ambiguity, and
even the most precise specification retains an element of that significative rigidity
which threatens to kill the very thing it has resolved to save. [. . .] [E]ven pictorial
fidelity has an element of rigid lettering, and the most precise specification an ele-
ment of ambiguity.51
The wider the historical passage between texts and interpreters, the more ambiguous
its meaning becomes. ‘Pure signification is unattainable through writing’, meaning that
the ‘history of musical notation is an attempt to reach a synthesis between unambigu-
ity and immediacy’.52 If the Rapallo concerts were intended to close the chasm between
the modern audience and the original source lost to history’s abyss, such is the effect
of Canto LXXV’s literary score.
Figure 5.3 Page from Ezra Pound, Canto LXXV. New Directions.

Proximately positioned as an extension of the stanza, Münch’s arrangement ‘chal-

lenges idealist notions of the musical work and discloses a complex composition and
transmission history’, following ‘the provenance of the score, from Janequin and
perhaps from Arnaut Daniel’ and the troubadour poets to a time before ‘the era of
pure music upon which idealist accounts of music derive their force’, Mark Byron
observes.53 For Münch as for Pound, Janequin served as an indexical marker of the his-
tory of musical reproduction, having been one of the first ‘composers to have his work
printed and distributed on a large scale, connecting this work to the ideas of reproduc-
tion [. . .] in how he undertakes to represent the natural world in his scores’, including
birdsong: a key motif of The Pisan Cantos.54 The cry ‘Out of Phlegethon!’ establishes
a mythic framework for the canto that forces deeper reflection on the transmission of
history and its relationship to modernity. The lines preceding the musical score are
not ekphrastic; rather, the score indicates the tapestry of historical mediation alluded
to in the stanza, which contains series of dynamic, war-torn images in which Münch
emerges ‘forth out of Phlegethon’, the fiery river leading into Hell, carrying ‘in [his]
satchel’ his sources of influence: works by the Baroque composer Dietrich Buxtehude,
the anthropologist Ludwig Klages, and Hans Sachs’s Ständebuch (1568), a versified
almanac of sixteenth-century trades with illustrative engravings by Jost Amman.55 The
final line of the stanza points to the ‘many’ versions of the ‘birds’ that underwrite the
score: Janequin’s, Milano’s, and Münch’s. These birds are also Rudge’s, whose phrase
Pound quotes in the canto’s last line, as she reassured Münch that he had preserved
the ‘essence’ of Janequin’s song of the birds, which through careful use of instrumenta-
tion and timbre, including the use of double-stopping, was able to convey the lute’s
polyphonic sound ‘not of one bird but of many’.56
Canto LXXV’s score is not a standalone fragment. As a reproduction of one of
the Rapallo scores, the canto trains the reader to read what follows through the same
historical methodology, given the programme was conceived in tandem with the poet’s
evolving conception of the ideogrammatic method in poetry.57 By conjoining ‘the musi-
cal score and the poetic text in Canto LXXV’, Pound sought not to provoke ‘rivalry
between the arts’, so much as to present ‘an eloquent request to the reader to value
the identity and provenance of aesthetic production’, Byron also insists.58 Such logic
further applies to Canto LXXIX, which alludes to Guido d’Arezzo: ‘that bastard’
who brings about ‘the change in writing the song book’,59 whose treatise Micrologus
(c. 1025) guided the development of the four-line stave: an early solmisation system
for writing down melodic chants, which removed the requirement of memorisation.
The premodern and modern coalesce in a flurry of fragmented images, including refer-
ences to a Bechstein electric piano and Beethoven, and repeated references to Guido,
to whom Pound twice returns as the mythic source of modern music’s textual origins.
Although whether Guido invented the stave or merely propagated it remains a point of
contention in early music history,60 the subsequent merging of the neume and the let-
ter-notation system catalysed more complex developments in Western music, including
polyphony,61 a model of multivocality upon which many modernists drew.
Expanding Canto LXXV’s theme of musical reproduction as an unstable bridge
traversing modernity and antiquity, the score’s dialectical opposite appears as the let-
tered ‘notation’ of birdsong in Canto LXXXII, whereby Pound composes his own
‘music, though his is not a music strictly of sound, but rather of [. . .] a writing which
is not imitative or even descriptive of sound, but, instead, one which requires the

90 tamlyn avery
“real” birds of the camp to be transformed into the image of written music’.62 Pound’s
remarkable arrangement of letter-notes strung across three lines,
f f
d
g
orchestrates a horizontal vision of pitch that depicts what it is to ‘write the birds in
the treble scale’, without lining the stave.63 These birds are sitting on wires that run
through the US prison camp in Pisa in which Pound was interned whilst awaiting his
trial and probable execution; these are wires of imprisonment, and of communication.
Pound envisions them as notes, and then transcribes what he sees. The letters do not
signify sound ‘in itself’ but sound as already codified, already written, to which nature
conforms. In notes or letters, The Pisan Cantos’ visions of literary scoring distort
the idealist perception of music as non-signifying expression. Petitioning the reader’s
active reflection on the historical mediation internal to the text’s aesthetic produc-
tion, the literary score irradiates the concealed history reproduction occludes from the
modern reader.
Mirrlees’s and Johnson’s Wild Notes and Organised Sounds

Though the literary scores of canonical figures including Pound and Joyce have drawn
localised critical attention, this textual strategy also pertained to other historically
marginalised figures within discussions of literary modernism and music. British poet
Hope Mirrlees’s critically neglected long poem Paris: A Poem, typeset by Virginia
Woolf for its publication with Hogarth Press in 1920, also contains a literary score.
It captures what Mirrlees metaphorised in her 1926 essay ‘Listening to the Past’ as
the ‘kaleidoscope of sounds’ that, visually intertwined through constantly rearranging
symmetrical patterns, evoke the simultaneity of the past, present, and future layers of
history.64 Paris seizes the political warp and weft of the French capital during one ordi-
nary, yet world-historical day, set against the ambient hum of the Peace Conference
proceedings of 1919. Nodding to the surrealist typography peppered with musical
notes pioneered by Parisian poet Guillaume Apollinaire,65 Paris widens the horizons
of the long-poems’ printed typography by including musical scoring (Figure 5.4),66
adding to the poem’s visually interwoven, palimpsestic layers of history and cultural
topography. Sound-images of streets haunted by those killed in past wars are accom-
panied by a musical quote from ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’: Almirena’s mournful recitative
in George Frideric Handel’s Italian opera Rinaldo.
The reproduction ends on the note that should be lyrically connected to the word
‘liberty’ in Giacomo Rossi’s accompanying libretto, which reads:
Lascia ch’io pianga la cruda sorte, / E che sospiri la libertà.

Let me weep for my cruel fate, / And let me sigh for my liberty.
Handel’s autographed score is not the version Mirrlees quotes.67 As Carruthers notes,
subtle distortions to the face of Handel’s original melodic text underscore that music’s
nature as a ‘recyclable object (a common phenomenon)’ that ‘persist[s] in cultural

Figure 5.4 Excerpt from Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem (1920).
memory’ and is ‘rich with historical signification’ in the poem’s context.68 Mirrlees
adds the diminuendo into barely audible pianississimo (very, very soft), mirrored in
the onomatopoeic sibilance of the typographically elongated word ‘H u s s s h’, the
implied sound of which also fades into metaphoric inaudibility. Drawn in silence, let-
ters and words that are estranged from their expected functions meaningfully amplify
the inaudible vibrations of postwar social memory that verse alone seemingly cannot
fully access or formulate.
As a conduit of social memory, Mirrlees’s literary score resonates with similar inno-
vations in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Bronze: A Book of Verse (1922), a quintessen-
tial collection of the New Negro Renaissance (c. 1919–40). Like Joyce and Pound,
Johnson was already both a published composer and poet prior to adopting musical
scores into her literary work, and a graduate of the Oberlin Music Conservatory of
Ohio.69 Two poems in Bronze, the poet’s second poetry collection, contain literary
scores: the first, an elegy commemorating the sacrifices of Black American soldiers,
entitled ‘Taps’; the second entitled ‘To Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Upon Hearing His
“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”’, which saw reproduction in Alain Locke’s
influential anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation (1927). In his introduction to
Bronze, W. E. B. Du Bois commended Johnson’s gift for capturing ‘a word – a phrase –
a period that tells a life history or even paints the history of a generation’, detectable
in the final line of the poem ‘To Samuel Coleridge Taylor’, which sings the boundless
‘sorrow of a dark child wandering the world, “Seeking the breast of an unknown
face!”’70 This gift for encapsulating social memory is concentrated in the sound-image
of the poem’s literary score (Figure 5.5).71

92 tamlyn avery
Figure 5.5 Johnson’s ‘To Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Upon Hearing His
“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”’.
As Paul Allen Anderson observes, ‘musical performances (and literary evocations

of them) provided especially haunting and portable sites for the staging of social mem-
ory’ in 1920s African American cultural production.72 In the author’s note to Bronze,
Johnson writes how to compose those poems is to ‘sit on the earth and sing – sing out,
and of, my sorrow’.73 Song forms the structural metaphor that ties the collection’s
thematically assorted sections together. It metaphorises the poet’s artistic processing
of complex, difficult emotions: lamentation, terror, and rage intertwined with love,
jubilation, camaraderie, and hope, contradictory sentiments that Bronze insists were
central to Black women’s collective experiences of Jim Crow, as the forces of cultural
modernisation chafed against the lingering residues of a harrowing past.
Johnson’s score is neither a complete nor a strictly faithful reproduction of Black
British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s melodic theme. ‘Motherless Child’ was
one folk song that Coleridge-Taylor, dubbed the ‘Black Mahler’ by the white Ameri-
can musicians he conducted,74 had classicised and compilated in his 1905 piano opus,
‘24 Negro Melodies’ (Op. 59, No. 22). Johnson would likely have been familiar with
the original score, which contained a foreword by Booker T. Washington, along with
summaries detailing the melodies’ provenance. First, Coleridge-Taylor scores the music
in E minor, whilst Johnson’s fragment is written in A minor, an apparently incidental
transposition. More notable is the alteration visible in the final two bars, in which
Johnson has added an evaded cadence. Rather than conclude this musical phrase on
the tonic note of the key (in this case, the note A), as in the original melody, Johnson
peculiarly ends the melodic phrase on the supertonic note, B (the second note of the
eight-note scale). This creates harmonic tension; the ear wants the cadence to resolve

into a note in the tonic chord, that is, A [I or VIII], C [III], or E [V], creating a lack
of resolution. The literary score’s evaded cadence thus serves as a launchpad for ren-
dering an imagined conversation between mother and child, a common poetic trope
in African American poetry circa 1922,75 including in Johnson’s first collection, The
Heart of a Woman (1918).
In ‘To Samuel Coleridge Taylor’, however, Johnson reimagines that maternal con-
versation from the perspective of an individual bereft of parental love, who is held
‘captive’ by that absence; ‘captive’ here is suggestive of coterminous physical but also
metaphysical enslavement, namely the bondage of intergenerational trauma.76 Written
in unbroken iambic tetrameter, the poem’s pedestrian form contrasts the disorganising
terrors of the racial sublime its content conveys. Although it was her associate Angelina
Weld Grimké whose poetry the author Sterling Brown likened to nineteenth-century
lyricist Emily Dickinson,77 Johnson harnesses that poet’s renowned ability to focus on
minute material objects in one instance, and in the next, open the poem’s field of vision
to the cosmic and sublime. Johnson’s descriptions of the ‘toy’ and the ‘frail little cap-
tive’, suddenly shift into sweeping images of those ‘drowsy empires’, ‘brooding planets’,
‘empty space’, and the fear of the ‘unknown’ maternal that overwhelm the speaker.78
The literary score appears at the moment the poet faces a crisis of representation: how
to convey irrepresentable intractable barriers, injustices, and those ‘creeping’ empires
that were the progenitors of slavery and colonialism in the lyric form.
When we speak of the spirituals’ reproduction, we are implicitly recognising a
conceptual and categorical distinction between orally transmitted folk songs and com-
posed art songs; between ‘wild notes’ and ‘organized sound’.79 Johnson’s poem evokes
a similar relationship between notes and letters to Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk
(1903), which famously paired fragments of notated African American spiritual melo-
dies with stanzas from canonical poetry to that end. Du Bois drew upon Frederick
Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), the first text to con-
ceive how the ‘sorrow songs’ sung by Africans enslaved on American plantations were
allegorical forms of sociopolitical communication: the white overseers heard slaves
divesting their sorrows, which they permitted as the songs set the rhythmic pace of
their labour in the fields; in the melodies and lyrics, the Black slaves heard encoded
messages of dissent, rebellion, and political solidarity. In the context of discourses
of ‘racial uplift’ following Reconstruction, those sorrow songs became popularised
by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, whose international successes in the post-Reconstruction
era inspired heightened interest in collecting, notating, and arranging spirituals to
transform them into reproducible texts, and thus, reified commodities. Simultaneously
premodern and modern, spirituals occupied a tenuous position between a culture of
orality and one of literacy, both linguistically and musically. White composers used
classical notation and phonographic recording technologies to capture and transcribe
profitable melodies. Many Black intellectuals saw notation as a necessary process of
cultural modernisation through their transformation from folk songs into art songs;
Alain Locke, for one, determined that the ‘Negro spiritual’ was to undergo, ‘without
breaking its own boundaries, intricate and original development in directions already
the line of advance in modernistic music’.80
A score is said to be always ‘incomplete in representing the composer’s intentions’,
due to ‘certain intangibles that cannot be expressed by our method of writing music’,
which preclude ‘vital elements’ of sound-making that are ‘incapable of being fixed

94 tamlyn avery
by the marks and symbols of notation’.81 If that is the case, Johnson’s fragmented,
tonally irresolute literary score meaningfully accentuates such ambiguity to unsettle
how the spiritual is to be read. Musical reproductions preserved otherwise ephemeral
sounds, as the basis of an historically durable cultural tradition; but that reproduction
was dependent on a visual system that could not fully capture what those wild notes
communicated as live sounds and sites of social memory, which is where Johnson’s
poetic intervention came into force. Johnson was one of the many women poets of
the New Negro Renaissance that subsequent generations of critics dismissed as too
‘conventional and sentimental, and out of step with the militant, rebellious race con-
sciousness of the period’,82 yet her literary scoring speaks to the poet’s unsung innova-
tiveness and political acuteness. Although grounded in similar theoretic and aesthetic
concerns as modernists such as Mirrlees, Joyce, and Pound, her poetics gave pictorial
shape and form to what Paul Gilroy has recently theorised as ‘black Atlantic sound’,
which resounds the ‘self-making and sociality’ at the centre of the Black Atlantic as
they are ‘organized’ through oral ‘sound: music and song’.83 Spirituals, as social forms,
require the poet to rethink the status of those songs as recyclable, popularised sound
objects, the spiritual aura of which has waned through their mass reproduction within
the American music industry’s racial capitalism. As the literary score deviates from
the harmonic structure of the original melody, Johnson amplifies these concerns by
insisting upon the reader’s active inspection of the cultural provenance of the poem
and musical text.
Underwriting modernism’s evolving relationship to ‘musical works’ was the notion
that they ‘essentially exist only as mediated through writing, because interpretation does
not have the direct sound to go on, only its notated form’, and musical hermeneutics ‘has
no rules for the decipherment of texts that is located in the actual phenomena, only in
the reflection upon the nature of musical texts’.84 For such reasons, musical composition
and the materiality of the score gave many modernists occasion to break with idealised
conceptions of absolute music, and review the historical and social contingencies of
noise, at a historical juncture in which the sounds of the present and past, old and new
alike, were mediated through machines, including telephones, telegraphs, gramophones,
lithographs, typewriters, and a range of other sound apparatuses and information pro-
cessors. As literary works integrated musical notation and scoring into literature’s visual
typography, they insisted upon a hybrid signification system that was responsive to mod-
ern technologies of textual reproduction, and the new literary metaphors of musical
listening and reading those technologies inspired. In doing so, they disrupted habitual
practices of reading and listening, to recover the artwork from its alienated status as a
commodity. Because the literary score became available as the crises of form modernity’s
noises incited drew the modernists towards new interartistic possibilities, it also offers
vital insights into the relationship between literature and music in sound studies.
Notes
1. E. M. Forster, Howards End (London: Penguin, [1910] 2000), 26–7.
2. Nathan Waddell, Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019), 50–1.
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, A Draft and Two
Schemata, ed. Heni Lonitz, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 179.

4. Ibid., 2–3.
5. Ibid., 8.
6. Eric Prieto, Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2002), 11.
7. In Western music, these innovations included the adoption of the stave and the rise of
polyphony over the medieval to early modern periods, along with the transition into the
octave system; the widening of large-scale genres, such as the choral mass during the Baroque
period, and the invention and enlargement of the symphony and opera during the Classical
and Romantic periods; and the ubiquity of chromaticism from the Late Romantic period,
which after Richard Wagner arguably led to the breakdown of Western tonality.
8. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley:
University of California Press, [1873] 1980), 106.
9. Prieto, Listening In, 27.
10. Stéphane Mallarmé, quoted in L. J. Austin, ‘Mallarmé on Music and Letters’, Bulletin of
the John Rylands Library, Manchester 42, no. 1 (1959): 19–39 (24, 31).
11. Gemma Moss, ‘Classical Music and Literature’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 92–113 (92).
12. Joshua Epstein, Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 3–4.
13. Ibid., 3.
14. Notable examples not examined here include Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods
for Jazz (1961), Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s collaboration on ‘L.Z. Masque’ in ‘A’ (1978),
and Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953).
15. A. J. Carruthers, Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems,
1961–2011 (Cham: Springer, 2017), v.
16. Ibid., xxvi.
17. Mark Byron, ‘A Defining Moment in Ezra Pound’s Cantos: Musical Scores and Liter-
ary Texts’, in Literature and Music, ed. Michael J. Myer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002),
157–82 (157).
18. Carruthers, Stave Sightings, v.
19. See Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 2010).
21. Ibid., 26.
22. Ibid., 17.
23. The first novel to feature an entire musical score, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: Or the
History of a Young Lady (1747), bore witness to how musical mass reproduction was
reshaping everyday life across new settings, as through emergent technologies and forms,
music became a prominent aspect of ‘eighteenth-century culture and daily life’ and the
basis of modern subjectivity. Clarissa’s costly ‘engraved score’, a folding illustration that
opened into a booklet, required extensive technical planning, leading subsequent publish-
ers to abandon this ‘three-dimensional novelty’. See Janine Barchas, ‘The Engraved Score
in Clarissa: An Intersection of Music, Narrative, and Graphic Design’, Eighteenth-Century
Life 20, no. 2 (1996): 1–3.
24. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana,
1977), 153.
25. Ibid.
26. James Joyce, quoted in Jack Weaver, Joyce’s Music and Noise: Theme and Variation in His
Writing (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 4.
27. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert
Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), 112.

96 tamlyn avery
28. Jacques Derrida, ‘Two Words for Joyce’, trans. Geoff Bennington, in Post-Structuralist
Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1984), 145–59 (148–9).
29. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Faber and Faber, [1937] 1975), 44.
31. Anthony Burgess was among the first to observe this musical pun; but HCE’s conceptual
connection to Bach, who influenced Joyce’s literary polyphony, has since been observed by
numerous scholars. See Alan Shockley, Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counter-
point in the Twentieth-Century Novel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 117–36.
32. Michelle Witen, James Joyce and Absolute Music (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 2.
33. Adorno, Towards a Theory, 179.
34. Zack Bowen and Alan Roughley, ‘Parsing Persee: The Codology of Hosty’s Song’, in
Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce, ed. Sebastian D. G. Knowles (New York: Routledge,
2014), 295–306 (300).
35. Ibid., 302.
36. Josh Torabi, Music and Myth in Modern Literature (New York: Routledge, 2021), 152.
37. Ibid., 146–7.
38. Ibid., 152.
39. Epstein, Sublime Noise, 4.
40. This accounts for why programme (narrative) music and ‘musical ekphrasis’ proliferated
over the 1880s. See Siglind Bruhn, ‘A Concert of Paintings: “Musical Ekphrasis” in the
Twentieth Century’, Poetics Today 22, no. 3 (2001): 551–605.
42. Epstein, Sublime Noise, 11.
43. Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray Schafer (New
York: New Directions, 1977), 42.
44. Harriet Monroe, ‘Rhythms of English Verse, II’, Poetry (December 1913): 110.
45. Ibid., 110–11.
46. Ezra Pound, quoted in Margaret Fisher, ‘Music’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B.
Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 298–312 (308).
47. Josh Epstein, ‘“Scoured and Cleansed”: Ezra Pound and Musical Composition’, in The
New Ezra Pound Studies, ed. Mark Byron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2019), 57–71 (66).
48. Pound, Complete Criticism, 42.
49. Roxana Preda, ‘Of Birds, Composers, and Poets: Ezra Pound’s Memoir of Gerhart Münch
in Canto 75’, Paideuma 42 (2015): 141–70 (141).
50. Ibid., 142–3.
52. Ibid.
53. Byron, ‘Defining Moment’, 177.
54. Richard Parker, ‘Canto 75 vs. “A”–24’, Golden Handcuffs Review 1, no. 14 (2011):
270–85 (273).
55. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 450.
57. Preda, ‘Of Birds’, 143.
59. Pound, Cantos, 487, 486.
60. John Haines, ‘The Origins of the Musical Staff’, The Musical Quarterly 91, no. 3–4 (2008):
327–78 (327).

62. Brad Bucknell, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 117–18.
63. Pound, Cantos, 525.
64. Hope Mirrlees, Collected Poems, ed. Sandeep Parmar (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), 88.
65. Carruthers, Stave Sightings, xxiii.
66. Mirrlees, Collected Poems, 14.
67. The opera premiered in London in 1711; but by 1920 no major performance had been
staged since 1731. It was typically performed either as a concert aria or a hymn.
68. Carruthers, Stave Sightings, xxiii.
69. Maureen Honey, ‘Georgia Douglas Johnson’, in Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the
Harlem Renaissance, 2nd edn, ed. Maureen Honey (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2006), 158–9 (158).
70. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Foreword’, in Georgia Douglas Johnson, Bronze: A Book of Verse
(Boston: B. J. Brimmer, 1922), 7.
71. Johnson, Bronze, 95.
72. Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 4.
74. Charles Elford, Black Mahler: The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Story (London: Grosvenor
House, 2008), 257.
75. In 1922, two rising Black male poets published poems in The Crisis on this theme: Langston
Hughes with ‘Mother to Son’, and Jean Toomer with ‘Song of the Son’.
77. Honey, ‘Introduction’, xxxiii.
79. Paul Gilroy, ‘“Lost in Music”: Wild Notes and Organised Sound’, in Sound and Literature,
ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 170–89 (171).
80. Alain Locke, quoted in Anderson, Deep River, 4.
82. Honey, ‘Introduction’, xxxiii.
83. Gilroy, ‘“Lost in Music”’, 171.
Select Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert
Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997).
———, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, A Draft and Two Schemata, ed.
Heni Lonitz, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2006).
Anderson, Paul Allen, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
Barthes, Roland, Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977).
Bruhn, Siglind, ‘A Concert of Paintings: “Musical Ekphrasis” in the Twentieth Century’, Poetics
Today 22, no. 3 (2001): 551–605.
Bucknell, Brad, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Byron, Mark, ‘A Defining Moment in Ezra Pound’s Cantos: Musical Scores and Literary Texts’,
in Literature and Music, ed. Michael J. Myer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 157–82.
Carruthers, A. J., Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems,
1961–2011 (Cham: Springer, 2017).

98 tamlyn avery
Epstein, Joshua, Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2014).
Goble, Mark, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia Uni-
Moss, Gemma, ‘Classical Music and Literature’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith
Prieto, Eric, Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2002).
Torabi, Josh, Music and Myth in Modern Literature (New York: Routledge, 2021).
Waddell, Nathan, Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2019).

6
Sound Agonistes: Music and the Economy

of Sacrifice in Sound Studies
Miranda Stanyon
A t first sight, music and sound go hand in hand. Yet in its formative years,
sound studies sometimes marginalised music in asserting its new identity. Interest
in sound resonated with histories of the senses and the sociology of the everyday, and
with disciplines like media and cultural studies, which often turned away from the
‘traditional’ arts – and sometimes, by extension, music more broadly imagined – as
elite, conservative, specialised, unworldly, and Eurocentric. Despite the rich history
of entanglements between literature and music, and despite notable exceptions in the
scholarship, sacrificing music might be seen as one of sound studies’ founding ges-
tures, a gesture with significant implications for literary scholars’ future engagements
with music. This chapter considers the positioning of music in programmatic work
on sound studies, investigating the problems and discomfort raised by music, before
exploring a comparison between the treatment of music and the fraught economy of sac-
rifice, where something is given up in the hope of gaining something more valuable – here
a new and better field. I then suggest that illuminating antecedents to this sacrifice lie in
literary history, with rhetorical exclusions and reinclusions of music from the domain of
the verbal arts – especially poetry – and ambivalent representations of musical genres
and practices. I offer a case study of sound and music in John Milton’s Samson Ago-
nistes, a poem which showily struggles with sacrifice, sound, and specious harmony. If
sacrifices are made in the hope of gaining something better, then in Milton’s tragedy,
ironically, the reader is asked to hope and listen for a larger kind of harmony: an affec-
tive, communal, and spiritual-political concord that mirrors the workings of audible
music – and literary language – as humanly ordered sound.
Locating Music in Sound Studies

‘Music is an idea, not just a form, and like any other idea, music is a problem’, notes
Matt Sakakeeny.1 We might add that music is a big idea, and correspondingly a big
problem, sometimes even an elephant in the room. It could hardly be called a constitu-
tive outside for sound studies, part of a ‘set of exclusions that are nevertheless internal
to that system’: plenty of work in sound studies includes music, or is conducted by
people whose vocation is musical.2 And yet neither does music sit comfortably within
the ‘system’. This stands in tension with sound studies’ habitual characterisation as
inclusionary, expansive, always emergent, or ‘conjunctural’ – the child of pluralist,
relativist, and levelling movements in the academy that saw the foundation of media
studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies.3

100 miranda stanyon
Some key texts and stock-taking moments suggest the varied ways that music, and
what are sometimes called ‘music studies’ (musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory,
and so on), are placed and dis-placed in the field. In their important reader, Michael
Bull and Les Back presented a post-Romantic view of music as an ineffable art that
constantly revealed the inadequacy of words and challenged scholars (echoing Beckett)
to fail again, and fail better in attempting to interpret it.4 Musicologists were acknowl-
edged to have developed tools for doing just this, but readers were simultaneously
warned that musicology could ‘strangle the life in music’.5 The volume’s thirty authors
included two working in music departments (musicologist Susan McClary and anthro-
pologist of music Steven Feld).6 The section ‘Living and Thinking with Music’, while
not the only to discuss music, tellingly centred on twentieth- and twenty-first-century
‘popular’ musics, with ‘classical’ music addressed in sociologist Richard Sennett’s brief
reflection on his embodied experiences as a cellist.7 This shaping of the territory and
division of labour is instructive: this strain of sound studies embraces (modern and
popular) musics but often sidelines ‘traditional’, older repertoires and disciplines. The
point is ramified in Bull’s monumental anthology Sound Studies (2013).8 According to
its framing material,
If Sound Studies incorporates the sonic turn in Media Studies and coheres around
Cultural Studies, it also extends into Urban Studies, Aesthetics, History, Architec-
ture, and Anthropology. It looks at the wide array of sonic experiences in society
to include sound, music, and silence. In so doing it goes beyond the traditional
disciplines of Ethnomusicology, History of Music, and the Sociology of Music.9
Sound studies thus has its home in postwar, postmodern disciplines; it attends to music
as part of an apparently all-embracing attention to the ‘everyday’, ‘present-day’, ‘mod-
ern experience’, and thereby transcends not only (tacitly) older forms and genres but
also the ‘traditional disciplines’ devoted to music.10
This gesture of transcendence is not isolated, nor surprising in the consolidation
of a new(ish) field, even a declaredly protean one. Marginalising music (and music
studies) can be implied to be a matter of progress, disciplinary expertise, or democ-
ratisation, with music studies’ methods being ‘deliberately elitist, credentialised [. . .]
available to aficionados but not the masses’.11 Or it can be framed as more stra-
tegic, with sound ultimately complementing music. Thus ethnomusicologist Veit
Erlmann wrote that ‘ethnomusicology and musicology [. . .] might lay superior claim
to sound [. . .] as their very birthright’ – casting them as entitled older-sibling disci-
plines – but explained that his collection offered few essays on music because, ‘even’
in such traditional fields, ‘new thinking’ was chiming with his volume’s search for an
‘ethnographic ear’.12 Not difference but slightly awkward similarity thus marked the
sidelining of music [studies]. A similar equivocation marks Gavin Steingo and Jim
Sykes’s forceful remapping of sound in and through the global South. Music presents
challenges in surveying existing literature and articulating desiderata for their proj-
ect. The editors present an ‘imaginary reader’ of extant work, with the small-print
disclaimer: ‘we have placed the voluminous literature on “music” off to one side but
do include a few musicological sources that explicate broader sound-related topics’.13
This is partly because the abundant research on sound and the South, although muted
in mainstream sound studies, ‘quickly overwhelm[s]’ ‘one’s bibliography’, raising ‘the

sound agonistes 101
question of what should constitute sound studies’. Certainly not all ‘sound-related
topics (e.g., music, language)’ should ‘“count as” sound studies’, although then again
‘any remotely comprehensive study of sound’ should take account of ‘the voluminous
scholarship on music in India and Africa’. Fortunately, ‘histories of sound and music
are relatively distinct’, and ‘[t]here is little to gain from employing the term “sound
studies” for any and all literature that is even vaguely associated with sound’, or from
‘claims to the effect that musicology (or ethnomusicology) has “been doing sound
studies all along”’.14 Still, not all work on music falls beyond the pale, and the editors
hail the music-oriented Audible Empire as, alongside their own collection, ‘carv[ing]
out a crucial space in twenty-first century thinking about sound’.15
Scholars occasionally admit to being, if not quite ‘suspicious’, then ‘impatient’ with
music.16 Others, of course, are much more irenic. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld
described sound studies broadly as ‘an emerging interdisciplinary area that studies
the material production and consumption of music, sound, noise, and silence’, and
identified musicology as a ‘long-standing scholarly tradition’ that aided the ‘recep-
tion’ of sound studies in the humanities.17 They noted the recent inclusion of ‘some
sound studies’ within music studies, and observed new branches of musicology that
had ‘fully digested cultural studies approaches’.18 Bijsterveld and Pinch’s own pioneer-
ing work bringing music into science and technology studies doubtless influenced their
perspectives. But if the demands of musical and musicological expertise are often cited
as barriers to music’s integration with sound studies, then expertise certainly does not
guarantee a warm reception for music in sound studies. Writers with backgrounds in
composition, musicology, or ethnomusicology are arguably among the least likely to
give music a hall pass. This is noteworthy insofar as a history could be construed in
which music’s disciplines existed in a world apart, secluded from the postwar acad-
emy: sound studies was pioneered by ‘outsiders’. Yet the prehistory of sound studies
coincided with some acute soul-searching and self-critique within music which, of
course, continues in the present.
Some earlier texts influential for sound studies praised or arguably romanticised
music, or regarded elite written repertoires as sources for broader social histories
of sound.19 But others were more aligned with the twentieth century’s ‘opening of
[Western] music to [what had been] the non-musical’: extended dissonance, micro-
tones, noise and distortion, extreme volumes including (near) silence, ambient sound,
durational works, aleatory compositions, use of found objects, field recordings, new
and non-musical instruments, and non-singing voices.20 Theorist-composers such as
‘Luigi Russolo, with his art of noise, Edgar Varèse, with his liberation of sound,
and John Cage, letting sounds be themselves’ epitomised what Erlmann, following
Edward Said, calls a ‘new inclusiveness’ in modern music (or, quoting Said more
fully, what might be called a ‘desperate attempt at a new inclusiveness’ in modern-
ism, triggered by the faltering of the ‘imperial enterprise’).21 The gestures are not
only inclusive: if ‘music’ in this vein increasingly opened itself to the previously non-
musical, it often turned away from what used to count as music.
In the midst of such musical experimentation, theorists as different as Douglas
Kahn, Michel Chion, or Friedrich Kittler challenged distinctions between music,
sound, and noise, and even our ability to listen to noise without subsuming it under
the rubrics and codes of music.22 In Kahn’s case, the exploding of ‘music’ extended to
critique of art music’s inclusivity and noisiness. His Noise, Water, Meat questioned

102 miranda stanyon
what twentieth-century music’s ‘openness to the world of sound’ both left out and cov-
ered up. On one hand, sounds that ‘signified’ became ‘the noise of noise’ for the avant-
garde, with a ‘banishment’ of imitative or signifying sounds that ironically preserved
music’s high modern status as the premiere non-mimetic art.23 On the other hand, the
inclusive treatment of noise by the avant-garde could act as window-dressing for an
ossified and unresponsive Western institution – a fig leaf for an ivory tower:
Despite the concentration of the bulk of Western art music activity on the music
of past centuries, played on vintage classes of instruments couched within equally
vintage rites, the actions of venturesome contemporary avant-garde composers
grappling with changing conditions of aurality have given rise to an impression
that Western art music as a whole has the capacity to respond to the world in
which people presently live.24
Rather than helping to explode music’s borders and humble its pretensions, then, pro-
gressive figures helped ‘Western art music [. . .] maintain its integrity and expand its
resources’.25 Even oppositional and form-bending composers may fail to purge music,
with its ‘vintage rites’, from noise. Studies like Kahn’s gave sonic specificity and depth
to a wider fascination within the humanities and social sciences with noise as a figure
of disruption and primal non-semiotic data and energy. Not creation ex nihilo, but
creation from and of noise, marks this cultural moment. ‘[N]o logos without noise’, as
historian and philosopher of science Michel Serres wrote in Genesis.26 And no music,
according to the political economist Jacques Attali, except as ‘a channelizer of vio-
lence, a creator of differences, a sublimation of noise, an attribute of power’.27
Attali’s take on music as a ‘ritualization’ of noise and ‘simulacrum of ritual murder’
– that is, a sacrifice – is interesting not least because it points towards what I would like
to suggest is one of the economies connecting music with sound studies.28 ‘Music’ – be
that Western art music, or ideals of harmony and organisation, or music as an area of
expertise, or music tout court, if such a thing existed – is given up here for the sake
of something greater: sound [studies]. Given the range and complexity of the rhetoric
surrounding music, and the brilliant treatment of music within any number of projects
in or in dialogue with sound studies, it may seem extravagant to talk about music’s
sacrifice. My suggestion is not that music is in any simple fashion excluded from sound
studies. After all, sacrificial gestures are always representative, and often figural or
substitutive in nature: human sacrifice does not mean that all humans are sacrificed,
and some of the best-known human sacrifices are commuted and transmuted into the
offering of a goat, ram, lamb, deer, or piece of bread. My suggestion is that we might
usefully gloss music’s treatment in parts of the field not only in a negative sense, as
navigating a ‘problem’, but also in a constructive sense, as a sacrifice that serves the
founding of a new, larger, better field.
Elements from the complex theory of sacrifice clarify this suggestion.29 Unlike capi-
talist exchanges, sacrifices are often non-symmetrical and non-contractual: offerings
made in order to gain something more valuable than what one has, although often with-
out a guarantee that the gods will grant their side of the transaction (and successfully
launching something as nebulous as a ‘field’ is not something done by fiat or contract).
Sacrifices are characteristically costly, giving up something valuable or – as with music
in its relationship to sound – something difficult to extricate from the whole (think of

sound agonistes 103
the guiltless scapegoat that must be set apart from the community before being loaded
with communal sins). There is correspondingly a complex valuation of the thing sac-
rificed: while it may be maltreated and disdained, as Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss
argued, sacrifice can also sacralise its victim – something we might see in equivocal cel-
ebrations of music in the field – and reincorporate it through consumption.30 There are
high-minded self-sacrificers, perhaps not unlike the occasionally contrite music special-
ists within sounds studies; and there are rhetorics which focus on the transformation of
the sacrificer and outwardly deny the logic of sacrifice, something that resonates with
the field’s gestures towards inclusiveness and repudiation of disciplinary territorialisa-
tion. As the Psalmist puts it, his God has ‘no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt
offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart.’31 Or, in an example relevant to my later discussion as the
only New Testament reference to Samson, Hebrews scorns the high priest’s sacrifice of
animal blood in the Temple, and burning of flesh outside the city, for Christ’s superior
blood-sacrifice and his followers’ continual ‘sacrifice of praise’ and charitable sharing.32
Crucially, sacrifices are foundational acts and boundary markers. They figure promi-
nently in narratives of cultural transition, from past to present or savagery to culture,
whether in myths of progress (where barbaric sacrificial practices end), myths of fall
(violent sacrifice brings about a state of corruption), or mixtures of the two. Even when
sacrifice is relegated to the past, it often features in contemporary warnings against
recidivism or diagnoses of ‘modern’ structures as hidden transformations of sacrifice. In
other words, culturally and analytically, sacrifices seem hard to give up.
As Derek Hughes and others observe, sacrifice has been an overwrought theme
in literature and music drama, and one sometimes given a central place in the very
constitution of these arts. But literature also has its internal moments of sacrifice as
it defines and redefines itself – moments of excluding, sidelining, and scapegoating
music.33 A key moment in English writing came after the Renaissance, and intensified
during the Commonwealth. Renaissance poetic theory had often elaborated the trope
of the ‘music of poetry’ and magnified the kinship between the ordering of sound in
music and the verbal arts.34 Composers and music theorists, meanwhile, had drawn on
rhetoric and grammar to classify the effects of musical figures and to structure musical
phrases that mimicked the sequential logic and discursivity of speech. Reacting against
this alignment of music and language, writers in the English Commonwealth and
their heirs through the eighteenth century developed rhetorics and poetics of sublime
difficulty, bold austerity, rough plain-speaking, and martial discord. They objected
to monarchy’s fictions of concord between a harmonious cosmos and harmonious
(monarchical) state – fictions like those developed in the court masque tradition – to
the courtier’s sycophantic sprezzatura; the muting of political disagreement down to a
mere ‘mutter’; and the restriction of eloquence to what one writer called ‘the hearing
of one voice’.35 ‘[O]nly by confronting discord and difficulty’, they reasoned, could ‘a
stronger kind of poetry [. . .] emerge’.36
The most prominent figure in this context is John Milton, who in Paradise Lost
famously cast off the ‘troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’ as ‘of no true
musical delight’.37 Even during the so-called Augustan age with its preference for
rhyming couplets and smooth sounds, later Whig writers such as John Dennis argued
against imagining poetry through music. Dennis took aim at the commonplace that
poetry’s ‘numbers’ and rhymes meant poetry ‘must be Musical’, arguing that ‘Passion’

104 miranda stanyon
was ‘still more necessary to it than Harmony’: ‘therefore Poetry is Poetry, because it is
more passionate and sensual than Prose’.38 Despite this appeal to the sensual and pas-
sionate nature of poetry, against music’s formal harmonies, Dennis elsewhere invoked
music’s own associations with sensuality and passion in order to castigate music and
indicate the proper domain of theatre. Dennis singled out opera in the process of
defending the morality of the English stage against reformers’ denunciations. Opera’s
listeners wallowed in the ‘mere sensual Pleasure’ ‘that effeminate Musick gives’, music
which ‘unmann’d’ both ‘he who gives [pleasure] or he who receives [it] in a supreme
Degree’.39 Both singer and listener, Dennis argued, were morally undone by music,
at least music of the wrong kind. We would not look to Dennis for a coherent phi-
losophy of sound, but we should find instructive precisely his flexible treatment of
music, which he repeatedly excludes to mark out the proper terrain of English poetry,
epic, and drama. Not unlike avant-garde Western musicians in the twentieth century,
Dennis hopes to expand the boundaries of his art, but expands the remit of literature
to exclude music.
‘Ever best found in the close’?

A Sweet Little Sound in Milton’s Samson
Milton’s Samson Agonistes casts particular light on the literary rhetoric of exclud-
ing and repudiating music, in this case in contrast not with noise or sound but with
quietness. In doing so, Samson both invokes and problematises sacrifice’s economical
prospect of giving up to gain more. Separating music from literature is difficult in
general, if we accept that there are low and porous barriers between these auditive
(or potentially, or subliminally, auditive) arts – and this despite the fact that writing
has become core to literature’s definition as a lettered medium. But in Samson the
separation proves exceptionally difficult because, in the text’s equivocal or multivocal
conclusion, one kind of harmony – specious and easy – is given up for the prospect of
another, greater harmony, be that music ‘sounded’ or silent.
The son of a musician and inheritor of a century and more of reforming suspicion of
music and performance, Milton positioned song within a teeming ‘world of intermedia
circulation’, and worried at music’s power to model perfect harmony and praise, yet
also to seduce, distract, corrupt, and to threaten writing and writerly authority.40 This
is nowhere clearer than in his Samson Agonistes (1671), a closet drama which ‘never
was intended’ for the stage, and which turns on the fate of a figure – the Old Testa-
ment warrior-hero Samson – whose blinding by the Philistines makes him pitiably
dependent on sound, as he is on his captors and visiting friends and kin, and as Milton
was after the onset of his own blindness.41 Captivity and blinding are also enabled by
sound: in the backstory of the poem, Samson ignored God’s injunction to keep silent
about the source of his enormous strength (his uncut hair), submitted to his Philistine
wife Dalila’s nagging, broke the ‘seal of silence’, and became a ‘blab’ (49, 495). The
poem’s genre, plot, and source thus turn on sound and silence.
The text’s vocabulary and imagery are also densely auditory, juxtaposing the senses
of sight and sound, and refracting the sonic into a spectrum of noises, music, speech,
cries, and silences. We meet Samson as he ‘Retir[es] from the popular noise’ of a
Philistine feast (16), although unable to escape implicitly noisy ‘thoughts [. . .] like

sound agonistes 105
a deadly swarm / Of hornets’ (19–20). Samson is visited by a sententious chorus of

Israelites who intermittently doubt their own purpose, fearing that in the ‘sound’ of
counsel ‘Little prevails, or rather seems a tune, / Harsh, and of dissonant mood’ to
‘the afflicted’ (660–2). With Dalila, who visits to tempt Samson back to a life of ease,
sounds become more cognitively dissonant, more slippery, and animal-sensual. Her
words ‘seem into tears dissolved, / Wetting the borders of her silken veil’ (729–30).
Dalila is like a ‘hyaena’ (748), an animal that according to Pliny copied speech, calling
shepherds by name so that they left their homes and were torn apart. Only the deaf
‘adder’s wisdom’ now protects Samson against her ‘warbling charms’ (936, 934), we
hear in a convention-laden passage connecting the powers of song, wine, magic, and
women’s verbal guile and sex appeal.
In captivity, Samson fears himself ‘sung and proverbed for a fool / In every street’
(203–4), conjuring up popular dissemination of news in broadside ballads, and ignit-
ing a slow-burning preoccupation with true report, honour and commemoration
against ‘double-mouthed fame’, rumour as ‘noise’ and ‘loud report’ (1088, 1090),
and boasting as quasi-musical ‘descant’ (1228). This preoccupation culminates in the
poem’s final exchanges and the image of virtue as a phoenix – one not resurrected after
her ‘holocaust’ (literally a burnt sacrifice), but immortalised by ‘fame’ (1697–707).
Among the complex resonances of this holocaust is its reminder of burnt offerings
made by Samson’s parents before his birth and Samson’s setting apart as an offering to
God, sanctified by privations that promised greater strength and redemptive potential
for Israel (Judges 13, SA 23–39); the strongly sonic trope of fame thus intersects with
an underlying, if ambiguous, sacrificial context.
Having failed to keep his obligations, Samson rebukes himself for being ‘vanquished
with a peal of words’ (recalling the forceful, repetitive, potentially popish pealing of
church bells (235)), Dalila’s ‘Tongue-batteries’ (404). Divine strength is not audible in
this way, conforming instead to a biblical paradox of divine silent speech, and hinting
at a contrast between fleshly and spiritual senses. Thus Samson’s past martial ‘deeds’
were ‘mute, [yet] spoke loud the doer’, although ‘Israel’s governors’ ‘persisted deaf’ to
their possible deliverance from tyranny (242, 248). The chorus then remembers how
the ungrateful Ephraimites were distinguished from fellow Israelites (and marked for
slaughter) by ‘want of well pronouncing shibboleth’ (289), summoning up the use of
fine-grained aural differences as markers of spiritual rectitude/turpitude – and recalling
a deadly ‘acoustemology’ practised by their forefathers.
The poem’s central event and interpretative problem is also its aural climax: a
‘hideous noise’ attending Samson’s destruction of the Dagonite ‘theatre’ where he has
been forced to perform feats of strength, killing the ‘flower’ of the Philistine ruling
classes and himself (1509, 1605, 1654). The feast that, always offstage, sets the scene
for the poem is ‘proclaim[ed]’ with ‘pomp, and sacrifice, and praises loud’ (435–6),
accompanied by ‘trumpets’, ‘pipes / And timbrels’ (1598, 1616–17). Celebrating the
defeat of Samson, the feast not only scandalises the strict Nazarite, but epitomises his
shame at bringing ‘obloquy [on God], and ope[ning] the mouths / Of idolists’ (451–3).
In the theatre’s destruction, sacrifices made by idolists to Dagon are replaced by a tacit
or possible sacrifice (for the term is never used of Israelite worship) by Samson to God;
ritual ‘pomp’, shouting, music, and praise are replaced by anti-spectacular destruction,
horrid noise, and, in their aftermath, quiet.42 Noise is a correlate of Samson’s sacrifice-
like violence, and one of the things it silences is the celebratory music of the feast.

106 miranda stanyon
High in intensity, the sounds of destruction are low-fidelity: we hear them obliquely
through others’ reactions and reports. First, Samson’s father Manoa breaks off his
speech to ask, ‘What noise or shout was that? It tore the sky.’ The chorus supposes
they are hearing ‘the people shouting to behold’ Samson (1472–3). A messenger later
confirms this, reporting that
At sight of him the people with a shout

Rifted the air clamouring their god [. . .] (1620–1)
Also confirmed here is Manoa’s representation of sound as physical force, tearing

or dividing the air; of sound weaponised, as it was in Dalila’s mellifluous attacks on
Samson’s ‘fortress of silence’.43 The poem elaborates on the material constitution of
sound after Manoa’s second aposiopesis, and the chorus’s response:
Manoa: [. . .] – O what noise!

Mercy of heaven what hideous noise was that! [. . .]
Chorus: Noise call you it or universal groan
As if the whole inhabitation perished,
Blood, death, and deathful deeds are in that noise,
Ruin, destruction at the utmost point.
Manoa: Of ruin indeed methought I heard the noise. (1508–15)
Sounds are granted an embodied, more-than-semiotic ability to carry violence in them,

to be destructive noises of ruin. This is significant partly in suggesting the gravity of the
danger represented by noise and music in Samson, and partly in indicating the power
of a tragedy addressed only to the ears – whether spiritual or fleshly – to strike the
reader and effect a purgative catharsis of sound through sound.44
The intense but nebulous sonic atmosphere leaves the Israelites in suspense: what is
the nature of the destruction? A messenger resolves their initial uncertainty, but his tes-
timony raises questions about Samson’s motivation that modern critics have often con-
cluded are irresolvable, and precisely because interpreters must rely on an oral report
about a silent, pregnant pause: when Samson ‘stood’ ‘with head a while inclined / And
eyes fast fixed [. . .] as one who prayed, / Or some great matter in his mind revolved’
(1636–8), was he finding his authentic vocation – a more-or-less literal ‘calling’ from
God – in self-destruction and slaughter, or not? The poem uses inaudibility (Samson’s
potential ‘calling’) and sonic mediation (ear-witnessing and second-hand report) to raise
questions of spiritual discernment in a postlapsarian world, and to school its readership
in practices that are modelled on but also exceed embodied listening in a noisy polis.45
The poem’s evocation of resistance to tyranny and idolatry, and suggestion of
precarious victories (aesthetic, interpretive, and political) – temporary composure
achieved through privation, difficulty, violence, and confusion – all this means its
soundscape resonates not only with reformed suspicion of music but also with Milton’s
republican sublime. For Milton, David Norbrook observes, Longinus’ sublime is ‘con-
sistently opposed to easy, specious harmony. Language that is too neatly patterned
leads to premature closure, so that’, in the words of Longinus as translated by Milton’s
follower Hall, ‘foreseeing their periods’ listeners figuratively ‘join with them in the
close, and as in a consort anticipate the conclusion’.46 The musical, formulaic, and in
that sense ritualistic anticipation Hall/Longinus derides in certain poetry reminds us
of the premium republican writers could place on diversity of voices, and the lurking

sound agonistes 107
parallels between aural concord, monologic forms, and tyrannous monarchy. It also
reminds us that ‘close’ applies equally to verse, grammar (the close of ‘periods’), and
music (cadence of phrase). Narratives and lives, too, close, and in the following I want
to examine the ending of Milton’s tragedy and its treatment of song.
Samson Agonistes famously draws to its close with Manoa celebrating his son’s
end and advising his fellow Israelites that ‘Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail /
Or knock the breast’, ‘nothing but’ ‘what may quiet us in a death so noble’ (1721–4).
Preferring quiet of mind to the sounds of cries, blows, or vocal complaint, Manoa
bears witness to the purging of turbulent passions that Aristotelian tragedy should
produce through its homeopathic logic of remedying like with like – ‘sour against
sour’, suffering against suffering, noise against noise.47 Manoa goes on to imagine the
‘silent obsequy’ that will mark Samson’s funeral and an overwhelmingly visual memo-
rial to be arranged: a ‘monument’ ‘With all his trophies hung, and acts enrolled / In
copious legend, or sweet lyric song’ (1732–4, 1736–7). This is the poem’s only positive
reference to song, yet it is apparently an inaudible one, inscribed (enrolled) on a sepul-
chre.48 Manoa foresees that the monument will form a centrepiece for national solem-
nities and recreations: youths will ‘resort’ there and ‘inflame their breasts’ to ‘valour’;
maidens will visit ‘on feastful days [. . .] with flowers, only bewailing’ Samson’s mar-
riage (1738–42). This feast pointedly opposes the noisy feasting and musical recre-
ations introduced early in the poem, alongside another imagined celebration in the
poem’s centre: dismissed by Samson, Dalila defiantly predicted that ‘double-mouthed’
Fame would make her ‘among the famousest / Of women’ for the Philistines, ‘sung at
solemn festivals’, ‘my tomb’ ‘visited’ with ‘annual flowers’ (971, 982–3, 986–7). Sam-
son’s future tomb with its externalised, textualised ‘acts’ further responds to Samson’s
early self-description as a ‘moving grave’ (‘My self, my sepulchre’, 102), shut up from
light and action. Samson’s monument, then, seems to invoke not performable song
but the visible genre(s) of lyric poetry. Manoa might seem to forestall practical music-
making, setting poetic ‘song’ as a simple counterpart to prose ‘legend’, the brevity
implied by song contrasting the ‘copious’ tale.
And yet the stifling of sound/song and the disciplining of passion it accompanies
in the poem’s catharsis is not so complete as this suggests. For one thing, legend has
its own murky aural connotations. By 1671 a legend could name unauthenticated,
superstitious tales. This sense itself derived from a genre of book (the legend) either
containing passages to be read aloud in church or focusing on lives of saints. The leg-
end qua liturgical book had been banned under Edward VI, and the legend as saint’s
life was, of course, odious to Puritans like Milton. Suspect sound then insinuates itself
into Manoa’s quiet plans and casts tiny doubts on the soundness of his production of
a single, authorised account of Samson’s life.49
Nor would it be surprising if sound were recuperated in the poem’s moment of
repose. Sound and hearing are not merely repudiated or sacrificed in the poem in
favour of longed-for light and sight: hearing is also necessarily the play’s key way of
knowing, its source of (always questionable) enlightenment. Sound parallels light as
well as opposing it. Thus Samson complains in a lyrical lament:
The Sun to me is dark

And silent as the Moon,
When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave. (86–9)

108 miranda stanyon
The simile structurally makes the power of sound (and feminine moon) echo that of
sight (and masculine sun), but semantically aligns silence with darkness, desertion, and
enclosure.
Returning to Samson’s monument, we find Manoa’s last speech followed by a
stanza from the chorus which itself takes the form of a sweet lyric, one uttered aloud
within the poem’s world, if not sung:
All is best, though we oft doubt,

What the unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
Oft he seems to hide his face,
But unexpectedly returns
And to his faithful champion hath in place
Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns
And all that band them to resist
His uncontrollable intent,
His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind all passion spent. (1745–58)
Samson thus ends with a somewhat irregular but recognisable sonnet.50 Most of its
lines are briefer than the pentameters of Milton’s standalone sonnets, and his favoured
Petrarchan pattern (ABBAABBA CDECDE) is varied (ABABCDCD EFEFEF) while
retaining the Italianate shape of an octave plus sestet. We find, too, a subtle but star-
tling semantic ‘turn’ over the enjambment that accompanies the transition from octave
to sestet: ‘whence Gaza mourns / And all that band them to resist’. Not only the Philis-
tines, but all who ‘band’ together against God should mourn in light of Samson’s fate –
not only geographically beyond Gaza, but potentially in the historical present beyond
the poem’s end. On this reading, the classicising chorus in its conclusion turns to face
the audience, not unlike the player entrusted with an epilogue in a modern Restoration
play, and addresses them as fellow ‘servants’ of God who will depart edified and with
‘peace and consolation’ – or, if they ‘resist’ the poem, as part of a ‘band’ of Philistines
who should ready themselves for ruin.
The lyric’s shorter lines are matched by relatively muted rhyme sounds, especially
in the sestet: it uses narrow vowels and closing consonants (ist, ent) that we might
contrast with the open vowel endings that singers love in contemporaneous Italian
repertoires. This is hardly an exuberant song of praise, nor the ‘trumpet’-blast Word-
sworth heard in Milton’s freestanding sonnets, but rather, as the form’s Italian name
suggests, a very ‘little sound’ – the kind of still, quiet voice that might come after the
tempest and embody the possibility of balance and concord after sacrifice and pur-
gation.51 Comparison with Italian models is seeded in Samson’s introduction, which
justified Milton’s inclusion of a chorus as ‘still in use among the Italians’ (and in this
context one might think of the chorus’s role in musical as well as spoken dramas,
given Milton’s engagement with music in Italy).52 Milton went on to explain that,

sound agonistes 109
unlike his Greek models, he did not use repeated stanzas, since these were ‘framed
only for the music, then used with the chorus that sung; not essential to the poem, and
therefore not material’. Yet Milton’s chorus does indulge in irregular rhymes and met-
rical variations, what Milton terms ‘apolelymenon’ (freed measures) or allæostrophic
(irregular) ‘stanzas or pauses’.53 The other characters speak largely in blank verse, the
non-rhyming metre chosen for Paradise Lost on the grounds that it broke free from
the ‘modern bondage of rhyming’: easy musicality was there sacrificed for the greater
cause of liberty. The chorus’s propensity to lapse into verse can be taken as an index
of the Israelites’ waywardness and error, with their supreme moment of lyricism at the
play’s end making for deep irony and cognitive dissonance.54 Still, the recognisability,
sustained length, and closure of the sonnet separate it formally from the chorus’s other
spells of rhyming. Alongside its position after the play’s noisy crisis, this allows a dif-
ferent reading of the evocation of song, one that chimes with the chorus’s assertion
that ‘all is [. . .] best found in the close’.
As Manoa perceived ruin in the hideous noise from offstage, Samson may hint that
proofs of divinely ordained resolution are found not only at the narrative’s end, but
in the cadences of an appropriately bounded, freely used, quiet lyric song. The term
‘close’ is significant in the poem, related to the semantics of bondage, but with its own
miniature patterning: it appears in the first speech, as Samson describes how the bank
where he sits with ‘choice of sun or shade’ offers respite from the prison where he
‘scarce freely draw[s] / The air imprisoned also, close and damp’ (7–8). The adjectival
‘close’ (with the aural difference from the noun of a final s/z) thus appears in proxim-
ity to ‘air’, another potentially ‘Songish’ term (as John Dryden would call the airs of
his music drama Albion and Albanius (1685)).55 The only other appearance of close
is with the false resolution Samson prays for before his inklings of a ‘remarkable’ last
‘act’ and reconciliation with God’s purposes: ‘speedy death, / The close of all my miser-
ies’ (650–1). Appropriately, the actual close of Samson’s life is marked not only by his
release from subjection through an outlet of violence but by a release and purgation
of ‘air’.
On this reading, then, music begins as part of a spectrum of destructive sounds
marking a noisy lapsed world; but song also emerges as an embodiment of moments or
‘pauses’ of psychological ‘peace’ and ethical-spiritual concord offered by ‘highest wis-
dom’ and wrought by tragedy. Harmonious ‘stanzas’ might be cadences without being
absolutely final cadences – appropriately, since the close of the poem is also forward-
looking: Manoa has called on his kin to seize the ‘occasion’ to collect Samson’s body
while the Philistines are in confusion, and to ‘Find courage to lay hold on’ the poten-
tial ‘freedom’ that is Samson’s legacy (1714–15). In Milton’s words, tragedy possessed
‘power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like
passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight’.56
The musico-poetic vocabulary of ‘measure’ and attuning suggests the importance of
well-tempered sounds to this schema. As Norbrook puts it, ‘it is not harmony in itself
that [Milton’s] Longinus rejects but its premature, specious approximation; the sublime
is indeed harmonious and unified, but only just’.57 Audible harmony and song are not
necessary signals of this free concord, but arguably become ethically permissible, part
of Milton’s realm of ‘things indifferent’ or adiaphorous – to be discerningly chosen or
omitted, just as Milton is free to deploy or avoid rhyme as a tool throughout the poem.58

110 miranda stanyon
Conclusion
Sacrificing music has a long history in literature and the humanities. Insofar as sound
studies has part of its root-system in cultural studies, and cultural studies one taproot
in a literary discipline whose narrow canonical textbase and medium-specific focus
it rejected, the ritual sacrifice of music in literature belongs to the dim prehistory of
sound studies. Another tendency of this chapter, less direct, is to suggest the limits of
categorising music as a ‘subset of sounds’.59 While calls to read music and literature
conjuncturally are welcome, we might hesitate over integrating music into sound stud-
ies by subsuming music into audible sound. Attention to the everyday and present-
day encourages (positive) characterisations of music as vibrating, live, and in the air.
Yet just as the inaudible slide of a sound technician’s controls or the noisy clank of a
roadie’s harness belong to musicking as a cultural activity, so too unsounded or only
potentially sounded texts, structures and concepts, literary representations and verbal
patternings, help make up music as a cultural domain. As Kahn argued, ‘None of the
arts is entirely mute, many are unusually soundful despite their apparent silence, and
the traditionally auditive arts grow to sound quite different when included in an array
of auditive practices.’60 Music and literature bear particularly strong witness to Kahn’s
observation. In interpreting music, literature, and sound with and against one another,
students of sound may well struggle to avoid the odd sacrificial gesture. And this is not
all bad. After all, there are no fields that exclude nothing. Even a provisional field is
an enclosure with lines that leave some things out, some of the time, and marginalise
others. Sacrifice illuminates the strategic, partial, complex, and recuperative nature of
music’s marginalisation. But perhaps, if we need to make continued sacrifices in this
context, we should at least sometimes remember a further strand of anthropological
arguments about sacrifice: sacrifice is not always or only about giving up. It involves
towards its close, or sometimes instead of violence, a practice of commensality, that
is, eating together or ritual feasting with the gods.61 Despite all the attendant risks of
poisoning, cross-contamination, trickery, mess, bad table manners, and bad sharing,
when it comes to relationships between the arts and disciplines, we might do well more
often to practise sacrifice as commensality.
Notes
My thanks to Ruby Lowe, Matthew Champion, and all my students in ‘Listening Across the
Channel: Sound and Modern Literature’ at King’s College London.
1. Matt Sakakeeny, ‘Music’, in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 112–24 (113).
2. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), 39; in relation to musicology,
see Georgina Born, ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the
Practice Turn’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135, no. 2 (2010): 205–43 (221–3).
3. See, for example, Jonathan Sterne, ‘Sonic Imaginations’, in The Sound Studies Reader,
ed. Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012), 1–17 (3, 5); Sakakeeny, ‘Music’, 113; and Gavin
Steingo and Jim Sykes, ‘Introduction: Remapping Sound Studies in the Global South’, in
Remapping Sound Studies, ed. Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2019), 1–36 (7, 12).
4. Michael Bull and Les Back, ‘Introduction: Into Sound’, in The Auditory Culture Reader,
ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 1–18 (12).

sound agonistes 111
5. Ibid.
6. Defining authors whose primary disciplinary ‘home’ is in ‘music’ risks seeming to create
the kind of disciplinary boundaries under investigation, and certainly a number of other
contributors were practising music-makers and composers, and/or worked in organisations
and institutions where ‘music’ might not be a structuring principle.
7. Richard Sennett, ‘Resistance’, in Auditory Culture, 481–4.
8. Michael Bull, ed., Sound Studies (London: Routledge, 2013).
9. Publisher’s book description at https://www.routledge.com/Sound-Studies/Bull/p/
book/9780415597333 (accessed 24 August 2023).
10. Ibid.
11. Mark M. Smith, ‘Introduction: Onward to Audible Pasts’, in Hearing History: A Reader,
ed. Mark M. Smith (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), ix–xxii (x). In disciplin-
ary terms, Smith, xi, brackets off ethnomusicology as ‘lack[ing]’ the ‘historical dimension’
relevant to his readers.
12. Veit Erlmann, ‘But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound, and the Senses’,
in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford:
Berg, 2004), 1–20 (2).
13. Steingo and Sykes, ‘Introduction’, 11, 27n18.
14. Ibid., 6.
15. Ibid. See Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan, eds, Audible Empire: Music, Global
Politics, Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
16. Mark M. Smith, Mitchell Snay, and Bruce R. Smith, ‘Coda. Talking Sound History’, in
Hearing History, 365–404 (398).
17. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, ‘Introduction to “Sound Studies: New Technologies
and Music”’, Social Studies of Science 34, no. 5 (2004): 635–48 (636); Trevor Pinch and
Karin Bijsterveld, ‘New Keys to the World of Sound’, in The Oxford Handbook of Sound
Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
3–36 (8). Compare Sterne, ‘Sonic Imaginations’; Anna Snaith, ed., Sound and Literature
18. Pinch and Bijsterveld, ‘New Keys’, 9.
19. Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 1976), 158–64; R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf,
1977), 103–19; Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending
to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
20. Steven Connor, ‘Strings in the Earth and Air’ (2006), 11, http://stevenconnor.com/seeingtosound
.html (accessed 24 August 2023).
21. Erlmann, ‘But What of the Ethnographic Ear?’, 15; Edward Said, Culture and Imperial-
ism (London: Vintage, 1994), 189. The characterisation of Russolo, Varèse, and Cage is
Douglas Kahn’s, ‘Ether Ore’, in Hearing Cultures, 107–30 (108).
22. See especially Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, trans.
James A. Steintrager (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 55–80; and Friedrich
A. Kittler, The Truth of the Technological World, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford
23. Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 17.
24. Ibid., 101.
25. Ibid.
26. Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1995), 7.
27. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 23.
28. Ibid., 24.

112 miranda stanyon
29. Germane studies include Derek Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Litera-
ture and Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Julia Meszaros and
Johannes Zachhuber, eds, Sacrifice and Modern Thought (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
30. First proposed in Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, ‘Essai sur la nature et la function du
sacrifice’, L’Année sociologique 2 (1899): 29–138.
31. Ps. 51:16–17.
32. Heb. 11:32 (on Samson), 12:1, 13:10–16.
33. For further discussion, see Miranda Stanyon, Resounding the Sublime: Music in English
and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670–1850 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
34. Compare Robert Stagg, ‘Against “the Music of Poetry”’, in The Edinburgh Companion to
Literature and Music, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2020), 183–8.
35. Quotations from John Hall’s translation of Pseudo-Longinus, Peri hypsous (1652), in
David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 138.
36. Norbrook, Writing, 67.
37. John Milton, ‘The Verse’, in Paradise Lost, ed. Alistair Fowler (London: Longman,
2006), 55.
38. John Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (London, 1701),
23–4.
39. John Dennis, An Essay upon Publick Spirit (London, 1711), 19.
40. Scott Trudell, Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 186–7. Trudell, 151–3, offers a recent view of
the extensive literature on Milton and music. See also David Ainsworth, Milton, Music
and Literary Interpretation: Reading through the Spirit (New York: Routledge, 2020). It is
rarer to integrate consideration of sound, music, and musically coded aspects of versifica-
tion in Samson Agonistes (hereafter SA), the approach adopted here.
41. John Milton, ‘Of that Sort of Dramatic Poem which is Called Tragedy’, in Samson Agonistes,
in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1997), 357.
42. Milton’s association of the term ‘sacrifice’ with idolatry may reflect early Protestant argu-
ments that Christianity was not sacrificial, and Catholic Reform’s renewed emphasis on
sacrifice. See Johannes Zachhuber and Julia Meszaros, ‘Introduction’, in Sacrifice, 1–11
(1–2). SA’s equivocation about Samson’s last act chimes with what Gregory Chaplin argues
is Milton’s heterodox downplaying of the Crucifixion and emphasis on the perfect obe-
dience which precedes and enables Christ’s sacrifice, an ethical choice imitable by other
humans. This ethical framework draws on Cicero, as do Milton’s musical images of cosmic
and interpersonal concord, Chaplin shows. Gregory Chaplin, ‘Beyond Sacrifice: Milton
and the Atonement’, PMLA 125, no. 2 (2010): 354–69. Discussions of SA and sacrifice
include Anthony Low, ‘Tragic Pattern in Samson Agonistes’, Texas Studies in Literature
and Language 11, no. 2 (1969): 915–30; and Brendan Quigley, ‘The Distant Hero of
Samson Agonistes’, ELH 72, no. 3 (2005): 529–51 (548).
43. Early modern understandings of sound as a purgative and/or destructive physical force
were widespread. See Marissa Greenberg, ‘Noise, the Great Fire, and Milton’s Samson
Agonistes’, in Metropolitan Tragedy: Genre, Justice, and the City in Early Modern Eng-
land (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 108–38.
44. See Greenberg, ‘Noise’, on cathartic purging and sound, although Greenberg suggests no
acoustic catharsis occurs. By contrast, Ainsworth sees a more abstract musical cathar-
sis available to readers, reflecting harmonia mundi and Samson’s restored ‘harmony’
with God, but less related to sonic sensation or poetic sound. Ainsworth, Milton, Music

sound agonistes 113
and Literary Interpretation, 120–40, especially 122–3. Elizabeth D. Harvey, ‘Samson

Agonistes and Milton’s Sensible Ethics’, in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas
McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 649–66 (656), sug-
gests the relevance to SA of seventeenth-century theories that ‘sensation happens when
the sense is converted into the nature of the sensible thing, that is, through an alteration’
of the subject.
45. Compare Greenberg, ‘Noise’.
46. Norbrook, Writing, 137–8, quoting Hall, Peri hypsous, 79.
47. Milton, ‘Of [. . .] Tragedy’, 355.
48. Compare Trudell, Unwritten Poetry, 193–4. On the slippery category of lyric and its rela-
tion to song, see Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early
Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
49. The prevalence of unreliable speakers in the poem is discussed widely. See Joan S. Bennett,
‘Reading Samson Agonistes’, in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson,
2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 219–35.
50. On the sonnet, see, for example, Michael Cohen, ‘Rhyme in Samson Agonistes’, Milton
Quarterly 8, no. 1 (1974): 4–6 (5); and Linda Gregerson, ‘Milton and the Tragedy of
Nations’, PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 672–87 (682–4). Greenberg’s and Trudell’s interpreta-
tions of SA in the wake of sound studies curiously do not comment on such manipulations
of poetic sound/song.
51. William Wordsworth, ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’, l. 13, in Poems of William Wordsworth,
Volume 3: Collected Reading Texts from The Cornell Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis
(Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, 2009), 605–6 (606).
52. Milton, ‘Of [. . .] Tragedy’, 356. See, for example, Edward Phillips, ‘The Life of John
Milton’, in Letters of State, written by Mr. John Milton [. . .] (London, 1694), i–xliv; and
John Arthos, Milton and the Italian Cities (London, 1968), 129–205, which speculated on
Monteverdi’s and others’ impact on SA.
53. Milton, ‘Of [. . .] Tragedy’, 357. Carey’s edition gives ‘stanzas of pauses’, while seventeenth-
century editions give ‘or’: pause is here synonymous with stanza (from stare, to stand); the
phrase emphasises Milton’s separation of his verse from the choreographic movements of
Greek choruses in a strophe and antistrophe (turn and counter-turn).
54. For one view of the final lyric’s prosody as condemning the chorus, see Janel Mueller, ‘Just
Measures? Versification in Samson Agonistes’, Milton Studies 33 (1996): 47–82. For inter-
pretation of the sonnet as a questionable but not merely ironic moment of catharsis and
community, see Gregerson, ‘Milton and the Tragedy’, 680–4. Gregerson notes in passing
rhyme’s ‘musical’ coding and apparent contradiction between SA and Paradise Lost, sug-
gesting, like Cohen, SA’s highly ‘flexible’ deployment of rhyme. On contemporary debate
about choruses and rhyme, see Ann Baynes Coiro, ‘Milton’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy:
Samson Agonistes’, in Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes
Coiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 97–120.
55. Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley:
University of California Press), 15:4.
56. Milton, ‘Of [. . .] Tragedy’, 355.
57. Norbrook, Writing, 138.
58. On adiaphora, see, for example, Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2001), 365–9.
59. Sakakeeny, ‘Music’, 122.
61. Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice, 10–11. See further Maurice Bloch, ‘Commensality and Poi-
soning’, Social Research 66, no. 1 (1999): 133–49; and Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter

114 miranda stanyon
Select Bibliography
Ainsworth, David, Milton, Music and Literary Interpretation: Reading through the Spirit (New
York: Routledge, 2020).
Attali, Jacques, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
Bull, Michael and Les Back, eds, The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003).
Chaplin, Gregory, ‘Beyond Sacrifice: Milton and the Atonement’, PMLA 125, no. 2 (2010):
354–69.
Erlmann, Veit, ed., Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity (Oxford: Berg,
2004).
Greenberg, Marissa, Metropolitan Tragedy: Genre, Justice, and the City in Early Modern England
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).
Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
Hughes, Derek, Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2007).
Milton, John, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1997).
Norbrook, David, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660
Novak, David and Matt Sakakeeny, eds, Keywords in Sound (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2015).
Pinch, Trevor and Karin Bijsterveld, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford:
Steingo, Gavin and Jim Sykes, eds, Remapping Sound Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2019).
Sterne, Jonathan, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2012).
Trudell, Scott, Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

7
Shakespeare’s Vibrant Theatres

Bruce R. Smith
T hat’s vibrant as in vibrating.1

The physical media of theatrical performance are frequencies of energy. They
exist in two forms: (1) electromagnetic light rays at 400–700 nanometres and (2)
mechanical sound waves at 20–20,000 hertz. Whatever the performance – live or
digital, medieval or contemporary – these two forms of vibrating energy communi-
cate what spectator/listeners see, hear, perceive, and feel. One of these two kinds of
vibrations – sound waves – is the subject of this chapter, with particular attention to
the original acoustic environments and original performance practices in the theatre
buildings for which Shakespeare contrived his designs in sound. The notations of those
designs are usually referred to as ‘scripts’, but that term privileges words. To call the
sound designs ‘scores’ comes closer to recognising the variety of sounds encoded and
implied in Shakespeare’s designs, and I am adopting that term here.
In performances of Shakespeare’s plays, now as well as then, a certain subset of
sound waves coalesce to produce the phonemes of English speech. But the ambition
of this chapter is broader: to study acoustic vibrations of all kinds: not just phonemes
but noise, shouts, sound effects, instrumental sounds, and sounds made by spectator/
listeners.
In turning attention to the full panoply of sounds present in performances of Shake-
speare’s plays I am following the example of Steve Goodman, who has been credited
with initiating a so-called ontological turn in sound studies. Instead of describing
the cultural meanings of sound, theorists like Goodman attend to the being-ness of
sound, its physical properties, its assaultive force on hearers’ bodies, and its politics.2
Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2010) makes Goodman’s case.
Goodman regards audible sound to be only one manifestation of vibration:
If we subtract human perception, everything moves. Anything static is so only at the

level of perceptibility. At the molecular or quantum level, everything is in motion, is
vibrating. Equally, objecthood, that which gives an entity duration in time, makes
it endure, is an event irrelevant of human perception. All that is required is that
an entity be felt as an object by another entity. All entities are potential media that
can feel or whose vibrations can be felt by other entities. This is a realism, albeit a
weird, agitated, and nervous one.3
As Goodman frames it, sound is first and foremost a physical force; its symbolic poten-
tialities are second-level effects. Ontology begets epistemology. Holger Schulze’s chapter
in this volume demonstrates how knowing-through-sound produces a distinctive kind of

116 bruce r. smith
knowledge. To consider theatrical sound in these ontological and epistemological terms

is to decentre intentional speech acts. Instead, sites of performance become acoustic
force fields, full of all kinds of sounds, rife with conflict. In these force fields of contained
energy, speech is only one force and, in certain moments at least, not the dominant force.
Tamsen O. Wolff’s chapter in this volume investigates just such a realignment of sounds.
Reading Shakespeare’s scores as vibrations might seem perverse. After all, Shake-
speare was famed in his own time – and remains famed today – as a wordsmith. To
listen for the non-linguistic sounds in which Shakespeare’s language is embedded, I
am arguing here, is better to understand the potencies and potentialities of his words
and their effect on listeners who apprehend semantic vibrations within a matrix of
other sonic vibrations. I proceed in four phases: (1) noise as the matrix of sound in
performances of Shakespeare’s plays, (2) extra-linguistic and para-linguistic sounds,
(3) speech as an unstable category, and (4) vibration as the interface between text/
performance and actors/audience. The result, I hope, will exemplify the affordances of
sound studies for Shakespeare studies.
Noise
When neighbours in the London parish of St Ann Blackfriars successfully petitioned
the Bishop of London to prevent Shakespeare’s acting company, the Lord Chamber-
lain’s Men, from opening the indoor Blackfriars Theatre in 1596, they listed as one
of their reasons ‘the same Playhouse is so neere the Church that the noyse of the
Drummes and Trumpetts will greatly disturbe and hinder both the Ministers and the
Parishioners in tyme of devine service and Sermones’.4
So focused have Shakespeare scholars been on the words spoken within the Globe
and the Blackfriars theatres that they have shut their ears to the multiple kinds of
sounds that were part of performances in those places – especially noise. Josua Poole
in his how-to-be-a-better-writer book The English Parnassus, or, A helpe to English
poesie (1657) provides under the heading ‘theater’ a suggestive list of adjectives: ‘Pub-
lick, spacious, thronged, crowded, open, populous, peopled, crammed, well-fill’d,
mirthfull, joyous, noisefull, clamarous, applausive, pompous, gorgeous.’5 In addition
to the drums and trumpets specified in the St Ann’s petition, early modern theatres
were full of other non-verbal noise: alarums from backstage in battle scenes, cannon
fire from the roof, fireworks accompanying entrances of devils and demons, shouts,
boos, applause, and catcalls from the audience.6 In terms of volume, such sounds out-
decibelled speech.
A curious thing about the St Ann parishioners’ complaint is their fear of trumpets
and drums. These loud sounds were prominent features of performances in the vast
outdoor theatres north of the city walls of London and across the Thames on the
South Bank. When the Blackfriars Theatre was finally allowed to open – with so-called
rehearsals of plays by child actors from St Paul’s School – the repertory did not favour
loud sounds. When the King’s Men finally did take over the space in 1609, perfor-
mances there featured consort music as the plays began, not drums and trumpets.7
Several plays acted by the King’s Men at both the Globe and the Blackfriars exist in
two versions. The version for the Blackfriars tones down the trumpets and replaces
them with quieter cornets.8

shakespeare’s vibrant theatres 117
In both the Globe and the Blackfriars one major source of noise was the audience.
Poole characterises all theatres, outdoor and indoor, as ‘noisefull, clamarous, applau-
sive’. Contemporary testimony attests that Shakespeare’s audiences were far from
being the quiet, attentive listeners that have been the rule in ‘legitimate’ theatres since
the late nineteenth century.9 Sound studies has generally considered noise as distracting
and undesirable.10 If we attend carefully to cues for sound written into Shakespeare’s
scores and the strategies the scores present for controlling boisterous audiences, the
role of noise becomes a dynamic part of the original performances. Greg Hainge in
Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise gives noise its ontological due.11 ‘Noise’
for Hainge is not the random frequencies that sound studies has regarded as meaning-
less and distracting but the matrix out of which all human-created meaning emerges.
Hainge’s schema can be understood as a figure/ground relationship. Perception is a
matter of where one turns one’s attention: to figure or to ground. What would happen
if we trained our ears to listen for the auditory ‘ground’ of Shakespeare’s plays, turning
non-verbal sounds into the ‘figure’?
Extra-Linguistic Sounds and Para-Linguistic Sounds

By extra-linguistic sounds I mean sounds that exist in vibrating frequencies somewhere
between noise and speech. By para-linguistic sounds I mean sounds that modulate and
enhance the phonemes of speech, as for example songs, in which the semantic sense of
words is enhanced via pitch, melodic cadence, and rhythm.
Extralinguistic sounds, whether explicitly cued or indirectly implied in Shakespeare’s
scores, are the hardest for modern ears to hear. So intent are we on decoding speech –
the ‘figure’ in Shakespeare’s work – that we tune out the ‘ground’ from which speech
emerges: noise. The figure/ground relationship is particularly apparent in how plays
at the Globe and other outdoor theatres customarily began. Out of the noise of the
assembling audience first emerged trumpet blasts to signal to the assembled audience
and to potential customers outside that the play was about to begin. The segue from
the trumpet signals to semantic sounds, often consisted in a Chorus outside the fiction
or an authoritative male character within the fiction asserting aural command over the
theatre building and silencing noise. The volume and timbre of the trumpets could often
be heard in the male actors’ declamatory voice. A signal example – signal in every sense
of the word – is the Prologue’s opening lines in the 1623 Folio text of Henry V:
O for a muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of inventïon:
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene.12
The piercing sound of the trumpet is continued in the bright /o/ of the Prologue’s first
phoneme. In the acoustic progression of vowel sounds from /aː/ in the front of the mouth
to /ʊ/ in the back of the mouth, the middle position is occupied by /o/. With lips protrud-
ing like a trumpet’s bell, /o/ is the loudest of the English vowels.13 In its first two lines the
Prologue to Henry V runs the gamut of primary English vowels, aligning the timbre of
the speaking voice with a trumpet’s brass in the visualisation of ‘a muse of fire’.

118 bruce r. smith
One of Shakespeare’s distinctive ways of dealing with audience noise is to begin,

not with a loud voice, but with a conversation in progress: Antonio conversing with
Salerio and Solano in The Merchant of Venice, Orlando voicing his woes to Old Adam
in As You Like It, Iago setting up Roderigo in Othello, Kent and Gloucester exchang-
ing court gossip in King Lear, and Philo commenting to Demetrius about Antony’s
‘dotage’ over Cleopatra moments before the two title characters enter in Antony and
Cleopatra. In these instances comparatively soft speech commands the audience’s
attention, and noise likely diminishes by degrees.
Other plays, from Shakespeare’s later career, are scored to begin with loud extra-
linguistic sounds: a shouting mob in Coriolanus, ‘a tempestuous noise of thunder and
lightning’ in The Tempest. The fact that these sounds are extra-spatial as well as extra-
linguistic foregrounds their visceral vibratory quality. These sounds were executed
‘within’, that is, from inside the ‘tiring house’ at the behind-the-rear façade of the
playing platform. Not being able to see the source of a sound has been demonstrated
to create a sense of disorientation.14
Designating songs and instrumental music in Shakespeare’s scores as paralinguistic
is likely to seem as outrageous to musicians and musicologists as regarding immortal
words as momentary semantic sounds is to Shakespeare scholars. The prefix para- sets
up music as ‘beside’ or ‘next to’ semantic sounds. The music in songs takes the pho-
nemes, rhythm, pitch, and cadences of words and shapes them acoustically, blurring
the distinction between music and words. In performance, music and words are both
species of sound within the genus of regulated vibration.
If extralinguistic sounds from ‘within’ functioned behind the words, paralinguistic
sounds functioned beside, above, or below the words, depending on where the musi-
cians were placed. Sometimes the places from which instrumental sounds emanate are
specified in the score. An ominous sound seeming to come from the under the stage in
4.3 of Antony and Cleopatra is heard by the soldiers onstage:
Music of the hautboys as under the stage

SECOND SOLDIER Peace, what noise?
FIRST SOLDIER List, list!
SECOND SOLDIER Hark!
FIRST SOLDIER Music i’th’ air.
THIRD SOLDIER Under the earth.
FOURTH SOLDIER It signs well, does it not?
THIRD SOLDIER No.
FIRST SOLDIER Peace, I say!
What should this mean?
SECOND SOLDIER ’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved,
Now leaves him (4.3.11–16)
On other occasions instrumental sounds are heard as coming from above, as being
‘in the air’. By his very name the spirit Ariel, who conjures the musical sounds in The
Tempest and sings the play’s songs, is associated with air. In the Blackfriars Theatre, for
which The Tempest was likely designed, the instrumentists were placed in a musicians’
gallery above the façade at the back of the playing space. Some witnesses describe the
space as being curtained, in which case paralinguistic music would have vibrated in the

air from an unseen source, producing a disorienting effect not dissimilar to the effect
of extralinguistic sounds produced from within the tiring house.
An example of this disorienting effect is the ‘Solemn and strange music’ that is cued
to sound when Prospero produces an apparitional banquet to Alonso, Gonzalo, Sebas-
tian, and Antonio in The Tempest 3.3. The paralinguistic function of the music – its
‘along-side-ness’ – is indicated in Gonzalo’s naming of the sound: ‘Marvellous sweet
music!’ The word ‘strange’ reverberates throughout The Tempest. The instrumental
music in 3.3 adds overtones to earlier instances of the word ‘strange’ and continues to
echo in the audience’s ears every time the word ‘strange’ is enunciated later in the play.
Heard but not seen: in cinema that arrangement is called ‘extradiegetic sound’
in contrast to ‘diegetic sound’ in which the source of the sound is visible within the
image.15 Cues for drums and trumpets in battle scenes suggest that such sounds were
usually extradiegetic. As such, they could function alongside words, as is usually the
case in film, but they could also drown out words, temporarily reversing the usual
figure/ground relationship.
The placement of musicians at the Globe Theatre remains more controversial than
at the Blackfriars. In the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe in London, where electronic
amplification is not used, positioning the musicians on the open gallery above the stage
results in a muted sound as compared with placing the musicians in an upper specta-
tors’ gallery just to the right or the left of the platform.16 In my 1999 book The Acoustic
World of Early Modern England – published two years before the reconstructed Globe
in London officially opened and three years before the replica of the Blackfriars Theatre
in Staunton, Virginia, was completed – I attempted acoustic analysis of both spaces,
using surviving dimensions of the original structures, their construction materials, and
principles of modern acoustic engineering. Speech was my reference point in both cases,
and I distinguished the reverberant lateral sound of the Globe with the quieter, rounder
resonance of the Blackfriars. To revisit these calculations with instrumental music in
mind confirms the general differences between the two acoustic environments but
points up some specific differences when the sound is not words but music. The Globe,
open to the sky and circumscribed with horizontal vibrating surfaces, fosters brighter,
more locatable instrumental sounds. Musicians, whether placed on the balcony above
the platform or in a gallery to the side or even on the platform itself, are visually and
acoustically present beside the actors. The musicians are physically more distant from
the actors in the reconstructed Blackfriars Theatre, resulting in a warmer and more
diffuse sound that embraces actors, musicians, and the audience alike. The musicians
figure as an independent sound source.
The affinities of music with other forms of sound is apparent in early modern
English in the word ‘noise’, which could refer not only to extralinguistic sounds but to
a pleasant or melodious sound as well as to the company of musicians who made those
sounds.17 ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord’: the King James Bible’s translation of the
first verse of Psalm 100 celebrates this once-current idea of noise.
Speech
If we make noise and non-linguistic sounds the ground and speech the figure, we
end up blurring the boundaries of speech itself. In Shakespeare’s sound scores, speech
comes in a variety of forms that incorporate to varying degrees extralinguistic and

120 bruce r. smith
paralinguistic sounds as well as noise. ‘Speech genres’ is Mikhail Bakhtin’s term for
utterance routines tailored to specific intents and situations.18 All of the speech genres
in Shakespeare’s scores – orations, soliloquies, asides, dialogue, clowning patter –
involve varying degrees of extralinguistic and paralinguistic elements, sometimes even
noise. Semantic sense is never the only motive for a character’s speaking.
In orations the tropes of classical rhetoric figure as paralinguistic sound effects. To
limit attention only to Hamlet, Claudius’s nervous oration in the first court scene (1.2)
is full of paralinguistic sounds. The scene is scored to begin with a flourish of trumpets.
Claudius, like the Prologue to Henry V, uses his voice as a trumpet to cover up the
one thing he wants to conceal, the crime of murdering his brother and marrying the
brother’s wife. He uses the sounds of words and the piling up of fine-sounding phrases
before mentioning, almost parenthetically, what he wants not to say:
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,

Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as ’twere, with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,
Taken to wife (Ham 1.2.8–14)
Another flourish of trumpets ends the scene. Noise comes later, when offstage noises of
trumpets, cannons, and drums are cued and are heard by Hamlet and Horatio. ‘What
does this mean, my lord?’ Horatio asks Hamlet. It is Claudius draining cups of wine
with his courtiers: ‘The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out / The triumph of his
pledge’ (Ham 1.4.5, 10–11).
Hamlet’s first aside in the court scene is another speech genre involving paralinguistic
sounds: a quip directed at the audience that is as much about contemptuous /k/ sounds
as about Claudius’s incest: ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’ (1.2.65). Hamlet’s
famous soliloquies – the first is ‘O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, / Thaw and
resolve itself into a dew’ (1.2.129–30) – function primarily as expressions of emotion, in
this case communicated through /s/ and /ʃ/ sounds.
Dialogue, exchanges of speech between two or more characters, is the staple speech
genre in Shakespeare’s plays. Characters exchange not only semantic information but
nuanced emotions, facilitated by sympathetic or antagonistic paralinguistic sounds.
Hamlet’s exchanges with the Ghost in 1.5 are a concise example. ‘Speak’, pleads Ham-
let; ‘swear’, demands the Ghost. The disjunction with the Ghost between body and no
voice in 1.1 and voice with no body (later in 1.5) makes this a case in extremis.
Clowning patter is a speech genre concerned with such disjunctions, in this case
disjunctions between sense and nonsense. Shakespeare’s clowns and fools are great
riddle-tellers and punsters. They revel in the arbitrariness of sounds and signifiers.
They are fond, too, of ‘breaking out’ into song. Take the first grave digger in Hamlet:
HAMLET Whose grave’s this, sirrah?

FIRST CLOWN Mine, sir.
[Sings] O, a pit of clay for to be made—
HAMLET I think it be thine indeed, for thou liest in’t.
FIRST CLOWN You lie out on’t, sir, and therefore ’tis not yours. For my

part, I do not lie in’t, yet it is mine.

HAMLET Thou dost lie in’t, to be in’t and say it is thine. ’Tis for the dead,
not for the quick; therefore thou liest.
FIRST CLOWN ’Tis a quick lie, sir: ’twill away again from me to you. (Ham
1.5.118–29)
Boundaries between speech and other kinds of sound – extralinguistic and paralinguis-
tic sounds as well as noise – are not static. Vibrations of extralinguistic sounds carry
over into speech, and paralinguistic vibrations become extensions of speech.
Alarums from ‘within’ during battle scenes, shouts onstage and off, and sound
effects like thunder affect speeches that occur during and after those sounds. The ‘tem-
pestuous noise of thunder and lightning’ at the start of The Tempest drowns out the
speeches it provokes, resulting in semantic chaos among the voices. In no production
of the play that I have witnessed could the actors’ voices be heard above the noise.
Rather, phrases emerged momentarily out of the noise and then receded:
MASTER Boatswain!
BOATSWAIN Here, Master. What cheer?
MASTER Good, speak to th’ mariners. Fall to’t yarely, or we run our-selves
aground. Bestir, bestir!
Exit
Enter Mariners
BOATSWAIN Heigh, my hearts! Cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! Yare, yare!
Take in the top-sail! Tend to th’ Master’s whistle! – Blow till thou burst thy wind,
if room enough (Tem 1.1.1–7)
When the noblemen onboard enter, the Boatswain mocks their attempts to speak amid
the storm: ‘Hence! What cares these roarers for the name of king? To cabin; silence!
Trouble us not’ (Tem 1.1.16–18). Only when Prospero enters in the next scene does
speech assume final dominance over extralinguistic noise.
A similar segue of noise into speech occurs in the first scene of Coriolanus. ‘Enter
a company of mutinous citizens, with staves, clubs, and other weapons’: the opening
stage direction in Coriolanus implies shouts and cries that compete with speech:
FIRST CITIZEN Before we proceed any further, hear me speak!

ALL CITIZENS Speak, speak! (Cor 1.1.1–2)
This is one of the very few times in Shakespeare when a crowd of people are cued to
speak on top of each other. Offstage shouts are heard again later in the scene. It takes
the dominant male voice of the statesman Menenius Agrippa, who enters the scene at
line 40, before shouting settles into speaking.
The extralinguistic sounds of the first scene of Coriolanus do not end when the
shouting stops: they reverberate through the entire play, always threatening to erupt,
as they do in the play’s many battle scenes and in the last scene when conspirators
murder Coriolanus in the presence of his archenemy Aufidius:
CONSPIRATORS Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!

Draw both the conspirators, and kill Martius, who falls. Aufidius stands on him

122 bruce r. smith
LORDS Hold, hold, hold, hold!

AUFIDIUS My noble masters, hear me speak (Cor 5.6.300–1)
Aufidius has had a change of heart and laments the death of his enemy. The last
sounds in the play are paralinguistic: ‘Beat thou the drum’, Aufidius commands, ‘that
it speak mournfully’ (Cor 5.6.149–50). The final stage direction is for ‘a dead march’
to accompany the removal of Coriolanus’s body offstage. The drums continue the
vibrations of Aufidius’s voice. Paralinguistically, the drums speak for Aufidius, in his
place. And they vibrate the affect of his speech out into the theatre and into the ears
of the audience, creating a vibrant aural field. Upon close inspection, the boundary
between linguistic sounds and other types of sounds turns out to be less rigid than
linguistic science would have it be.
Early modern brass instruments were regarded as particularly apt for paralinguistic
use because they were played with tongue and lips. The sounds produced by musicians
using these instruments were, in multiple senses of the word, articulate sounds. In early
modern trumpets there were no valves to change pitches; everything was done with the
player’s lips and tongue. Military signals in particular required precise arrangements
of the tongue. As Cesare Bendinelli explains in Tutta l’arte della Trombetta (The entire
art of trumpet) (1614), a student of the trumpet should learn
to lead with his chin (mangeggiar il barbozzo) [together] with the notes of each
register – this is called ‘accenting’ the trumpet and gives it elegance. When [the
pupil] has succeeded in this, and knows how to play all the notes (voci) well, he
then can learn how to sing and play with the tongue.19
Tonguing technique is particularly important in military signals, which Bendinelli

understands as words. Particular tongue positions are specified in Bendinelli’s nota-
tions: ‘The principal military signals have syllables (parole) placed under them, in
order that the player may know in which way to tongue (far la pronontia) into the
trumpet and to differentiate one signal (cossa) from another.’20
Shakespeare’s history plays are full of trumpet cues that signal what is happening
in a battle. In most instances, the battle is taking place offstage and is heard by the
audience via alarums rather than seen. Two or three characters may move the battle
onstage for a private encounter, as happens when Macduff rallies his troops in the pas-
sage from 5.6 to 5.7:
MACDUFF Make all our trumpets speak, give them all breath,
Those clamorous harbingers of blood, and death.
Exeunt. Alarums continued
Enter Macbeth
MACBETH They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly,
But bear-like I must fight the course (Mac 5.6.9–10, 5.7.1–2)
In effect Macbeth is responding to the trumpets’ speech. The audience hears in those
trumpet sounds an extension of Macduff’s voice.
It is not only trumpets that speak for characters in Macbeth but drums. From the
beginning of the play Macbeth is associated with the distinctive sound of his drum.

A cue for ‘Drum within’ interrupts the witches’ chanting in 1.3. ‘A drum, a drum! /
Macbeth doth come’, chants one of the three witches at 1.3.25–6. There are repeated
stage directions for ‘Drum and colours’ before each of the entries of the opposing
forces in the concluding sequence of battle scenes. These stage directions bring directly
onto the stage sounds that are usually heard from within. In each case, a drum speaks
first, then the men. It is Malcolm’s drum that heralds his victorious entry in the last
scene. In sonic terms, the whole battle sequence has been a matter of battling drums as
much as battling speeches. Drums may lack articulation, but the rhythm with which
they are struck can certainly cue differences in speech rhythms and even in pitch and
volume if more than one drum sound together.21
The close connection between drumming and speech is quite explicit in the role of
Parolles, the braggart soldier in All’s Well That Ends Well. His name literally means
‘words’ – of which he speaks plenty – but he is also enamoured of his drum. In the
jokes played on him a direct connection is made between drumming and verbal bom-
bast. For Parolles his drum is a metonym for manliness, valour, and war, and the
recovery of his lost drum becomes his obsession, much to his fellow soldiers’ amuse-
ment. ‘A pox on’t, let it go. ’Tis but a drum’, says Lord G. ‘But a drum?’, Parolles
exclaims. ‘Is’t but a drum? A drum so lost!’ (AWW 3.6.35–6). When the lords trick
him by covering his eyes with a hood and pretending to be his captors, Parolles – ever
the man with ready words – slanders the nobleman he has served, Count Roussillon,
as an imposter, a man of all sound and no action: ‘Faith, sir, he’s led the drum before
the English tragedians’ (AWW 4.3.218). When English acting companies went touring
on the Continent, they used this way of drumming up business.22 Earlier in the play
Parolles has been ridiculed as ‘That jackanapes / With scarves’ (AWW 3.5.18–19).
Scarves were worn and waved by morris dancers, whose movements were coordinated
with drum beats and piping.
Songs, in which words are set to music, are an especially interesting form of para-
linguistic sound-making. The idea of ‘setting’ words ‘to’ music23 – or in Shakespeare’s
time ‘in’ music – is fundamentally placing words next to (para-) music. We frequently
speak of songs as a merging of music and words, but the relationship between these
two entities can shift. In the case of chant, words predominate; in highly ornamented
songs, words can become secondary. Coming from multiple musical traditions, the
songs in Shakespeare’s plays can veer in either direction. Shakespeare’s comedies, espe-
cially As You Like It and Twelfth Night, contain multiple cues for speech turning into
song in the form of snatches of popular ballads, rounds, dance songs, and art songs.24
If audiences recognised popular tunes, they may well have joined in, and the few words
noted in the text may not have marked the end of the song in a given performance.
In As You Like It the best-known song today is Thomas Morley’s artful setting of
‘It Was a Lover and His Lass’ from near the end of the play. Which came first – the
song’s use in As You Like It (c. 1600) or the song’s inclusion in Morley’s The first
booke of ayres. Or Little short songs, to sing and play to the lute, with the base viole
(1600) – remains controversial, but Morley’s setting of the words to (or in) music for
voice and lute demonstrates how exquisitely the music shapes the phonemes, rhythm,
pitch, and cadences of the words. As originally printed in Morley’s book, the song pro-
vides a score for all the sounds – linguistic, paralinguistic, and extralinguistic – that are
involved in its performance. On the left in Figure 7.1 the top stave cues words, pitches,
and rhythm, a singer’s voice, while the lower stave gives finger positions and rhythmic

124 bruce r. smith
Figure 7.1 Thomas Morley, ‘It was a lover and his lass’, in The first booke of ayres.
Or Little short songs, to sing and play to the lute, with the base viole (London:
William Barley, 1600), sigs B3v–B4. Reproduced by permission of the Folger
Shakespeare Library, Washington DC.
cues for an accompanying lutentist. On the facing page another stave provides pitch
and rhythmic notations for a bass-viol player, who provides a so-called ground bass
for all the figures sounded by the singer and the lutenist.
The rising rhythm of ‘It was a lov-er and his lass’, coupled with the rising pitches
of ‘was’ and ‘lov-’, the quick descent from there, and the tripping rhythm after the
pitch climax of ‘lov-’ are all paralinguistic embellishments to the semantic sense of the
words. Early modern taste in all things artistic ran to ornamentation.25 The lutenist
might provide further ornamentation in improvisations on the bare notations of finger
positions.
Also prominent in Morley’s setting are the extralinguistic sounds of ‘hey-nonny-
nonny-no’ and ‘Hey ding-a-ding-a-ding’, nonsense syllables that are repeated again
and again, becoming the song’s main event. (The text of the song in the First Folio
provides only one iteration of these syllables.) As the court fool Touchstone quips at
the end of the song, ‘though there was no great matter in the ditty, yet the note was
very untunable’ (AYL 5.3.37–8). ‘Matter’ here refers to semantic sense. The two pages
who have performed the song for Touchstone and his country wife Audrey take excep-
tion to Touchstone’s courtly dismal of their music: ‘We kept time, we lost not our time’
(5.3.39). But Touchstone hears it all as nonsense: ‘I count it but time lost to hear such
a foolish song’ (5.3.40).

Vibrancy
Let us return to the petition made by neighbours of the Blackfriars Theatre. They
opposed the opening of the theatre for two reasons, both having to do with vibrations.
First, ‘by reason of the great resort and gathering togeather of all manner of vagrant
and lewde persons’ and, second, because ‘the same Playhouse is so neere the Church
that the noyse of the Drummes and Trumpetts will greatly disturbe and hinder both
the Ministers and the Parishioners in tyme of devine service and Sermones’.26 St Ann
was a relatively quiet, well-to-do parish made up of closes and narrow lanes, ves-
tiges of the Blackfriars monastery that had occupied the site.27 The prospect of noisy
throngs of ‘vagrant and lewd persons’ was not only a political threat but an acoustic
threat. A proximity search of the database Early English Books Online reveals how
often ‘loud’ appeared in the same context as ‘lewd’ even when people were not present,
as in the formulaic phrase ‘a lewd and loud lie’.
When trumpets and drums were added to the lewd and loud noises of audiences,
the result was a challenge to the primacy of words and speech, especially in the ears
of Puritan-leaning members of the parish. The contrasts between church-space and
theatre-space were sharp:
Church acoustic Theatre acoustic

Quiet Noisy
Single dominant male voice Many competing voices
Group voices under total control Group voices not under control
Linguistic sounds Extra- and para-linguistic as well as linguis-
tic sounds
In services at St Ann’s Church, The Book of Common Prayer precisely dictated the
sounds to be made, all of them under control of the priest: direct addresses of priest
to parishioners, readings from the Old and the New Testaments by the priest, group
singing of psalms in Sternhold and Hopkins’s four-square word-for-word settings, a
sermon delivered by the priest, group prayers led by the priest and spoken by the priest
alone. All very orderly, as directed by ‘The Order for Morning Prayer’, ‘The Order for
Holy Communion’, and so forth.
By contrast, a theatre was a noisy and potentially unruly space, full of competing
sounds. Superficially, Shakespeare’s plays might seem to be just as orderly as Church
of England services. First one character speaks, then another, taking turns.28 Instances
like the mob scene in Coriolanus, in which ‘All Citizens’ are cued to speak at once, are
rare. The underlying dynamics of turn-taking remain, however, competitive. Semiotic
analysts like Keir Elam and Alessandro Serpieri regard plays in performance as dialec-
tics in which a speech by one character alters the ethos that all the other characters are
creating together. Elam explains, ‘As a speaker, the character (a) posits possible worlds
and reveals propositional attitudes; (b) enters into dialectic relations with his inter-
locutors; (c) manifests himself as a particular rhetorical force, with his own idiolect or
style.’29 In acoustic terms, characters onstage compete for ‘air time’ with each other –
and with the audience. Early modern audiences – more rambunctious than modern
audiences – competed for air time with the actors. There is abundant testimony of

126 bruce r. smith
audiences jeering and shouting down actors as well as exclaiming their approval.
There was always the possibility that an early modern stage-player could ‘lose the
audience’, as actors would say today.
If Shakespeare’s prologues and opening speeches function as attempts to control
audience noise, his epilogues enact a giving up of aural control to the audience. The
Epilogue to The Tempest, scored to be spoken by Prospero – who has used his voice to
attempt to stage-manage the proceedings from start to finish – betrays an anxiousness
about what will come next: extralinguistic noise. Prospero’s return to his dukedom in
Milan will not happen unless the audience responds to his words with claps and deep-
breathed shouts:
Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please (Tem Ep 5–13)
Parting gestures like Prospero’s Epilogue would seem to return the vibrations of the
play – linguistic, extralinguistic, and paralinguistic – back into the noise out of which
the performance emerged in the beginning. But the vibrations of the performed sounds
begin at once to re-verberate in the listeners’ memories, to be recalled later as snatches
of speeches, as musical tunes, as impressive sound effects.
Vibration, in Goodman’s conception, is a force that connects all material enti-
ties, animate (as with actors and audiences) or inanimate (as with trumpets, drums,
and lutes and the timber and plaster of theatre buildings). In sonic transactions these
always-present vibrations of molecules are made viscerally apparent. Vibrations start
as physical sound waves, but they can be converted into different manifestations via
the energy-transfer of ‘transduction’. In transduction, one form of energy is trans-
duced, or ‘carried across’, into another.
In theatrical performance, sound waves produced by vibrating vocal chords, by
instruments blown, struck, and plucked, and by reflected sound waves in the theatre
building are converted into other forms of energy in listeners’ bodies. Early modern
physiology understood these transductions as happening in five phases:
1. Sound waves striking listeners’ ears become

2. spirit-infused humours circulating in listeners’ bodies, to become
3. affects in the listeners’ hearts,
4. cognitions in listeners’ fore-brains, and finally
5. aural memories stored at the back of the brain.
In this five-part scheme, resonance (‘re-sounding’) is more than a metaphor. To attend

only to cognitions, to words, is to miss the full vibrancy of Shakespeare’s theatres.

Notes
1. Versions of this chapter were given as talks at the London Renaissance Seminar in autumn
2021 and at a Sound Studies Workshop at Newcastle University in spring 2022 under aus-
pices of the Leverhulme Trust. I am grateful to the people who encouraged my project and
made suggestions, many of which are incorporated in this chapter.
2. Brian Kane, ‘Sound Studies without Auditory Culture: A Critique of the Ontological Turn’,
Sound Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 2–21.
3. Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2010), 81–4.
4. ‘Neighbors’ Petition of November 1596 against a Playhouse in Blackfriars’, UK National
Archives, manuscript SP 12/260 folio 176, digital image in ‘Shakespeare Documented’
database, Folger Shakespeare Library, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/
document/neighbors-petition-november-1596-against-playhouse-blackfriars, including a
summary with quotations by Alan Nelson, from which my quotations are taken.
5. Josua Poole, The English Parnassus, or, A helpe to English poesie containing a collection
of all rhyming monosyllables, the choicest epithets, and phrases: with some general forms
upon all occasions, subjects, and theams (London: Thomas Johnson, 1657), sig. O5v.
6. The physical noisiness of early modern theatres is described by Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in
Shakespeare’s London, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The psy-
chological and political implications of noise are explored in Kenneth Gross, Shakespeare’s
Noise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
7. David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006), 111–40.
8. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 4th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2008), 139–208. See also Sarah Dustagheer, ‘Acoustic and Visual Practices
Indoors’, in Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean
Playhouse, ed. Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014), 137–51.
9. Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, 275–82.
10. See the succinct survey, with full bibliography, by David Novak, ‘Noise’, in Keywords
in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2015), 125–38.
11. Greg Hainge, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2013).
12. William Shakespeare, Henry V, Pro 1–4, in The New Oxford Shakespeare, ed. Gary Taylor,
John Jowatt, Terri Borous, and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Further quotations from Shakespeare are taken from this edition and are cited in the text.
13. Comparisons among the qualities of vowel sounds and their placement is the starting point
of my book The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3–6.
14. Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd edn (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2007), 73–84.
15. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 32–58.
16. Philip Pickett, first director of music at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, personal communica-
tion 1998.
17. OED Online, ‘noise, n.’†3. and †3.b, OED Online, https://www.oed.com. These meanings
of ‘noise’ became obsolete in the eighteenth century.
18. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987).

128 bruce r. smith
19. Cesare Bendinelli, Tutta l’arte della Trombetta, trans. Edward H. Tarr (Vuarmarens: The
Brass Press, 2011), 10.
20. Ibid., 11.
21. Speculation about connections between drums and words is made by Charles Subor,
‘Drumming, Language, and Poetry – Finding Relationships’, Percussive Notes (1 April
1992): 63–6.
22. Pavel Drábek and M. A. Katritzky, ‘Shakespearean Players in Early Modern Europe’, in
The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. Bruce R. Smith (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1527–33. See also Jerzy Limon, Gentlemen of a
Company: English Players in Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1985). There is also evidence that the London companies used drums for
similar advertising purposes when they travelled outside London.
23. OED, ‘set, v.1’, VI.73.a.
24. Ross W. Duffin, The Shakespeare Songbook (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004) provides a
complete catalogue; songs in the comedies are analysed by Kathryn Roberts Parker, ‘Music
and Festival Culture in Shakespeare’s Comedy’ (PhD dissertation, University of Sydney,
2020).
25. Russ McDonald, ‘Ornament’, in Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, 388–96.
26. ‘Neighbors’ Petition of November 1596 against a Playhouse in Blackfriars’.
27. Maps and diagrams of the Blackfriars neighbourhood are reproduced in the University of
Victoria’s ‘Map of London’ database, https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/BLAC6.htm.
28. Oliver Morgan, Turn-Taking in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
29. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2005),
119. The dynamics of the dialectic are explored in songs specific to the comedies. See Ales-
sandro Serpieri, ‘Shakespeare’s Poetry in Action: Between Thought and Passion’, Actes des
congrès de la Société Française Shakespeare 24 (2007): 165–82.
Select Bibliography
Goodman, Steve, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2010).
Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 4th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008).
Hainge, Greg, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2013).
Ihde, Don, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd edn (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2007).
Novak, David, ‘Noise’, in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 125–38.
Smith, Bruce R., The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

8
‘Imaginative and musical mixtures of

sounds’: Rap, Patter, and Hyper Diction
in Musical Theatre
Tamsen O. Wolff
E arly on in the musical Hamilton (2015), the character of George Washington

identifies himself in his opening song with a nod to Gilbert and Sullivan’s The
Pirates of Penzance (1880): ‘Now I’m the model of a modern major general. / The
venerated Virginian veteran whose men are all / Lining up, to put me on a pedestal.’1
This might be a throwaway line; after all, the musical, which tells the story of the
United States’ founders with a multicultural cast and a hip hop score, is rife with
allusions to its many influences and predecessors, especially in the annals of musical
theatre and rap. Composer and lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda notes in passing in the
margin of the libretto:
My first part in high school was as The Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance.
It was going to sneak in one way or another. I also think my rhyme for general is
better than theirs, ‘mineral.’ All props to Gilbert & Sullivan, kings of light patter.2
Yet, while patter and rap are not the only musical forms in Gilbert and Sullivan’s and
Miranda’s works (the former are operettas, the latter also rely on R&B, jazz, pop, and
other forms), they remain the signature expression of each. And Miranda’s glancing
mention touches on a larger and more complicated relationship between the two. Ini-
tially it seems a curious pairing: how does the patter originally associated in musical
theatre with Gilbert and Sullivan, traditionally marked as white and British, elitist,
nonsensical, and ‘performed’, circulate or become supplanted in Miranda’s Hamilton
by rap, which is traditionally marked as Black and American, ‘street’ or vernacular,
and ‘real’?3 It does so because, despite an apparent divergence of content and connota-
tions, the actual vocal practice of rap and patter is remarkably similar.
Musical theatre imparts specific narratives in and through the kinds of sounds that
characters make, which means the basic components of material, physical vocal pro-
duction in musicals matter. While nearly all dramatic texts are written to be performed
and thus heard, musicals are made up of multiple kinds of scripted sound, including
musical notes for instruments and voice, lyrics, and speech. Of the many sonic ele-
ments in theatrical texts and in production – from the punctuation, composition, and
delivery of actors’ lines, to sounds called for in the script, to sound design created for
individual productions, to the aural architecture of theatre spaces, to ambient noise

130 tamsen o. wolff
in performance – the embodied phenomenon of voice, as Adrian Curtin observes,

has ‘traditionally been under-examined and under-theorised’.4 Making the constitu-
tive parts and practices of the voice central to musical theatre analysis also shifts a
frequent critical approach to musicals, which emphasises distinguishing and assessing
the relationship between musical numbers (song and dance) and spoken dialogue. In
musical theatre studies there is even a sometimes apologetic, surprisingly persistent
effort to justify why characters break into song, or, in some cases, there is an explicit
refusal to address this jump, which itself can wind up feeling like another kind of
defensive posture.5 In taking the voice as the starting point, it is possible to reorient
the long-standing binary of music versus text. Rather than reiterating the division of
singing versus speaking – what we might think of as the blunt difference between bod-
ies of water and land mass on a geographical map – I am interested in the many funky
iterations, overlaps, and practices of voiced sound; the features, in other words, of a
three-dimensional, topographical, vocal sonic map of musical theatre.
Rap and patter come together under the umbrella of a vocal practice I am calling
hyper diction. The three interlocking components of hyper diction are: the spoken word,
set to music; the speed of the music; and the stressed syllables of the spoken words set
to that music. In musical theatre, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s fourteen operet-
tas arguably mark the beginning of hyper diction and Miranda’s Hamilton offers the
most recent iteration, but hyper diction surfaces repeatedly across the canon of musical
theatre, including in the practice of mid-twentieth-century Golden Age musicals, like
The Music Man and My Fair Lady. Because of its often intense tongue-twisting speed,
hyper diction is a form of vocalisation that raises questions about what is intelligible
and to whom. On the level of production, it pushes the limits of what performers can
articulate and what audiences can understand. On a narrative level, because it is an
exhilaratingly ingenious vocal trick, hyper diction encourages storylines about inven-
tive, playful virtuosity and sleights of hand.
Hyper diction begins with the quickly spoken word, or patter. Patter is usually
defined as fast, glib talk, often prepared and practised speech that nonetheless appears
to be somewhat spontaneous (partly by virtue of its speed and apparent ease). The
word ‘patter’ originates in the fourteenth century, meaning to repeat the Paternoster
(the ‘our Father’ prayer) in a rapid, mechanical, indistinct fashion. By the eighteenth
century, ‘patter’ had come to mean superficial, insincere, or devious speech.6 It has
long been integral to a number of occupations that involve some kind of performance,
persuasion, or deceit, from magicians and auctioneers to talk show hosts, street hawk-
ers, and comedians. In the theatre proper, spoken patter – often to introduce songs
and acts or between verses of songs – has a history in popular entertainment and in
opera that dates back at least to the 1830s. Its purpose in these contexts has run the
gamut from being informational to being a line of entertaining continuity, to cover-
ing transitions between acts, to being a way to distract the audience, to enhancing a
show. Often patter is used to fill auditory space, when for example a bingo caller or a
dance caller interpolates patter, usually in the form of metrical lines, in between calling
instructions to the players or dancers. Recognised as one of the foundational sources
for rapping, radio DJ spoken patter also performs many similar functions: it fills or
enlivens otherwise empty air time between songs on an audible medium, creating con-
tinuous energy and movement through speech and sound, offering information about
songs just played or about to be played, and sometimes providing a narrative. Unlike

rap, patter, and hyper diction 131
the more or less spontaneous speech of early theatre or radio patter, hyper diction
in the form of rap and patter in musicals is entirely scripted, even though it is often
designed to suggest improvisation. Hyper diction thus also exists as a performance
text that readers can sound out, although this is markedly different from hearing it in
performance, where the specific requirements of the practice are on display.
Spoken patter by itself can sound musical, but hyper diction – rapid, cadenced,
highly enunciated rhyming speech – must be set to music. Whereas music genres or
forms (for example, jazz or symphonies) are frequently defined in terms of instrumen-
tation and structure, often on the level of bars and movements, hyper diction is defined
first and foremost by the relationship between words and time.7 It requires a large
number of words to be articulated at high speed to fit the music, which must in turn
have a fast, steady beat. Patter songs emerged when the spoken word was set to quick-
paced music, and speed and syllabic stress came into play. According to Laura Kasson
Fiss, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were almost immediately inseparable from the
definition of the patter song provided by the official Grove’s Dictionary of Music and
Musicians: the very first definition in 1880 read, ‘a kind of song the humour of which
consists in getting the greatest number of words to fit the smallest number of notes’,
and by 1907 Gilbert and Sullivan were included and credited in the definition as the
original practitioners of the form.8
There are two main kinds of patter songs: the narrative, which tells a story, and
the list, which identifies a category and itemises its parts.9 In Gilbert and Sullivan, an
example of the former is Sir Joseph’s song ‘When I Was a Lad’ from HMS Pinafore,
while Ko-Ko’s song ‘As Someday It May Happen’ from The Mikado, more popularly
and aptly known as ‘I’ve Got a Little List’, represents the latter. Rap composition,
however, according to Imani Perry, tends to take one or more of four forms: narrative,
exhortation or proclamation, description, and battle.10 Listing – especially of objects
and sometimes of insults – is also a regular feature of these four forms of rap. Both
rap and patter can be broken down into the essential categories of content (what the
artist is rapping/pattering about); flow (the rhythms and rhymes the artist is using);
and delivery (how the artist uses his or her voice to perform or ‘spit’ the flow; this
includes vocal techniques, including breath control, enunciation, and style).11 Like all
forms of written poetry, patter and rap as hyper diction combine sonic and poetic
devices: rhyme techniques and strategies, including assonance (repetition of a vowel
sound), bending words, alliteration, consonance (repetition of a consonant sound),
and compound rhymes. As Justin St. Clair points out, in literature ‘[m]uch word play
[. . .] depends upon phonological sounding’ and ‘poetry in particular – has inherited
the aural legacy of patterned, acoustic mnemonics’.12 Patter and rap also emphasise
creative cleverness, the strikingly memorable in lyrics and beats, punchy breaks and
playful rhymes.
For both, speed of delivery in performance is critical. Soon after the Broadway
opening of Hamilton, an essay appeared on the statistical, number-crunching web-
site FiveThirtyEight that expanded on Miranda’s reference to Gilbert and Sullivan by
claiming, ‘Hamilton Is the Very Model of a Modern Fast-Paced Musical’.13 In it, the
author calculates the relative speed of a range of musicals in words per minute, and
concludes that Hamilton takes first place for words per minute (144), with Pirates of
Penzance (the one Gilbert and Sullivan operetta under consideration) clocking in at
58 words per minute.14 Certainly, by virtue of being a largely rapped-through musical,

132 tamsen o. wolff
Hamilton set the record for the fastest pace of any Broadway show. The study does
not isolate instances of syllables per minute, however, which is a better metric of hyper
diction. The speed or syllables per minute of a classic patter song from Gilbert and
Sullivan, for example, might easily match the fastest rap song in Hamilton. For indi-
vidual songs, the most words per second award goes to Stephen Sondheim’s patter
song from Company (1970), ‘(Not) Getting Married Today’ in which Amy, a bride
on her wedding day, reaches new heights of velocity at 6.2 words per second.15 This
is also the most sustained patter and thus the hardest from the singer’s perspective to
perform because there are no built-in rests. In contrast, Lafayette’s song ‘Guns and
Ships’ from Hamilton clocks in at 6.3 words per second, but the actor has multiple
chances to catch his breath because there are scripted opportunities for his cast-mates
to cheer him on that punctuate the breakneck pace of the rap. This is true as well of
Angelica Schuyler’s rap in Hamilton, ‘Satisfied’, which is fast, but supported through-
out by choral interruptions that give the actress occasions to breathe. Even when rests
occur they are hidden behind other sound so the propulsive rhythm of the words never
seems to slow down.
This kind of speed happens when as many words as possible are crammed into the
fewest possible musical notes, which requires syllabic text setting. Lyrics are broken
down into syllables, or individual units of sound, with each syllable getting its own
note. Hyper diction uses stressed syllables often said at the same time as each of four
beats in a bar (unless there is a rest). Since the lyrics must stay in time with the beat,
the stress can fall on different syllables from those that would be stressed ordinarily
in speech, which can sometimes be a source of humour or unpredictability. Stressed
syllabic text setting also provides opportunities for apparently off-the-cuff (but none-
theless scripted) invention. In the Major-General’s song in Pirates of Penzance, for
example, it is a standard piece of theatre business for the actor playing the Major-
General to ‘search’ for a way to conclude a stanza’s phrase with a rhyming word.
Thus, ‘About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot of news – [pause for actor’s bit
of ‘searching’ for a rhyme that will stretch over the four syllables of ‘a lot of news’,
before his triumphant concluding line:] / With many cheerful facts about the square of
the hypotenuse!’16 The final line is then taken up in the rousing refrain, which consists
only of that last rhyming line’s being repeated four times at top speed by the chorus.
This patter song, like most patter songs, is a combination of extraordinary speed in
syllabic articulation and moments of dramaturgically justified, brief rest – useful to the
taxed performer and listener – that still emphasises the rush and spontaneity of the
form. Hyper diction, in other words, is both a technical skill and a performance that
draws purposeful attention to that skill.
In many musicals the practice works as the audible equivalent of waving something
shiny to distract attention with a specific desired outcome. This function is especially
prevalent in classic mid-century American musicals that fall chronologically midway
between operetta and rap. Meredith Willson’s The Music Man (1957), for example,
offers a prototypical example in the song ‘Ya Got Trouble’, which is an explicit, trans-
parent diversionary tactic, a sneaky salesman’s effort to create a need where there is
none, in this case to identify a community scapegoat (pool halls!) in order to point
to a solution that requires a purchase and community investment (boys’ band instru-
ments!). The singer, the con artist and male lead, Harold Hill, is casting about for a
problem for the town of River City, Iowa that will demand the answer he wants to

provide. The song’s powers of apparently extemporaneous invention and its alacrity,
as well as the way in which it details a rapid list-like and narrative descent into deg-
radation, place it squarely in the hyper diction tradition. Speaking words swiftly here
can only end with ‘Trouble! We’ve surely got trouble right here in River City, with a
capital T that rhymes with P and that stands for Pool.’17 The song offers a series of
displacements in a downward slide, using a three-step process of repetition (‘Trouble
[. . .] trouble’), rhyme (‘T that rhymes with P’), and replacement (‘and that stands for
Pool’). Of course what Hill says is ridiculous, and the offstage audience knows it; part
of the pleasure in the song is the degree of Hill’s fluency coupled with the ludicrousness
of his fabrication.
Not coincidentally, the song describes the danger of words particularly. As Hill
uses words duplicitously, he directs his listeners to the sinister threat of other words,
in this case the slang that these parents’ kids will inevitably parrot if they spend time
in the dreaded pool hall. Dwelling on the word ‘woooords’, he asks ominously, ‘Are
certain words creeping in, like “swell?”’, which causes the chorus to chant in alarmed
response, ‘Trouble trouble Trouble trouble.’18 The actual words that are causing
trouble – Hill’s – go unnoticed because he redirects his suggestible listeners. In the cycle
of repetition, rhyme, and replacement, Hill uses auctioneer language (I’ve got twenty,
twenty do I hear twenty-five – a practice of repetition and building on the repetition),
the pitch of travelling salesmen, and the language of preachers who suggest to a con-
gregation that they are going to hell in a (fast-moving) hand basket.19 Critically, the
speed of expression (driven by a rapid, steady beat) as well as the rhyme and replace
pattern is cover for the illogical claims, which keep accumulating and escalating. Yet
at the same time that hyper diction can be a narrative cover-up, it is also always a form
of performance exposure because it is hard to fake the skill that is required to rap or
patter well. From a performance perspective, hyper diction is an example of ingenious-
ness, not disingenuousness.
As a test of a performer’s vocal powers, hyper diction embraces a paradox of unin-
telligibility – the words are accelerated until they threaten to degenerate into incompre-
hensible noise – and heightened intelligibility, since the practice requires consummate
breath control and enunciation. The performance of teetering on the verge of losing
control – as well as the ideal audience response to that performance – is repeatedly
written into musicals that rely on hyper diction. Early on in Hamilton, for instance, in
Hamilton’s initial encounter with his new friends – John Laurens, Hercules Mulligan,
Aaron Burr, and the Marquis de Lafayette – he lets his emotions and words get away
from him when he raps with increasing speed and volume, ‘A bunch of revolutionary
manumission abolitionists / Give me a position, show me where the ammunition is!’
Suddenly remembering that he is in a public tavern, he dials it back: ‘Oh, am I talkin’
too loud? / Sometimes I get overexcited, shoot off at the mouth. / I never had a group
of friends before. / I promise that I’ll make y’all proud.’20 But the rhyming concluding
response from his new friends celebrates this borderline out-of-control energy: ‘Let’s
get this guy in front of a crowd!’21 Musicals often have aural lessons like this built into
the written text: numbers that explain explicitly either how sound works or how it
could work, simultaneously suggesting to an audience what and how to think about
voiced sound and how to respond to what they are hearing. Sonic pedagogical strate-
gies that are included in musicals’ scripts are frequently straightforward and practical,
as with the unambiguously named The Sound of Music (1959), in which Maria, as the

134 tamsen o. wolff
new governess to the seven Von Trapp children, wins them over with song, but also
breaks down the basics of music for them and teaches them to sing with the number
‘Do-Re-Mi’. This is a tutorial, not just for the children but for the audience, so we
can appreciate what Maria is doing musically as well as how vocalising can create
unexpected connections between people. This kind of sonic guidance may be in the
musical’s book, as is the case in the first interaction between Hamilton, Laurens,
Mulligan, Burr, and Lafayette, but it can also be present in vocal performance. One
immediate lesson in Hamilton is that homosocial bonds are formed in, around, and
through the practice of hyper diction.
The verbal hat trick of repetition, rhyme, and replacement in The Music Man also
shows up in Hamilton to reinforce this message, but with a different context. Harold
Hill’s linguistic evocation of auctioneers, salesmen, and preachers gives way in Ham-
ilton to the vocal context of battling or battle rhyming, which emerged as a dominant
form of rap in the 1980s. Battling, an established part of hip hop lyrics, is made up of
bragging and boasting, or braggadocio, combined with insults against rival rap artists.
The goal of battling is to outdo other rap artists, whether this is done by facing off in
person in performance or in song lyrics across the airwaves. To battle well, rap artists
usually have to be highly familiar with the style of their opponents. As will.i.am from
the Black Eyed Peas puts it:
[If you know the history of different MCs] you know how to approach a person
if a person wants to battle you. If a person battles you and they’re coming with
[a certain style], it’s like, OK, I know where this [guy] is getting that shit from, he’s
got a little 2Pac in him. I’m gonna fuck this [guy] up, with some 2Pac, and I’ma add
2 Pac and mix 2Pac with Chuck D, and I hit them – boom – and I hit them from
every single angle.22
So, for example, when Lin-Manuel Miranda grants ‘all props’ to Gilbert and Sullivan
while also noting ‘my rhyme for general is better than theirs’, his combined gesture
of acknowledgement and one-upmanship is in total keeping with a (mild) hip hop
braggadocio.
In Hamilton, the heated Cabinet debates between Jefferson and Hamilton offer the
clearest convergence of the offstage form and practice of rap battling, not only in the
verbal sparring and jockeying but in the heckling from other characters and calls for
audience participation. But another example arrives early in Hamilton, in the sixth song
of the show’s forty-six musical numbers, ‘Farmer Refuted’, in which a gentleman who
identifies himself as the (real-life) loyalist Samuel Seabury stands on a box and cries,
‘Hear ye, hear ye!’ before reading his anti-Revolution ‘Free Thoughts on the Proceedings
of the Continental Congress’.23 Although he is not British, Seabury’s loyalist alignment is
immediately clear in his prim demeanour, his pretentiously genteel diction, and the clas-
sical harpsichord that accompanies his speech. Hercules Mulligan is the first to interject
after Seabury’s initial two lines – ‘Oh my god. Tear this dude apart’ – an invitation Ham-
ilton jumps at, attempting at first to engage with Seabury, rather than simply ride rough-
shod over him – ‘Honestly, look at me, please don’t read!’ – before abandoning that
effort.24 He then raps alongside Seabury’s rote speech, chiming in on some of Seabury’s
words and mirroring some of Seabury’s language and sounds but using different words
to change the meaning (so Seabury’s ‘They have not your interests at heart’ becomes

Hamilton’s ‘The have-nots are gonna win this’25). In this way, Hamilton steals the argu-
ment from Seabury and rewrites it in the moment. Thrown off his game by Hamilton’s
steady interruptive stream of (scripted) spur-of-the-moment mimicry and reversal, Sea-
bury’s speech becomes confused and breaks down even as he tries to stick to his text.
When Hamilton proclaims, ‘If you repeat yourself again I’m going to scream’, he is not
objecting to repetition, which is a heavy weapon in the hip hop arsenal, and one he uses
regularly.26 What he is rejecting is outdated soapbox delivery and Seabury’s reading from
and clinging to a pre-written script, all of which is antithetical to a rap battle. Hamilton
runs circles around Seabury verbally (as well as literally circling him on his box in the
Broadway production’s choreography) and effectively takes him down. Miranda notes:
I began with the harpsichord progression and wrote this melody and lyrics rather
quickly. None of this is in Seabury’s writings [. . .] The fun (and laborious part)
of this tune was having Hamilton dismantle Seabury using the same vowels and
cadences and talking over him. Heed becomes he’d. Rabble/unravel. Heart/hard to
listen to you, etc.27
Seabury makes one change in key, a single failed effort to dodge the relentlessness of
Hamilton’s verbal assault, but principally an opportunity for Miranda to have Hamilton
mock Seabury with a musical meta-joke: ‘Don’t modulate the key and then not debate
with me.’28 Seabury’s initial claim is that this ‘[Constitutional] congress does not speak
for me’, but that is precisely what Hamilton does, with repetition, rhyme, and replace-
ment reinforcing his dominance and entertaining his fellow rabble-rousers.29
As Hamilton demonstrates, hyper diction often provides the soundscape for men’s
relationships with one another. Here the ‘acoustic field of study’, to draw on R. Murray
Schafer’s original definition of soundscape, is not only the predominantly male charac-
ters’ text and the male actors’ voices but what their kinds and manner of vocalisation
might invoke or suggest.30 Women’s roles in Hamilton are constrained, as Stacy Wolf
points out, by occupying the age-old trio of wife/madonna (Eliza Schuyler Hamilton),
muse (Angelica Schuyler), and whore (Maria Reynolds).31 Purely dramaturgically, the
male relationships are the critical ones: the camaraderie of the first act between Burr,
Hamilton, Lafayette, Laurens, and Mulligan becomes the rivalries between Burr, Ham-
ilton, Jefferson, and Madison in the second act, reinforcing through the double casting
of two of these actors the challenging, devoted, and nuanced relationships that exist
between men. At the heart of the male revolutionary cohort is the relationship between
Burr and Hamilton, the love/hate ‘bromance’ of the show, which plays out sonically.32
To draw attention to Hamilton’s hyper diction, Miranda sets the account and action
of his hero’s percussive verbosity – his ‘throwing verbal rocks’ and talking for six
straight hours at the Constitutional Convention33 – against Burr’s reticent smoothness
(represented and deeply informed by the mellifluous voice of Leslie Odom, Jr. who
originated the role). The text setting characteristic of hyper diction requires words
with many consonants. Although Burr also raps, most of his lyrics call for elongated
vowels and melisma (the carrying of one syllable over more than one, or even over
many notes). His defining song, ‘Wait for It’, is particularly notable for its extended
vowels, especially the long wail of the ‘AAA’ that occurs in multiple words, including
‘wait’, ‘takes’, ‘breaks’, ‘stakes’, ‘late’, and ‘discriminate’. Throughout, Miranda dem-
onstrates the tension between Burr and Hamilton by weighting the different kind and

136 tamsen o. wolff
number of sounds that are assigned to the two characters. This occurs on the particle
lyrical level of the use of vowels (Burr) versus consonants (Hamilton) and the use of
melisma (Burr) versus rap (Hamilton). The difference is also built into assumptions
about the actors’ timbre (the sound of the voice), like the one I provide here (‘the mel-
lifluous voice’ for Burr). Most tellingly, this difference is repeatedly reinforced even
when it is not borne out by the script, as, for example, when Burr even while rapping
announces his rejection of rap: ‘You spit, I’ma sit / We’ll see where we land.’34
Hamilton’s revolutionary brotherhood also bands together in opposition to the
British, and to be anti-British here is to embrace stereotypes (reflected in stereotypical
sounds) of the British. From a sonic standpoint, the British and British-allied charac-
ters never pose a threat in this account of the American Revolution; their language and
affect is pompous, effete, rigid, and ridiculous, and their music is out of date (from
a contemporary audience’s perspective by centuries in the case of Seabury, and by
decades for King George, whose sound is Beatles-adjacent). These characters directly
evoke Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical comedy characters. More, as Raymond Knapp
argues, Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas presented Americans
with a full slate of useful – and durable – musical images of Englishness. To this
end, it hardly mattered that these images were originally intended as parodies [. . .]
[One of these] helped establish and reinforce a familiar trope on the American
stage: that Englishness, in a male, is indistinguishable from homosexuality.35
Notably, given that Hamilton aims to overthrow stereotypical or entrenched repre-

sentations of the Founding Fathers, the character of King George embodies this trope.
Perhaps especially as voiced by Jonathan Groff in the original Broadway production,
King George is played for comedy as an over-the-top, shrill, mincing gay male stereo-
type. In contrast, the group of American friends is avowedly, even noisily heterosexual,
despite Miranda’s note in the marginalia of the script that ‘it is possible that Hamilton
and Laurens were lovers at some point – Hamilton’s letters to Laurens are every bit as
flirtatious as his letters to the opposite sex, if not more so’.36 The single indication of
this possibility is silence: the brief revelation of Laurens’s death at the end of the first
act marks the only occasion that leaves Hamilton speechless.37 For the rest of the show,
hyper diction sounds out the province primarily of straight men, both acknowledging
and disavowing the connection to English patter and its associations with queerness.
Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s My Fair Lady (1956), based on Bernard
Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913), uses hyper diction to reveal the limits and possibili-
ties of both speech and sound. My Fair Lady, a dramatisation of vocalisation as the
means to social advancement, is the apotheosis of musical theatre’s didacticism. Henry
Higgins, professor of phonetics, accepts a bet from a new friend, Colonel Pickering,
that if he gives speech lessons to Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl, she will be able
to pass successfully as a member of the upper class. A wide range of vocal sound is
both the subject and the medium in My Fair Lady. All of Professor Higgins’s musical
numbers are hyper diction, which was a decision by Lerner and Loewe because they
felt Shaw’s character was too emotionless to sing, but also because Rex Harrison, the
original Higgins, was famously a non-singer. In an interview with the BBC in 1967,
Harrison described the experience in terms of the creative control that hyper diction
offers a performer:

I was using the melody, but not singing it. I mean, I could use notes, and sometimes
when I was doing the play I used to use quite a lot of the notes. Sometimes I would
use hardly any of the notes. But I was able to sort of jiggle it about.38
Lerner, the lyricist, observed that the words for Higgins’s songs were ‘set exactly the
way one speaks it’, while Loewe, the composer, explained it this way: ‘instead of writ-
ing a baritone solo, the music had to be written in such a way that a non-singer could
sing it; in other words no sustained notes’.39 Again, as Loewe’s comment suggests,
hyper diction highlights the difference between vowels (commonly sustained notes)
and consonants. When individual syllables land on individual notes to create speak-
singing, there is very little to no melisma. Even when the sound tilts in the direction of
singing rather than speaking, the sound is usually not sustained. It is a truism of speech
that the literal meaning of words is delivered (or confirmed) by consonants, while emo-
tional meaning is carried on vowels; the corollary in singing is that words are delivered
by consonants while music happens on vowels. The high ratio of consonants to vowels
in hyper diction might suggest that hyper diction reflects literal meaning and speech
more than emotion and music. That is Henry Higgins’s stated position as a professor
of ‘the science of speech’, but his practice of hyper diction contradicts it.
In the parodic humour and lists that mark his hyper diction, the character of
Higgins has clear links to Gilbert and Sullivan, as he does in his position of author-
ity and in the multiple ways he can be read as at least a ‘heterosexually challenged’
Englishman40 (including in his bond with Pickering, who moves in to Higgins’s house
after the first scene; the ways in which they behave like the parents of Eliza; the lack of
conventional romantic duets between Eliza and Higgins; his misogyny; and his number
‘A Hymn to Him’). On several occasions Higgins delivers Gilbert-like comic hyper
diction diatribes that reveal his idealised and wrong-headed perception of himself. He
is not, as he asserts in ‘An Ordinary Man’, ‘an average man of no eccentric whim’, ‘a
very gentle’ and ‘quiet living man’.41 All his actions belie these claims, but most impor-
tant, the frantic jumps in tempo and the violent accents of the number contradict his
words, which demonstrate not sense but extreme emotion and volatility. Here and at
several other points, Higgins skates close to the edge of losing control vocally. When
he accelerates to the brink near this number’s conclusion, he turns on, at increasing
volume, sped-up recordings of women’s voices that he has in his study. This results in
cacophony, a great incomprehensible jabbering chorus. His aim is to make it sound
like women (and their voices) are the problem, but he introduces the vocal chaos, his
hyper diction number degenerates into a racket, and he requires the noise to make his
point. Despite the narrative goal of ‘correct’ intelligible speech for Eliza, throughout
the musical extra-verbal vocal sounds erupt in place of words or when words are no
longer able to convey meaning.
In My Fair Lady, the importance of the sounds is acoustic as well as semantic; the
noises Eliza makes, for example, are just as important as the words she makes. In the
opening scene, in which we meet Eliza selling flowers at Covent Garden in the rain, she
makes distinctive, visceral sounds that exist between speech and noise. Among these
is the disbelieving, dismissive, expressive ‘Gaaarn!’ a phonetic distortion of the slangy
‘Go on!’ Another is Eliza’s signature yowl of unimpeded vowels: ‘AAoooww!’42 This
regular high-pitched wail of outrage, without any consonants to provide linguistic
sense, might be the most expressive sound in the show. Higgins, who initially likens

138 tamsen o. wolff
Eliza’s ‘disgusting and depressing’ noises to ‘a bilious pigeon’, proceeds in her elocu-
tion and diction lessons to break down ‘every syllable she utters’, so that we hear many
isolated garbled sounds from Eliza, from individual vowels to words obscured by a
mouth full of marbles.43 Higgins finally draws a correctly pronounced ‘ai’ diphthong
from her after he manages to speak calmly about the ‘extraordinary, imaginative and
musical mixtures of sounds’ in the English language, something she knows more about
than he does.44 Eliza has mastered ‘proper’ speech before the end of the first act; the
second act exists for Higgins to bring together his sound, emotion, and words.
Hyper diction always draws attention to the sound of the words as well as their
content, since the words make sound as they tumble by. The acceleration as well as
the variation in rhythms and rhyme means that the words can register as percussion
or noise. This potential unintelligibility serves a number of purposes. For example,
rap’s popular reputation for unintelligibility is at least partly strategic, as Imani Perry
explains:
One of the communication elements that resists white supremacy and co-optation
has been the self-conscious incomprehensibility of hip-hop lyricism [. . .] Difficulty is
a strategy in hip hop, both in terms of words, which are fast and hard to understand
if you are not privy to the hip hop community, and of demands for an authentic
personal connection to hip hop and its geography, the hood. Difficulty is a cultural
and political strategy, as well as an ideological one.45
In musical theatre, various forms of hyper diction test an audience’s listening skills dif-
ferently. Comprehension matters more with narrative, for instance, since an audience
is meant to follow a story – one that sometimes includes important plot points espe-
cially in Gilbert and Sullivan – while lists are befuddling because their components are
unpredictable and often nonsensical. As Perry points out, the question of intelligibility
also rests on listeners’ foreknowledge or cultural familiarity with the form. In the case
of Gilbert and Sullivan’s patter, the original audiences at the Savoy were provided with
the operettas’ lyrics to read while attending performances. They could also then take
the lyrics home, learn, repeat, and circulate them; an early version of the cast album.
Gilbert and Sullivan’s audiences – even those who could not read, who were likely
to be in the minority within the theatre – were aficionados who recited the works by
heart. This audience experience of being co-present at a performance, reading along
or not with the text, as well as individually reading (and sounding) or reciting the
text helped create a culture of close listeners. If anything, today’s Gilbert and Sullivan
audience tends to be even more deeply, sometimes even obsessively familiar with the
work.46 The phenomenal popularity of the almost entirely sung and rapped-through
Hamilton similarly owes something to the fact that the double CD includes all the
lyrics, or nearly all the text for Hamilton. The CD, with its album booklet of lyrics, is
readily available – unlike tickets to the show – so that audience members lucky enough
to see a production of Hamilton overwhelmingly already know (and frequently sing
along with) the musical’s numbers with the performers. Musical theatre encourages
and relies on an audience’s enthusiasm to learn songs that they have read and heard,
or will hear performed, and to form communities based on that effort. If hyper diction
poses a particularly challenging test of comprehension, listeners come together to meet
that test.

A musical theatre audience could regard hyper diction as a trick because it is not
singing in the way they might expect to find singing in a musical and it can be hard to
follow. But it is a trick for them and not on them, because hyper diction – breakneck,
rhythmical, poetic, musical – is an exhilarating, joyful skill to hear in action. When we
grasp the meaning of the words, we have accomplished something remarkable along-
side the performer, who is working at the peak of his or her vocal game; when we do
not, we are still collectively engaged in a uniquely challenging and thrilling experience
of finding meaning in the sounds.
Notes
1. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton the Revolution: Being the Com-
plete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, with a True Account of Its Creation, and Concise
Remarks on Hip-Hop, the Power of Stories, and the New America (New York: Grand
Central, 2016), 61. The Gilbert and Sullivan line is: ‘I am the very model of a modern
Major-General / I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral.’
2. Ibid.
3. On Gilbert and Sullivan, see Laura Kasson Fiss, ‘“This particularly rapid unintelligible pat-
ter”: Patter Songs and the Word–Music Relationship’, in The Cambridge Companion to
Gilbert and Sullivan, ed. David Eden and Meinhard Saremba (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2009), 98–108; and Raymond Knapp, ‘“How great thy charm, thy sway how
excellent!” Tracing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Legacy in the American Musical’, in Cambridge
Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan, 201–15. On the literary, aesthetic, and artistic work of
hip hop and rap, and the problems with the traditional identifying markers of the form, see,
for example, Daniel Levin Becker, What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language (New York:
City Lights, 2022); Alan Light, ed., The Vibe History of Hip Hop (New York: Three Rivers
Press, 1999); Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and John Yasin, ‘Rap in the African American Music
Tradition: Cultural Assertion and Continuity’, in Race and Ideology: Language, Symbolism,
and Popular Culture, ed. Arthur K. Spears (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999).
4. Adrian Curtin, ‘Attending to Theatre Sound Studies and Complicité’s The Encounter’, in
Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020),
351–71 (355).
5. See, for example, Scott McMillin: ‘My argument is that the principles of disjunction
between book and number, and between one number and another, that organised the revue
and operetta formats still inform the musical, and there is no point in being ashamed if it.’
Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind
Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 13.
6. ‘Patter’, OED Online, http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl.
7. Fiss, Patter Songs, 98.
8. Ibid., 104.
9. Ibid., 106.
10. Perry, Prophets of the Hood, 77.
11. Paul Edwards, How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop MC (Chicago: Chicago
Review Press, 2009).
12. Justin St. Clair, ‘Literature and Sound’, in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed.
Michael Bull (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 353–61 (353–4).
13. Leah Libresco, ‘Hamilton Is the Very Model of a Modern Fast-Paced Musical’, FiveThir-
tyEight, 5 October 2015, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/hamilton-is-the-very-model-
of-a-modern-fast-paced-musical.

140 tamsen o. wolff
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ian Bradley, ed., The Complete Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 219.
17. Meredith Willson, The Music Man (New York: Van Rees Press, 1958), 36.
18. Ibid., 37.
19. In his analysis of The Music Man, Raymond Knapp notes the connection to patter, adding
even further possible sources for Hill: ‘Hill, in “Ya Got Trouble,” takes over and redefines
within one persona a number of American stereotypes, including most obviously both the
traveling salesman with his huckstering patter, and his close cousin the religious dema-
gogue . . . but also evoking the temperance sermonizer (“I say, first it’s a little medicinal
wine from a teaspoon; Then beer from a bottle”), the stumping politician up on his soap-
box (“Remember the Maine, Plymouth Rock, and the Golden Rule”), and even, perhaps,
the fast-talking auctioneer (“Ya got ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, pockets in a
table!”). Linking all of these is the special fascination Americans have long had for rapid
verbal patter evident from their earlier fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan and their later
love-hate relationship to rap.’ Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation
of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 147.
20. Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton, 27.
21. Ibid.
22. will.i.am, quoted in Edwards, How to Rap, 29. A person who raps is often referred to by
the prefix MC, or refers to him- or herself this way (from the title, Master of Ceremony,
also spelled emcee); he or she can also be referred to interchangeably as a rapper, lyricist,
or hip hop artist.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
(Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, [1977] 1994), 7.
31. On gender representation in Hamilton, see Stacy Wolf, ‘Hamilton’, The Feminist Specta-
tor, 24 February 2016, http://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2016/02/24/hamilton; and
James McMaster, ‘Why Hamilton Is Not the Revolution You Think It Is’, HowlRound, 23
February 2016.
32. Hilton Als, ‘Boys in the Band: A Musical about the Founding Fathers’, The New Yorker, 9
March 2015.
34. Ibid., 25.
35. Knapp, ‘Tracing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Legacy’, 210–11.
36. Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton, 131. Consider, for example, when Hamilton’s friends
drunkenly rib him before and after his wedding in true unimaginative straight male mea-
sure: ‘Raise a glass to freedom! Hey! Something you will never see again. No matter what
she tells you.’ Ibid., 136.
37. This scene is also the only part of Hamilton unrepresented on the cast album (Miranda and
McCarter’s reasoning: ‘It’s more of a scene than a song’, ibid., 131).
38. Rex Harrison, Post-Recording Conversation. With Goddard Lierberson. My Fair Lady
(Original Broadway Cast Recording). Columbia Records, Sony Music Entertainment,
1956, 1967, 2002.

39. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Playback. With Goddard Lieberson. My Fair Lady
(Original Broadway Cast Recording). Columbia Records, Sony Music Entertainment,
1956, 1967, 2002.
40. Knapp, ‘Tracing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Legacy’, 212. In the London 2001 revival at the
Royal National Theatre, with Jonathan Pryce as Higgins, Nicholas Le Prevost played
Pickering as gay.
41. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, My Fair Lady (New York: Gardners Books, 1969).
42. Ibid., 14, 15.
43. Ibid., 16.
44. Ibid., 31.
45. Perry, Prophets of the Hood, 50.
46. Currently there are more than 200 websites for Gilbert and Sullivan fans, and in 2009 there
were over 2,000 professional and amateur groups devoted to their work in the UK alone.
Ian Bradley, ‘Amateur Tenors and Choruses in Public: The Amateur Scene’, in Cambridge
Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan, 177–89.
Select Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Image Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang,
1977), 179–89.
Brooks, Daphne, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2021).
Cavarero, Adriana, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Eden, David and Meinhard Saremba, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan
Fox, Aaron A., Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2004).
Hampton, Marion and Barbara Acker, eds, The Vocal Vision: Views on Voice (New York:
Applause Books, 2000).
Knapp, Raymond, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005).
———, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton: Princeton
McMillin, Scott, The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind
Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Rodenburg, Patsy, The Right to Speak (New York: Methuen Drama, 2015).
Symonds, Dominic and Millie Taylor, eds, Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of
Song and Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Part III:
Literature, Voice, Acousmatics

9
‘Let it resound’: ‘Lift Every Voice and

Sing’ as Sonic Witness
Noelle Morrissette
‘
L ift Every Voice and Sing’, written in 1900 and first performed in 1901, marked a
new century of African American life post-Emancipation, trailing from the failure
of Reconstruction and entering a new century that was characterised by the historian
Rayford Logan as the ‘nadir’ of Black experience in the first decade of the twentieth
century.1 The song was authored as a modern-day hymn of African American experi-
ence birthed from this nadir with a nod to the past, an acknowledgement of the dif-
ficult present, and lifted hopes for the future of Black liberation and equality in the
American nation. The hymn represents modernity itself, following from the musical
forms of the spirituals originating in enslavement and the blues in Reconstruction
America.
It became known as the ‘Negro National Anthem’ and later, the ‘Black National
Anthem’, by which name it is known today. The reputation of ‘Lift Every Voice and
Sing’ has outlasted James Weldon Johnson, its lyricist, and his brother John Rosamond
Johnson, its composer. It was birthed in 1900 for the occasion of a 12 February cel-
ebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. James W. Johnson, then principal of Stanton
School, Jacksonville’s grade school for African Americans, was originally slated to
give an address at the event, but he instead was driven by a lyrical inspiration. As his
form shifted from oratory to lyric, the occasion’s subject also shifted: from Lincoln
the Great Emancipator to the descendants of the emancipated. This shift in emphasis
marks the beginning of Johnson’s artistic effort to collaborate, affirm, and offer a mul-
tiplicity of voices and settings in which his compositions could be performed. Johnson
describes its collaborative composition with his brother: ‘we planned to write a song
to be sung as part of the exercises [celebrating Lincoln]. We planned, better still, to
have it sung by schoolchildren – a chorus of five hundred voices.’2 Johnson reflected
that having composed the first stanza, ‘the spirit of the poem had taken hold of me’: he
found himself overcome with emotion – tears, ecstasy, and serene joy. Rosamond (as
his brother was called) set it to music.
‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ began modestly, on the Johnson family home’s front
porch in Jacksonville, Florida, and grew to national and later international promi-
nence through its vocalisation by the voices of 500 Jacksonville children emanating
outwards. It is a process affirming the vocalisation of African American experience,
and articulating an aesthetic James Weldon Johnson, then James William Johnson,
was only just developing: ‘the idea of a breathing line of poetry that could not be con-
tained on the page or in a single individual, but which required the performative aspect
of multiple voices to physically complete and vocalise the thought contained within’.3

146 noelle morrissette
This breathing line of poetry directed Johnson’s composition of it. Describ-

ing the song’s genesis in his autobiography Along This Way, Johnson emphasised
what became his customary practice in the musical trio Cole and Johnson Brothers
(1901–6): ‘walking it out’. This rhythmic form was a version of the call and response
practices of Black church congregations in responding to preachers during sermons,
called ‘lining-out’: such a practice welcomed congregants familiar with the lessons of
the Bible if not its text, and represented a long tradition of acknowledging the wis-
dom of the spirituals, songs which originated in a captive people who honoured the
biblical wisdom even without the opportunity to read it.4 This physical experience
of sound as Black creation, with Johnson using the rhythm of his body to inspire
and fill the lines of his lyric, would come to full expression in his sermonic poems,
God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), where modern lyric finds
its spiritual expression not in religion per se, but in the embodied, breathing lines of
poetry shared between its performers, who are the collective authors of its context
and meaning.
Johnson recalls:
I got my first line: – Lift ev’ry voice and sing. Not a startling line; but I worked
along grinding out the next five. When, near the end of the first stanza, there came
to me the lines:
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
the spirit of the poem had taken hold of me. I finished the stanza and turned it over
to Rosamond.
In composing the other two stanzas I did not use pen and paper. While my
brother worked at his musical setting, I paced back and forth on the front porch,
repeating the lines over and over to myself, going through all the agony and ecstasy
of creating. As I worked through the opening and middle lines of the last stanza:
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on our way,
Thou who hast by Thy might
Let us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray;
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee [. . .]
I could not keep back the tears, and made no effort to do so. I was experiencing the
transports of the poet’s ecstasy. Feverish ecstasy was followed by that contentment –
that sense of serene joy – which makes artistic creation the most complete of all human
experiences.
When I had put the last stanza down on paper I at once recognized the
Kiplingesque touch in the two longer lines quoted above; but I knew that in the
stanza the American Negro was, historically and spiritually, immanent; and I
decided to let it stand as it was written.5
The song was sung at the February 1900 celebration to great effect; the Johnson broth-
ers then moved away from Jacksonville to pursue successful careers in New York’s

‘lift every voice and sing’ as sonic witness 147
musical theatre scene. ‘The song passed out of our minds’, Johnson reflected in his
1933 autobiography, Along This Way,
But the schoolchildren kept singing the song; some of them went off to other
schools and kept singing it; some of them became schoolteachers and taught it to
their pupils. Within twenty years the song was being sung in schools and churches
and on special occasions throughout the South and in some other parts of the coun-
try. Later, in 1920, it was adopted by the NAACP, and is now quite generally used
throughout the country as the ‘Negro National Hymn.’6
Johnson believed that the song’s widest circulation came through copies pasted in
the backs of hymnals and songbooks used in Sunday schools, YMCAs, and similar
institutions.7
There is a second part to the lyric’s completion through the body: not just its author, but
the hundreds of children and students who ‘kept singing’ the song. It was also ‘fervently
sung’ by some white people,8 confirming its physical transference through the bodies of its
listeners and performers, thereby confirming their alteration through the interracial trans-
fer of song – the ‘every voice’ of the song’s title. The voices ‘lift’ and ‘carry’ Black culture
to a central place in the national discourse, asserting the ‘immanence’ of Black people to
the nation.
Johnson’s compositions become shifting frameworks, inviting new voices and con-
texts to enliven the song’s meaning through its performances and the multiple experiences
informing them. This movement is central to Johnson’s developing aesthetic: none of his
major works is a discrete, unmoving whole. Instead, we find Johnson constantly resituat-
ing his works, sharing them as incomplete compositions to be taken up and taken in by
others in the changing landscape of the sonic environment.9 Such movement incorporates
the biography of a people seeking a homeland and opens the narrative as a continued
quest of African Americans within the American nation.
In the Cole and Johnson Brothers trio, James Johnson advanced the appropriation
of well-known tunes that belonged to no one for their compositions. He was proud
of the appropriative measures that such borrowing facilitated, for not only were the
spirituals and work songs given new voice by the trio’s compositions, they were sung
enthusiastically by Black people and white people in a broader acknowledgement of
their popular appeal. The trio as a whole had different ideas about the future of music
and Black culture in the US. Bob Cole was convinced that Latin American and Carib-
bean culture would strongly inflect and fuse with Black culture in the US, that ragtime
and habanera rhythms would merge. Rosamond saw great opportunity in operatic
interpolations that elevated Black culture as a whole, and he inserted operas from
Giuseppe Verdi and others into ragtime, much as Antonín Dvořák, Frederick Delius,
and other (European) classical composers inserted spirituals into their symphonies.
These differences were productive ones that helped direct Johnson’s developing views
of multilingual, simultaneous voices in Black culture that influenced his major com-
positions. The start was in ‘Lift’. The year after its composition, Johnson was nearly
lynched in his hometown by National Guardsmen, confirming the aspect of the Ameri-
can modern soundscape that was chaos and brutality.10
The precursor of Johnson’s modern hymn was the spirituals of the ancestors, for
which he had deep reverence. In his preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals

(1925), Johnson emphasises their spontaneity, variety, and the interchange of their
meanings, underscoring them as practices of cultural transmission and modes of
expression, constantly moving, breathing, and transforming.11 He acknowledged the
fluid, improvisatory meaning of Black cultural expression found in the spirituals and
their modern descendant, ragtime. Expressive forms such as these, as well as regional
vernacular, cannot be set to the page, Johnson asserted; for example, ‘Not even in the
dialect of any particular section is a given word always pronounced the same. It may
vary in the next breath in the mouth of the same speaker. How a word is pronounced is
governed by the preceding and following sounds’, he wrote.12 The spirituals similarly
elude fixity of musical notation, in an intentional act meant to affirm an expressivity
of life that lives past the page.
Johnson’s preface elaborates on this complexity of expression:
There are the curious turns and twists and quavers and the intentional striking of
certain notes just a shade off the key, with which the Negro loves to embellish his
songs. These tendencies constitute a handicap that has baffled many of the recorders
of this music. I doubt that it is possible with our present system of notation to make
a fixed transcription of these peculiarities that would be absolutely true; for in their
very nature they are not susceptible to fixation. Many of the transcriptions that have
been made are far from the true manner and spirit of singing the Spirituals.13
Johnson’s emphasis on ‘singing the Spirituals’ – vocalising their spirit – versus tran-
scribing them privileges the practice that affirms their meaning and their fugitive
sounds. Melodic lines have been traced by previous notations of the spirituals, Johnson
acknowledges, but these transcribers have missed a key aspect of the spirituals: their
harmony, which distinguishes them from most other folk songs with which they were
compared. This harmony reveals the tonal slide, the rhythmic play, the fluid context
of these songs – in short, it conveys their spirit or feeling through the act of transmis-
sion, or what Johnson calls ‘swing’. The spirituals’ proper transmission hinges on their
performance in this spirit, which Johnson contrasts with ‘playing the notes too cor-
rectly’ or ‘not play[ing] what is not written down’.14 Any performer, Black or white,
may ‘flounder [. . .] either in the “art” or the “exhibition” pit’.15 Johnson’s emphasis
on performance dissolves the gap that transcription of the spirituals preserves: Salomé
Voegelin finds that ‘critical discourse does badly in dealing with sound as it assumes
and insists on the gap between that which it describes and its description – it is the very
opposite of sound, which is always the heard, immersive and present’.16
Johnson assures the reader of The Book of American Negro Spirituals that in
this study,
the only development has been in harmonizations, and these harmonizations

have been kept true in character [. . .] [T]he songs [. . .] have not been cut up or
‘opera-ated’ upon. The arrangers have endeavoured above all else to retain their
primitive ‘swing.’17
He makes clear that the dedication of the book is reserved for those ‘through whose
efforts these songs have been collected, preserved, and given to the world’ not through
notation but through enactment. Like the children in Jacksonville who sang the Johnson

brothers’ ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ into national culture, Black composers, musicians,
and singers carried the spirituals beyond themselves, singing, in the words of Johnson’s
poem about the makers of the spirituals, ‘O Black and Unknown Bards’, ‘far better than
they knew’.18 Johnson’s poem, which begins with ruminative questions, opens his pref-
ace to The Book of American Negro Spirituals, highlighting the status of the unnamed
Black creators of the spirituals.
Johnson used this idea of the centrality of fluid performance of the spirituals to
model the meanings he hoped to enact in his writing: from The Autobiography of an
Ex-Colored Man to God’s Trombones.19 Resisting fixation allowed Johnson to advance
his works through time, troubling the very notions of an exclusive American tradi-
tion of belonging through culture and history. If we understand R. Murray Schafer’s
soundscape as one in which ‘the general acoustic environment of a society can be read
as an indicator of social conditions which produce it’,20 we must listen for, and attune
ourselves to, the way in which this environment produces multiple forms of sound and
experience. In his preface to The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals, Johnson
emphasised that the spirituals were ‘still in the making’.21 In other words, the spirituals
remain a dynamic, elusive form of expression for African Americans. ‘Lift Every Voice
and Sing’ demonstrates as a modern-day hymn that the spirituals are not fixed in time,
place, or notation. Like Black culture itself, these songs are constantly moving, making
and remaking themselves.
Assessing Johnson’s prefaces as markers of his developing ideas about Black
expressive culture and its transference, we find that his very framing of the spiritu-
als and ‘American Negro Poetry’ helps develop his ideas about the form his writing
would take.22 Text and sound become mobile, elusive markers of Black culture and the
unfulfilled quest for equal citizenship, and these markers in Johnson’s work are carried
into the new century of modernity and modernism. In many of his subsequent works,
Johnson characterises linguistic and musical variety through sound, using it to describe
and advance past aural experiences of the modern world. His innovative incorporation
of spirituals and hymns, classical and romantic scores for piano and opera, abolitionist
oratory and Broadway era songs from New York’s Tenderloin district, and ragtime is
used to show their imperative and continuous alterations, through performance and
their continued expression.
When Johnson’s narrator in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man writes of
ragtime music that it ‘was music that demanded physical response, patting of the feet,
drumming of the fingers, or nodding of the head in time with the beat’, he points to a
form of interracialism that does not demand the ‘loss’ of racial claims in its transfer-
ence. The sounds of ragtime and more broadly expressive culture demand physical
interaction. As Steven Feld observes, ‘listening habits and histories figure in the shap-
ing of poetic, vocal, and instrumental practices’.23 ‘Listen to it’, Feld implores. ‘Hear
how knowing [. . .] [the environment] animates multiple forms of instrumental and
vocal expression.’ Hear in these expressions opportunities for experimentation with
the practice. Hear in these expressive acts ‘the embodiment of knowing the world
through sound’.24
Many of the physical interactions of the latter twentieth century are public expres-
sions of attitudes shaped by racialised experiences. Wattstax, Los Angeles, 1972: in the
Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, no one rises to the rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled
Banner’. When vocalist Kim Weston shifts to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’, survivors of

the 1965 Watts uprising raise their fists in a Black power salute. Washington DC, 2007:
Reverend Lowery closes his eyes and offers verses from the song as part of his inaugural
benediction of President Barack Obama. San Diego, 2016: NFL San Francisco 49ers
quarterback Colin Kaepernick takes a knee to protest police brutality. NYC, 27 May
2020: Anthony McGill, principal clarinettist for the New York Philharmonic, takes two
knees, playing ‘America the Beautiful’ in a minor key, and places his hands behind his
back, as in a police arrest. The sonic witness of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ is all about
us, and while it often centres on Black suffering, it is all of us, as we face injustice,
police brutality, and an incomplete democracy.25 In the broader world of this song,
which extends past Johnson’s death in 1938, multiple nations, the World Wars, African
decolonisation, the revolutionary 1960s, and these more contemporary moments meet
the physical demand of the music to acknowledge the breathing movement of Black
culture as an uncontained, dynamic, evolving witness to the world of human agents.
Knowledge alone, as W. E. B. Du Bois observed, is not enough to advance equality. It
must be knowledge and action.
‘Nothing that I have done has paid me back so fully in satisfaction as being part
creator of this song’, Johnson wrote, adding:
I am always thrilled deeply when I hear it sung by Negro children. I am lifted up

on their voices, and I am also carried back and enabled to live through again the
exquisite emotions I felt at the birth of the song. My brother and I, in talking, have
often marvelled at the results that have followed what we considered an incidental
effort [. . .] we wrote better than we knew.26
Johnson’s ‘O Black and Unknown Bards’, a poem that paid homage to the unnamed
creators of the spirituals, echoed this sentiment: ‘you sang far better than you knew’.
‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ acknowledges the past of enslavement and suffering to
make way for a resilient hope, one that sustains and directs us on the path towards
liberty. While not yet fulfilled – not in 1900, not in 2023 – the song emphasises the
truth of faith, homeland, and the quest for a fully realised liberty. ‘Let us march on
till victory is won.’ Despite harsh racism, poverty, and oppression, African Americans
and any oppressed group will strive for a better day and keep their faith in justice and
‘a new day begun’. The song has emerged at key moments in the national conscious-
ness over the twentieth century to reveal anxieties over Black citizenship and Black
voices of critique. Back in 2008 at a state of the city address in Denver, CO, the
jazz singer René Marie sang the tune of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ but replaced the
lyrics with ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’, for which she was nationally chastised. More
recently, the Reverend Joseph Lowery invoked the lyrics to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’
in his inaugural benediction of Barack Obama: ‘God of our weary years / God of our
silent tears, / Thou who has brought us thus far on the way.’
The references to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ as the ‘Negro National Anthem’ or
‘Black National Anthem’ indicate cultural pride, but alternatively they have been used
to advance judgement of Black citizens as less loyal to the nation. Indeed, ‘Lift Every
Voice and Sing’ – the history of its performances, the contexts in which it has been
sung and in which it has been received – carries us directly to Colin Kaepernick’s
protest voiced through the national anthem. Is there space in American culture for dis-
senting Black voices? Are Black citizens permitted to love their nation and criticise it?

Johnson took great pains to refer to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ as the ‘Negro
National Hymn’, not ‘anthem’. (‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ became the official US
national anthem in 1931.) Ollie Jewel Sims Okala, Johnson’s family nurse and literary
executor, recalled that Johnson insisted it was a ‘Hymn’: ‘In his typical calm manner,
he never failed to remind me that “a nation can have but one anthem and our anthem
is the Star Spangled Banner.”’ But Johnson fully understood the inequality that moved
African Americans in particular to embrace ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ as an anthem
representing their experiences of the nation as a people apart. Anthems became espe-
cially crucial in a post-World War I international discourse of nation’s rights.27
The survival of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ for 120 years of expression in various
contexts, sung by Black people and white people, children and adults, conveys the
continued harshness of racism, and the hopefulness that as a nation, we sing ‘far better
than we know’. Johnson presented his ‘hymn’ as a modern spiritual, suggesting that
as a nation we must become attuned to the many voices and experiences that attach
themselves to the song.
It is a simple song, with a partial ascending and descending scale, a bridge of sorts in
a major-to-minor key prior to the refrain, and an aspirational progression of optimism,
of hope prevailing beyond the minor key to resolution in the major key. It is graspable,
easy for anyone to voice. One does not need a musical score to carry the song’s tune, but
it also can be made elaborate with multiple instruments, four different vocal ranges, and
a variety of arrangements. Many of Rosamond Johnson’s compositions maximise the per-
formative contexts in which the song could be used, from symphonic renditions to mixed
quartette, to vocalist-specific keys for noted singers such as Marian Anderson (G flat).28
‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ is a story about what everyday people – educators, church-
goers, musicians, college students, civil rights advocates of all backgrounds – did with the
song. Craig Werner observes the ‘simultaneous quality of music – its ability to make us
aware of the many voices sounding at a single moment’.29 A song requires body, breath,
and vocalisation. ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ is linked to African American political status
and the history of protests for equality. The voices of the many are welcomed – from
white women at Bryn Mawr to Japanese citizens who sing it in translation to Japanese.
All classes, with or without religious affiliation or space to worship, may sing this song.
The spirituals’ resistance to notation, and Johnson’s privileging of ‘swing’ through digres-
sion, playing with the beat, and swinging from one body to another, demonstrate the
imperative need for fugitive expression. ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ has come to represent
the necessity for fugitive expression in US and international discourse.
The Johnson brothers’ work in collecting the spirituals in two volumes, with
Rosamond Johnson’s scoring marking innovative efforts to reflect the un-notatable
and the living opposite of the ‘“opera-ated” upon’ versions of the spirituals, demon-
strates their vision of a world where the ever-present voices of the ancestors as artists
and Makers of the nation combine with the modern soundscape of Black life. To write
a modern-day spiritual, or hymn, was to acknowledge past bards and the powerful
foundation of Black music in the American discourse of freedom. Johnson’s emphasis
on the voices of the emancipated meaningfully ‘let it resound far as the rolling sea’ –
the powerful body of voices whose hopes, dreams, and political might had yet to be
released into the national discourse. Modern-day hymns can be sung by the many.
When white people join with Black people in singing, they extend the transference of
sound with which Johnson animated his works.

Johnson’s God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) extends this
premise, its originators possessing the ‘wonderful voice’ ‘not of an organ or a trumpet,
but rather of a trombone, the instrument possessing above all others the power to
express the wide and varied range of emotions encompassed by the human voice –
and with greater amplitude’.30 His project in writing God’s Trombones was to invite
a broader culture of listeners into the world of the African American preacher and his
congregants. Among Johnson’s literary works, God’s Trombones is particularly cher-
ished. Like ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’, it continues to be performed with new inflec-
tions of culture and experience. We continue to read God’s Trombones today much as
we continue to sing ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’: for its gift of song and its promise of
hope; because it articulates the faith and creative survival of African American lives,
and many more lives besides; because of our personal relationship with our nation and
the vast universe; because of continued suffering; for the continued quest for liberty
and equality. ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ and God’s Trombones, the two works of
which Johnson was most proud to have created, remind us that we act in the world
together, and that when we reflect upon our personal and shared trials, we discover the
things that make us human. The cadence and rhythm of the preacher’s delivery found
in Johnson’s poetic sermons pays homage to the ‘trombones’ of expressive culture.
Lifted voices elevate their speaking subjects and cultural forms, animating a fresh and
politicised expression for a new generation of leadership.
You sang far better than you knew; the songs

That for your listeners’ hungry hearts sufficed
Still live – but more than this to you belongs:
You sang a race from wood and stone to Christ.31
Notes
1. Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901
(New York: Dial, 1954).
2. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson
(New York: Viking Press, 1933), 154.
3. Brent Edwards, ‘The Seemingly Eclipsed Window of Form: James Weldon Johnson’s Pref-
aces’, in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 580–601 (532).
4. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, ‘Rethinking Vernacular Culture: Black Religion and Race
Records in the 1920s and 1930s’, in African American Religious Thought: An Anthology,
ed. Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003),
996–1018 (982).
5. Johnson, Along This Way, 154–6.
6. Ibid., 156.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Noelle Morrissette, James Weldon Johnson’s Modern Soundscapes (Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 2013), 134.
10. Ibid., chapter 1.
11. Ibid., 130.
12. James Weldon Johnson, ed., The Book of American Negro Spirituals (New York: Viking
Press, 1925), 43.

13. Ibid., 30.

14. Ibid., 28.
15. Ibid., 29.
16. Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New
York: Continuum, 2010), xiv.
17. Johnson, Book of American Negro Spirituals, 50.
18. Ibid., 12.
19. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Boston: Sherman,
French, 1912); James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
(New York: Viking Press, 1927).
(Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, [1977] 1994), 7.
21. James Weldon Johnson, ed., The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals (New York:
Viking Press, 1926), 11–12.
22. See Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of
Black Internationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
23. Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression,
30th anniversary edn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), xxvii.
24. Ibid., xxviii.
25. Imani Perry, ‘Afterword’, in May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National
Anthem (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 218–26.
26. Johnson, Along This Way, 156.
27. Shana L. Redmond, ‘Introduction’, in Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Soli-
darity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 1–19.
28. JRJ Papers, MSS 21, Box 6, folder 11, Yale University Library Music Archives.
29. Craig Werner, A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (Edin-
burgh: Canongate, 2014), xiv.
30. Johnson, God’s Trombones, 6, 7.
31. James Weldon Johnson, Fifty Years and Other Poems, with an Introduction by Brander
Matthews (Boston: Cornhill, 1917), 8.
Select Bibliography
Edwards, Brent, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Inter-
nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
———, ‘The Seemingly Eclipsed Window of Form: James Weldon Johnson’s Prefaces’, in The
Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1998), 580–601.
Morrissette, Noelle, James Weldon Johnson’s Modern Soundscapes (Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, 2013).
O’Meally, Robert G., ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia Uni-
Perry, Imani, May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
Redmond, Shana L., ‘Introduction’, in Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity
in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 1–19.
Voegelin, Salomé, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York:
Continuum, 2010).
Werner, Craig, A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (Edinburgh:
Canongate, 2014).

10
Sound Media, Race, and Voice

Sam Halliday
Introduction
A mongst the personal papers of Ralph Ellison, now archived in the Library of
Congress, is an unattributed typescript of a radio play, possibly written by Ellison
himself as part of his work for the Federal Writers Projects in the late 1930s and early
1940s, though possibly never broadcast or performed.1 The play concerns the life and
work of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (?1809–76), a real-life African American concert
singer, who, having been born a slave in Mississippi, first found freedom and then
fame, performing in the concert halls of North America and England.2 According to
a character within the play, Greenfield possessed ‘[t]he greatest voice of the age’ (20).
This earned her the nickname ‘The Black Swan’, inspired, in part, by the nickname of
another famous nineteenth-century concert singer, Jenny Lind (1820–87), ‘The Swed-
ish Nightingale’. In Lind’s case, the nickname refers, of course, to the singer’s bird-like
voice, in tandem with her nationality. But in Greenfield’s case, the nickname refers
primarily to race. Though most varieties of swans sing, few are esteemed for it, and
none at all are songbirds. Meanwhile, the variety known as the Black Swan (Cygnus
atratus) is given that name antithetically, to distinguish it from others that, in adult-
hood, are white. As a descriptor as much as an appellation, then, ‘The Black Swan’
identifies Greenfield as possessed of a ‘black’ voice. Or maybe, it suggests that such a
voice resounds or passes through her, as if it were an auditory analogue of black skin.3
A cognate claim is made in the Ellison archive radio play – though in a more histor-
icist or ‘culturalist’ vein, not necessarily conditioned by belief in racial essences. At the
beginning of the typescript, the narrator contends, ‘You have heard their voices. You
have heard their laments and their protests and the singing in the fields’, with reference
to the slaves amidst whom Taylor is raised, and their customary music (1). As Taylor’s
mother tells another character a little later, ‘Elizabeth has been singing ever since she
was nine months old. She picks up every tune she hears on the plantation’ (5). Both
statements recall the famous claim made by Frederick Douglass, in his slave narrative
of 1845, that slave songs are perhaps the most important historical document extant
of the African American experience of slavery.4 In Douglass’s text, in turn, one finds a
kernel of well-known claims according to which music made by slaves is a source for
African American music generally, and vocal sound that music’s paradigm or core.5
The radio play does not contest these claims when it has Taylor, or her dramaturgic
counterpart, sing herself, at points throughout the script. Her mother presents her as
relaying music heard in infancy, and as other characters declare later, her adult voice
is ‘uncommonly beautiful’ and her performances ‘superb’ (14, 16). But the play has

sound media, race, and voice 155
difficulty demonstrating any of these things directly, for the simple reason that the
historic voice it turns upon is lost: Taylor died in 1876, just before the first technology
for capturing and reproducing sound, the phonograph (1877), became available. No
matter how the actor playing Taylor sings, or is instructed to in the radio script she
follows, no one involved in the play can know what the real-life singer really sounded
like, or reproduce the voice in its own right. But as Ellison and anyone else involved
in that play would have been well aware, black music had been hugely invigorated by
sound recording in the decades since the phonograph’s invention, in ways that helped
both document existing traditions and create substantively new ones. So-called race
records representing both these trends were an important commodity from the 1920s,
as part of a worldwide economy of music in which African Americans were involved
as both consumers and producers.6 The very first record company to be owned by
African Americans indeed paid tribute to Taylor as a herald of all this, taking its
name from Taylor’s nickname: Black Swan Records, based in Harlem, New York City,
traded from 1921 to 1924, and disseminated music in a range of genres, including
gospel, blues, and jazz.7
In the Ellison archive radio play, then, Taylor’s voice is a major object of repre-
sentation, even though it cannot represent itself. What does it mean to represent this
voice via radio? The medium has obvious advantages for the portrayal of not just
this but any voice, both as an acoustic medium and as an ‘acousmatic’ one, to invoke
Pierre Schaeffer’s famous definition of the acousmatic as a condition allocating ‘to
the ear alone the entire responsibility for a perception that ordinarily rests on other
sensible witnesses’.8 The other ‘witnesses’ Schaeffer has in mind here are the eyes and
eyesight, primarily, along with other sensory faculties responsible for pegging sound
to a definite source, and pegging that source to a definite location, in non-acousmatic
situations. All these agencies are typically absorbed into a sensory ensemble, along
with touch, taste, and smell, wherein ear and eye correct and bolster one another (at
least in so-called fully abled individuals). And as both Schaeffer and his interlocutor/
commentator Michel Chion emphasise, the acousmatic has become a regular feature
of modernity since the late nineteenth century, not least via sound technologies such as
the phonograph itself. In Chion’s words, the increasing prevalence of ‘radio, records,
telephone, tape recorder’ and the like has made the acousmatic influential in many
walks of cultural and economic life (and here we should add sound cinema, the object
of Chion’s classic study The Voice in Cinema (1984; English trans. 1999)).9 This makes
the sources of many sounds invisible, and many of those sounds appear autonomous.
In what follows, I trace the acousmatic and its vicissitudes in relation to a range of
early twentieth-century fiction by African Americans, meditating on both ‘black’ and
other racial voices. I also look at musicology wherein blackness is adduced by white
writers as a component of black music, and that music treated as an index or effect
of race itself. In charting the conceptual moves of these and associated texts, I hope
to show how technology is put to work, both materially and imaginatively, when race
is putatively heard instead of being seen (and, sometimes, seen and heard at the same
time). Insofar as all these texts consider hearing as an alternative to sight, they reflect
the history of the acousmatic generally. And in this, they also help tease out the limi-
tations of the acousmatic as an epistemological mode – for though there are analytic
dividends to be reaped from acousmatic listening, there are liabilities as well. On one
hand, as Chion argues, the fact that sight and hearing become detached in acousmatic

156 sam halliday
listening may lead listeners to a richer appreciation than they would otherwise enjoy
of ‘sound object[s]’ in themselves. But on the other, as Brian Kane points out, the self-
same situation may lead listeners to unconsciously adulterate that object, attributing
qualities or causes to it that are not actually implicit in the sounds themselves.10 As
Kane puts it, such objects are phenomenologically ‘underdetermined’, and thus beg
‘imaginative supplementation’.11 And where race is concerned, supplements may be
metaphysical.
It is in part because they recognise the dangers of all this that some of the writers
I address believe the ‘black’ voice to be chimerical. Of these writers, George Schuyler
expresses this belief most directly; his fellow-novelist contemporaries Richard Wright
and Ralph Ellison do so less directly while also entertaining other possibilities. The
non-black musicologists Leonard Bernstein and Milton Metfessel are most convinced
of the reality of black vocality amongst non-literary writers I consider: in the latter’s
case, this conviction leads to both intellectual and material investment in ‘phonopho-
tography’, a technological procedure supposedly capable of making the blackness of
‘black’ voices visible and quantifiable. Male writers predominate throughout the pres-
ent chapter – a fact that is certainly regrettable, but at least partly necessitated by the
way black voices come under the same kinds of analytic and aesthetic pressure as
those historically imposed by men upon the vocal sounds of girls and women. Because
of this, in turn, my closing discussion of Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) incorporates
discussion of Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886), a text that both assesses these
pressures and protests them. As we shall see, James’s novel simultaneously assesses
and protests and instances the ‘sonic gaze’ (a term coined by Avital Ronell) – a ‘male’
way of listening to women that is premonitory of ways that certain white people listen
to black people.12
Passing and Telephony

One way of bringing the sonic gaze into clear relief is by comparing it to the scopic
gaze described by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952; English trans.
1967). Here, the latter is said to focus on black skin, in ways that freight black subjects
with psychic as well as extra-psychic burdens commensurate with hyper-visibility.13 At
first blush, this account fits the history of race and racism in North America well, inso-
far as blackness is represented there in visual terms. Thus, from the fugitive slave post-
ers of the nineteenth century to cinematic extravaganzas such as The Birth of a Nation
(1915; dir. D. W. Griffith), race in the US has often been literally spectacular. But coun-
tervailingly, race has also often threatened to become invisible, almost as a function of
its importance. As is well known, the legal doctrine partus sequitur ventrem (a child’s
legal status follows the mother’s), pivotal in slave codes since the seventeenth century,
and premonitory of the notorious ‘one drop’ statutes adopted by certain states in the
early twentieth century, decreed that certain persons should be considered ‘black’ even
if they appeared not to be.14 Meanwhile, the realities of sexual depredation of female
slaves by male masters under slavery, and associated demographic increase, meant
that, as Douglass famously pointed out in the same 1845 Narrative cited above, the
black population had become more variously and ambiguously ‘black’ well before the
end of slavery.15 By the close of the Reconstruction era (1863–77), race was attended
by what some historians call a crisis of visibility.16 African American author Charles

W. Chesnutt is an astute guide to this. His essay ‘What Is a White Man?’ (1889) mor-
dantly delineates the colour line in different Southern states, and shows how one might
pass from ‘white’ to ‘black’ as one travels from one state to another.17 Chesnutt’s novel
The House Behind the Cedars (1900) explores the implications of this more fully,
partly via a series of plot points uncoupling sound from vision. One of these involves
a white man who hears a woman’s voice and is convinced that she is black on the
basis of his acousmatic listening (he overhears her passing by his window, while half
asleep).18 But this does not prevent him being equally convinced of the same woman’s
whiteness later on, and falling in love with her – never dreaming that a ‘black’ voice
and ‘white’ skin might coincide in the same person.
And so to other novels concerned with ‘passing’, the practice of deliberately assum-
ing a racial identity contrary to that imposed by majoritarian decree. Nella Larsen’s
Passing (1929), famously depicts the rooftop terrace of a racially exclusive northern
hotel where incognito black women take tea; Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1928) surveys
a range of racist institutions, all tending to convince its heroine of the benefits of giving
up her given, black identity for white. By the same historic juncture, the post-slavery
‘New Negro’ had become less distinctly Southern (in US terms), and more Northern;
not just a denizen of the US, but also of an international diaspora – at least according
to Alain Locke’s definitive account in his The New Negro anthology (1925). These
developments, in turn, were bound up with the Great Migration, the large-scale demo-
graphic shift from South to North within the US, which further opened up the question
of what was truly ‘racial’ and what more truly cultural and geographical. According
to some migrants, much of what had customarily been seen as ‘blackness’ was really
‘Southern-ness’, and the descendants of slaves much more cognate with the descendants
of their masters than hitherto assumed. To travel North might be to cast off insignia
of so-called race, including diction, accent, and vocabulary. In this context, the wide-
spread literary practice of using non-standard orthography to represent black dialectic
(a practice Chesnutt follows in some of his fiction) came to seem increasingly prob-
lematic. Thus James Weldon Johnson, in his Preface to The Book of American Negro
Poetry (1922), notes that most younger writers in the anthology eschew the practice, in
favour of techniques more suited to their metropolitan, supra-local outlook.19
In this they may have found an unexpected ally in the telephone. This, at least,
would be a plausible inference to draw from the avowed anti-racism of its inventor,
Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), as discussed by Ronell in her The Telephone
Book (1989), a study that applauds the telephone for its (potential) colour-blindness.20
George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) picks up this theme, as part of its wide-
ranging satire on essentialist attitudes to race, whether adduced by black people
or white people. Here, Schuyler modulates a claim earlier made in ‘The Negro Art
Hokum’ (1926), his contrarian assault on Locke and other figures whose celebrations of
blackness he considered to be ultimately based on the same metaphysics as the racism
they were trying to contest. As one of his novel’s characters contends:
There is no such thing as Negro dialect, except in literature and drama. It is a well-
known fact among informed persons that a Negro from a given section speaks the
same dialect as his white neighbors. In the South you can’t tell over the telephone
you are talking to a white man or a Negro. The same is true in New York when a
Northern Negro speaks into the receiver.21

158 sam halliday
Dialect exists in literature, but not in any real-world sound or mannerisms that lit-
erature purports to represent. Instead, this dialect is purely textual or alphabetic, and
all sonic manifestations of it hallucinatory. By revealing this to non-biased listeners,
the telephone performs an admirable service, over and above its more familiar and
obvious function of facilitating conversation. To be sure, neither Schuyler nor his
character deny that real voices have acoustic variations. But they do deny that any of
these variations correspond to race.
A more complex picture emerges from the telephone’s portrayal near the start of
Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Here, the telephone is imaginary: not wire and
metal, but constructed ad hoc by cupping one’s hands to one’s face and asking one’s
interlocutor to play along. That ‘play’ is indeed the order of the day here is a function
of the fact that those invoking it are young adults, and that as well as playing at being
telephone users, they play at being older ones. Not coincidentally, the two men con-
cerned, Bigger and Gus, also play at being white – a condition they identify with vocal
mannerisms, timbre, and commands. And as African Americans, their simulation of
these mannerisms and so on represents a form of passing, albeit one that is not trying
to fool anyone, but rather to measure out the socio-economic as well as racial gulf that
separates them from white countrymen:
‘Let’s play “white,”’ Bigger said, referring to a game of play-acting in which he and
his friends imitated the ways and manners of white folks.
[. . .]
[. . .] Bigger saw Gus cup his left hand to his ear, as though holding a telephone
receiver; and cup his right hand to his mouth, as though talking into a transmitter.
‘Hello,’ Gus said.
‘Hello,’ Bigger said, ‘Who’s this?’
‘This is Mr. J. P. Morgan speaking,’ Gus said.
‘Yessuh, Mr. Morgan,’ Bigger said; his eyes filled with mock adulation and respect.
‘I want you to sell twenty thousand shares of U. S. Steel in the market this morning,’
Gus said.
[. . .]
‘Yessuh, Mr. Morgan,’ Bigger said.
Both of them made gestures signifying that they were hanging up telephone
receivers; then they bent double, laughing.
‘I bet that’s just the way they talk,’ Gus said.22
In contrast to Schuyler’s character, both Gus and Bigger ‘bet’ that whiteness can be
heard, and simulated, even in the absence of the acousmatic telephony their play-acting
invokes. Moreover, Bigger matches Gus’s ‘white’ voice with a ‘black’ one, represented
orthographically via ‘yessuhs’ redolent of the dialect tradition. Thus, their roles expose
the gaps between a range of objects: not only ‘white’ sound and ‘black’ sound, but also
between black/white sound and black personhood – between black skins and, in Gus’s
case, an auditory white mask. But beyond this, Wright suggests that Schuyler is partly
right, albeit for the wrong reasons. To reveal what white people really sound like, one
needs to bracket how they look – including white people’s skin colour, especially. This
may not disable racial prejudice, but might at least unsettle it.
Telephony aside, the major locus of attempts to ‘see’ race from the early twentieth
century is music. It is to this that we now turn.

Singing and Phonophotography

The history of visualising sound is often traced to Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni
(1756–1827), whose experiments involved coating glass or metal plates with sand,
passing sound through those plates, and then observing traces made by sound vibra-
tions, in the sand, upon those plates.23 Subsequent research often focused on the voice,
and how this might be educed visually for the benefit of those who could not hear.24
Alexander Graham Bell’s research in this tradition led directly (if unexpectedly) to the
invention of the telephone, in 1876. Just one year later, Thomas Edison’s invention of
the phonograph eventually led (no less unexpectedly, at least to Edison himself) to an
extraordinary burgeoning of recorded music, and a related quickening in music’s modes
of social circulation. In song lyrics and adjacent discourses, musicians provided a de
facto commentary on all this. And in African American music, this commentary often
focused on race. The aforementioned Black Swan Records made a joke out of the way
that listeners seeking authentically ‘black’ sounds could rely upon the label, despite the
potential for racial masquerade acousmatic sound afforded. ‘The Only Genuine Col-
ored Record[s]’, its labels assured its customers: ‘Others are only passing for colored.’25
This brings us to the increasing influence of black music on music generally, and
related interest in black music amongst academic musicologists. Leonard Bernstein’s
undergraduate thesis, ‘The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music’ (1939),
reflects both trends. Here, Bernstein espouses a form of musical nationalism, wherein
black music supplies melodic traits, rhythms, and other source material to American
composers, much as European folk materials had done for composers from old-world
nations previously. Amongst American materials, particular attention is given to the
flatted 3rd, 5th, and 7th notes in major scales, said to give a ‘special Negro flavor’
to black singing.26 Not only do these intervals constitute a challenge to conventional
methods of notation, they also challenge the distinction between pitch per se and pitch
articulation:
As a matter of strict record, none of these three alterations of the major scale can
be notated absolutely correctly. They are dependent on the Negro timbre; that is,
they are almost purely a matter of intonation [. . .]. It is for this reason that when
swing [i.e. the sub-genre of jazz] is played on the piano – which, being a mechani-
cally exact instrument, cannot produce quarter-tones and the like – the pianist must
resort to such impressionistic approximations as:– [here, Bernstein interpolates a
few bars of musical notation.]
Obviously, music based on this scale sounds most authentic when sung by a
Negro voice, although such instruments as clarinet and trumpet in the hands of
a man with ‘feeling’ – usually a Negro – come very close to the vocal execution.27
In ‘Negro’ music, what is also how, as any given melody owes part of its being to
the inherent idiosyncrasy of live performance, notwithstanding any actual or possible
notation. Insofar as this music ‘sounds most authentic’ when performed by ‘Negroes’,
how also corresponds to who, as the supposed racial essences of singers commingle
with the substance of the music they perform. Though ‘mechanically exact’ instru-
ments may generate a tolerable facsimile of this music, these can never replicate the
full range of its ‘vocal expression’. Vocality is this music’s core, even when other instru-
ments are involved in its performance.

160 sam halliday
But the voice itself remains elusive to precise representation, whether by conven-
tional musical notation or otherwise. This creates particular challenges for those seek-
ing to analyse black music systematically. And though Bernstein seems not to have
known it, these are challenges Milton Metfessel believes he has surmounted in his
Phonophotography in Folk Music (1928). Metfessel was a researcher at the Iowa labo-
ratory for the Psychology of Music and Speech, devoted to what his colleague Carl
E. Seashore called ‘the scientific study of the expression of musical emotion’.28 His
special interests were blues and spirituals: supposedly privileged expressions of emo-
tion amongst African Americans. Like other ethnomusicologists, Metfessel used the
phonograph to gather data.29 But despite the phonograph’s ‘inestimable value’ in this,
as Seashore observes, its records can only be interpreted by ear (8). Though the lat-
ter claim may sound odd coming from a musicologist, it points towards an optimum
scenario wherein music could be seen as well as heard. Were a sufficiently stable and
precise method to become available, the ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘who’ of music (as I have
just called them) could be measured simultaneously.
This is what both Metfessel and Seashore think ‘phonophotography’ enables. Via a
bespoke apparatus, the new technique combines features from conventional phonog-
raphy and cinematography, as Metfessel details:
The apparatus consists of photographic instruments mounted within a suitcase. In

the interior [. . .] there is a large wheel to which a crank is attached from the out-
side. Motion picture film is wound around the wheel, coming from a film magazine.
In its passage from the magazine to the wheel, beams of light are concentrated in
it. These lights are reflected from tiny mirrors, which are attached to diaphragms.
[. . .] The diaphragms pick up the vibrations of sound [coming either from a pho-
nograph or live performance], and the mirrors translate the vibrations into an up
and down flashing of the light. (22)
The singing voice initiates a sequence that transduces and displaces it at each succes-
sive stage. Sound begets the rise and fall of diaphragms; these, in turn, help mobil-
ise reflected light. At the conclusion of this sequence, the voice acquires permanent,
substantial form. Metfessel’s wider mission is accomplished: ‘Phonophotography lifts
folk music out of the subjective and intangible into an objective, measurable physical
reality’ (178).
Can the ‘Negro-ness’ of ‘Negro’ singers be measured in the same way? Flatted
intervals aside, Metfessel identifies several things differentiating black voices from oth-
ers, starting with rhythm – a term that he aligns with ‘primitive’, as happens so often
in discussions of black music of this period (98). Second, he claims that ‘Negroes’
mingle song with speech, making songs’ internal rhythms more complex (44). Finally,
he states that when black singers become emotionally aroused, ‘the entire organism is
stirred up’, leading them to clap their hands and shake their heads (175). When per-
formers are emotionally transported, their music becomes trans-vocal.
This leads us to a wider point. If black music is visual as well as auditory, it is not
enough to hear the voice, or even see its transcript, Chladni-style: one also needs to see
the singer’s body.30 And in that case, one must consider not only formal and aesthetic
pressures on that body but historic and sociopolitical ones as well. Here, we may again
consider Bigger in Native Son (notwithstanding the fact that we have seen him speak,

not sing). When he plays ‘white’, he does not just make pseudo-acousmatic sounds;
he also makes exaggerated facial expressions (‘his eyes filled with mock adulation and
respect’), burlesquing obsequy. Behind these expressions stands a whole tradition of
minstrelsy and related performance genres encoding blackness as a set of gestural and
physiognomic tropes. And behind these, in turn, stands a wider edifice of customs,
laws, and institutions, all constructed with the effect if not express intent of telling
black people how they should act – in every sense. In a commentary on Native Son,
Ralph Ellison claims that though supposedly ‘physical’ expressions of black culture,
including rhythmic speech, appear self-grounded, they are in fact consequent upon
and repercussive of that edifice of customs, laws, and institutions just referred to –
displacements of the latter, à la phonophotography. Though often seen as an avatar of
‘primitive simplicity’, the hypersensitive response of the ‘Negro’ to their environment
means that they should instead be acknowledged as ‘complex’.31 In Invisible Man
(1952), Ellison extends this line of thought, dramatising the interplay of acousmatic
and non-acousmatic sounds, and highlighting the political capital that may be used –
or abused – by those who would control the ‘black’ voice. The novel’s examination of
that voice will occupy us shortly, and bring the present chapter to its conclusion.
Invisibility
The rigour of Invisible Man’s interrogation of these issues has slowly become evident
over the last few decades. In 2004 David Copenhafer could claim, with justice, that ‘we
have yet to comprehend the novel, yet to understand what it has to say, in particular,
regarding the interaction of the acoustic, the visual, and the racial’.32 Since then, though,
several critics have taken up the challenge of understanding just this. In Phonographies:
Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005), Alexander Weheliye proposes that the narra-
tor’s subjectivity is best understood as a correlative of sound technologies with which
he is associated, and the ‘invisibility’ these promise (or threaten).33 Nicole Brittingham
Furlonge’s 2011 essay on the novel agrees, and adds that the narrator’s relationship with
such technologies reflects Ellison’s own critical writings on recorded music.34 In a 2016
essay, Herman Beavers focuses on the speaking voice, and shows how a disruption of
the ‘feedback loop’ connecting speech to listening vexes the narrator’s relationships with
others.35 And in Sydney Boyd’s ‘The Color of Sound’ (2018), the putative blackness of
black voices, as depicted in the novel, is identified with timbre, a musicological category
we have seen adduced above – precisely in relation to the ‘Negro’ voice – by Bernstein.36
A key coordinate for all these readings is the novel’s Prologue, which famously
dilates upon a phonograph recording of Louis Armstrong singing ‘What Did I Do to
Be So Black and Blue?’ (Fats Waller, Harry Brooks, and Andy Razaf, 1929). Via this
recording, the narrator hears his own ‘invisibility’ reflected. But as Copenhafer and
others point out, it is not just this that the phonograph reflects; it is also the narrator’s
own actual, acoustic voice. And throughout the novel, this voice occasions self-regard
and self-critique in roughly equal measure. As a student, the narrator addresses himself
to a ‘connoisseur of voice sounds’, as he gives debating-society-type speeches, freighted
with ‘more sound than sense’.37 Upon leaving the South, he joins the Great Migration,
with this express intent: ‘here in the North I would slough off my southern ways of
speech. Indeed I would have one way of speaking in the North and another in the
South’ (135). In an ironic commentary on this prospectus, his voice appears, later,

162 sam halliday
temporarily, divorced from him, ‘spill[ing]’ words ‘in a mumble over which I had little
control’ (211). But later still, en rapport with his own voice, he joins the Brotherhood
(a political group) as a public speaker. In this capacity, the narrator gives a speech
whose audience regards him like a crowd of Metfessels: ‘They were listening intently,
and as though looking not at me, but at the pattern of my voice upon the air’ (366). It
is as if Chladni’s aim of visualising sound had taken root in every mind.
In his capacity for public speech, the narrator also resembles an otherwise quite
different character in Henry James’s The Bostonians, that earlier novel whose rela-
tion to Invisible Man I signalled in the introduction to this chapter and which I turn
to directly now. In James’s text, Verena Tarrant speaks on behalf of women’s rights,
as one of several ‘Bostonians’ making up one side of the novel’s agonistic scheme.
On the other side is Basil Ransom, whose misogyny and anti-black white Southern
chauvinism complete the novel’s set of geopolitical and cultural antimonies: North
versus South; feminism versus male chauvinism; (relatively) pro-black racial liber-
alism versus white supremacy. Ideological contention between these two sides is
compounded by the erotic kind, as Basil battles for Verena’s heart against another
Bostonian, Olive Chancellor. In their respective discourses, these rivals dwell obses-
sively upon Verena’s voice – Olive declaring, ‘A voice, a human voice is what we
want’, and Basil swooning, ‘Murder, what a lovely voice!’38 But as that reference
to ‘murder’ should lead us to suspect (though it is not in fact an augury of the real
thing), Basil’s wishes for Verena are against her own best interests. As he tells her
to her face, ‘I don’t listen to your ideas, I listen to your voice’ (326). He disregards
her as a subject, even as he craves her as an object. Olive’s view of this is categori-
cal: ‘It was because [Basil] knew that [Verena’s] voice had magic in it’ that ‘from
the moment he caught its first note he had determined to destroy it’ (369). Basil is a
killer, hunting with a sonic gaze.
This brings us to that gaze’s relationship to race. As I have suggested, that gaze’s
prototype is a ‘male’ way of listening to women, but cognate, supplementary versions
include the way that black people are listened to by certain white people. And in
Invisible Man, these white people are represented by the narrator’s colleagues in the
Brotherhood. Their leader, Brother Jack, insists, ‘“We’re not interested in his looks but
in his voice”’, apparently determining that race should play no part in the organisa-
tion’s dealings with the narrator (245). But what he really means is that race should
determine all those dealings surreptitiously – veiled by the sonic’s detachment from
the scopic, and by his and his colleagues’ ostensible approval of the narrator’s speech.
When Jack castigates a colleague for invoking stereotypes of black musicality (‘“all
coloured people sing”’), it seems that he sees the narrator as a voice of reason (253;
emphasis in original). But it soon transpires that the Brotherhood have no time for
what the narrator says, except when this coincides with what they tell him to say.
Instead, they care about how he sounds – in one instance, with a pronounced erotic
inclination. In that instance, the narrator’s would-be paramour, Emma, tells him, ‘“at
times you have tom-toms beating in your voice”’ (333). Reprising Metfessel’s associa-
tion of the ‘Negro’ voice with, on one hand, rhythm, and on the other, cultural naïvety,
she comes on to him using perhaps the most exemplary word of Western racism:
‘“primitive”’ (333; emphasis in original).
Parallels between Invisible Man and The Bostonians can only be taken so far.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their divergent vintages and genealogies, differences

between the two texts are just as important as their similarities. For instance, James’s
evocation of the black voice is occasioned not by the public speaker of his text,
Verena, but by the man who will not listen to it, Basil. In an extraordinary twist, Basil
becomes a proxy ‘slave’, even as he hails from – and speaks for – the plantocracy:
‘his discourse was pervaded by something sultry and vast, something almost African
in its rich, basking tone, something that suggested the teeming expanse of the cotton
field’ (36). It is the chauvinist, revanchist misogynist who here sounds ‘black’. And
in a further twist, the narrator glosses Verena’s speeches with broad, impressionistic
paraphrases, as if their actual words were not worth quoting. This is what I meant
earlier when I said that the novel instances the ‘sonic gaze’ as well as assessing and
protesting it: though it ‘listens’ to women, it pointedly refuses to do so in the way they
demand, instead reproducing the patriarchal assumptions and prerogatives against
which they protest. In this respect, if not in others, the novel is of Basil’s party, not
Verena’s. But the most significant difference between The Bostonians and Invisible
Man is a corollary of the distinction between the third-person narrator of one and the
first-person narrator/protagonist of the other. In The Bostonians, the narrator stands
above the fray, bestowing sympathy and scorn on all the novel’s characters in equal
measure (patriarchal bias notwithstanding). But in Invisible Man, the narrator is part
of that fray, inextricably bound up with the milieu that he describes. This is the case
even, if not especially, when he retreats into the underground lair described in the
novel’s Prologue and Epilogue, with only Louis Armstrong’s phonographic voice for
company. What does that intone?
The answer takes us to the relation between the acousmatic and invisibility, implicit
throughout the novel, not least when, at the very end, the narrator refers to his own
voice as ‘disembodied’ (468). This is not the first time a voice has been referred to
in this way: earlier, a woman’s singing voice acquires the same descriptor, as does a
preacher’s when he preaches (99, 107). In all these cases, ‘disembodi[ment]’ denotes a
bracketing of vision which brings the voice closer to the listener for purposes of closer
scrutiny. But as we have seen throughout this chapter, ‘closer’ does not mean ‘better’,
if the ear is subject to racially inflected metaphysical assumptions. Though the narra-
tor of course does not adhere to these, avowedly, he lives in a world where acousmatic
voices are routinely ascribed racial meanings, whether or not their bearers like it. What
did he do to be so black and blue? He has found that being heard does not compensate
him for the trauma of not being seen.
Notes
1. Ralph Ellison, ‘Radio, undated’, Library of Congress, Ralph Ellison Papers, Part I: Family
Papers, 1890–1996, Box I: 21. The manuscript cited here has 25 pages. Further parentheti-
cal references in the text.
2. Scholarship on Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield includes Sara Lampert, ‘Black Swan/White
Raven: The Racial Politics of Elizabeth Greenfield’s American Concert Career, 1851–1855’,
American Nineteenth-Century History 17, no. 1 (2016): 75–102; and Julia J. Chybowski,
‘Blackface Minstrelsy and the Reception of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield’, Journal of the
Society for American Music 15, no. 3 (2021): 305–20.
3. This possibility is the focus of Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s analysis of Taylor (and her public
reception) in The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York:
New York University Press, 2016), chapter 2.

164 sam halliday
4. Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, An American Slave,
Written by Himself (Boston: The Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), chapter 2.
5. For the first claim, see, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Sorrow Songs’, in The Souls
of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 250–64; for the second, see, for example,
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), ‘The Jazz Avant-Garde’ (1961), in Black Music (New York:
Da Capo Press, 1998), 69–80 (especially 77).
6. See, for example, Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Indus-
try, 1890–1919 (Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
7. See, for example, David Suisman, ‘Co-Works in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan
Records and the Political Economy of African American Music’, The Journal of American
History 90, no. 4 (2004): 1295–324.
8. Pierre Schaeffer, ‘Acousmatics’, trans. Daniel W. Smith, in Audio Culture: Readings in
Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2006),
76–81 (77).
9. Michel Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, trans. John Dack and Christine North (1983),
11, https://monoskop.org/images/0/01/Chion_Michel_Guide_To_Sound_Objects_Pierre_
Schaeffer_and_Musical_Research.pdf.
10. Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford
11. Ibid., 9.
12. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 184.
13. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove
Press, [1952] 1967), chapter 5.
14. See, for example, F. James Davis, Who is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park:
Pennsylvania University Press, 1991), 33–4.
15. Douglass, Narrative, chapter 1.
16. See Mark M. Smith, How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Smith dislikes the term ‘crisis’, and insists that
visibility did not wane but rather gained support from non-visual senses during the nine-
teenth century.
17. Charles W. Chesnutt, ‘What is a White Man?’ (1889), reprinted in Interracialism: Black-
White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, ed. Werner Sollors
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 37–41.
18. Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars (London: The X Press, [1900] 2012),
68.
19. James Weldon Johnson, ‘Preface’, in The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1922), vii–xlviii (xxxix).
20. Ronell, Telephone Book, 401–2.
21. George S. Schuyler, Black No More (New York: Macmillan, [1931] 1971), 31.
22. Richard Wright, Native Son, with an Introduction by Arnold Rampersad (New York:
HarperPerennial, [1940; restored 1991] 1993), 17–19, emphasis in original.
23. See, for example, Tobias Wilke, Sound Writing: Experimental Modernism and the Poetics
of Articulation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 32–44.
24. See, for example, Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: Language, Deafness and the Senses – A
Philosophical History (London: HarperCollins, 1999).
25. Reprinted in Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (London: Studio
Vista, 1970), 14.
26. Leonard Bernstein, ‘The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music’ (1939),
reprinted as ‘Harvard Bachelor’s Thesis’, in Findings (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1982), 37–99 (53).

27. Ibid.; emphasis in original.

28. Carl E. Seashore, ‘Introduction’ to Milton Metfessel, Phonophotography in Folk Music:
American Negro Songs in New Notation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1928), 6. Further parenthetical references in the text.
29. Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: Univer-
sity Press of Mississippi, 1999).
30. Metfessel himself is well aware of this, and includes conventional photographs in his book
alongside transcriptions of phonophotography. These photographs show singers’ faces in
the act of singing. As Metfessel comments, ‘it is the experience of simultaneously hearing
and seeing exactly how the Negro sings which will give a more complete analytic compre-
hension’ than any possible by sound or vision solely (26–7).
31. Ralph Ellison, ‘Richard Wright’s Blues’ (1945), in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison,
ed. with an Introduction by John F. Callahan; Preface by Saul Bellow (New York: Modern
Library, 1995), 128–44 (139).
32. David Copenhafer, ‘Invisible Music (Ellison)’, Qui Parle 14, no. 2 (2004): 177–204 (177).
33. Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, NC:
34. Nicole Brittingham Furlonge, ‘“To Hear the Silence of Sound”: Making Sense of Listen-
ing in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man’, Interference Journal: Issue 1. An Ear Alone is Not
a Being: Embodied Mediations in Audio Culture (2011), http://www.interferencejournal.
org/to-hear-the-silence-of-sound/ (accessed 2 July 2022).
35. Herman Beavers, ‘The Noisy Lostness: Oppositionality and Acousmatic Subjectivity in
Invisible Man’, in The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century, ed. Marc
C. Connor and Lucas E. Morel (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 75–98.
36. Sydney Boyd, ‘The Color of Sound: Hearing Timbre in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man’, Ari-
zona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 74, no. 3 (2018):
47–64.
37. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1952] 1965), 95, emphasis
removed. Further parenthetical references in the text.
38. Henry James, The Bostonians, ed. with an Introduction by Charles R. Anderson (Harmond-
sworth: Penguin, [1886] 1986), 81, 348. Further parenthetical references in the text.
Select Bibliography
Beavers, Herman, ‘The Noisy Lostness: Oppositionality and Acousmatic Subjectivity in Invis-
ible Man’, in The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century, ed. Marc C.
Connor and Lucas E. Morel (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 75–98.
Bernstein, Leonard, ‘The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music’ (1939), reprinted
as ‘Harvard Bachelor’s Thesis’, in Findings (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 37–99.
Boyd, Sydney, ‘The Color of Sound: Hearing Timbre in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man’, Arizona
Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 74, no. 3 (2018): 47–64.
Brittingham Furlonge, Nicole, ‘“To Hear the Silence of Sound”: Making Sense of Listening in
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man’, Interference Journal: Issue 1. An Ear Alone is Not a Being:
Embodied Mediations in Audio Culture (2011), http://www.interferencejournal.org/to-hear-
the-silence-of-sound/ (accessed 2 July 2022).
Brooks, Tim, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Urbana;
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
Chion, Michel, Guide to Sound Objects, trans. John Dack and Christine North (1983), https://
monoskop.org/images/0/01/Chion_Michel_Guide_To_Sound_Objects_Pierre_Schaeffer_
and_Musical_Research.pdf.
Copenhafer, David, ‘Invisible Music (Ellison)’, Qui Parle 14, no. 2 (2004): 177–204.

166 sam halliday
James, Henry, The Bostonians, ed. with an Introduction by Charles R. Anderson (Harmond-
sworth: Penguin, [1886] 1986).
Kane, Brian, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford
Metfessel, Milton, Phonophotography in Folk Music: American Negro Songs in New Notation,
with an Introduction by Carl E. Seashore (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1928).
Ronell, Avital, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 1989).
Schuyler, George S., Black No More (New York: Macmillan, [1931] 1971).
Suisman, David, ‘Co-Works in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan Records and the Political
Economy of African American Music’, The Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (2004):
1295–324.
Wright, Richard, Native Son, with an Introduction by Arnold Rampersad (New York: Harper-
Perennial, [1940; restored 1991] 1993).

11
The Acousmatics of Prison Writing

Julian Murphet
P risons have an uncomfortable place in the history of the science of sound.

Theories of resonance and acoustic surveillance were galvanised by architectural
experiments with incarceration. ‘The “ear” of Denys, the tyrant of Syracuse [fourth
century bce], famous for its acoustic properties, was a device that allowed him to hear
from outside what his prisoners were saying inside. Its configuration was similar to
an ear canal.’1 Leibniz’s plans for a prison-like ‘panacousticon’, which he called the
‘palace of marvels’, are telling:
These buildings will be constructed in such a way that the master of the house will
be able to hear and see everything that is said and done without himself being per-
ceived, by means of mirrors and pipes, which will be a most important thing for the
State, and a kind of political confessional.2
And we should not forget the morbid fact that Antoine Ferrein erected his new science of
the voice (specifically his discovery of the function of the cordes vocales) on experiments
done with the unclaimed cadavers of dead prisoners (and dogs) in mid-eighteenth-century
Paris.3 For our purposes, however, the critical fact about prison, from the point of view
of the prisoner, is that it is an architectural topos where the faculty of sight – typically
so dominant in daily life – is reduced to an absolute minimum even for sighted people,
because its domain is so starved of novel sensory inputs, while the auditory senses are
heightened to a new intensity of perceptiveness. And, given this inverse ratio between
sound and vision, the most peculiar thing about prison sound is that its source is most
often invisible – that is to say, in Michel Chion’s influential term, that prison sound is dis-
proportionately acousmatic.4 It is a fact made palpable in the convention of prison-genre
cinema which features the ‘disembodied male voice-over’ as a ‘pure distillate of the law’,
separated from any body, floating freely as a meta-diegetic promise of ‘justice’.5 But what
matters most in this context is the fact that, for centuries, writers who have also been
prisoners have seized hold of the acousmatic property of prison sound and turned it into
testimonials of terror, torture, resilience, and resistance, as well as rare utopian promises.
The relationship between imprisonment and the experience of sound has shifted
dramatically over time and space, and writers have left behind a detailed record of
these transformations that has not yet adequately been noted, let alone analysed and
interpreted. Of medieval prisons with their walls operating as ‘breathing membranes,
not hermetic seals’, and their creation of, not ‘a world of men and women, not even
a world of beasts, but a chaos, a pandemonium’, we have the written evidence of
Boethius, Villon, and others.6 To Thomas More, Lady Jane Grey, Thomas Wyatt, and

168 julian murphet
Henry Howard the Earl of Surrey we owe our partial glimpses of the Tudor prison’s
typical soundscape, its fragmentary, ‘architecturally haphazard’, anti-panoptical floor-
plan resulting in extended periods of isolated audiovisual deprivation (punctuated by
howls of pain) geared towards extorting the climactic auditory moment of coerced
confession or recantation.7 We know many of the ominous acoustic qualities of Victo-
rian prisons thanks to Dickens – sounds dissociated, jarring, violent, and threatening –
in Little Dorrit. Verlaine’s poetry, subject to some searching acoulogical readings by
Michel Chion, displays remarkable qualities of sonic synaesthesia to compensate for
the starving of the eye.8 To Henry David Thoreau, that most astute recorder of sounds,
we owe the following realisation of sonic experience in the Concord jail cell where he
paid his dues for civil disobedience:
It seemed to me that I never had heard the town clock strike before, nor the eve-
ning sounds of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside
the grating. It was to see my native village in the light of the middle ages, and our
Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed
before me. They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an
involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of
the adjacent village inn, – a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer
view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions
before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to com-
prehend what its inhabitants were about.9
Thoreau leads us to suppose that, as per Nathaniel Hawthorne’s insistence that in any
new settlement some space must be reserved for a cemetery and some for a prison,10 the
town jail is one of the better situations from which to observe the settlement itself: in
a condition of growing alienation, privatisation, and separation, the prison perversely
brings one’s native place ‘closer’, not via abstract analysis but via the unstoppered ears
and grated windows, through which pass the accumulated sounds and conversations
of a social formation glimpsed in its moving totality – as if it were the Middle Ages.
On the other hand, Harriet Jacobs’s account of her years in an airless attic elud-
ing the clutches of her hated owner assume a much more troubling attentiveness to
‘shudder[ing] at the sound of his footsteps, and trembl[ing] within hearing of his voice’
any time her supersensitive ear detected these sounds.11 Sound in this prison is a daily
torment of unpredictable intrusions:
Suddenly I heard a voice that chilled my blood. The sound was too familiar to me,
it had been too dreadful, for me not to recognize at once my old master. He was in
the house, and I at once concluded that he had come to seize me. I looked round
in terror. There was no way of escape. The voice receded. I supposed the constable
was with him, and they were searching the house.12
In the open-air prison of chattel slavery, every sound made by the slaveowner is a por-
tent of structural violence, an all-too familiar reminder of the pervasive constraints on
liberty set by an entire class, its constables, fellow travellers, and scribes in the South.
Jacobs’s narrative is punctuated by this acoustic terrorism, invasive and resounding
across every threshold and private barrier like the law itself.

the acousmatics of prison writing 169
One of the most significant developments in the history of the prison was taking
place in the USA during Thoreau’s and Jacobs’s lifetimes, namely the establishment
in Auburn, New York, of a new system of incarceration based on solitary confine-
ment and an emphasis on self-improving spiritual discipline. This is one of the few
aspects of prison life that has regularly attracted the attention of sound scholars,
not only because Michel Foucault treated it at great length in his Discipline and
Punish, but because sound itself was a crucial aspect of the Auburn system; specifi-
cally its reduction to a theoretical zero. If ‘Bentham considered a prisoner’s ability
to make “noise” as the sole weakness of his system: resistance as sonic externaliza-
tion rather than visual internalization’, then Auburn would perfect the panoptical
hypothesis.13 As Brandon LaBelle points out, ‘Auburn instituted its “silent system”
in 1821 whereby silence was to be maintained at all times: there was to be absolutely
no talking among prisoners.’14 The Board of Inspectors of Auburn penitentiary put
it as follows:
Let the most obdurate and guilty felons be immured in solitary cells and dun-
geons; let them have pure air, wholesome food, comfortable clothing, and medi-
cal aid when necessary; cut them off from all intercourse with men; let not the
voice or face of a friend ever cheer them; let them walk their gloomy abodes, and
commune with their corrupt hearts and guilty consciences in silence, and brood
over the horrors of their solitude and the enormity of their crimes, without hope
of executive pardon.15
Guards would patrol the quiet corridors in stockinged feet, able to discern even the
slightest murmur or tapping, and intervene immediately to prevent any intercourse
among inmates. The prevailing idea was to turn attention inwards by imposing a
monastic severity of sensory deprivation on those deemed guilty by the state. Rates of
insanity were unsurprisingly high. One inmate released from an Auburn-style prison
in 1905 recorded her initial reactions to being back in a world of spoken interests
and uncontrolled sounds. Florence Maybrick’s ‘My Year of Freedom’, published in
the New-York Tribune Sunday Magazine, ‘offered a moving account of the difficult
process of adjusting from a life in solitary confinement to “the volume and sound
and the perpetual movement” of “normal life,” which had left the former prisoner
“fairly dazed and stunned” at first’.16 Urban soundscapes, interdicted for years of soli-
tary confinement, strike the returning prisoner as a debilitating pandemonium. The
‘punitive-penitent quietudes imposed on prisoners under the Silent System’ amounted,
indeed, to torture.17
Consider Alexander Berkman’s description of his first night in Pennsylvania’s Western
Penitentiary, at the end of the nineteenth century:
Gradually the clamor ceases, the sounds die out. I hear the creaking of rusty hinges,
there is the click of a lock, and all is hushed and dark.
The silence grows gloomy, oppressive. It fills me with mysterious awe. It lives.
It pulsates with slow, measured breathing, as of some monster. It rises and falls;
approaches, recedes. It is Misery asleep. Now it presses heavily against my door.
I hear its quickened breathing.18

170 julian murphet
Under Auburn conditions, the world becomes an ear, as the eye progressively loses its
functions. We note how the propinquity between prison and social life, so precious to
Thoreau, has been negated by the Silent System. Acoustic reports of life outside only
deepen the alienations of obligatory silence:
Life is so remote, so appallingly far away – it has abandoned me in this desert of

silence. The distant puffing of fire engines, the shrieking of river sirens, accentuate
my loneliness. Yet it feels so near, this monster Life, huge, palpitating with vitality,
intent upon its wonted course. (66)
Inside the penitentiary, Berkman repeatedly remarks the uncanny experience of sink-
ing into a well of enforced silence: ‘The clatter and noises have ceased; the steps have
died away. All is still in the dark hall. Only occasional shadows flit by, silent, ghost-
like’; ‘Within the House of Death is felt the chilling breath, and all is quiet and silent
in the iron cages’ (76, 139). On rare occasions, some stray sound breaks through the
blanket of noiselessness only to exacerbate the agony of it:
Through the bars, I gaze upon the Ohio. The full moon hangs above the river, bath-
ing the waters in mellow light. The strains of a sweet lullaby wander through the
woods, and the banks are merry with laughter. A girlish cadence rings like a silvery
bell, and voices call in the distance. Life is joyous and near, terribly, tantalizingly
near, – but all is silent and dead around me.
For days the feminine voice keeps ringing in my ears. It sounded so youthful
and buoyant, so fondly alluring. A beautiful girl, no doubt. What joy to feast my
eyes on her! I have not beheld a woman for many months: I long to hear the soft
accents, feel the tender touch. My mind persistently reverts to the voice on the
river, the sweet strains in the woods; and fancy wreathes sad-toned fugues upon the
merry carol, paints vision and image [. . .] (158)
Here Thoreau’s social ear is turned around on itself; the outer sign becomes an inner
torment. Prison’s sexual segregation saturates the girl’s voice with a turbid and hal-
lucinatory desire converting sound to picture, tone to touch, cadence to fugue. But it
is in the ‘maddening quiet and darkness’ of the dungeon, the solitary cells, ‘bereft of
all consciousness of time’, that the mind truly wavers on the brink, ‘yearning for the
sound of a human voice’:
Utterly forsaken! Cast into the stony bowels of the underground, the world of man
receding, leaving no trace behind. [. . .] Eagerly I strain my ear – only the ceaseless,
fearful gnawing [of the rats]. I clutch the bars in desperation – a hollow echo mocks
the clanking iron. My hands tear violently at the door – ‘Ho, there! Any one here?’
All is silent. (167–8)
The damage done by this deprivation of any soulful sound is radical, and leaves behind
a trail of human wreckage – ghosts of the sonic dead. ‘Like ghastly nightmares, the
shadows pass before me. There is “Silent Nick,” restlessly pacing his cage, never ceas-
ing, his lips sealed in brutish muteness. For three years he has not left the cell, nor
uttered a word’ (210–11). And just as it was for Maybrick, so it is for Berkman upon

release from fourteen years of this silent treatment: ‘I feel dazed. The short ride to
Pittsburgh is over before I can collect my thoughts. The din and noise rend my ears;
the rushing cars, the clanging bells, bewilder me. I am afraid to cross the street; the
flying monsters pursue me on every side. [. . .] The turmoil, the ceaseless movement,
disconcerts me’; ‘this seething life, the turmoil and the noises of the city, agonize me’
(390, 397). Unaccustomed to even the whisper of a name, the ear cannot withstand the
maelstrom of modernity, and the subject descends into panic, seizure, flight.
It is only in the secret system of communication devised by the inmates to tear the
pall of silence that Berkman’s narrative discovers some fragile evidence of human soci-
ality in sound. This is the prison ‘telephone’, improvised through the empty pipes that
sustain the plumbing of the cell toilets, either in Morse code or, more precious still,
in conducted voices. Berkman’s scene of discovery resounds to generic, spy-thriller
overtones:
Only an occasional knocking, as on metal, disturbs the stillness. I listen intently.

Nearer and more audible seem the sounds, hesitating and apparently intentional. I
am involuntarily reminded of the methods of communication practiced by Russian
politicals, and I strive to detect some meaning in the tapping. It grows clearer as I
approach the back wall of the cell, and instantly I am aware of a faint murmur in
the privy. Is it fancy, or did I hear my name?
‘Halloa!’ I call into the pipe.
The knocking ceases abruptly. I hear a suppressed, hollow voice: ‘That you,
Aleck?’
‘Yes. Who is it?’
‘Never min’. You must be deaf not to hear me callin’ you all this time. Take that
cott’n out o’ your ears.’
‘I didn’t know you could talk this way.’
‘You didn’t? Well, you know now. Them’s empty pipes, no standin’ water, see?
Fine t’ talk. Oh, dammit to—’
The words are lost in the gurgle of rushing water. Presently the flow subsides,
and the knocking is resumed. I bend over the privy. (139)
Interrupted only by an occasional flush, this system is a standing ‘party line’ con-
sisting of the same cell numbers on different floors – 6K, 6F, 6H, and so on – and
achieves an extraordinary amount of communication when combined with tapping
and note-passing across adjacent cells. Auburn’s silent system, ruthlessly enforced, is
internally compromised by a covert ‘hacking’ of the pipes used to convey excrement.
Once caught using it, all prisoners on a vertical pipe are hauled off to the dungeon
(196); and then, before the end of the nineteenth century (in late 1898), the telephone
is ended altogether: ‘No more talking through the waste pipes; the new privies have
standing water’ (282).
Berkman’s memoirs are extraordinarily attentive to the physics and psychology
of prison acoustics, and give moving evidence of the resourcefulness of inmates in
exploiting its infrastructure. As one of the first genuinely intellectual inmates of the
Auburn system, Berkman took his opportunity to map it from within, only to find that
it had virtually nothing to do with visible dimensions or textures. Prison time is aural
first and foremost, especially when the rule is silence. And, in its punitive sonic regime,

172 julian murphet
the new American prison seemed specifically designed neither to rehabilitate nor to
exploit incarcerated labour, but to suck from it the resilience and fortitude of its innate
sociality. It is at this point that Berkman’s testimony joins the historic record:
The silent system is a disciplinary silence designed to bear down on the body as the
final mark of the law and to force the criminal into a state of deep solitude while
quite often leading to insanity: the debates and ultimate design of the Eastern Peni-
tentiary in Philadelphia in the 1820s pointed at Auburn’s initial project of solitary
confinement without labor (which results in absolutely no interaction) as an ultimate
failure. This initial design of the Auburn prison was finally retracted in favor of soli-
tary confinement with labor after prisoners underwent extreme psychological distress
caused by the absolute separation and silence in which they were confined.19
Berkman’s Memoirs show how this supposedly more humane regime was just as
destructive as its predecessor, specifically in its haunting figure of ‘Silent Nick’, who
has internalised the discipline of Western Penitentiary as a permanent sealing of the
lips and closing of the mind.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world and reflecting on a six-week spell in
the Alexanderplatz police interrogation cells, Rosa Luxemburg was able to reclaim
the affirmative, utopian dimension of Thoreau’s ‘involuntary auditor’ in her typically
ecstatic mode of prison writing. The following anecdote stands out for the stunning
richness of its auditory imagination:
After 10 p.m. the diabolic concert of the city trains would grow somewhat softer,
and soon after that the following little episode from the life of the streets would
become audible. First you could hear dimly a hoarse male voice, which had some-
thing demanding and admonishing about it, then in reply, a young girl singing,
probably around eight years old; she sang a children’s ditty while hopping and
jumping and at the same time letting go with silvery peals of laughter which had
a bell-like purity of tone. The man’s voice must have been that of a tired, bad-
tempered janitor, who was calling his little daughter home to go to sleep. But the
little rascal didn’t want to obey, let the deep gruff voice of her father go in one ear
and out the other, kept flitting around in the streets like a butterfly, and countered
the oncoming strictures and threats with a merry children’s rhyme. One could viv-
idly picture the short skirt flapping and the thin legs flying in dance steps. In the
hoppity-hop rhythm of a children’s song, in the rippling laughter, there was so
much carefree and triumphant joy of life that the whole dark and musty building
of the central police headquarters was enveloped as though by a silver cloak of mist
and in my foul-smelling prison cell the air was suddenly scented with the perfume
of dark-red roses falling through the air.
This is the last of three exquisite sound-scenes inscribed in the same letter, emphasis-
ing the penumbral darkness of the cell in order to fall back on strong aural sensations
which begin infernally (the ‘hellish’ cacophony or ‘diabolic concert’ of the streetcars)
and then modulate into the repeated late-night scene she is at pains to recreate. In
the person of this nameless young girl, in her nightly defiance of her jailor-father,
Luxemburg has found a fitting figure for her political solidarities with the oppressed
and incarcerated. Their sounds are antiphonic and counterbalancing in timbre and

pitch: below, a thoroughbass male voice, ‘hoarse’, ‘tired, bad-tempered’, ‘deep gruff’,
full of ‘something demanding and admonishing’; and trilling above it, the sprightly
piccolo of ‘a young girl singing [. . .] a merry children’s rhyme’ and ‘letting go with
silvery peals of laughter’, liquid ‘rippling laughter’ with ‘a bell-like purity of tone’. In
this measured counterpoint Luxemburg detects the ‘hoppity-hop’ rhythm of the girl’s
feet, ‘hopping and jumping’, ‘flitting around in the streets like a butterfly’; and this
intuited percussion allows for a sudden transposition from the aural to the visual:
‘One could vividly picture the short skirt flapping and the thin legs flying in dance
steps.’ Prison obliged Luxemburg ‘to see and hear from a distance those things that
for me mean life and happiness’, and in that distance was the opportunity to ‘use [her]
eyes and ears, and thus to create an inner equilibrium and rise above everything petty
and annoying’.21 Her many sound-scenes written during her four-year incarceration
are extraordinary attempts to flesh out her solidarities with the street, abolishing
prison walls through the acute sensitivity of her auditory organ, and to identify with
her beloved birds who sang and ‘rose above’ the grim bars of her cage.
In Ruth First’s 117 Days (1965), written about her incarceration of that duration
in South Africa’s apartheid state, the auditory is once again loaded with ethnographic
information. The better part of her confinement taking place in a working central
police station, her critical acoustic nerve is trained on the violent machinery of law:
My ears knocked with the noise of a police station in operation. The cell was
abandoned in isolation, yet suspended in a cacophony of noise. I lay in the midst
of clamour but could see nothing. Accelerators raced, exhaust pipes roared, car
doors banged, there were clipped shouted commands of authority. And the silence
only of prisoners in intimidated subservience. It was Friday night, police-raid night.
Pickup vans and kwela-kwelas [‘get-in-heres’], policemen in uniform, detectives in
plain clothes were combing locations and hostels, backyards and shebeens to clean
the city of ‘crime,’ and the doors of Marshall Square stood wide open to receive the
haul of the dragnet.22
The deluge of auditory phenomena, overwhelming the narrow range of visual expe-
rience by an order of magnitude, is broken down by the analytic intelligence into
its component tracks; cacophony resolves into an audio-image of Power sweeping
the demographic litter of the streets into detention. It is the ‘suspension’ of the ‘I’/
eye that permits the image to appear, too complex and multi-faceted to allow of any
single form or aspect. ‘I could dispense with my eyes. Ears were more useful in isola-
tion.’23 Prison, depriving the subject of visual stimuli, trains the cortex to parse the
incessant clamour for signs of systemic significance; and equips the ear with politi-
cal radar, capable of new ranges of journalistic perception. Over and against which,
human beings are perceptible principally through the void they make in audible space.
‘And the silence only of prisoners in intimidated subservience.’ Sound is, however, the
medium in which the artificial separation between ‘criminals’ and ‘politicals’ (those
detained without charge on suspicion of communist conspiracy) is transcended, and,
suggestively at least, where the abolition of apartheid itself is rehearsed:
The Ninety-Dayers were locked away from this mainstream of police station life,
but the sounds and some of the sights washed us nevertheless. Washed and were
welcome in a series of endless days when time was determined only by the scratches

174 julian murphet
on the wall and the visits of Security Branch interrogators. The politicals were in
separate cells, segregated from the other prisoners, but sounds filtered through the
thick walls, especially at night.24
Community may be negated by the state’s enforcement of segregation, and its prison
apparatus of division and distinction (white people apart from Black people, politicals
from criminals, men from women), but ‘sounds filter through’ the walls to create, if
not the actuality, then at least the promissory note of a community to come.
Back in the USA, the Silent System having by this point fallen into disuse, the emer-
gent norm was one of overwhelming noise, which imprisoned writers consistently
noted as an infringement on their privacy and sanity. In George Jackson’s prison letters,
for instance, we detect a return to a much older paradigm of the maddening hubbub,
conducted through the resonant metals of modern incarceration:
It destroys the logical processes of the mind, a man’s thoughts become completely
disorganized. The noise, madness streaming from every throat, frustrated sounds
from the bars, metallic sounds from the walls, the steel trays, the iron beds bolted
to the wall, the hollow sounds from a cast-iron sink or toilet.25
The inmate either uses such noise as a mode of resistance to thought – ‘they make these
loud noises so they won’t hear what their mind is trying to tell them’ – or he creates
a noise-buffering bubble of critical attentiveness: ‘I don’t let the noise bother me even
in the evenings when it rises to maddening intensity, because I try to understand my
surroundings.’26 But the pandemonium seems to serve, at least passively, as a mode of
low-level torture, accentuated by the omnipresent, sharp acoustic reflection of metallic
clanging and harsh human braying off bare brick walls.
Angela Davis notes the same soundscape in her Autobiography:
When the iron door was opened, sounds peculiar to jails and prisons poured into
my ears – the screams, the metallic clanging, officers’ keys clinking. [. . .] As the
women slid their heavy iron gates closed, loud metallic crashing noises thundered
from all four corridors of the seventh floor. I could hear the same sounds at a dis-
tance echoing from throughout the jail.27
The institutional, regimented nature of these ferocious, clashing sounds – repeated

daily, identical, synchronised, definitive – reinforces the segregation of prison life from
the outer world and further degrades the psychological fibres of the inmates. As Davis
remarks, ‘sometimes the women would ask to be moved to the “mental” cellblock
[reserved for women with psychological problems] because they couldn’t tolerate the
noise in the main population’.28
Meanwhile, in Her Majesty’s Prison Maze in Belfast, the radical Republican hun-
ger striker Bobby Sands, MP, gives moving written testimony to the power of the
human voice in a situation of rigorous spatial separation in a high-security prison
wing. If prison in occupied territories exists largely to frustrate the intercourse and
throttle the morale of the colonised, the politics of sound inevitably assumes the
function of extramural political action. Few have transcribed this substitution as
fully as Sands:

The singing continued. It broke the monotony and the tension-filled air and for a
few minutes helped to take your mind off your surroundings and situation. [. . .]
Then one of the lads began to sing Ashtown Road. The wing went deadly silent and
I sat, slightly shivering, listening to every note and word of the beautiful rendering
as the singer sang on in his very sad voice. I felt my morale rising and once again I
was glad I was resisting. Better suffering while resisting than being tortured with-
out fighting back at all. The singer finished and the lads nearly tore the place down.
The Master of Ceremonies called on the same singer to sing the last song and away
he went again with The Wind that Shakes the Barley.29
Himself a noted songwriter during his four terrible years of imprisonment at Her
Majesty’s pleasure, Sands attests to the power of the human voice not only to traverse
and resonate across carceral steel and concrete, to steal under doors and through bars,
but to resituate the imagination and replenish the courage and resilience of a collective
resistance tending towards individual deaths. Gaelic classes, for instance, are held ‘at
the cell door listening to your mate, the teacher, shouting the lesson for the day at the
top of his voice from the other end of the wing when the screws happened to be away
for their dinner or tea’ (31). The wing-wide system of shouts, taps, songs, and lectures
among prisoners harnesses the conductive properties of modern prison architecture
(which otherwise work to torture the auditory nerves) to promote solidarity between
the isolated, and boost morale amongst the men separated from their struggle.
Sands also records the awful, heightened significance of sound and silence, both for
the veteran of the cells (‘The sound of screaming men tears at my heart and attacks
my mind and I wish to God it were I again, for the pitiful cries of my comrades being
tortured are harder to bear than the physical hurt that besets my brutalised body’, 202)
and the new inmate, in these simple ballad lines:
From wall to door he walked the floor

Listening for a sound.
Each sudden creak or sneaky squeak
Sent him swishing round,
His bulging eyes so terrorised
Near fell upon the ground.
That eight foot space ’twas freedom’s grace.

To exercise the bones,
With every step the body wept
In awful moans and groans,
And sounded like the gnawny grind
Of some one rubbing stones. (144)
In prison, it is precisely the unpredictable swings between extremities of noise and of

silence, babel and vacuum, that supercharges the sonic dimension with political and
allegorical significance: ‘A sinister silence reigned: not so much as a sigh from the
wind stirred, not one bird sang, but there was nothing in Belsen to sing about either,
I thought, going through the gate to hell’; ‘I can hear heavy booming noises echoing
all around me like thunder. Somehow it reminds me of heavy doors closing’ (62, 178).

176 julian murphet
Carceral sound, or its absence, is always already political and carries the phenomeno-
logical spores of the darkest episodes of twentieth-century history into the chambers of
the ear. But, as it was for Luxemburg and Thoreau, so prison is for Sands also a space
in which the auditory becomes utopian, to the extent it is visited by species-outsiders,
particularly birds:
Many a day in the eternal hours, I stand watching the birds and listening to the
lark, trying to discover its whereabouts in that stagnant blue ocean above me that
represents the outside world, and I long for the liberty of the lark. I suppose, to
many, a few birds, the sound of a lark, a blue sky, or full moon, are there, but stay
unnoticed most of the time. But, to me, they mean existence, peacefulness, comfort,
entertainment and something to view, to help forget the tortures, brutalities, indig-
nities and evils that surround and attack my everyday life. (161)
As his body slowly wastes away, starving to death under a self-imposed regime of nil
by mouth, it is the sounds of avian life that increasingly occupy Sands’s pen, turned
towards the songs of the curlew and the lark as disembodied carriers of everything he
is leaving behind, everything he has given his life to redeem:
The birds were singing today. One of the boys threw bread out of the window. At
least somebody’s eating! I was lonely for a while this evening, listening to the crows
caw as they returned home. Should I hear the beautiful lark, she would rent my
heart. Now, as I write, the odd curlew mournfully calls as they fly over. I like the
birds. Well, I must leave off, for if I write more about the birds my tears will fall and
my thoughts return to the days of my youth. They were the days, and gone forever
now. But I enjoyed them. They are in my heart – good night, now. (242)
In prison, with its imposed sensory deprivation and torturous sonic regime, the pen-
etrative qualities of extramural birdsong (or the songs of passing girls) give rise to
affective intensities, perfect crystals of memory-sound that are vestiges of lost time and
promissory notes of alternative futures. In situation after situation, we have seen how
writers take these acousmatic signatures of life beyond the prison walls as omens of
altered circumstances. Precisely to the extent that their sources cannot be seen, cannot
be allocated a place within the gridwork of the penitentiary, they exceed the carceral
cognitive map imposed by the authorities and prise open heterotopic acoustic pockets
alive with political energy and phenomenological freedom. It is the task of the writer in
these situations to record as verbal friezes these ephemeral visitations of the auditory
‘outside’, and so defy the intentional deprivation with evidentiary proof of its undoing.
One of the most interesting test cases for this acousmatic reading of prison litera-
ture is the memoirs of Nawal El Saadawi, held for a period of several weeks in Qanatir
Women’s Prison at the behest of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Another intellectual
detained for her beliefs and writings, Nawal anticipates the same kind of individual
segregation as that imposed upon Ruth First, Bobby Sands, and Alexander Berkman;
but she is held in a communal cell amongst a large group of other political detainees,
just metres away from another large cell holding a motley crew of common prisoners:
sex workers, drunks, and petty thieves. Her romantic hopes of writing like Luxemburg
while detained in genteel isolation rapidly accede to a sense of acoustic damnation:

‘I want to be transferred to a solitary cell. I don’t want to stay in this cell any lon-
ger.’ But the prison administration rejected my request. I came to understand that
in prison, torture occurs not through solitude and silence but in a far more forceful
way through uproar and noise. The solitary cell continued to float before me like a
dream unlikely to be realised.30
As with George Jackson and Angela Davis, the Egyptian political prisoner must first
come to terms with the routine acoustic torture of ‘uproar and noise’:
Steel clanging against steel, the sound colliding with the walls and the echo rever-
berating over the inner walls, as if hundreds of steel doors are being closed and
locked. A whistle as sharp as utter silence, and voices resounding like a whistle, like
a waft of trapped smoke escaping through a narrow aperture. (27)
This regimented cacophony besieges the fortress of even Nawal’s iron discipline and
threatens to topple the seat of her reason – the very rationalist secularism for which
she is being detained:
I raised the handkerchief from my face and stuffed it into my ear. Continuous ring-
ing and sharp screaming, whose source I could not place. Weird voices and a com-
motion I’d not heard before. From where does all of this come? Do these sounds
pass through the four walls, the ceiling, the earth’s depths, to arrive here? Human
and non-human voices alike. A sharp scream like that of a newborn child; wailing
and moaning akin to the howling of wolves, quarrelling and cursing and a stifled
sobbing. Raspy coughing, hands slapping and the sound of kicking. The whinny-
ing murmur of water, what sounded like pleas of supplication, and chanting like
the ritual of prayer. Frogs croaking, cats meowing and dogs barking, and over all a
sharp whistling, the cockroaches’ calls. (31–2)
There are few writers as adept at registering the full pandemonium of a communal
jail cell, the true Miltonic limbo of ‘a universal hubbub wild / Of stunning sounds and
voices all confused’.31 But something happens during Nawal’s enforced cohabitation
with other women prisoners; gradually she learns to embrace their noise and draw
from it, so that by the end of the memoir she herself has become an agent of noise
conducted concertedly against the infernal regime of sonic torture. By binding ties of
solidarity and focusing the din of the incarcerated, Nawal taps into the innate political
force of sound itself – here metaphorised as a ‘demon’ latent in women’s bodies:
We began knocking at the bars on the door, calling out all together: ‘We will destroy
this prison! We will not die without noise!’ The steel door rocked under the heavy
blows. The prison vibrated with the sound which had become like the roar of a
waterfall. From the inner selves of human beings threatened with death emerged
the tyrannical demon – the latent strength long imprisoned, the stored-up energy
suppressed since the remote past, since childhood, since birth, or rather from before
birth, ever since those human beings were foetuses in their mothers’ wombs. (184)
This vital ‘choric’ energy of women prisoners, which Nawal went on to weld into a
political organisation – the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association – as a direct response

178 julian murphet
to this experience of orchestrated noise in Sadat’s cells, is a prodigious realisation of

the carceral politics of sound being turned against the explicit design of the prison
institution. The sinister resonance of prison architecture, its bare walls, metallic con-
ductors, concrete flooring, and bars for doors, is consciously engineered to create max-
imal sonic distress in inmates by bouncing brutal metallic noises off stark reflective
surfaces into the always open organs of audition. But for these very reasons, a politi-
cal manifestation in jail will generally take acoustic shape around the same torturous
properties, reflecting them back at the jailors.
As Robin James has argued, incarceration in the neoliberal order happens pre-
ponderantly to what Lester Spence calls ‘exceptional populations’ – Black and Brown
people who are permanently at biopolitical risk from financial and legal harm because
they are largely surplus to the requirements of capital at any given moment.32 These
‘exceptional populations are subjected to various techniques – like surveillance, quar-
antine (e.g., in the prison–industrial complex), debt – that produce the material, social
immobility these techniques claim to manage’.33 Immobilised, held in thrall, these
populations are also subject to a sonic regime that eats away at their fibres of solidar-
ity and connectedness by reflecting their pain back at them in an amplified form; in
prison, everyone can hear you scream, and you will hear everybody’s scream, forever.
The writings of political prisoners over the twentieth century teach us, in exquisite
detail, about this harrowing instrumentation of sonic torture as a routine element of
daily life under conditions of detention and immobility. Yet they also show us that
the very conditions that engender psychic harm are the same that enable resistance;
Berkman shows us that ‘prisoners subject to acoustic surveillance could just as well
spy on the conversations of their guards’;34 and Sands and Nawal teach the even larger
lesson that, seized by a counter-current, the very mechanics of sonic torture can be
transformed into liberatory conductors of insurgency. As François Bonnet observes:
Sound is not a prisoner of the archipelagic structure, then; it is not doomed to be

a vector of order and authority for this structure. It can take many paths, many
channels, can elaborate many strategies, oblique strategies. And through them, it
can reclaim its rights.35
However, there are carceral spaces where writers have not yet penetrated, where
the harm done to hearing is so extreme as to vitiate all resistance. Recent work on
the ‘acoustemology’ of detention has focused on the extreme use of sonic torture or
‘acoustic violence’ in detainment facilities in the theatre of war with its archipelago of
camps and confession cells.36 Suzanne Cusick has shown how the ‘acoustical monop-
oly’ enjoyed by US Army interrogators over prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay and
elsewhere, as they bombard their victims with heavy metal music at ear-damaging,
bone-rumbling decibel levels, ‘produces the presence of a ubiquitous but invisible
power with which there can be no negotiating a mutuality of acoustical agency’.37
In ‘the extremes of acoustical, physical and psychic suffering at the heart of the bio-
political, carceral regime of US military interrogation camps’, writes Georgina Born,
‘the camp oversees domination through sonically enforced individuation: an “ulti-
mate violence that batters prisoners’ bodies, [shattering] [. . .] the capacity to control
the acoustical relationality that is the foundation of subjectivity”’.38 As Cusick puts
it forebodingly:

Whatever prison authorities may consciously believe, their practices produce

prison populations that amount to a conglomeration of hearing, speaking people
who do not hear, vocalise and co-create with each other an acoustical environment
characterised by relationships of reciprocity between self and other, individual and
collective, private and public. Isolated without ever being alone, palpably in the
presence of an invisible presence with the power to reduce them to ‘all ears’ [. . .]
or to vibrating objects [. . .], denied both the privacy-based right to silence and the
public right to free speech, these prisoners have experienced a preview of one very
dark symbolic order [. . .].39
Ramona Nadaff, writing about similar abuses of sound in US Army camps in the Middle
East, proposes that in conditions of ‘post-acoustic trauma’ induced by the ‘sonic imperial-
ism’ of extremely loud music, ‘the brain changes and works differently in its incorporation
and response to sound’.40 In the ‘“panacousticon” where unjustifiable revenge and retribu-
tive justice reign rhythmically, where music as a form of surveillance produces, to revise
Foucault’s words, “an anxious awareness of hearing” and of being heard’, prisoners suffer
profound sleep deprivation and enter ‘a new type of geographical space and time in which
detainees, the waking dead, are immobilized’.41
The Beirut-based artist/activist Lawrence Abu Hamdan creates works that reconstruct
the psycho-physical conditions under which prisoners were held at Syria’s Saydnaya
prison, principally by drawing on recorded testimonials. The aesthetic reworking of this
testimonial evidence is the closest we have to a literary rendition of the ‘panacousticon’,
and it takes the difficult form of what Abu Hamdan calls ‘trauma-architecture’ or ‘pain-
projections’, which the auditor enters in a more or less willing compact with the prisoner’s
sonic experience. As he puts it,
my task was to design dedicated earwitness interviews to uncover the witnesses’

acoustic memories, to reconstruct the acoustic space of the prison, and through this
process to understand what is happening within its walls and build evidence about
the conditions under which detainees are being held.42
Like Anna Deavere Smith and Svetlana Alexievich before him, Abu Hamdan is acting
as acoustic scribe for those without a voice, whose hearing has been irreparably dam-
aged by a carceral regime that works to erase subjectivity through sonic decimation.
In the centuries-long relationship between prison, writing, and sound, this is surely the
darkest epoch yet.
Notes
1. Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue, eds, Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday
Sounds, trans. Andrea McCartney and Henry Torgue (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2006), 104.
2. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 7.
3. See Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York:
Zone, 2010), 176.
4. See Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia

180 julian murphet
5. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 163.
6. G. Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2008), 5; Aldous Huxley, Themes and Variations (New York: Harper, 1950), 205.
7. See Ruth Ahnert, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Kristen Deiter, The Tower of London in English
Renaissance Drama: Icon of Opposition (London: Routledge, 2008), 27–53.
8. Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, trans. James A. Steintrager (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2016), 102–3.
9. Henry David Thoreau, ‘Civil Disobedience, 1849’, in The Portable Thoreau, ed. with an
Introduction by Jeremy Cramer (London: Penguin, 2012), 73–98 (91).
10. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, in Collected Novels, ed. Millicent Bell (New
York: Library of America, 1983), 115–346 (158).
11. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Lydia Childs (Boston, 1861), 86.
12. Ibid., 159. See the discussion in Jason Haslam, Fitting Sentences: Identity in Nineteenth- and
Twentieth-Century Prison Narratives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 70–81.
13. James A. Steintrager and Rey Chow, eds, Sound Objects (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2018), 6.
14. Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (London:
Continuum, 2010), 68.
15. Board of Inspectors of Auburn penitentiary, quoted in Orlando F. Lewis, The Development
of American Prisons and Prison Customs 1776 to 1845 (Albany: Prison Association of
New York, 1922), 81.
16. Anne Schwan, Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-
Century England (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2014), 145.
17. Hillel Schwartz, ‘Inner and Outer Sancta: Earplugs and Hospitals’, in The Oxford Handbook
of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), 273–97 (274).
18. Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (Stirling: AK Press, 2016), 37. Further
parenthetical references in the text.
19. LaBelle, Acoustic Territories, 71.
20. Rosa Luxemburg, Letter to Hans Diefenbach, 29 June 1917, in The Letters of Rosa
Luxemburg, ed. Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza, trans. George Shriver
(London: Verso, 2013), 423–4.
21. Ibid., 426, 431.
22. Ruth First, 117 Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation under the South
African 90-Day Detention Law (London: Virago, 2010), 9.
23. Ibid., 26.
24. Ibid., 29.
25. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago: Lawrence
Hill, 1995), 21.
26. Ibid., 154, 64.
27. Angela Davis, An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 33, 49.
28. Ibid., 20.
29. Bobby Sands, Writings from Prison (Blackrock: Mercier Press, 1997), 77. Further parenthetical
references in the text.
30. Nawal El Saadawi, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, trans Marilyn Booth (London:
Zed, 2020), 129. Further parenthetical references in the text.
31. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ll. 951–2, in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John
Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern
Library, 2007), 354.

32. See Lester Spence, Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-Hop and Black Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
33. Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 44.
34. François J. Bonnet, The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, trans. Robin McKay
(Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019), 215n279.
35. Ibid., 278.
36. J. Martin Daughtry, ‘Thanatosonics: Ontologies of Acoustic Violence’, Social Text 32,
no. 2 (2014): 25–51.
37. Suzanne G. Cusick, ‘Towards an Acoustemology of Detention in the “Global War on
Terror”’, in Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience,
ed. Georgina Born (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 275–91 (289).
38. Born, Music, Sound and Space, 47–8, quoting Cusick, ‘Towards an Acoustemology of
Detention’, 276.
39. Cusick, ‘Towards an Acoustemology of Detention’, 290–1.
40. Ramona Naddaff, ‘The Animal Whose Ear It Is’, in Unsound: Undead, ed. Steve Goodman,
Toby Heys, and Eleni Ikoniadou (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019), n.p.
41. Ibid.
42. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, ‘The Missing 19dB’, in Unsound: Undead, n.p.
Select Bibliography
Ahnert, Ruth, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
Attali, Jacques, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
Bonnet, François J., The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, trans. Robin McKay
(Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019).
Chion, Michel, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, trans. James A. Steintrager (Durham, NC:
———, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press,
1999).
Cusick, Suzanne G., ‘Towards an Acoustemology of Detention in the “Global War on Terror”’,
in Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, ed. Georgina
Born (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 275–91.
Daughtry, J. Martin, ‘Thanatosonics: Ontologies of Acoustic Violence’, Social Text 32, no. 2
(2014): 25–51.
Goodman, Steve, Toby Heys, and Eleni Ikonaiadou, eds, Unsound: Undead (Falmouth: Urbanomic,
2019).
James, Robin, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
LaBelle, Brandon, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (London: Continuum,
2010).
Pinch, Trevor and Karin Bijsterveld, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford:
Spence, Lester, Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-Hop and Black Politics (Minneapolis:
Steintrager, James A. and Rey Chow, eds, Sound Objects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2018).

12
Aural Anxiety and Rurality in Women’s

Second World War Writing
Imogen Free
W ar necessitates a practice of aural anxiety; listening, for instance, to the siren

that warns of bombing to come, represents a means of anticipatory survival. Con-
sequently, however, this experience also stigmatises the practice of listening, thereby
channelling wider wartime anxiety into the realm of the aural. In her work on aural
biopolitics and the air-raid siren, Beryl Pong refers to a diary entry written by Vivienne
Hall, a British civilian during the Second World War: ‘you just have to listen and
hope for the best’, she writes, ‘that’s all we do, we are just one large frightened ear’.1
The Second World War is often characterised as the first ‘total’ war, in which conflict
stretched ‘beyond the battlefield to encompass a nation’s every political, economic and
cultural domain’.2 In cities that experienced intensive bombardment, such as London
and Liverpool, as well as listening for the shrill air-raid siren that anticipated bombing
to come, civilians experienced ‘the growling, roaring crackle of the incendiary bomb
on a burning building; the high-pitched tinkle of breaking window-glass; the crash of
falling bricks [. . .] the hum of aeroplanes [. . .] the zoom of the low-flying dive-bomb
“plane”’.3 ‘Total war’ brought the sonic experience of conflict to the home front, albeit
in very different forms from the battlefield.
This chapter explores the relationship between anxiety and aurality in the war-
time short stories of Rosamond Lehmann and Jean Rhys. Moving beyond an urban
Blitz-scape, the rural settings of these stories nevertheless present an aural anxiety
that troubles the soundscape of war. Their writing of an aural anxiety, situated in or
expressed by the rural, in turn calls into question wartime constructions of gendered
citizenship and the narrative of conflict. I am particularly interested in three elements
of such sonic expression. First, I analyse the mingling of natural sounds with those of
warfare, exploring a ruralised version of the wartime hyper-aurality discussed in this
introduction. This takes the form of an atmospheric rippling, humming, or buzzing,
from a ‘natural’ source (such as a river or a swarm of bees) that serves to recall, and
resonate with, those of an urban Blitz or even battlefront soundscape. I investigate
how this disrupts conceptions of the aesthetics of war, recentralises women’s ‘wartime
acoustemology’, but also draws attention to wider issues at the heart of conflict: the
ethics of care, nationalism, ideology, and misogyny.4 Second, I investigate the means
by which these texts mix wires with waves, the ‘natural’ with the technological, con-
sidering how anxieties around acousmatic sound feed into the conflicts of identity and
ideology at work in the texts. I do so by analysing these authors’ presentation of a
‘radio imaginary’, which calls into question wartime rhetoric that heightened both the

aural anxiety and rurality in women’s wwii writing 183
significance of rurality and a sense of gendered public identity and duty in the period.5
Third, I consider the sounds of the village community that raise the alarm about the
uncomfortable confluence between gendered citizenship and identity in this period, the
dangerous ways in which the ideal of ‘wartime womanhood’ and good rural citizen-
ship become somewhat synonymous, in a complex system of socially policed behav-
iours and duties. For as James Mansell argues, ‘an individual’s resonance with, or
resistance to, the sound-space of the nation was [. . .] a marker of insider/outside sta-
tus’, as ‘wartime situations heighten the politics of belonging and, in turn, amplify its
sonic underpinnings’.6
Building on Ella Finer’s work on ‘Feminism and Sound’, which reads the figure of
‘Echo’ as an ‘ancient sound artist’, only ever giving back ‘incomplete reproductions of
sound material’, I consider how Lehmann’s and Rhys’s development of an alternative
soundscape of conflict might speak back to the common understanding of women’s
civilian experience.7 I do so by connecting ‘the richness and complexity of sonic dif-
ference’ that Finer identifies, to the gender difference at play in such writing.8 Thus, to
elucidate the aural gender politics at work in these texts, I engage with contemporary
feminist sound studies by Finer, Tara Rodgers and Anne Carson.9 Furthermore, I turn
to these studies in order to foreground the challenge Lehmann’s and Rhys’s work poses
by troubling the soundscape of war and undermining the paradoxical construction of
‘wartime womanhood’, an impacted identity that intersects heavily with ideological
investments in the rural landscape in this period. In reading their wartime work in light
of such studies, I situate this chapter among works by Marion Shaw and Stella Deen
which argue for the feminist potential of the interwar rural novel, though instead of
celebrating its ability to present alternative systems of living, I examine the oppressive
patriarchal systems at work in the ideological, as well as physical, space of the coun-
tryside during the war.10
The Sonic Politics of War on the ‘Home Front’

As a ‘total war’, ‘waged by all against all’, the Second World War was a period in
which the civilian ‘female population were no longer insulated from the brutality of
the battlefield’; aurality was a key medium for registering this experience.11 Pong notes,
for instance, that Virginia Woolf’s ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ resounds with
an anxious aurality, registering the noise of a warplane as ‘the zoom of a hornet which
might at any moment sting you to death’.12 ‘There is a sense’, Pong argues, ‘that one
hears both not enough and too much.’13 Or as Anna Snaith discovers in the work of
Elizabeth Bowen, there is a distinct sense of an ‘auditory wartime regime of hyper-alert
listening’.14 But as these readings imply, listening on the home front is not only bound
up with a sense of anxiety due to impending violence. During the Second World War,
aurality also became a conflicted territory of national responsibility and citizenship.
Both governmental legislation and propaganda encouraged British citizens not to resist
the injunctions of sonic warnings such as sirens – what R. Murray Schafer describes as
‘signals’, foreground sounds that ‘must be listened to’ – while at the same time resisting
their ‘damaging vibrations’.15 Techniques of aural ‘self-management’, listening carefully
but not too intensely, were considered, as Mansell notes, ‘contributions to the national
war effort’.16 Wearing earplugs, for instance, ‘became a patriotic act’ because they were

184 imogen free
necessary in order to ensure ‘a restful night’s sleep’, which would in turn ensure a full
reserve of energy for war work the following day.17 The injunction to citizens to actively
suppress extraneous noise was enforced through legislation such as the 1939 Emer-
gency Powers (Defence) Act, in which the government seized control of ‘every aspect
of the audible environment, giving bells, whistles, and sirens specific wartime meanings
and tightly controlling their use [. . .] [C]reation of noise by anyone other than official
war personnel was designated a criminal offence.’18 Good citizens were able to listen
well, and would sound accordingly, and bad citizens did not. Thus, wartime listening
became, as Pong argues, ‘conditioned by an aural biopolitics’.19 Sonic signs and systems
of noise control became a means of managing ‘human bodies and processes under
regimes of authority over knowledge, power, and subjectivation’.20
This authority was partly managed by the discourse of the ‘People’s War’ in war-
time propaganda, which presented the Second World War as ‘collective suffering and
collective heroism’, and encouraged every citizen to contribute to the war effort by
maintaining their sense of morale.21 A key aspect of this endeavour required citizens to
personally resist the ‘nervous’ impact of noise, with Lord Horder arguing that ‘every
effort to suppress needless noise is a contribution to the resistance of the nerve force of
the individual, and therefore a contribution towards winning the war’.22 To resist the
threat of noise meant reimagining a national soundscape that was free from such anxi-
eties. Indeed, Mansell argues that ‘in contrast to the soundscape of aerial bombard-
ment that often serves to characterise “total war on the home front” more strongly
than any other’, it was ‘rural sounds, and the quietness of the countryside’ that ‘came
to signify the essence of the national homeland’.23 This ‘rural imaginary’ played a sig-
nificant role in what Mansell describes as ‘cultural attempts’ to describe the quotidian
soundscape of the nation during the war.24 At the root of this relationship is a sense in
which, as David Matless contends, ‘the mythic qualities of rural landscape [. . .] have
served to symbolize and refract national identity’.25 By the outbreak of war, argues
Marion Shaw, the idea ‘that somehow the real England was one of village greens,
country churches, haymaking’, an idea which stemmed from interwar loss and anxiety,
had become ‘a powerful motivator of patriotism’.26
As a means of ‘affective mobilisation’, the sonic is particularly adept at embodying
such ideology.27 Yet, as expressive of a particularly modern imagining of the nation,
sonic attempts to call upon the rural often mingle with the contemporary technolo-
gies that enable their transmission. An example of such rural-sonic nationhood can be
found in the rise in popularity of recorded birdsong from the 1930s onwards, accom-
panied by the idea that the sound could ‘counter the noise and pressure of modern
life’ (part of BBC director John Reith’s ‘founding vision for radio’).28 Birdsong played
a crucial role in how Britain defined its soundscape from 1939, for as Michael Guida
notes, it was both a ‘distinct sonic expression of the character of the nation and, at the
same time, an emblem of peace and tranquillity’.29 As Mansell argues, ‘the nation must
be actively imagined’.30 Listening to rural sounds such as birdsong, which were expres-
sive of an idealised peacetime, became a patriotic act because it meant participating
in the sonic idea of the nation: aligning yourself with an aural politics that related to
practices of citizenship that celebrated the ‘land’.
In the 1942 film Listen to Britain, the soundscape of Britain at war mingles ‘the
evening hymn of the lark’ with ‘the roar of spitfires’, as the rustle of a radio tuning in
fades to voices announcing ‘London calling’ among the rattle of transport; the whir-
ring of industry mixes with church bells and clip-clopping hooves.31 The film counters

the idea of the soundscape of the nation at war as only being represented by sounds
of war-related ‘violence’, for as Heather Wiebe argues, its blurring of ‘natural sounds’
with ‘urban and industrial noise’ represents ‘everyday wartime life’.32 It does so, as Sam
Halliday has noted, to present Britain’s civilians living in a ‘more or less normal and (so
the film seeks to persuade us) good-humoured way’, participating in an acoustic form
of ‘People’s War’ propaganda.33 Yet Listen to Britain also significantly represents Jim
Sykes’s expanded definition of the term ‘wartime acoustemology’, described by Pong as
‘a sonic way of knowing and being in the wartime world’, through ‘the more mundane
soundscapes with which wartime sounds are intermingled’.34
For Sykes, this refocus demands we turn ‘to the sonic lifeworlds of women and
children’, in order to bring ‘to the forefront neglected phenomenologies of war’.35 By
broadening the soundscape of war, Listen to Britain also includes sonic experiences
that affect women and children more directly. We hear women factory workers singing
in unison to the radio while handling parts for munitions, a woman playing a piano
in an ambulance station to a group of solemn medical staff, a weary mother clattering
to get tea-time together while listening to the children singing nursery rhymes in the
playground below. These iconic soundscapes invoke a sense of morale and solidarity
through aural affect, and Wiebe suggests that in doing so, these soundscapes form
part of a particular campaign of ‘affective mobilisation’. Wiebe notes that the film was
‘made in 1941 just as women were being required to register for war service’, and this
is why the ‘film actively works to include them in its account of Britain at war, in ways
that perhaps shape its turn to everyday sound’.36 In Listen to Britain, we see the sonic
nation being imagined not only through a mixing of the urban and rural, but through
the lens of gendered responsibility and citizenship too.
In Gender and the Second World War, Corinna Peniston-Bird and Emma Vickers
argue that ‘war is a “clarifying moment” which throws gender into stark relief’ by
revealing ‘what in constructions of gender is negotiable and flexible, and what is not’.37
As Listen to Britain attests, women made immense contributions to war work by
taking up temporary positions in munitions factories, as Air Raid Wardens, drivers,
conductors, and medics. In December 1941, the second National Service Act expanded
conscription to make ‘all unmarried women and all childless widows’ between the ages
of twenty and thirty ‘liable to call-up’, and this was later further expanded to include
married women.38 But as the editors of Behind the Lines argue, wartime propaganda
actively ‘stipulated that women’s new roles were “only for the duration” and framed
the situation as wives and mothers making heroic sacrifices “for the nation in its time
of need”’, but only in this time of need.39 ‘Propaganda’, they note, ‘reminded female
defence workers that they were not themselves – that is, not “natural” – but behaving
temporarily like men.’40 The paradoxical figure of the wartime woman was thus ‘cre-
ated by the symbolic and the pragmatic mobilization of women for the war effort’, by
what Sonya O. Rose identifies as the ‘contradictory’ expectation that women should
remain ‘feminine’, keen mothers and wives, while contributing ‘to the war effort’.41
With recourse to the rural, despite anxieties around the ‘naturalness and social
acceptability’ of women replacing men in agricultural labour, ‘land girls’, volunteers
for the Women’s Land Army, were celebrated. Their value, however, was premised
on two key factors: that they assimilated into rural life, however temporarily; and
that their labouring roles were, crucially, temporary.42 Urban women evacuated to the
country risked being judged ‘feckless’ if they sought leisure in pubs or cinemas, and
were often denigrated for their unwillingness to adapt to rural patterns of living.43

186 imogen free
Despite ‘the myth’ of the ‘People’s War’, the glow of rural citizenship was premised on
the social policing of gendered roles.44 Thus, as I will illuminate in my readings, the gen-
dering experience of wartime is constructed by the same patriarchal ideology implicit in
the contemporary politics of rurality; the dynamics and aesthetics of the two subjects
feed off one another. Sound, being imbued with both particular wartime resonance and
the tools of a feminist theoretical framework – the capacity to not only register but to
remix and recompose narratives of experience – provides a particularly perspicacious
mode of interpreting the complex ideological intersections between ‘wartime woman-
hood’ and rural citizenship, at a time when the politics of aurality was heightened.
‘When the Waters Came’

In contrast to the imagined serenity called up to soothe the minds of the nation, the
English writer Rosamond Lehmann’s collection of short stories The Gipsy’s Baby
(1946) presents a rural climate of anxiety, characterised by an obsessive listening to
an environment that seems to be not only under threat but also curiously threatening.
Kristine Miller writes that these stories ‘describe the setting of [Lehmann’s] own life
in wartime: a peaceful, rural England far removed from both the physical and social
upheaval of the bombing’.45 Yet throughout these stories Lehmann’s rural environment
reverberates with the sounds, however displaced, of war. Lehmann’s resonant prose
challenges Miller’s assumption that this collection represents an autobiographical
rendering of her life in conflict; the ruralised soundscapes of these stories actively prob-
lematise normative depictions of women’s wartime experience and a sense of gendered
citizenship or responsibility bound up with the politics of rurality.
In ‘When the Waters Came’, we find a familiar soundscape made alien – a soft
meadow made uninhabitable by severe frost – natural, of course, yet distinctly unnatu-
ral. Listening to an icy ‘bush of dogwood’, the protagonist, a single mother in rural
England, describes the sound as a ‘musical ring, hollow, like a ghostly Xylophone’.46
This eerie musicality not only disturbs the measures of imposed wartime quiet but also
seems to sound another kind of affective alarm. Lehmann makes clear that this story
is set during the cold winter months of 1939–40, during the ‘Phoney War’, a period of
tense anticipation in which the expected enemy attacks and bombardment did not take
place.47 As the narrator rather ominously notes, ‘nothing very disturbing was likely to
happen for the present’, though ‘one thought, of course, of sailors freezing in unimagi-
nable wastes of water [. . .] of soldiers numb in the black-and-white nights’ (WTWC,
93). Although the narrator refers to distant violence, the war never features directly in
the story; rather, it is registered through an intense listening to the rural soundscape,
mingled with a sense of dreadful anticipation.
In this story, the rural soundscape, supposed to induce a sense of calm and national
stability, becomes a repository for anxiety, and a means of expressing the repressed
experience of violence by women on the home front. When the frozen environment
finally thaws in February, it does so ‘not gradually but with violence, overnight’
(WTWC, 95). ‘That night was the end of the world’, Lehmann writes:
She heard the branches in the garden snapping and crashing down with a brittle
rasp. It seemed as if the inside of the earth with all its roots and foundations had
become separated from the outside by an impenetrable bed of iron. (WTWC, 95)

Listening to the world break up in a freak, but ‘natural’, act of nature, the narrator
seems to anticipate the violent upheaval of war. The sound of the thaw unseen, expe-
rienced acousmatically, brings her into closer contact with a wider sense of impending
doom, to a war which has not yet ‘happened’, registering its trauma in its everyday
rural soundscape, as part of what Sykes would call its ‘wartime acoustemology’.48
When the protagonist takes her children out in the morning to inspect the damage
from the thaw, the once eerily quiet landscape has come alive with the sounds of water:
‘wherever you looked, living waters spouted, trickled, leaped with intricate overlapping
voices into the dance’ (WTWC, 95). R. Murray Schafer describes the sound of water
as ‘the sound which above all others gives us the most delight in its myriad transforma-
tions’, yet here its animacy is too intense a contrast with the silent snow.49‘Such sound
and movement on every hand after so many weeks of silence and paralysis made you
feel light-headed, dizzy’, the protagonist explains, ‘as if you, too, must be swept off and
dissolved’ (WTWC, 95). As her children begin to play dangerously near the rushing
water, the protagonist’s internal dialogue streams but she represses vocality: ‘it can’t be
dangerous’, she cautions herself, ‘I mustn’t shout’ (WTWC, 97). Jessica Gildersleeve
describes this as a ‘self-silencing’ that indicates a ‘denial or repression of anxiety’, as
Lehmann attempts to ‘bury’ the war, which ‘sprawled everywhere inert: like a child too
big to be born’ (WTWC, 93).50 Amidst these acts of repression, the story’s real child,
the protagonist’s daughter Jane, falls into the freezing water and ‘perfectly silent, her
astonished face framed in its scarlet bonnet’, she starts to sink (WTWC, 97).
Jane’s silent, bonneted face amongst the turbulent waters recalls the silence of the
soldiers freezing in foreign waters, whose distant presence the protagonist tried to
drown out earlier on. The loud ‘voices’ of the water, which seem to render both Jane
and the soldiers dangerously silent, create a resonance between the local stream and
the freezing oceans which animates the protagonist’s suppressed memory and makes
her realise the danger of her self-silencing.51 Lehmann draws this connection through
the seemingly ceaseless reach of watery sound, transforming this tragic domestic event,
so that it echoes with wider anxieties about international conflict. In making a sonic
connection between domestic and national tragedy, between the rural and interna-
tional, Lehmann finds a means of expression in response to the silencing, anxious
climate of war. Just as in her 1938 speech for ‘Writers Declare Against Fascism’, Lehm-
ann had invoked an ethics of international care that reached beyond the divisions of
geography, class, race, and religion by foregrounding the fate of children, in ‘When the
Waters Came’ she draws a sonic resonance between her protagonist’s maternal anxi-
ety and anxiety about war to develop a feminist, anti-fascist stance.52 Although the
protagonist of this story ultimately manages to save her daughter from the water, the
weight of the event, its clear relation to wider anxieties about the future of democracy,
bears upon her.
Comparing this text with a story written by Jean Rhys in 1945, we can situate the
anxious, polyphonic waters of Lehmann’s story within a wider feminist aesthetics of
waves that troubles the very idea of peacetime. As Tara Rodgers demonstrates in her
‘refiguring of waves [. . .] towards a feminist epistemology of sound’, the ‘physical prop-
erties of sound waves have been aligned with the connotations of fluidity and excess
associated with female bodies throughout Western history and philosophy’.53 Rodgers
highlights the roots of sound waves’ descriptors in maritime navigation which then echo
in acoustic texts to illustrate the association between sound waves and ‘gendered and

188 imogen free
racialised excess’, something the male, Western subject has attempted, with scientific
objectivity in the form of visualisation, ‘to control’.54 My argument here is that, in creat-
ing an aural resonance between ‘personally’ traumatic events and a mass traumatic expe-
rience of war, Lehmann critiques the sonic stiff upper lip of the ‘People’s War’ presented
in the introduction to this chapter, developing resonances that subvert wartime modes of
‘affective mobilisation’. As Rodgers argues, ‘authors of acoustic texts typically defined
sound as fluid disturbances of an idealized state of rest’, and here Lehmann disturbs the
idealised ‘peace and tranquillity’ of rural soundscapes.55 As we will see in the follow-
ing reading of Jean Rhys’s ‘The Sound of the River’, sound and water waves take on
what Rodgers describes as the ‘properties’ that have been ‘abandoned to the feminine’:
that of ‘formlessness and uncontrollability, which threaten the coherence of subject and
object as distinct entities’.56 The sound/water waves externalise a seemingly destructive
yet seductive will for self-expression that abides neither the conventions of sonic nor
gendered wartime behaviour.
‘The Sound of the River’

‘I didn’t exactly retire to the country when war broke out’, Anglo-Caribbean writer
Jean Rhys wrote, ‘in self-mocking mode’ years after its close.57 The war years saw her
living precariously in rural England, thinking about what Carole Angier describes as
her ‘twin obsessions’: her ‘hatred of England’ and ‘England’s hatred of women’.58 ‘The
Sound of the River’ recounts Rhys’s experience of a holiday she took with her husband
Leslie after he was demobbed in 1945. They stayed in an isolated cottage ‘to recover
and rest’, but one evening Leslie began experiencing chest pains, suffered a heart attack,
and died next to her.59 Rhys wrote the troubling story very shortly afterwards, partly to
respond to the terrible sentence Leslie’s family levelled at her: that she had failed in her
care-giving duties, that despite Leslie having lived through the war, Jean’s despair had
exhausted him.60 Unable to respond to these misogynistic accusations verbally, Rhys
developed a soundscape of aural anxiety. In ‘The Sound of the River’, fear is indescrib-
able but distinctly audible. What David Toop terms a ‘present absence’, the sound takes
on different tones throughout the story; it is an aural haunting, or in Toop’s words, a
‘sinister resonance’.61 Akin to Lehmann’s troubling waters, Rhys’s rural soundscape is
expressive of a climate of anxiety, and through it Rhys expresses her anxieties about
the ideological nature of England’s landscapes. The soundscape of the story’s ‘coun-
try retreat’ should be ideally restorative and recuperative, in accordance with wartime
schemes that promoted the healing properties of the countryside, sending inner-city
war-workers for a ‘rest’, but there is no rest in this country.62 Instead, Rhys develops
eerie connections between the ‘natural’ sound of the river and the technological sounds
of wires and waves, which disrupt the ‘peace’ of the countryside.
The story begins with a crisis of expression. As a couple ‘rests’ in a rented cottage,
the protagonist tries to describe the root of her fear: ‘If I could put it into words it
might go’, she explains, ‘but there aren’t any words for this fear. The words haven’t
been invented.’63 The fear the protagonist is attempting to describe here is an affec-
tive experience that cannot be captured by words. In her discussion of ‘nonverbal
responses’ to the Second World War, Gill Plain argues that ‘inarticulate passivity is
[. . .] suggestive of problems of identity stemming from the war’s capacity to alienate
individuals from language, and in consequence, from themselves’.64 The narrator is

unable to define her fear, but her acoustic atmosphere does so for her; it manifests as
an aural anxiety that pervades the story. It begins when the couple walk by the river,
as the husband observes that the river looks ‘curiously metallic’ and ‘not like water
at all [. . .] very much alive in an uncanny way’, with ‘streaming hair’ (SR, 227). The
river’s streams of flowing metal seem to recall wires: lively, silently communicative,
and disconcertingly animate. Along these wires, the river follows them back to their
room, but here it is no longer silent but making a ‘row’ (SR, 227). Rhys subverts the
expected calming effect of listening to rural sounds on the radio, instead presenting the
acousmatic transmission of such sounds as fearful:
There’s something here to be frightened of, I tell you. Why can’t you feel it? When
you said, let’s be happy, that first day, there was a tap dripping somewhere into a
full basin, playing a gay and horrible tune. Didn’t you hear it? (SR, 229)
In tracing the noise of the river through to the dripping tap, Rhys associates her hyper-
acusis (‘decreased sound tolerance’) with fear, as found noise seems to become a kind
of eerie music, taking on a meaning that it should not.65 In similar terms, Dr John
Ivimey describes being troubled by the pervasive reach of the gramophone, across
‘town or country [. . .] perched on a hill-top, or basking by the sea’, its music dis-
turbing the peaceful boundaries and natural soundscapes of these areas.66 ‘No greater
disservice was ever done to music’, he declaims, ‘than by allowing it to be tapped
like electricity, gas and water [. . .] soon every bathroom will have its wireless tap.’67
Rhys’s wireless tap haunts the peaceful countryside, signifying the pervasive reach of
phonophobia that seems to dissolve physical and psychological boundaries, the bond
between listeners and the bond between soundscape and situation.
Yet it is the sound’s very incoherence that seduces the protagonist, like Rodgers’s
sound waves – ‘figurations of alterity and desire’ – it appeals to their struggle for
expression.68 In the morning, she wakes up to ‘the first fine day’ (SR, 229) they have
had and recounts to her husband her ‘funny’ dream:
I dreamt I was walking in a wood and the trees were groaning and then I dreamt
of the wind in telegraph wires, well a bit like that, only very loud. I can still hear
it – really I swear I’m not making this up. (SR, 229)
The sound of the river has changed from watery streams of wire to an intense atmo-
spheric sound that recalls the roar of white noise, that of an untuned radio, and also
the boom of aircraft flying overhead. Rhys muddles the technological with the ‘natural’,
the threat of war’s violence with personal trauma, to disturb what Marie Thompson
terms ‘the conservative politics of silence’ from which stems the national aural politics
of rural peace, throwing into question its use as an ideological tool and condition.69 For
once the roar of the river enters the room, multiple voices begin to creep in to the nar-
rator’s head: ‘you’re not my daughter if you’re afraid of the shape of a hill’, they say, ‘or
the moon when it is growing old. In fact you’re not my daughter’ (SR, 228). The many
metallic voices of the river recall what she does not want to hear: a disavowal of her
femininity or role in the patriarchal system of the family.
The sound ‘of the river’ then takes on a final meaning, as shortly after recounting
it, she realises her husband is unresponsive. This sound was also that of the man lying

190 imogen free
next to her dying. The story cuts to what feels like an interrogation scene between the
protagonist and the doctor recording the death, in which he questions how she had
not recognised his struggle sooner. Internally, she responds, ‘I was late because I had
to stay there listening. I heard it then [. . .] I heard the sound of the river’ (SR, 232).
The perceived failure of the protagonist to act as an appropriate care-giver is bound
up with her fearful but seductive interaction with this sound. In the place of form,
she hears ‘formlessness’, ‘fluidity’, movement, the sound waves call her away.70 She
finds means not of expression but of alterity. Written in a contemporary landscape
in which ‘fear of noise separated [. . .] those who counted as fully national and those
who threatened to destabilise the nation by failing to “hold their nerve”’, the story’s
phonophobia signals a nervousness about the ideological underpinnings of wartime
aurality.71 In reworking the sound of England from ‘the restful countryside’ into a
hyper-alert soundscape of white noise, wires, and metallic inflections, Rhys subverts
the calming role of the radio, writing back to the sonic nationalism discussed earlier.
For Rhys, such nationalism is but one branch of a wider system of oppressive hegemo-
nies, an inherently patriarchal structure. As the voice of the wiry river told her earlier,
‘you’re not my daughter’.
‘A Dream of Winter’
Lehmann’s feverish story ‘A Dream of Winter’ shares Rhys’s concern about an acous-
matic ‘natural’ sound which simultaneously calls up an atmosphere of wartime anxiety
and stages a critique of gendered citizenship. In this story, also set during the ‘Phoney
War’ period, Lehmann’s protagonist lies in bed and listens to a swarm of bees that may
or may not still be alive in the honeycomb she has hired a ‘bee man’ to remove from
her house.72 The story’s soundscape should be ideally restorative, but instead it is the
scene of intense aural anxiety mingled with inactivity. ‘The silence’, she writes, ‘was
so absolute that it reversed itself and became in her ears continuous reverberation. Or
was it the bees’, she asks, ‘still driving their soft throbbing dynamo, as mostly they did,
day in, day out, all the year round?’ (ADW, 101). The bees whirr away, either in her
mind’s ear or in the roof of the house, and their continuous sonorous motion becomes
strangely conducive to power – the narrator likens them to a ‘dynamo’, an energy
generator. As the days of the protagonist’s illness and bedrest go on, the noise becomes
‘fiercer, louder’, as her keen listening transforms the bees into ‘[a] snarling, struggling,
multiple-headed organism [. . .] seeming to strive in vain to explode away from its cen-
tre and disperse itself’ (ADW, 101). In her solitary listening, the buried murmur comes
to resemble a kind of bombastic army. The bees’ buzzing recalls Woolf’s description of
the warplane as a zooming ‘hornet’; by detailing the engine-like whirring of the bees,
Lehmann transposes some of the sonic qualities of the (anticipated) Blitz. Lehmann
brings the sounds of the war on the home front into the realm of the rurally domestic
in order, I argue, both to challenge preconceived notions of women’s experiences of
war and to deconstruct the complex workings of gendered citizenship in this period
of conflict.
Having removed the hive, the ‘bee man’ informs her that there is not likely to be, as
she had hoped, any honey to help sustain her family through sugar rations. She hears
the bees taunt her verbally:

Another sentimental illusion. This source of energy whose living voice comforted
you at dawn, at dusk, saying: We work for you– vanished! [. . .] What you took
for the hum of growth and plenty is nothing, you see, but the buzz of an outworn
machine running down. (ADW, 106)
The contrasting language of vitalism, industry, and labour positions the ‘resourceful’
wartime mother as a profiteer. Here, the sonic clearly speaks to anxieties around
performing certain cultural roles. The empty hive represents the broken system of
the country house, and the identification that the story draws between the workman
removing the hive and the bees themselves – both are described as disturbing the quiet
of its walls, the man with his ‘low drone, bee-like’ voice (ADW, 104) – suggests an
anxiety around the class, as well as gender, dynamics of the situation. As the bees taunt
her, the war signals the end of ‘ripe gifts unearned out of traditional walls’ (ADW,
106). This disappointment helps the protagonist to process the realisation that care
should not exist purely on a familial level; by the end of the story, she acknowledges
that for the community of bees, the lack of honey had not been ‘a question of no sur-
plus, but of the bare necessities of life’ (ADW, 107). A member of Penn International,
Lehmann is also challenging the idea of the international ‘enemy’ here, listening to
what should be the pleasant rural sound of the English bees, they become, in not pro-
viding as they should, weaponised as a seemingly alien community. In processing this
connection through hyper-aurality, the protagonist interrogates her own ideological
perceptions of citizenship and rurality.
Furthermore, in the context of wartime expectations of rural gendered citizenship,
the mechanical sound of the whirring bees is also disturbing the would-be ‘organic’
nature of women’s honey harvesting and preserving. In 1941, around the time Lehm-
ann wrote this story, the Women’s Institute ‘mounted a fruit-preserving campaign’
supported by the Ministry of Food. As Matless writes, ‘associations of femininity,
community and fruitfulness came together’, in a delightfully sticky package.73 In this
story, the loss of honey stages a failure of a domestic duty which, in the wider context
in which this story was read, is also a failure of wartime gendered citizenship. The
aural attention given to what might be the buzz of the bees, or might equally be a sonic
phantom or ‘sinister resonance’, stages these anxieties. As Joan W. Scott emphasises,
the effect of echo ‘undermines the notion of enduring sameness that often attaches to
identity’.74 Lehmann’s haunting bees act as a sonic echo of aerial warfare that disrupts
the homogenous narrative of women’s rural experience in the Second World War.
‘I Spy a Stranger’
In Jean Rhys’s ‘I Spy a Stranger’, disrupted wartime cultures of rural sound call gendered
responsibility into question, while the rural village exemplifies what Rhys describes as
the ‘woman hatred in this country’.75 In a notebook kept at the time, Rhys questioned
‘who said England & hell, the white cliffs of Albion & of hell, or hell like England has
white cliffs’, half-repeating and subverting snippets of nationalistic folk narrative.76
Here, and in the following story, Rhys takes up the figure of Echo in the form Ella Finer
describes, as an ‘ancient sound artist’, reworking narratives of rurality, nationhood,
and propaganda to critique them.77 In the stories read so far, the soundscape of rural

192 imogen free
England was the repository for its ideologies; in ‘I Spy a Stranger’, Rhys homes in on
the ‘community’ of its rural villages to analyse the weaponisation of such aesthetics
against otherness.
The story is set in an oppressively ‘tight-knit’ village community which villainises
Laura, a ‘non-conforming’ stranger, who has come to stay with her cousin, Mrs Hudson,
during the war.78 The narrative explores ‘the sinister implications of domestic homo-
geneity’, as the villagers identify her as alien, purportedly due to her having lived in
Europe for several years, and abuse her accordingly.79 The village, convinced that she
is a ‘crazy old foreigner’, makes ‘a lot of nasty talk’.80 Mrs Hudson cautions Laura that
‘it’s better not to answer them’ (ISS, 235), so she begins collecting newspaper cuttings
in a book, in order to find an alternative means of response. Laura annotates these
cuttings, criticising definitions of nationhood and identity: ‘I could not stop myself
from answering back’, she writes, ‘saying that there was another side to the eternal
question of who let down who, and when’ (ISS, 238). While collaging the cuttings,
she describes being haunted by ‘words, phrases, whole conversations’ about fascism
and nationalism: the world ‘dominated by Nordics, German version – what a catas-
trophe’, she thinks, but ‘then of course, England and the English’, she sighs (ISS, 238).
Disrupted by voices rising from the past, her friend Blanca discussing the English and
‘their extraordinary attitude to women’ (ISS, 238), Laura draws relations between
nationalist ideology and misogyny. There is a sense that she is speaking through the
many-headed voices the protagonist of ‘The Sound of the River’ feared, repurposing
the gender ‘propaganda’ she finds in the newspaper clippings and making her own
story. This might present another form of ‘passive response’ to war, a means of har-
nessing aural anxiety, cutting up the earworms of propaganda, making texts speak
and signify differently, indirectly, through verbal collage.81 Embodying Echo, ‘giving
back only ever “incomplete reproductions” of sound material’, Rhys undermines the
original meaning of this material, as Laura remixes those ‘haunting’ words in order to
haunt them back.82
Despite this ‘passive’ outlet, things become increasingly strained, in particular in
Laura’s relationship with Mrs Hudson’s husband, Ricky. Ricky pressures Laura to
leave the house, but shortly before her departure, other voices of authority intervene.
Mrs Hudson describes one night, during the ‘worst raid we’ve had’, when Laura
did not come down to shelter but remained ‘smoking and playing the gramophone
she’d bought’ (ISS, 242). Laura seems to be attempting to drown out the sound of
the bombing, but this is considered irresponsible, poor aural citizenship: ‘is this the
moment to fool about with music?’, Mrs Hudson asks (ISS, 242). When an Air Raid
Warden begins to bang on the door, Laura starts to yell about ‘the law!’ and the
‘Universal Robots!’ (ISS, 242). This is a moment of abstract but direct response as
she protests aural biopolitics through noise-making. We might read Laura’s sonic
action as embodying another characteristic of Echo, who in Anne Carson’s reading
was ‘described by Sophokles as “the girl with no door on her mouth”’, and who, for
Carson, thus embodies a subversive figure, for as she notes, ‘putting a door on the
female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to
the present day’.83 Thus Echo is cast, Finer argues, ‘as continual vocal disturbance to
the dominant social acoustics of history [. . .] which have so often sought to restrain
or dominate women who speak out, who are deemed to talk excessively, too much,
too loudly out of turn’.84

The story’s ending exemplifies the warning Finer’s reading provides, as Laura is sent
to a rural ‘sanitorium for a rest’ (ISS, 243). In ‘I Spy a Stranger’, the English village is
oppressively homogenous, a space threatened by masculine and institutional violence,
in which sonic expression is controlled. In her wartime short stories, Rhys presents
‘misogyny and war as intimately connected’, and these dual features are emphasised
and channelled into subverted soundscapes of rurality, including that of the suspicious,
whispering rural village.85 There is something critical and resistant in Rhys’s develop-
ment of this soundscape during a period of such politicised sonicity. Rhys’s obsession
with meaningless noise, and the phonophobia attributed to ‘white noise’, or uniden-
tifiable sounds, positions her at odds with the ‘sound-space’ of the nation, at a time
when sonic cues had strictly policed meanings and were intended to control citizen’s
behaviours. But as Rhys makes clear in ‘A Solid House’, this connection between sonic
affect and social assimilation and cohesion reaches before and beyond wartime: ‘are
you telling me the real secret, how to be exactly like everyone else?’, its protagonist
asks. ‘Tell me, for I am sure you know. If it means being deaf, then I’ll be deaf.’86
Both Rhys and Lehmann present subjects with a sense of wartime hyper-aurality
that borders upon hyperacusis, and that suggests they fail to resist sonic affect in a
way that would align them with a sense of gendered citizenship during the war. The
soundscapes the women encounter in their stories reveal a sense of their being out of
rhythm, out of sync with the complex wartime womanhood they should adhere to,
for they fail to discover the ‘techniques of [aural] self-management [. . .] necessary
for the greater good of the nation-at-war’.87 For as the protagonist’s child asks in
‘A Dream of Winter’, ‘if you can’t stand the hum of a wretched little bee, what’ll you
do in an air-raid?’ (ADW, 110). I argue that in the attention that their listening calls to
issues of citizenship, ideology, and misogyny, these writers develop a politics of aural
anxiety that can be elucidated in light of recent criticism in feminist sound studies.
Ultimately, what we find in these stories is a radical reconceptualisation of the rural
soundscape which is bound to an active refusal or complication of women’s wartime
roles. This approach, in turn, challenges the common conception of the soundscape of
war as located in ‘discrete conflict zones, or in palpable violence’, and instead allows
reflection on ‘the actions and structures supporting such violence’.88 By rewriting the
rural soundscape of war into one of aural anxiety, Rhys and Lehmann interrogate the
ideological work of gendered citizenship.
Notes
1. Cited by Beryl Pong in ‘“The Zoom of a Hornet”: Virginia Woolf, Aural Biopolitics, and
the Phenomenology of the Air-Raid Siren’, in Literary Fiction and the Hearing Sciences, ed.
Edward Allen (Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming), originally in Amy Bell, ‘Landscapes of
Fear: Wartime London 1939–1945’, Journal of British Studies 84, no. 1 (2009): 153–75
(164).
2. Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 7.
3. Sir James Purves-Stewart, ‘Noise and Nerves in Wartime’, Quiet: A Magazine Devoted to
the Prevention of Avoidable Noise (March 1941): 7–9 (7). Quiet was the resident maga-
zine of the Noise Abatement League (NAL, earlier The Anti-Noise League). Established in
1933, its mission was the ‘to promote the cause of quiet and to prevent interference with the
amenities of life by avoidable noise’, Quiet (March 1936): 26. For further information, see

194 imogen free
James G. Mansell, The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2017), 29, 46–56.
4. ‘Wartime acoustemology’ is a term discussed by Jim Sykes in ‘Ontologies of Acoustic
Endurance: Rethinking Wartime Sound and Listening’, Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary
Journal 4, no. 1 (2018): 35–60. A full explanation of its relevance here is provided in the
following pages.
5. See Timothy Campbell, Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2006), xiii for more on the ‘radio imaginary’.
6. Mansell, Age of Noise, 127.
7. Ella Finer, ‘Feminism and Sound’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2020), 315–33 (319, 317).
8. Ibid., 317.
9. Tara Rodgers, ‘Toward a Feminist Epistemology of Sound: Refiguring Waves in
Audio-Technical Discourse’, in Engaging the World: Thinking after Irigaray, ed. Mary C.
Rawlinson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 195–215; Anne Carson,
‘The Gender of Sound’, in Glass, Irony and God (New York: New Directions, 1995),
119–42. See also Marie Thompson, ‘Gendered Sound’, in The Routledge Companion to
Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 108–18.
10. See Marion Shaw, ‘Cold Comfort Times: Women Rural Writers in the Interwar Period’, in
The English Countryside between the Wars: Regeneration or Decline?, ed. Paul Brassley,
Jeremey Burchardt, and Lynne Thompson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 73–87 (76);
and Stella Deen, ‘The Spinster in Eden: Reclaiming Civilisation in Interwar British Rural
Fiction’, in Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention, ed. Kristin Bluemel and
Michael McCluskey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 135–49.
11. Susan Gubar, ‘“This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun”: World War II and the Blitz on Women’,
in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet,
Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz (London: Yale University Press,
1987), 227–59 (227). I add the specification of ‘civilian’ women to Gubar’s note here in
acknowledgement of women’s work during the First World War.
12. Virginia Woolf, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, in Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 216–19 (216).
13. Pong, ‘“Zoom of a Hornet”’, 10.
14. Anna Snaith, ‘Introduction’, in Sound and Literature, 1–35 (1).
15. R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (Toronto: The Canadian Publishers, 1977),
10; Mansell, Age of Noise, 128.
17. Ibid., 130.
18. Ibid.
19. Pong, ‘“Zoom of a Hornet”’, 8.
20. Ibid.
21. David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 254–6.
22. Lord Horder, ‘To Our Readers’, Quiet (March 1940): 5.
24. Ibid.
25. Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 10.
26. Shaw, ‘Cold Comfort Times’, 76.
27. Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2010), 11.
28. Michael Guida, ‘Ludwig Koch’s Birdsong on Wartime BBC Radio: Knowledge, Citizen-
ship and Solace’, in Being Modern: The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth
Century, ed. Robert Bud, Paul Greenhalgh, Frank James, and Morag Shiach (London: UCL
Press, 2018), 293–310 (302).

29. Ibid., 305.

30. Mansell, Landscape and Englishness, 128.
31. Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister, Listen to Britain (London: Press Books, BFI
Special Collections, 1942).
32. Heather Wiebe, ‘Morale as Sonic Force: Listen to Britain and Total War’, Sound Studies:
An Interdisciplinary Journal 7, no. 1 (2021): 24–41 (24).
33. Sam Halliday, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 157.
34. Sykes, ‘Ontologies of Acoustic Endurance’, 35; Pong, ‘“Zoom of a Hornet”’, 3.
35. Sykes, ‘Ontologies of Acoustic Endurance’, 35.
36. Wiebe, ‘Morale as Sonic Force’, 25.
37. Corinna Peniston-Bird and Emma Vickers, ‘Introduction’, in Gender and the Second World
War: Lessons of War, ed. Corinna Peniston-Bird and Emma Vickers (London: Palgrave,
2017), 1–2.
38. National Service Act 1941 (UK).
39. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz,
‘Introduction’, in Behind the Lines, 1–17 (7).
40. Ibid.
41. Peniston-Bird and Vickers, ‘Introduction’, 3; Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War?
National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 123.
43. Ibid.
44. For more on the mythologising of the home front during the Second World War, see Angus
Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Cape, 1991).
45. Kristine A. Miller, British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 65.
46. Rosamond Lehmann, ‘When the Waters Came’, in The Gipsy’s Baby (London: Collins,
1946), 91–9 (94) (hereafter WTWC). Further parenthetical references in the text.
47. Jessica Gildersleeve, ‘Monstrous Child: Rosamond Lehmann’s War Writing’, Philament
(2011): 1–11 (7).
48. Sykes, ‘Ontologies of Acoustic Endurance’, 35.
49. Schafer, Tuning of the World, 16.
50. Gildersleeve, ‘Monstrous Child’, 9.
51. Schafer, Tuning of the World, 18.
52. Rosamond Lehmann, ‘Speech possibly made for Writers declare against Fascism’, RNL
1/1/5/1, The Papers of Rosamond Nina Lehmann, King’s College Archives, University of
Cambridge.
53. Rodgers, ‘Refiguring Waves’, 197.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 199; Guida, ‘Ludwig Koch’s Birdsong’, 305.
57. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys (London: Penguin, 1992), 411–12.
58. Ibid., 412.
59. Ibid., 427–30.
60. Ibid., 430.
61. David Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (London: Continuum,
2010), viii.
62. Joan Woollcombe, a member of the NAL and a Red Cross worker, details such a scheme in
Quiet (March 1941).
63. Jean Rhys, ‘The Sound of the River’, in The Collected Short Stories (London: Penguin,
2017), 226–32 (226) (hereafter SR). Further parenthetical references in the text.

196 imogen free
64. Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 11–12.
65. David Baguley, ‘Tinnitus and Hyperacusis in Literature, Film, and Music’, in Tinnitus:
Clinical and Research Perspectives, ed. David Baguley and Marc Fagelson (San Diego:
Plural, 2016), 1–12 (8).
66. Dr John Ivimey, ‘Musician’s Plea for Noise Control’, Quiet (Spring 1937): 13–14 (14).
67. Ibid.
69. Marie Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 4.
70. Rodgers, ‘Refiguring Waves’, 202, 205.
72. Rosamond Lehmann, ‘A Dream of Winter’, in The Gipsy’s Baby, 99–113 (101) (hereafter
ADW). Further parenthetical references in the text.
74. Joan W. Scott, ‘Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity’, Critical Inquiry
27, no. 2 (2001): 284–304 (291).
75. Angier quoting from Rhys’s ‘Orange Notebook’, Jean Rhys, 415.
76. Ibid.
77. Finer, ‘Feminism and Sound’, 319.
78. Plain, Women’s Fiction, 24.
79. Ibid.
80. Jean Rhys, ‘I Spy a Stranger’, in The Collected Short Stories, 232–45 (234) (hereafter ISS).
Further parenthetical references in the text.
83. Carson, ‘Gender of Sound’, 121.
86. Jean Rhys, ‘A Solid House’, in The Collected Short Stories, 211–25 (221).
88. Wiebe, ‘Morale as Sonic Force’, 24.
Select Bibliography
Carson, Anne, ‘The Gender of Sound’, in Glass, Irony and God (New York: New Directions,
1995), 119–42.
Finer, Ella, ‘Feminism and Sound’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2020), 315–33.
Guida, Michael, ‘Ludwig Koch’s Birdsong on Wartime BBC Radio: Knowledge, Citizenship and
Solace’, in Being Modern: The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century,
ed. Robert Bud, Paul Greenhalgh, Frank James, and Morag Shiach (London: UCL Press,
2018), 293–310.
Halliday, Sam, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
Mansell, James G., The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2017).
Pong, Beryl, ‘“The Zoom of a Hornet”: Virginia Woolf, Aural Biopolitics, and the Phenomenol-
ogy of the Air-Raid Siren’, in Literary Fiction and the Hearing Sciences, ed. Edward Allen
(Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming).

Rodgers, Tara, ‘Toward a Feminist Epistemology of Sound: Refiguring Waves in Audio-Technical

Discourse’, in Engaging the World: Thinking after Irigaray, ed. Mary C. Rawlinson (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2016), 195–215.
Snaith, Anna, ‘Introduction’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge
Sykes, Jim, ‘Ontologies of Acoustic Endurance: Rethinking Wartime Sound and Listening’,
Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4, no. 1 (2018): 35–60.
Thompson, Marie, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
———, ‘Gendered Sound’, in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 108–18.
Toop, David, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (London: Continuum, 2010).
Wiebe, Heather, ‘Morale as Sonic Force: Listen to Britain and Total War’, Sound Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Journal 7, no. 1 (2021): 24–41.

Part IV:
Literature, Media, Coded Sound

13
Sound Technology and US Fiction in the

Postwar Era: The Ethics and Aesthetics
of Cross-Racial Listening
K. C. Harrison
Introduction
T he advent of sound recording in the late nineteenth century brings about a crisis
of representation that informs both the style and substance of modernist litera-
ture.1 By removing sound from source, voice from physical presence, recording pro-
vokes anxiety that ‘permanence outside the subject invites greater mutability, where
the primacy and purity of voice are subjected to the machinations and imaginations
of culture and politics’.2 This fear and fascination manifest in formal innovations that
mimic the stuttering, repetitions, channel-switching, and multiplicity of voices of radio
and records.3 While there is no bright line dividing modernist from postmodern authors
– and indeed, in her recent monograph Sound Recording Technology and American
Literature: From the Phonograph to the Remix, Jessica Teague argues against the
conventional pre- and post-1945 division of American literature – authors classified
according to the latter categories (postwar and postmodern) are often described as
abandoning the search for authenticity in favour of an awareness of the compromised
nature of all expression; both language and the circumstances of its dissemination
are ‘always already’ imbricated with social and cultural limitations beyond individual
control.4 Authors in the twentieth century engage with sound technology in a vari-
ety of ways that reflect both the search for authenticity and its abandonment. Black
American writers are the vanguard of this critical shift, positioned to critique record-
ing industries’ complex and often exploitative relations of power and voice.
There is a rich, multilayered body of literary scholarship showing how authors of
colour participate in and prefigure these qualities more often attributed to White male
authors from William Burroughs through Thomas Pynchon to David Foster Wallace.5
The condition of decentredness, Philip Brian Harper argues, may be ‘a function of the
increasing implication in the “general” culture of what are usually thought of as socially
marginal or “minority” experiences’.6 Robert Stepto traces postmodern irony to a long
tradition of African American authors’ simultaneous embrace and distrust of literacy.7
Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Signifying Monkey is notable in this critical conversation, and
Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005) expands
the scope beyond literature to argue that race is present in our understandings of sound
more generally: in the ways that inhabitants of the twentieth century vocalise, impro-
vise, create, listen, and exchange. Questions of embodiment and disembodiment that

202 k. c. harrison
intrigue anglophone modernist authors like Beckett, Joyce, and Woolf are inflected in
the United States by Black diasporic legacies of bondage and resistance. Shane White
and Graham White’s The Sounds of Slavery establishes a sonic archive of this history,
grounded in the ethical question posed by Saidiya Hartman: how to represent racial
horror without repeating its violence (a question W. E. B. Du Bois grapples with at the
turn of the twentieth century).8 Fred Moten identifies the experimentation of Black
poetics – which he puts into conversation with Freud, Heidegger, Derrida – with the
‘freedom drive’: formal resistance to objectification, grounded in sound. Jennifer Lynn
Stoever invites readers to participate in an ethics of listening, acknowledging how our
racial imaginations and actions have been formed through sound, from the antebellum
period to today.9 Teague brings Stoever’s call back to the page when she advocates for
‘resonant reading’, making ‘ear training’ a part of the ‘intersubjective space between
text and reader’.10
This chapter explores three pairs of authors, spanning 1940 to the 1970s, each a
case study in ‘resonant reading’ that shows how writers engage with sound technolo-
gies at the same time that they encounter ethical questions related to racial identity.
Carson McCullers earnestly, William Burroughs carelessly, and Thomas Pynchon
anxiously demonstrate White authors’ concern with influence by and responsibility
towards their contemporaries of colour. Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, and Ishmael Reed
push the formal boundaries of writing with stylistic innovation and canny concern for
the power relationships governing the production and dissemination of Black artists’
work (what Nathaniel Mackey calls ‘musicking’11). I hope to contribute to the emerg-
ing (‘never “emerged”’, some complain) narrative of sound studies that locates these
questions of racial identity and sound at the centre of twentieth-century US literature.
Carson McCullers: The Radio as Inadvertent Integrator

In 1930 there were twelve million radios in American homes; by the end of 1940, that
number had reached fifty million, averaging one radio per home.12 This rapid growth
is even more remarkable when you consider that commercial radio broadcasting only
began in 1920, and managed to grow during the Great Depression even as other sec-
tors of the entertainment industry suffered.13 What did this unprecedented expansion
of communications and entertainment bode for the novel? Surely not the ‘death of
paper’ that some early radio enthusiasts and detractors alike predicted.14 But while
some writers continued to work in relative isolation from the powerful new medium,
many took up the challenges and possibilities of radio to suggest new roles for fiction,
as well as to defend fiction’s unique capacities.
Pamela Caughie has argued that ‘voice divorced from sight’ destabilises race,
class, and gender boundaries, even – or perhaps especially – as the radio brings about
what Theodor Adorno called ‘corporeal proximity’.15 Citing Michael North, Caughie
locates a new awareness of the cultural construction of identity, its mediated nature.16
As often accompanies new media (whether the novel in the eighteenth century or Twit-
ter today), there was both excitement and concern about the democratising effects
of radio and records. These technologies could link communities across distance in
service of a broad range of ideals, from FDR’s famous ‘fireside chats’ to the broadcast
speeches of Hitler and Mussolini. Americans worried about the coercive power of the
radio voice to create mass monoculture. At the same time, the radio’s broadcasting

sound technology and us fiction in the postwar era 203
of Black music heralded a kind of sonic integration that raised new possibilities for
empathy and awareness – as well as exploitation.17
Published in 1940, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter shows how even a rural adolescent
– far from the urban clamour of streetcars, sirens, claxons, loudspeakers, pneumatic
drills, and the other machinery that defines the modern soundscape – may become ‘an
acoustically cosmopolitan subject’ through her exposure to the variety of radio pro-
gramming.18 Its protagonist Mick is a smart, rough-and-tumble tomboy; early in the
novel she scrawls on a wall the words ‘EDISON, DICK TRACY, MUSSOLINI – PUSSY
– MOTSART’.19 Her graffiti, a statement of the dominant figures of her young imagi-
nation, juxtaposes the modern inventor, the comic-strip-turned-radio-show detective,
the fascist dictator, the sexual slur, and the classical musician with the irreverence for
distinctions between high and low art, political news and entertainment, that charac-
terised popular media and was the particular concern of radio’s critics, who derided it
as ‘a disorderly medium that shoved classical music into the same wavelength as news
reports and vulgar advertisements’.20
But rather than confirming these fears, the novel valorises the possibilities of radio
as an escape from provincial limitations – as indeed McCullers herself would find
when leaving her own small town to study at Juilliard at the age of seventeen. The
yoking together of disparate references was already a feature of modernist literature
(famously in Joyce’s Ulysses published in 1922), and while readers may assume the
list reflects Mick’s naïvety, it reveals her miscellaneous radio listening, as well as her
earnest hope for understanding and connecting with the wider world. The popular
appeal of McCullers’s accessible realist writing has perhaps prevented critics from
examining her relationship to technology, but her musical training makes it unsurpris-
ing that listening would form the novel’s ethical core. The mute Singer is valorised
as the confidant of the novel’s many isolated characters, a receiver capable of seeing
commonalities that elude them. Characters’ divergent reactions to Singer’s radio reveal
this most sharply: only the protagonist Mick listens attentively; the White middle-class
Biff is distracted; the Black physician Copeland switches it off; and the drunk labour
organiser Blount fails to notice it.
McCullers explores, and at times inadvertently displays, the limits of White char-
acters – and writers – in their attempts to listen across Jim Crow racial lines. While
the idealised White mute character Singer listens often to the concerns of the Black
doctor Benedict Mady Copeland, he has difficulty comprehending Copeland’s daugh-
ter, Portia, who is described as speaking ‘like a low song. She spoke and he could not
understand. The sounds were distinct in his ear but they had no shape or meaning.’21
When Mick threatens to idealise the consolations of music for the racially persecuted
character Willie – saying, ‘Anyway Willie can still play his harp’ – Portia swiftly under-
cuts Mick’s optimism with the brutal social reality: ‘With both feets sawed off that
about all he can do.’22 These moments of racialised sound – that include White charac-
ters hearing without listening – demonstrate Stoever’s thesis of a ‘sonic colour line’.23
McCullers sees in the radio potential for crossing this line, even inadvertently. In her
1953 novel Clock Without Hands radio forms a bond between Jester Clane, a White
teenager dissatisfied with his surroundings, and Sherman Pew, a passionate young
Black artist. Jester’s White supremacist grandfather plans to give a radio address
condemning desegregation, but the radio itself seems to silence his ‘vile words, cuss
words unsuitable for the radio’, and instead calls forth the Gettysburg Address, ‘the

204 k. c. harrison
first speech he had memorized in law school’.24 The medium of the radio causes the
Judge to ventriloquise, in spite of his racist intentions, an oratorical defence of equal-
ity, ‘a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men
are created equal [. . .]’.25
In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter the radio presents the possibility for transcending
local circumstances, but proves insufficient; Clock Without Hands delivers a utopian
moment when we hear a message concerning American pluralism transmitted despite
its imperfect medium. Throughout her writing, Carson McCullers, who early in life
imagined a career as a concert pianist, considers the potential of sonority to link indi-
viduals in a broader community of listening. The technology of record players and
radio broadcasts may amplify music’s transcendent possibilities, but not without con-
fronting the obstacles that for McCullers inhere in all acts of communication.
Ralph Ellison: The Breaks and the Lower Frequencies

Both McCullers and Ellison are interested in the democratising potential of radio to
counter racial bigotry. Ellison does so with sophistication informed by his lived expe-
rience as a Black man and his more intimate knowledge of sound technology. Like
McCullers, Ellison enters writing from music studies – his at Tuskegee Institute – and
never abandons an intense interest in both classical and jazz as he sees the success of
Invisible Man, published in 1952. His description of the novel’s ‘ironic, down-home
voice’ marries the two genres ‘irreverent as a honky-tonk trumpet blasting through a
performance, say, of Britten’s War Requiem’.26 As the unnamed protagonist struggles
among competing models of oratory – from the folk trickster Trueblood, to the aca-
demic Barbee, to the nationalist Ras – with snatches of spirituals, blues, and other
music from whistles to operas permeating his experience, Ellison foregrounds the
search for personal authenticity against the perils of mechanisation. Far from a simple
equation between authenticity and voice, however, Ellison explores the potential of
sound technology to mediate the voice in new and surprising ways, and ends up valo-
rising ‘the lower frequencies’ as a conduit for the unrecognised but vital influence of
marginalised artists on the mainstream.
Ellison’s immersion in blues and jazz styles is well documented in Arnold Ramp-
ersad’s definitive biography; less explored is his ‘passion for technology that grew over
the years’27 and was apparently undiminished by building audio amplifiers and install-
ing high-fidelity sound systems with his friend David Sarser, a musician and pioneering
sound engineer for Philips Electronics.28 At first technology functions as a metaphor for
racism, from the electrified rug of the battle royale to the ‘crushing electrical pressures’
at the hospital.29 In both scenes, the feeling of being trapped within an electrified racist
machine coincides with the imperative to perform: ‘pumped between live electrodes like
an accordion between a player’s hands’.30 Internalised racism is a ‘soul sickness’ that
turns one into a ‘mechanical man’ or a ‘[machine] inside the machine’.31
Louis Armstrong, heard through the radio-phonograph machine in Invisible’s under-
ground den, might seem to epitomise the mechanical man.32 By Ellison’s time, although
Armstrong remained hugely popular, his performance style had become controver-
sial for the way that it seemed to some to pander to White audiences’ expectations
of minstrel performers’ exaggerated gestures, like Armstrong’s signature eye-rolling.33
Such stereotyped images reappear throughout Invisible Man as a source of anxiety,

from Mary’s cast-iron ‘red-lipped and wide-mouthed Negro’ coin bank to Tod Clifton’s
‘Sambo’ puppets.34 Ellison takes Armstrong’s mechanised phonograph voice and does
something much more complex than make it a figure for the ‘mechanical’ race traitor,
however. Ellison’s invisible man engages with the voice of Armstrong singing ‘What
Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue?’ to consider the many gradations that lie between
the betrayal and the embodiment of authentic identity.35 As a disembodied, electrified
current, the voice transcends the limits of minstrelsy.
The lower frequencies of the radio and the vibrations the machine sends through
the narrator’s body restore the embodiment and expression that racial invisibility
denies: ‘There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music
I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body.’36 These
underground vibrations elude the threat of pandering that plagues public oratory; the
novel validates and connects the medium of writing with ‘a different way of listen-
ing’; we readers, along with the protagonist, hone our ability to produce and detect
‘unheard sounds’. This mode of perception involves hearing the ‘silent spaces between
the notes’, those ‘nodes, where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead’ that
Invisible detects in Armstrong’s song; he wonders whether ‘the only true history of
the times’ might lie beneath the surface of music, ‘a mood blared by trumpets, trom-
bones, saxophones, and drums, a song with turgid, inadequate words’.37 While critics
Michael Borshuk, Jürgen Grandt, and Timothy Spaulding have focused on the ways
that Ellison’s virtuosity deliberately mimics the improvisatory space of the ‘break’ in
jazz performance, Ellison adds to this musical break a distinct literary meaning.38 It
is true that Ellison shares many techniques with jazz musicians: he works through
variations on a theme, appropriates a variety of forms, and introduces moments of
chaos or dissonance to create a distinct personal style. Although Ellison was unde-
niably invested in the democratic potential of music and in new means of sharing
sound worldwide, he chose the printed page for his medium, and remained committed
throughout his life to the novel’s ethical power – perhaps ironic, considering what crit-
ics like Ishmael Reed would see as his tokenisation by the literary establishment. Not
only do Ellison’s ‘breaks’ expand the scope of the American novel with his adaptation
of jazz idioms and the inspiration of radio, but he also defends the unique province of
fiction – the silent space of reading akin to ‘the silent spaces between the notes’.
Ellison valorises the ‘lower frequencies’ as a space of subversive expression. As
opposed to the high-frequency FM signals ascendant in postwar commercial radio,
the lower AM frequencies remained the bandwidth of the smaller independent radio
stations and whichever ‘ham’ radio enthusiasts could manage to escape the regulations
that began to restrict individual broadcasters as commercial radio gained strength in
the 1920s and 30s.39 But the ‘very low’, ‘ultra low’, and ‘super low’ bands on the radio
spectrum are used below the surface of the ocean and the earth, for communication
in mines and among submarines. It is in this way that the ‘lower frequencies’ indicate
the signals of the literal and figurative underground. The subterranean lair of Ellison’s
invisible man, as we know, provides a retreat from the demands of publicity, a den of
hibernation, but it is also a planning ground for subversive activity, where the pro-
tagonist’s above-ground invisibility is undone by the light of a thousand electric bulbs,
and he recognises a responsibility to record the unacknowledged histories of the young
men of Harlem ‘outside the groove of history, and it was my job to get them in, all of
them’.40 Using the ‘lower frequencies’, Ellison’s protagonist both seizes the potential

206 k. c. harrison
of broadcast to link individuals in a collective consciousness and rejects the means of

commercial radio. Like the invisible man above ground, Black voices on the commer-
cial airwaves are subject to the manipulations and distortions of the controlling corpo-
rate interests. The ‘lower frequencies’ model a form of communication that eludes the
compromising effects of the public domain. In this way Ellison attempts to resolve the
tension that we continue to see today, between the democratic potential communica-
tions technologies offer and the ways that so-called new media remain entrenched in
existing hierarchies of gender, race, nation, and class. The lower frequencies represent
Ellison’s vision for a novel that communicates across racial lines, maintaining nuance
and resisting co-option as the popular reception of Armstrong’s performance did not.
From LeRoi Jones’s Radio to Burroughs’s ‘Cut-Ups’

The relationship between the Beats and Black Arts demonstrates Michael Magee’s
assertion that ‘African American cultural expression [is] the prime mover behind the
“experimental attitude” of the American avant-garde.’41 The Black Arts Movement
inspires major shifts in American letters: the disjunctive style of the postwar avant-
garde, the amplifying voices of non-dominant groups, and the negotiation of media
changes.42 Both literary groupings can be oversimplified as romanticising authenticity
or essentialism; by exploring the Black Beat writer LeRoi Jones’s evolution into the
Black Arts co-founder Amiri Baraka, and in particular his multilayered engagement
with sound technology, and finally his influence on the proto-postmodernist William
Burroughs, we can better understand the intersection of race, technology, and the arts
at this critical period.
Baraka’s early treatment of radio in Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961)
and The System of Dante’s Hell (1965) builds on Ellison’s radio-phonograph in Invisible
Man to consider technology as both a means of and metaphor for interracial encounter.
Critics note the deep nostalgia that poems like ‘In Memory of Radio’ and ‘Look for
You Yesterday, Here You Come Today’ show towards Baraka’s childhood radio drama
heroes Captain Midnight, Green Lantern, and the Lone Ranger.43 What they miss is how
Baraka’s fondness for radio participates in the wrenching conflict he experiences, nego-
tiating his identity in the period of transition from bohemianism to Black Nationalism.
Radio, Baraka demonstrates, has caused him to internalise White radio voices. Just as,
following his 1959 trip to Cuba, Baraka reconsiders his relationship to White colleagues,
collaborators, and influences in the Village, these works show him re-evaluating the
interracial communication radio provides. The imaginative boundary-crossing that was
effortless to a child, and that he cultivated as an editor and cultural broker in Greenwich
Village, becomes problematic. Rather than utterly reject the technological and figurative
possibilities of radio, however, Baraka finds in the medium’s static, channel-switching,
and confusion of voices a new model for his process of self-inquiry.
‘In Memory of Radio’ and ‘Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today’ appear
together in Preface; both lament the poet’s lost innocence, bemoaning ‘all the lovely
things I’ve known [. . .] disappeared’ and ‘one’s youth [. . .] taken off / for greener
parts’.44 The radio drama heroes form part of the pantheon of White influences and
friends that Baraka must expel as part of his attempt to develop a fully Black con-
sciousness (the ‘suicide’ of the book title refers to his former, Beat identity). The poet’s
alienation from his onetime companions is felt in lines like ‘Where is my Captain

Midnight decoder?? / I can’t understand what Superman is saying!’ and amplified to

nearly farcical desperation in the subsequent outburst ‘THERE MUST BE A LONE
RANGER!!!’ The end of the poem leaves Baraka stripped of the materials of his identi-
fication with the White hero – ‘My silver bullets all gone / My black mask trampled in
the dust’ – but the final image of ‘Tonto way off in the hills / moaning like Bessie Smith’
suggests the emergence of a once marginalised voice to fill the void.45 Tonto stands in
for the poet, mourning his lost White counterpart in the language of the blues.
The process of excision enacted in Baraka’s poems presupposes a parasitic power
in radio that appears earlier in Ralph Ellison’s work, and later in that of William
Burroughs. As early as 1945 Ellison wrote of Black voices on the airwaves entering
White listeners’ bodies like ‘an X-ray machine concealed in a radio’.46 While the ques-
tion that ends his 1952 novel embraces radio’s capacity to cross boundaries – ‘Who
knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?’ – Ellison’s earlier writing
depicts this capacity as a threat, its X-rays ‘shrivel[ing]’ White writers’ ‘vital sperm’.47
Radio is not only a literal and metaphorical means of boundary-crossing; its formal
qualities enter the writing. Nathaniel Mackey relates Jones’s poetic practice – the
‘treadmill or a stuttering effect’ of his repetitions – to his description of John Coltrane’s
practice of ‘testing’ notes.48 Looking at the intrusions of radio in System, however,
provides an additional source for this stuttering effect: radio.
Like Invisible Man, The System of Dante’s Hell foregrounds its narrator’s search
for personal expression amid the pain and confusion of conflicting models:
All the other times I know form crusts under my tongue and hurt my speech. I slur
my own name, I cannot remember anyone’s name who I thought beautiful. Only
indelicate furtive lust. Even intimacy dulled by some hacking silent blade. The knife
of the lie. Lying to one’s self. You are uglier than that. You are more beautiful. You
have more sense than to kill yourself this way. You are invisible in my mouth &
talk through my head like radios.49
As in Ellison, mechanisation threatens the authentic self, but the protagonist finds a
way to use technology to embrace a transformed identity. Even as the radio penetrates
the mind and threatens individual consciousness, Jones finds that it models a counter-
tactic in the character of The Shadow. ‘Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity
of Lamont Cranston?’ he begins ‘In Memory of Radio’, invoking the hero identified by
his voice in the dark, who uses the power of suggestion to make himself invisible to vil-
lains. Airing from 1930 to 1954, the show capitalised on the medium of radio, associ-
ating its hero with the disembodied voice that famously queries, ‘what evil lurks in the
hearts of men?’ For Jones the Shadow suggests a racial and poetic parallel: ‘shadow’,
like ‘shade’, being slang for Black person, the Shadow represents the African Ameri-
can artist’s capacity for social perception. ‘Oh, yes he does / Oh, yes he does’, Baraka
repeats at the end of the poem – the Shadow indeed knows what evil lurks in the hearts
of men, and the context of Preface in which ‘In Memory’ appears suggests that it is a
racialised evil. Jones’s relationship to the Shadow helps him to reclaim the radio for
activist ends; rather than the voice of a White hero like the Lone Ranger infecting his
ears, the Shadow is another invisible man, a model for the power of a voice ‘on the
lower frequencies’. The radio dramas that created a sense of double consciousness also
inspire strategies of resistance.

208 k. c. harrison
While William Burroughs’s work is less overtly concerned with race, it is indebted
to an African American media critique that he encountered through Baraka’s bohe-
mian circle in New York. Burroughs used cuts in his work to interrupt the flow of
media indoctrination, to demonstrate the insidiousness of ‘mind control’ through what
he called the ‘word virus’. In The Ticket that Exploded (1957–61) Burroughs describes
its parasitism in terms that recall Baraka’s anxiety of internalised oppression: ‘the
realisation that something as familiar to you as the movement of your intestines the
sound of your breathing the beating of your heart is also alien and hostile’.50 For
Burroughs the control of the mass media creates a populace of automatons: ‘you are
a programmed tape recorder set to record and play back’.51 While Burroughs’s tape
projects may seem to emerge from Jack Kerouac’s interest in the medium (in his use of
the tape recorder in ‘Imitations of Tape’, the final section of Visions of Cody, written
in 1951–2, for example), they in fact owe more to Jones’s suspicious and disjunctive
relationship to sound technology.52
The ‘cut-up’ began as a visual, tactile technique for disrupting print media: in 1960
Burroughs and his collaborator, the painter Brion Gysin, ‘sliced through a pile of news-
papers’ to create an amusing and intriguing satire:
In Hollywood, Rita Haywo in the ground facing another million in their slots,
said: When I started this thing I had sideburns and a guy but the authorities didn’t
want to mix rock with politics. The crowd stopped the traffic and it fell to Mr.
Van R in the line of duty to think that a million men were fitted into the ground
in their slots.53
Already in this first example themes of automation (‘in their slots’), gender, culture,
and authority are evident. The concerns that emerged in the paper cut-ups soon lent
themselves to tape-recording experiments inspired by Gysin’s friendship with pio-
neering electronic musician and mathematician Ian Sommerville. The newly avail-
able inexpensive and mass-produced portable tape recorder becomes a democratised
means of counterintelligence, a media for the masses, against the mass media. The
earliest cut-up instructions, in 1960, advise, ‘Pick a book any book cut it up’, but
soon the manipulation of print media gives way to the cut-up novels’ preoccupation
with the audiovisual:
turn off the sound track on your television set and substitute an arbitrary sound
track prerecorded on your tape recorder street sounds music conversations record-
ings of other television programs you will find that the arbitrary sound track seems
to be appropriate and is in fact determining your interpretation of the film track.54
‘What we see is determined to a large extent by what we hear’, writes Burroughs.55

Schooling their readers in guerrilla sound-editing techniques, they hope to revise,
rewrite, and re-record collective narratives instilled by the mass media: ‘You can cut
the mutter line of the mass media and put the altered mutter line out in the streets
with a tape recorder.’56 While artists and authors saw the potential of emerging media
to foster new forms and wider audiences, the reality of commercial control of the air-
waves usually kept the avant-garde on the pages of the small presses. ‘Where are our
revolutionary television/radio stations, roaming about in the backs of trucks?’ Baraka

asks in a radio address. ‘We are the most developed nation technologically; why don’t
we have alternatives to the “Big Five”?’57 Whereas Ellison’s interest in technology led
him to experiment with home electronics and to serve on the boards of National Edu-
cational Television and the Commission on Public Broadcasting, Jones/Baraka took
the more radical stance that ‘learning western technology must not be the end of our
understanding of the particular discipline we’re involved in’.58 In order for ‘the whole
technology [. . . to] change to reflect the essence of a freed people’, it ‘must begin by
being “humanistic”’, Jones writes in the late sixties.59 Ten years earlier in his 1958
PEN International Address, Ellison had spoken of the need for authors to ‘keep pace
with that growth [of science and technology], to dominate it, and to humanise it’.60
But in that ten-year interval the meaning of humanism was sharply contested, with the
inhumane results of Western liberal tradition coming under fire from women, people
of colour, and antiwar activists. While television images of the civil rights movement
and Vietnam War protests helped to precipitate political change, corporate networks
were unreliable allies. The most efficient and reliable means of transmitting revolution-
ary messages remained print:
The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power and
more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrep-
resent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori ridiculous or simply ignore
and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to
establishment interest.61
This concern for the way that mass media could ‘ignore and blot out of existence’, in
particular, the messages of the counterculture, led Burroughs to dub young Americans
of the 1960s the ‘Invisible Generation’. But the invisibility imposed by the increas-
ingly powerful broadcast networks, Burroughs argued, could be manipulated to the
generation’s advantage. Secrecy, subterfuge, and sound were tools adapted to the use
of a people thus suppressed. The fact that Burroughs becomes the ‘grandfather of
postmodernism’ while largely ignoring the influence of or his responsibility towards
Black contemporaries is not surprising, but can be corrected. His political aesthetic of
noise developed alongside Black contemporaries’ prior understandings of invisibility
and sonic revolution.
Thomas Pynchon and Ishmael Reed:

‘the Black Hole Sings the Blues’
Despite his own assertion to readers of Gravity’s Rainbow to ‘Check out Ishmael Reed’,
Thomas Pynchon tends to be included in a lineage of White postmodern authors who,
like Burroughs, obscure their indebtedness to Black innovation. Pynchon anxiously
considers his role as a White writer, and develops a concept of ‘Soniferous Aether’ as
a means of communicating Black experiences to largely ignorant White audiences that
places his writing in a continuum with Ellison and Baraka, as well as Reed.62 Radio
makes the inaudible audible by converting and amplifying electromagnetic frequen-
cies otherwise impossible to detect, providing both a powerful metaphor for the work
of the novel and a source of formal innovation. Reed and Pynchon expand this sonic

210 k. c. harrison
potential into interstellar space, seizing on new discoveries such as the black hole to
imagine ‘a subcultural (underground, marginal, or liminal) region in which a domi-
nant, white culture’s representations are squeezed to zero volume, producing a new
expressive order’, challenging the idea that sound cannot travel through space as a
‘very elaborate scientific lie’.63
Like Ellison’s invisible man, Pynchon’s protagonist pursues an Orphic course ‘into
the depths [. . .] beneath the hot tempo’.64 Diving after his lost mouth harp into the
Roseland toilet to the strains of Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker’s sax, he is pursued by ‘Red’
(Malcolm X) as he excavates the fears and desires underlying his encounters with race.
In this gesture Pynchon surely echoes and emulates his modernist forebear’s descent
into the ‘blackness of Blackness’ and aspires to Ellison’s – or Parker’s – facility with the
art of subterfuge; Slothrop follows his harp down:
for the sake of tunes to be played, millions of possible blues lines, notes to be
bent from the official frequencies, bends Slothrop hasn’t really the breath to
do . . . not yet but someday . . . well at least if (when . . .) he finds the instrument
it’ll be well soaked in, a lot easier to play. A hopeful thought to carry with you
down the toilet.65
The degree of Pynchon’s pessimism regarding interracial rapprochement, for individu-

als or society, has been explored by David Witzling in the only full-length study of Pyn-
chon’s relationship with race.66 Does the impending bomb blast – which arrives faster
than sound – at the end of the novel render the injunction for the cinema audience to
sing ‘Now, everybody – ’ futile or hopeful?67 Witzling argues that Pynchon’s formal
exuberance belies the political paralysis and inefficacy of both the White left and Black
militancy.68 Paired with Reed’s playful pyrotechnics, however, it is possible to read the
annihilation in the novel’s end as the positive prerequisite for change.
Mumbo Jumbo’s engagement with the soundscapes of Blackness has been well
covered by critics including Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates Jr. The plot of
Reed’s 1973 novel revolves around the rise, theft, and restoration of ‘Jes Grew’, a
1920s song and dance craze that is not just modern fad but a resurgence of ancient
rhythms: a fecund, creative, inclusive practice, opposed to the ‘Atonist’ demand for
control, hard work, and militarism.69 (The enemies of Jes Grew, the ‘Atonist’ mem-
bers of the ‘Wallflower Order’ are defined by their tin ear and inability to dance.)
Reed traces the spiritual heritage of Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker all the way
back to the Egyptian goddess Isis; he values an oral, vocal, sonic archive that his
writing collects and complements. At the end of Mumbo Jumbo the Book of Thoth,
the historical text that has accompanied resurgences of the Jes Grew phenomenon
from ancient Egypt to 1920s Harlem, disappears in a pile of ashes. This loss of text
– ‘The Work of its Word’ – is framed as a temporary setback.70 Although the 1920s
story ends when ‘Jes Grew sensed the ashes of its writings, its litany and just with-
ered up and died’, Black Herman reassures his audience, ‘Better luck next time . . .
we will make our own future text.’71
Pynchon takes on the challenge Reed offers to the dominant ‘Atonist’ order and
explores the role of listening as the racial responsibility of the White writer and reader.
In his first novel V. and in an early story ‘The Secret Integration’, Pynchon’s characters

attempt to ‘tune in’ to Black perspectives – sometimes literally, through the use of
radio equipment. V. centres Kurt Mondaugen, an engineer sent to South-West Africa
during the genocide of the Herero people to solve the mystery of the sferics (atmo-
spheric radio disturbances), low-frequency ‘clicks, hooks, risers’, and ‘nose-whistlers’
that interrupt German audio surveillance activities.72 Abandoning his outpost during
a rebellion of the Bondelswaartz, the enslaved Africans, he finds his way to a colonial
villa; while other Europeans distract themselves at a ‘siege party’, Mondaugen tire-
lessly monitors the radio signals, until he follows a wounded African bleached white
in the blinding sunlight, who sings an incomprehensible Hottentot song.73 Mondau-
gen resurfaces in Gravity’s Rainbow, having taken up residence among the Africans,
‘haunted by a profound disgust for everything European’.74 The sferics emanate from
the lower frequencies as a form of resistance that invites ridicule – masking fear –
and invites the attention of a White ‘écouteur’ or ‘Low-Frequency Listener’ who tries
but fails.75
For both Pynchon and Reed, the Other Side is a space of metaphysical and racial
alterity grasped primarily through sonic experience, whether the ‘lower frequencies’
immanent in Pynchon’s world, or the musical culture through which Reed links Afri-
can American jazz rhythms with Haitian ritual incantation. Although Pynchon does
not explicitly embrace Reed’s ‘HooDoo – or as they say in Haiti and other places,
“VooDoo” or “Vodun”’, he is nonetheless interested in ‘the possibility of the real
world and the psychic world intersecting’, what Reed calls the principle of ‘LegBa
(in the U.S., “LaBas”)’.76 I am not the first critic to note that Slothrop serves as
‘a kind of transmitter’.77 The symbols he draws as he wanders the Continent as
‘Rocketman’ signify
crossroads, where you can sit and listen in to traffic from the Other Side, hearing
about the future (no serial time over there: events are all there in the same eternal
moment, and so certain messages don’t always ‘make sense’ back here: they lack
historical structure, they sound fanciful, or insane).78
It is this sense of historical simultaneity that Reed cites throughout Mumbo Jumbo,
and in interviews, as the key to his work’s power, using ‘the past to prophesy about
the future – a process our ancestors called “Necromancy”’.79 Like Eddie Pensiero in
Gravity’s Rainbow, Reed is an Agent of History, ‘passing through [. . .] restructuring’
the Harlem Renaissance, Egyptian legend, and contemporary politics. The B/black
hole is a sonic crossroads, not yet named as such in Reed’s early work, but confirmed
in its significance as the title of Reed’s 2020 poetry collection Why the Black Hole
Sings the Blues.80
Reading Pynchon’s ‘Low-Frequency Listener’ in the tradition of Ellison and Reed
rightly places him in a trajectory of postwar US fiction that acknowledges the aesthetic
innovations of Black writers engaging with aurality and technology, as their White
counterparts struggle to understand and acknowledge the legacies of racism. All of
the writers covered here defend the unique province of the novel to explore questions
of ethics and identity, while drawing on the suggestive power of radio and recording
technology to provide a ‘crossroads, where you can sit and listen in to traffic from the
Other Side’.81

212 k. c. harrison
Notes
1. Leah Hutchison Toth, ‘Resonant Texts: Sound, Noise, and Technology in Modern Litera-
ture’ (PhD dissertation, University of Kentucky, 2016), 11.
2. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1999), 8.
3. Julian Murphet, Helen Groth, and Penelope Hone, eds, Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and
2017).
4. Jessica E. Teague, Sound Recording Technology and American Literature: From the Pho-
nograph to the Remix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
5. Nathaniel Mackey, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. trace the appearance
of qualities such as fragmented narrative, dislocated identity, irony, and the free play of
signification in African American literature.
6. Philip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 12.
7. Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1991).
8. Shane White and Graham J. White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American
History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston: Beacon, 2005); Saidiya Hartman,
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
9. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race
and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016).
10. Teague, ‘Introduction’, in Sound Recording Technology, n.p.
11. Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimen-
tal Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
12. US Census 1940. Paul F. Peter, ‘The American Listener in 1940’, The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, 213, no. 1 (1941): 1–8.
13. Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge
14. Rubén Gallo, Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
15. Pamela Caughie, ‘Passing as Modernism’, Modernism/modernity 12, no. 3 (2005): 385–406
(403).
16. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Lit-
erature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 18.
17. Caughie is interested in the experience of racial ambiguity that sound technologies enable,
versus its consumption by white audiences as explored by Lisa Gitelman in Scripts,
Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999).
18. Rudolph Arnheim, Radio (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 13–14.
19. Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 45.
20. Gallo, Mexican Modernity, 164.
21. McCullers, Heart, 305.
22. Ibid., 309.
23. Stoever, Sonic Color Line.
24. Carson McCullers, Clock Without Hands (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 240.
25. Ibid.
26. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), xv.

27. Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 23,
33–4, 252.
28. Ellison, Invisible Man, x.
29. Ibid., 232.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 94, 217.
32. See Millard, America on Record, 96, on Armstrong as ‘the voice of the phonograph’, with
the African American technologised voice defining the medium even as audibility continued
to be regulated by venues that banned white and Black performers from sharing a stage.
33. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, eds, Uptown Con-
versation: The New Jazz Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 287.
34. Ellison, Invisible Man, 557.
35. Ellison steadily and staunchly defended him. Indeed, Armstrong may be called the hero
of Ellison’s 1964 book of essays, Shadow and Act. O’Meally quotes Ellison’s essay ‘An
Extravagance of Laughter’ to make the case for Armstrong’s jazz ‘as a rippling, subversive
comic art’ in ‘Checking Our Balances’, in Uptown Conversation, 280–2.
37. Ibid.
38. Michael Borshuk, Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Lit-
erature (New York: Routledge, 2006), 105; Jürgen E. Grandt, Kinds of Blue: The Jazz
Aesthetic in African American Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004);
A. Timothy Spaulding, ‘Embracing Chaos in Narrative Form’, Callaloo 27, no. 2 (2004):
481–501.
39. Irving Settel, A Pictorial History of Radio (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1967).
40. Ellison, Invisible Man, 443–4.
41. Michael Magee, ‘Tribes of New York: Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and the Poetics of the
Five Spot’, Contemporary Literature 42, no. 4 (2001): 694–726 (701). Parts of this section
of the chapter were previously published as ‘LeRoi Jones’s Radio and the Literary “Break”
from Ellison to Burroughs’, African American Review 47, no. 2–3 (2014): 357–74.
42. Daniel Punday, ‘The Black Arts Movement and the Genealogy of Multimedia’, New Literary
History 37, no. 4 (2006): 777–94 (779).
43. See Werner Sollors, The Quest for a ‘Populist Modernism’ (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1978); and Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist
Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delaney (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1987).
44. Amiri Baraka and William Harris, eds, The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (New York:
Basic Books, 1999), 12–13.
45. Ibid., 14.
46. Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 200.
47. Ibid.
48. Mackey, Discrepant Engagement, 130–1; LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Black Music (New
York: William Morrow, 1971), 66.
49. Amiri Baraka, Three Books by Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): The System of Dante’s
Hell; The Dead Lecturer; Tales (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 20.
50. James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg, eds, Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader
(New York: Grove Press, 2000), 209.
51. Ibid., 222.
52. Aldon Lynn Nielsen notes the ‘scant space’ Baraka receives in biographies and critical
histories of the Beats for his work as an editor and a colleague, ‘a nexus for America’s first
racially-integrated avant-garde’, in Integral Music: Languages of African American Inno-
vation (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 118.

214 k. c. harrison
53. Brion Gysin, Back in No Time (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 71, 126.
54. William Burroughs, The Ticket that Exploded (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 218.
55. Ibid.
56. Grauerholz and Silverberg, Word Virus, 295.
57. Baraka radio address, ‘Culture Language Media and Meaning’, Noropa University, Boulder,
CO, 13 July 2006, AlternativeRadio.org.
58. Amiri Baraka, ‘Technology and Ethos’, in Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 (New
York: Random House, 1971), 155–7 (157).
59. Ibid.
60. Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 365.
61. Grauerholz and Silverberg, Word Virus, 296.
62. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), 810.
63. Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984), 12; Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 810
65. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 75.
66. David Witzling, Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Post-
modernism (New York: Routledge, 2008).
67. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 887. See David Cowart, ‘“Unthinkable Order”: Music in
Pynchon’, in Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uni-
versity Press, 1980), 63–95.
68. See Witzling, Everybody’s America, 149, on the ‘political pointlessness’ of the novel’s
satiric elements.
69. Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1972), 160.
70. Ibid., 33.
71. Ibid., 203–4.
72. Thomas Pynchon, V. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1961), 248.
73. Ibid., 304.
75. Ibid., 298, 761.
76. Bruce Allen Dick and Amritjit Singh, eds, Conversations with Ishmael Reed (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 62.
77. Cowart, ‘“Unthinkable Order”’, 87; Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 727.
79. Dick and Singh, Conversations, 60–1.
80. Ishmael Reed, Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues (Dallas: Dalkey Archive Press, 2020).
Robert Elliot Fox identifies the black hole as ‘a concept [. . .] which has recently exerted a
powerful effect on the creative imagination [. . .] of speculative fiction writers’ in ‘Blacking
the Zero: Towards a Semiotics of Neo-Hoodoo’, Black American Literature Forum 18,
no. 3 (1984): 95–9 (95). Patrick McGee describes ‘the Text of Jes Grew [as] the black
hole at the center of Mumbo Jumbo’ in Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 114.
81. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 793, 727.
Select Bibliography
Baker, Houston, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984).
Borshuk, Michael, Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature
(New York: Routledge, 2006).
Grandt, Jürgen E., Kinds of Blue: the Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 2004).

Mackey, Nathaniel, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental

Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Millard, Andre, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge
Moten, Fred, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2003).
Murphet, Julian, Helen Groth, and Penelope Hone, eds, Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and
2017).
Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2004).
North, Michael, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
O’Meally, Robert G., Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, eds, Uptown Conversa-
tion: The New Jazz Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
Teague, Jessica E., Sound Recording Technology and American Literature: From the Phono-
graph to the Remix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Weheliye, Alexander G., Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, NC:
White, Shane and Graham J. White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History
Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston: Beacon, 2005).

14
Coded Sound: Reading in the Age of

Networked Media
Justin St. Clair
W e read, as Garrett Stewart argues, by listening. Silent reading is never truly

silent, for the words resound in our mind’s ear, a phonotext composed of sounds
that often signify outside the bounds of graphical inscription. The aurality of ‘I scream
in a freezer’, for example, compels readers to acknowledge the disjuncture between
the printed text and its inevitably sounded transduction. Over the course of the twen-
tieth century, however, the aurality of the literary novel evolved. While nineteenth-
century realism was characterised by what Mikhail Bakhtin termed heteroglossia (that
is, ‘multi-voicedness’, or a diversity of languages and speech types), the advent of
twentieth-century recording technologies – acoustic, electric, and digital – increasingly
rendered the novel heterophonic (that is, multi-sounded, or characterised by a diver-
sity of audio streams). The digital age is the most mediated in human history, and the
proliferation of forms and content alike has provided literary novelists with a wealth
of new material to remediate. This, in turn, has exacerbated the sounded gulf between
the written and the read, challenging readers who must, on occasion, listen in con-
cert, deploying collaborative, extratextual strategies for processing the media aurality
encoded within contemporary fiction. As novelist Tom McCarthy recently told the
New York Times, ‘literature, as a mode, or as a set of possibilities, only begins once
we acknowledge being irreversibly embedded within networks that both precede and
exceed us [. . .] once we acknowledge being irremediably mediated’.1 This chapter,
then, examines Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) as a case study in
coded sound, investigating how the novel utilises sound technologies and how such
mediality suggests and engenders networked strategies of reading, strategies which
allow readers to process sound that resonates beyond the graphical limits of the page. 2
Over the past several decades, few novels have been as daringly ambitious as
Danielewski’s debut. House of Leaves is a tour de force, a dazzlingly vertiginous pas-
tiche of styles and media forms. The novel’s nested narrators, ever unreliable, hold
forth in prose and verse, from footnotes and appendices. There are journal entries,
transcripts, and embedded quotations; interviews, letters, and miscellaneous lists;
commentaries on commentaries and word games galore. We get inverted text, mirror
text, text laid out like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, red-letter embellishment (featur-
ing not Jesus but the Minotaur), faux-links in blue ink, and even a forty-two-page
index containing terms that both appear (verbigeration, transubstantiation, rumina-
tion, echolocation, immolation) and do not appear (defenestration, premeditation)
in the novel. Throughout, House of Leaves exhibits a relentless engagement – both

coded sound 217
structurally and thematically – with the logic and grammar of diverse forms of artistic
expression, including everything from audio-imaging and cinematography to archi-
tecture and graphic design. ‘As if learning about omnivorous appetite from the com-
puter’, writes Katherine Hayles, ‘House of Leaves, in a frenzy of remediation, attempts
to eat all the other media.’3
As a consequence, the novel defies easy summarisation. An existential horror story,
of sorts, House of Leaves has, at its unsettling centre, an impossible house, the interior
dimensions of which exceed those of its exterior – first by a quarter of an inch and
then, after the discovery of a mysterious hallway, immeasurably. Pulitzer Prize-winning
photographer Will Navidson,4 who moves into the house with his wife and children,
soon decides to make a documentary. He gathers the requisite equipment, puts together
an expedition team, and sets off into the abyss. Carnage ensues. The resulting film is
apparently lost (or perhaps does not exist, even within the world of the novel), but
readers get an account of its contents nonetheless thanks to Zampanò, a mysterious,
blind critic who has somehow screened a copy with the help, it would appear, of his
many amanuenses. All of this is framed by the unreliable annotations of Johnny Truant,
a troubled tattooist’s assistant who discovers The Navidson Record – not the film, but
Zampanò’s eponymous exegesis – in a trunk following the critic’s apparently violent
death. Johnny organises the fragments of the partially destroyed manuscript, admitting,
on occasion, to a few sly alterations. As he comes increasingly unhinged, Johnny adds
his own commentary and digressive adventures (both real and invented) to the novel’s
many footnotes. To complicate matters even further, an additional set of footnotes
attributed to ‘the Editors’ and encrypted letters from Johnny’s mother, Pelafina, which
appear in the index, add competing claims on the novel’s already convoluted narrative
hierarchy. The locus of authority is altogether indeterminate: House of Leaves is, in
essence, a bit like Pale Fire with at least three additional layers. Ever contested in the
novel’s fan-driven digital afterlife – from twenty-year-old discussion boards to recent
random subreddits – is the question of who has written whom.
While Danielewski’s deft handling of horror tropes has cemented the novel’s status
as a cult favourite, much of House of Leaves’ appeal can be linked to its intense and
persistent gamification. With a series of nested, unreliable voices, Danielewski desta-
bilises the narrative’s epistemic structure, leaving readers ever unsure of the veracity of
the novel’s fictional particulars. Simultaneously, he dangles a series of proverbial car-
rots, constantly tantalising the audience with the possibility of a solution to the central
question of narrative genesis. We encounter puns and typos, malapropisms and Freud-
ian slips, acronyms and elaborate acrostics, omissions, deletions, excisions – every-
thing seems to suggest a clue, a code, a cipher. The more we search for these apparently
meaningful puzzles, the more we find; the more we find, the more we solve; the more
we solve, the more we search. It is a kind of addictive semiosis, a self-motivating cycle
of compulsive textual engagement.
Ultimately, the experience of textual navigation is House of Leaves’ defining fea-
ture, its governing characteristic. There is no fixed trajectory, and given the competing
narrative registers, the experimentation with typographical layout, and the inclusion
of countless puzzles, readers rarely – if ever – manage to trace the same track through
the book. One of the ways that Danielewski complicates navigation (while simultane-
ously underscoring the disjuncture between the visuality of print and its aural evocali-
sation) is by allowing fonts to signify extralinguistically.5 Readers quickly realise that

218 justin st. clair
the various narrators have each been afforded a separate font: Zampanò’s words are
set in Times New Roman, Johnny’s in Courier, the Editors’ in Bookman, and Pelafina’s
in Dante.6 While this serves as a visual indicator to help readers track the various
voices, it can also, on occasion, dissuade them from toggling among narrators –
choosing, for example, to stay with Zampanò’s Times New Roman rather than
digressing into Johnny’s Courier (or vice versa). The extensive use of footnotes – and
footnoted footnotes, to say nothing of those suggesting that the appendices be con-
sulted – can have a similar effect, as it is often legitimately difficult, after bouncing
along the bottom of multiple pages, to wend one’s way back to the appropriate pas-
sage. Moreover, portions of the book are laid out in a fashion that suggests no intui-
tive point of entry, leaving readers without so much as a clue as to which quadrant of
the page to prioritise. And then there is the problem of all those damn puzzles: start
working your way through one of the novel’s many acrostics and you are likely to lose
your bearings entirely.
As a result, House of Leaves is routinely categorised as an ergodic novel. Originat-
ing with Espen J. Aarseth’s oft-quoted Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
(1997), the neologism is a useful way of emphasising the critical interface between
form and user in cybertextual constructions. ‘The concept of cybertext’, Aarseth notes,
focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of

the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers
attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even
reader-response theorists would claim.7
For the reader of a traditional text, Aarseth argues, activity occurs only in the mind
(excepting, of course, what he deems ‘trivial’ actions, such as ‘eye movements and the
periodic or arbitrary turning of pages’8). Cybertexts, however, demand an embodied
response. ‘During the cybertextual process’, he writes, ‘the user will have effectuated
a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction.’9
Finding no readily available adjective to describe this process, Aarseth married the
Greek ergon (work) and hodos (path) to arrive at ergodic. A novel like House of
Leaves, then, is ergodic in the sense that ‘nontrivial effort is required to allow the
reader to traverse the text’.10 Turning the pages will not suffice. Instead, readers create
a workpath through the novel: they must rotate the book this way and that to access
inverted material; they must hold the book to a looking glass to read mirrored text;
they must choose which tangents to pursue, footnotes to follow, puzzles to solve, path-
ways to take. Thus, ‘a chain of events (a path, a sequence of actions, etc.) has been
produced by the nontrivial efforts’ of the reader, and this special type of participatory
engagement – what we might call the selective play of the user – creates something
distinct from (and in a certain sense more relevant than) narrative action.11
While Aarseth’s paradigm is an interesting and useful way to think about how
an audience engages House of Leaves (and, indeed, other works of sounded fiction),
it might not, as he seems to suggest, entirely eclipse traditional reader-response the-
ory. Interpretive communities, in particular, are especially pertinent to the navigation
of ergodic fiction. In literary studies, the idea of the interpretive community is most
closely associated with Stanley Fish, who complains that when the Right is not busy
trotting him out as the posterchild for relativism, everyone else is misunderstanding

coded sound 219
his signature dance move. Conservatives have mostly moved on to other strawmen
(namely critical race theory), but Fish may have something of a point. ‘An interpretive
community’, Fish clarifies,
is not a community of people who share a point of view or a set of interests, for
example, the community of Star Wars fans. An interpretive community is a com-
munity made up of people who by virtue of their education and initiation in prac-
tice now have consciousnesses which are in a sense community specific. They walk
around the workplace or their arena of practice, and merely by looking out, see
that arena or workplace already organized in specific ways that are meaningful, in
ways that can be read.12
To put it another way, then, Fish understands his coinage to reflect a self-effacing,
ideological construction rather than a self-selecting fandom. As a direct result of mem-
bership of which they are likely unaware, Fish contends, readers in an interpretive
community manifest a group-specific set of practices and assumptions which they
deploy automatically and without reflection.
Fish’s clarification is entirely sensible. Nonetheless, the misapplication of the term
(that is, the commonplace understanding that, say, a self-selecting group of hardcore
punk fans also represents an interpretive community) is not unreasonable. More often
than not, I would argue, and particularly in cases in which the fan community is a rela-
tively close-knit subcultural formation, the interest group (joined voluntarily and cog-
nisantly on the basis of shared affinities) is but a subset of a larger, invisible group, one
with the kind of ideological interpretive predilections that Fish has identified. In other
words, a community of people who share a point of view or a set of interests, to repeat
Fish’s language, is quite often composed of those who already belong – unknowingly
– to the same interpretive community, and who, seeing the world through similar fil-
ters of meaning, gather together under the banner of some specific fandom. For this
reason, I make little attempt in this chapter to distinguish between interpretive com-
munities in the sense Fish intends and fandoms engaged in interpretation. There may
be a difference, to be sure, but the processes are inextricably interwoven: on the basis
of pre-existing ideological lenses, fan groups hash out canonical readings of their cho-
sen texts, the negotiations of which, as a kind of education and initiation in practice,
ineluctably colour the community-specific consciousness of group members.
Online interpretive communities are central to Danielewski’s art and reception. In
fact, Danielewski timed the launch of houseofleaves.com to coincide with the publica-
tion of the novel and its companion soundtrack, Haunted (which his pop-singing sis-
ter, Poe, simultaneously released on Atlantic Records). The website’s discussion forum
(which has since been transferred to markzdanielewski.com) quickly became the cen-
tral hub for an online community of readers, who, in threads by the thousands and
posts by the tens-of-thousands, dissected, hypothesised, and fabricated. The readings
produced in the forum – which is still active – run the gamut, from the asinine rant-
ings of trolls and subliterate paranoiacs to the perceptive (and helpful) observations of
careful obsessives. Over the past twenty years, the online community has produced an
overwhelming amount of material, so much commentary, in fact, that it transcends the
exegetical. Instead of merely annotating or explicating, the community has positioned
itself as the omphalos of an extensive transmedia experience, rendering the actual

book but one ‘part of a much larger network of information processing, one that oper-
ates across media platforms in real-time and connects many different readers’.13
One of the most notable aspects of the integration of House of Leaves into an
information-processing network is the phenomenon of crowdsourced interpretation.
The novel, as I note above, is suffused with puzzles and ostensible clues, which, in
aggregate, elude the capacity of any first-time reader. Indeed, even repeat visitors,
working alone, are typically unable to process all of Danielewski’s inclusions – some
are well hidden and inevitably go unnoticed, others require specialised knowledge
or a particular skillset. Take, for example, the endpapers of the hardcover edition.
The pastedown and flyleaf of the front and rear covers contain hundreds of lines of
hexadecimal code, arranged in four-character increments. Here are the first two lines,
which represent approximately 1 per cent of the entire sequence:
464F 524D 0000 2A9E 4149 4646 434F 4D4D 0000 0012 0001 0000 2A6F 0008
400B AC44 0000 0000 0000 5353 4E44 0000 2A9E 4149 4646 434F 4D4D 0000
0012 0001 0000 2A6F 0008 400B AC44 0000 0000 0000 5353 4E44 2A77 0000
0000 0000 0000 0001 0101 0200 0404 0002 0101 0102 0101 0103 06FF 0201
0000 0800 0000 02FE 0202 0001 0000 0000 0001 0101 0200 0404 0002 0101
0102 0101 0103 06FF 0201 0000 0800 000014
Many readers are likely to overlook the endpapers entirely, or, as I first did on pur-
chasing the book, assume the code to be nothing more than a quirky design element.
Typeset in miniscule four- or five-point font, the hexadecimal string is easily mistaken
for visual decoration. Even if it is immediately recognised as hex code, however, and
assumed to have a significance beyond the symbolic, it cannot be read directly by
cognoscenti – that is to say, it cannot be sight read in the same way that a francophone
might easily parse the novel’s French. Instead, the code must be processed, algorithmi-
cally converted into something that human readers might find meaningful. And this,
as Aarseth would have it, is decidedly non-trivial work. As a result, readers wishing to
pursue this particular path but not accustomed to tinkering with hex code inevitably
turn to the novel’s information-processing network: the House of Leaves forum. ‘Has
anyone converted [this] from hex and tried to run it?’ asks a representative user, who, a
bit late to the party, is immediately ridiculed for his inability to uncover earlier threads
on the topic.15 Nonetheless, this is precisely the pattern we find throughout the com-
munity: a reader discovers an ostensible clue and crowdsources its interpretation by
posting the discovery and soliciting assistance.
The question of the hex code puzzle in House of Leaves was first taken up by the
Angry Psychos community, subscribers to an email list founded in the mid-1990s by
fans of Mark Danielewski’s sister, the pop singer Poe.16 The siblings were asked about
the endpaper code during a joint Yahoo! Chat event in November of 2000. Mark
acknowledged that people were ‘on the right track’, but refused to provide additional
information.17 ‘I can’t just give away secrets’, he demurred.18 His sister, on the other
hand, was more direct: ‘Program it and see’, she advised.19 Within a matter of days,
Poe fans – apparently lacking access to a flatbed scanner and OCR software20 – had
discerned the file type, hand-keyed the entire string, and posted the results to various
fan sites and discussion forums. The header, they discovered, revealed the code to be
that of an audio file.21 Once the entire sequence of 20,000-odd characters was keyed

coded sound 221
into a hex editor and saved as an .aiff, the resulting file could be played on any com-
puter: it was a two-second audio snippet of Poe’s 1996 near-hit, ‘Angry Johnny’.22
Despite its brevity, the sound file is deeply unsettling. What eventual listeners hear
is not lifted directly from Poe’s album Hello (1995), but has been eerily distorted. The
singer’s voice is shrouded, emerging through digital static as though phoned in on a
bad line from some alternate realm. The effect audibly reinforces the novel’s recur-
ring evocation of existential dread and, simultaneously, is an actualisation of what
one of Danielewski’s characters calls ‘Rumpled Technology’, an appeal to authenticity
though the aesthetics of wear.23 We get but a word-and-a-half in the resulting sound
file: ‘Johnny, angr–’. The long E that should end the second word is curtailed, snuffed
out just as soon as it begins. In fact, given the clip’s duration, truncation, and distor-
tion, Danielewski fans unfamiliar with his sister’s music often have no idea what they
are hearing. ‘My ears must be failing me, either that or my memory of the book’, offers
one contributor to the House of Leaves forum. ‘What exactly is that AIFF saying?
I hear something like “sewing ang,” which I know is nowhere near anything.’24
Readers who finally do realise what the clip contains are still left wondering what
it portends. As with many of Danielewski’s puzzles, the endpaper hex code is a con-
catenation of clues. First, readers must discover what the endpapers are (a coded file,
not cyber-decoration). Next, they must render the code into a format intelligible to the
human sensorium (audible sound waves, not abstract numerals). Thereafter, they must
recognise the linguistic content embedded within the audio file (‘Johnny, angry’, not
‘sewing ang’). And, finally, they must determine whether the message itself is, in fact,
significant, or whether it is little more than a meaningless dead end, a playfully embed-
ded Easter egg that contributes nothing but second-order decoration to the sprawling
novel. In this particular case, I would contend, Danielewski’s coded message is doubly
meaningful, providing readers with possible clues as to the narrative’s ostensible incep-
tion and to its navigation as well.
By imprinting the endpapers with a portion of the novel’s soundtrack, Danielewski
has – in a literal sense – framed the print experience of House of Leaves with his sister’s
music. This echoes a number of other passages in the novel that also nudge the reader
outside the printed volume and into a larger discourse network, while simultaneously
suggesting that music may offer an interpretational strategy for contextualising and
processing various textual elements. Near the end of the novel proper, for example,
we get a pair of staves, which, printed vertically on facing pages, compel anyone inter-
ested in reading the music to rotate the book ninety degrees in a counterclockwise
direction.25 The stave on the right (or above, after rotation) contains a pickup note
and four bars of music. The one on the left (or below, after rotation) is completely
blank: no clef, no time signature, no barlines, nothing. Much like the endpaper hex
code, this musical notation requires non-trivial work on the part of the reader – admit-
tedly less effort, however, for those proficient in sight-reading music, as they need not
employ machine conversion to arrive at the resulting melody. The song is either ‘When
Johnny Comes Marching Home’ or ‘Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye’, which for most of
their respective histories have been sung to essentially the same tune. For most Ameri-
can readers, the former is probably more familiar, a rousing Civil War era song about
the cessation of hostilities that effectively glorifies war by celebrating a soldier’s heroic
return. In contrast, ‘Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye’ is a far darker tale of Irish conscription,
in which the eponym returns from battle abroad badly disfigured and fit only to beg.

While readers cannot be entirely certain which song to map atop the novel’s Johnny
Truant, the latter is a decidedly better bet.26
In a similar fashion, the blank stave is also an ambiguous, if suggestive, inclu-
sion. Like much of the novel’s other negative space, it offers an actual, demarcated
site for writerly activity on the part of the reader – a direct invitation, in this case,
to replace textual lacunae with music. Given the position of the empty stave, readers
might initially suspect that the next four bars of ‘Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye’ would be
an appropriate transcription. On closer examination, however, careful observers will
note that due to the translucency of the paper, not only is the printed content from the
previous page visible, but the bleed-through also aligns perfectly with the unmarked
stave. On the obverse, Navidson – nearing the end of his final expedition and lost in
the deep spaces of his own cavernous house – is ‘derailed by some tune now wedged in
his head’.27 Just before his film runs out, he clears his throat and sings, ‘Daisy. Daisy.
Daisy. Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy over the love of you’,
before muttering, ‘That’s not right.’28 He is correct: the lyric is not quite right. The
line from the popular Victorian tune ‘Daisy Bell’ (aka ‘A Bicycle Built for Two’) is ‘I’m
half crazy all for the love of you’, far less ambiguous than Navidson’s prepositional
replacement (which might suggest, alternately, that the speaker is either half-crazy
because of his love or half-crazy because he has moved on, fallen out – is over his
beloved, to put it in the parlance of the present).
Film buffs immediately recognise the reference: it recasts the moment near the
end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) when the remaining astro-
naut, David Bowman, finally begins to deactivate HAL 9000. The malevolent AI asks
whether Bowman would like to hear a song, and when he answers in the affirmative,
it proceeds to deliver a pre-programmed version of ‘Daisy Bell’, its pitch dropping
as modules are disconnected. Winding down, HAL pre-echoes Navidson by slurring
‘all for’, which comes out nearer the situationally appropriate ‘o-ver’. Danielewski’s
appropriation of the scene, moreover, is doubly referential as the use of ‘Daisy Bell’ in
2001: A Space Odyssey is itself an allusion to what the Library of Congress calls ‘the
earliest known recording of a computer-synthesised voice singing a song’.29 In 1961
computer music pioneer Max Matthews along with vocoder developers John Kelly
and Carol Lochbaum programmed an IBM mainframe at Bell Laboratories to sing, in
a manner of speaking, a robotic rendition of ‘Daisy Bell’. Given the technology of the
day, the result was as ‘flat as a dial tone’, but nonetheless impressive.30 When Arthur C.
Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Kubrick’s co-writer on the screenplay,
witnessed a demonstration soon thereafter, the seed for the famous scene was planted.
For Danielewski, then, coded music represents both an interface between media
forms and also a mode of toggling between subject positions, be they human/machine,
reader/writer, or viewer/listener. As many of the novel’s puzzles directly encourage the
audience to engage the text by incorporating paratextual music, readers increasingly
find reason to use sensory faculties beyond the visual. The pivotal chapter that contains
the unmarked stave, for example, opens with two epigraphs, the first attributed to Poe,
the second in Braille. At first blush, the Poe quotation – which concerns navigating the
underworld unassisted – appears to have been lifted from the oeuvre of Edgar Allan.
It was not. Like the endpaper hex code, the quotation originates with Danielewski’s
musical sister, but the attribution gives no such clarification (nor does it indicate that
the line has been appropriated from the title track of her debut album).31 The Braille,

coded sound 223
meanwhile, playfully trumpets the unreadability of the text, ‘[e]ven to the keenest eye
or most sentient fingertip’.32 Indeed, the inscription is unembossed, so fingertips are
of no use. Moreover, as most people proficient in Braille are visually impaired, read-
ers with keen eyes are also unlikely to make much sense of the epigraph as it stands.
Fortunately, ‘the Editors’ have provided a footnote that purports to render the Braille
in Latin script. And so it does, with one notable exception: where the footnote reads
‘You will never find a mark there’, the Braille in question, properly transcribed, actu-
ally declares ‘You will never find Mark there.’33
Ultimately, the two epigraphs that open the novel’s twentieth chapter highlight the
limitations of traditional modes of reading (individual, visual) while simultaneously
blurring attribution in a fashion designed to redirect interpretive lines of inquiry. In
addition to the ambiguity inherent in crediting ‘Poe’ for a line on solitary visitors to
the underworld, the Editors’ transcription of the Braille text closes with the unusual
attribution ‘ – [Illegible]’.34 Indubitably, it is this particular detail that sends many
readers (as it did me) on a mission to decipher the Braille.35 What does the illegible
portion contain? Why were the Editors unable to read it? Is the transcription accurate?
Etc., etc. It turns out, rather amusingly, that the ‘–[Illegible]’ tag has been transcribed
verbatim from the Braille epigraph, right down to the editorial brackets. While this
sheds no light whatsoever on the putative source of the quotation (or its fictional
copyist, for that matter), it does re-emphasise the novel’s central conundrum regard-
ing narrative transmission. Furthermore, readers goaded into pursuing the illegible,
so to speak, eventually land outside the novel, attempting to decode the Braille by
consulting paratextual resources or, more commonly, crowdsourcing their questions in
the online community.36 In either case, persistent readers who eventually find ‘Mark’
(where they are told they never will) in concert with his sister (warning against solitary
endeavours) are encouraged to continue seeking answers in assemblage, that is, in a
dual sense, assemblage as both process (the aggregation of disparate data) and form
(following Katherine Hayles, ‘a cluster of related texts that quote, comment upon,
amplify, and remediate one another’37).
In the final analysis, the most significant sounded element of House of Leaves is literally
illegible. In other words, it is not the visually accessible music enfolded within the book’s
covers but rather the recorded component of the novel’s networked assemblage – Poe’s
album, Haunted – that allows readers to disambiguate the narrative’s competing voices
and decode the novel’s locus of authority. Released simultaneously, the book and the CD
were deliberately cross-marketed, the rear cover of the novel even emblazoned with Poe’s
logo and a message encouraging readers to
listen to the house . . . ‘HAUNTED’

The new CD from Poe on Atlantic Records
www.p-o-e.com38
In the months to follow, Danielewski and Poe repeatedly cross-promoted their media
assemblage, urging their respective audiences to consider the book and its music in tan-
dem. Disappointed with the album’s lack of radio play, for example, Poe remixed the
song, ‘Hey Pretty’, to include snippets of her brother reading from the novel.39 The single
immediately gained traction, and Danielewski subsequently appeared alongside his sister
to perform the spoken-word selections live – from the opening slot on tour with Depeche

Mode to an appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.40 It was, in other words,
a windfall of promotional synergy that literary practitioners rarely encounter. Never-
theless, the relationship between Poe’s CD and Danielewski’s book was – and remains
– decidedly more than a marketing ploy, for ‘clues to deciphering some of the novel’s
mysteries actually exist outside the oversized book and in its sibling soundtrack’.41 Ulti-
mately, the central question of House of Leaves’ nested narrative structure – whose tale
is this? – finds its most significant hint, as Jessica Pressman convincingly argues, in Poe’s
music.42 To make a long and rather convoluted story short, Johnny Truant, in the novel
proper, stumbles across a band playing ‘The Five and a Half Minute Hallway’ – a song,
enterprising readers eventually discover, that occupies the pivotal midpoint of Poe’s
CD.43 Those who seek out the CD are rewarded: Poe’s lyrics suggest to careful listeners
that Pelafina is, in fact, ‘the author of both Truant and Zampanò’, thereby ‘provid[ing]
a key to [. . .] the central enigma in House of Leaves’.44
As a novel, House of Leaves can be comfortably read as occupying a multiplicity of
nodes in the history of literary fiction. Most obviously, its heterophonic obsession with
competing media forms marks it as the evident progeny of high postmodernism, echoing
everything from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) to Don DeLillo’s White
Noise (1985). Perhaps less apparent to literary historians, however, is the novel’s posi-
tion as a work of soundtracked fiction, that smaller subset of print works – including
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985) and Kathy Acker’s Pussy, King of
the Pirates (1996) – for which recorded, musical complements have been produced.
Danielewski, however, accomplished several things that his predecessors never managed
to achieve. First and foremost, he succeeded in creating a digital interpretive community,
one that has proven persistent and regenerative, continuously existing in some format
for more than two decades. While this community was arguably seeded and nourished
by a decidedly corporate infrastructure – House of Leaves was published by Pantheon,45
after all, and Poe was signed to Atlantic Records – it thrived largely due to the formal
structure of Danielewski’s gamified fiction. By embedding a welter of puzzles, riddles,
and tantalising ambiguities into the very fabric of his narrative, Danielewski has invei-
gled successive generations of readers, most of whom wend their way, eventually, to the
Web for assistance. Second, Danielewski outstripped his precursors by rendering both
the book’s soundtrack and its digital community an integral part of the interpretive
experience. Not only is Poe’s album an essential component of House of Leaves, but the
interpretations generated by the novel’s online community also serve as an indispensable
resource for those navigating the multimedia assemblage, allowing readers to process
and decode sound that resonates beyond the graphical limits of the novel’s pages.
Notes
1. ‘Tom McCarthy Thinks the Wrong Kurt Vonnegut Book is Famous’, New York Times,
20 January 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/books/review/tom-mccarthy-by-
the-book-interview.html.
2. Portions of this chapter have been adapted from Justin St. Clair, Soundtracked Books from
the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of ‘Books That Sing’ (New York: Routledge,
2022). Used with permission.
3. N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves’, American
Literature 74, no. 4 (2002): 779–806 (781).

coded sound 225
4. Both Will Navidson and his Pulitzer are entirely fictional. The prize-winning photograph
described in the novel, however, is clearly based on Kevin Carter’s March 1993 photo of a
starving Sudanese child with a vulture lurking in the background. Carter committed suicide
months after receiving his prize, an unsettling real-life backdrop to the existential horror of
the novel.
5. It should be emphasised that Danielewski did not leave typographical and layout choices to
a book designer, but insisted on doing it himself. ‘Mark Z. Danielewski drafted the original
manuscript for his breakthrough novel House of Leaves (2000) in longhand, then revised it
with a word processor’, notes Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. ‘But after he signed a book con-
tract with Pantheon to publish it, he flew (at his own expense) to New York City, set up shop
in his publisher’s offices, and taught himself QuarkXPress in order to do the typesetting – he
didn’t wish to entrust any of the staff designers with his vision for the typographic effects
so central to the book.’ Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Track Changes: A Literary History of
Word Processing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 203.
6. The names of several of these fonts have obvious overtones that resonate within the world
of the novel – an editor is, pardon the dad-joke, a Bookman; Dante conjures the Inferno,
fitting for Pelafina; and so on. Many readers, moreover, use the font choices as ‘evidence’
to support theories regarding the source of the narrative. The cover of House of Leaves,
for example, appears to be set in Dante (or a variant thereof), leading some to argue that
all of this, ultimately, is Pelafina’s tale.
7. Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
8. Ibid., 2.
9. Ibid., 1.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 94. Aarseth uses a football match to clarify the distinction between narrative and
ergodic function. ‘For instance’, he writes, ‘both stories and games of football consist of a
succession of events. But even though stories might be told about it, a football match is not
in itself a story. The actions within the game are not narrative actions.’ Ibid.
12. Scott Parker, ‘Interview with Stanley Fish’, Philosophy Now 116 (2016), https://philoso-
phynow.org/issues/116/Stanley_Fish.
13. Jessica Pressman, ‘House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel’, Studies in American
Fiction 34, no. 1 (2006): 107–28 (114).
14. Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (New York: Pantheon, 2000). These are the first
312 characters found on the interior pastedown.
15. whtdrkness, 06-14-2002, 08:27 AM, ‘Hexadecimal on inside covers’, https://forums.
markzdanielewski.com/forum/house-of-leaves/house-of-leaves-aa/2329-hexadecimal-on-
inside-covers.
16. The story of the initial solution of the endpaper hex code appeared on the now-defunct Poe
fansite http://www.polishchick.com as ‘House of Leaves Hex Code’. It is archived at https://
web.archive.org/web/20010409232854/http://www.polishchick.com/features/holhex.shtml.
17. Chat capture, quoted in ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Optical character recognition.
21. The opening thirty-two bits, ‘464F 524D’, when converted to ASCII, is a chunk ID that
reads ‘FORM’. The next four bytes, ‘0000 2A9E’, is a so-called unsigned long, providing
the file length, 10,910 bytes. The subsequent sixty-four bits, ‘4149 4646 434F 4D4D’,
reads ‘AIFFCOMM’, indicating that what follows is encoded in Apple’s Audio Interchange
File Format.

22. Poe’s album Hello (1996) peaked at no. 71 on the Billboard album chart; the single ‘Angry
Johnny’ hit no. 7 on the ‘Modern Rock Tracks’ chart, its video receiving significant airplay
on MTV.
23. On the embrace of the decay inherent in an off-the-shelf, do-it-yourself approach to media
reproduction, the fictional commentator Murphy Gruner remarks, ‘These days nothing
deserves our faith less than the slick and expensive.’ Danielewski, House of Leaves, 144.
24. chris_adams, 06-09-2001, 10:18 PM, ‘Hexcode Aiff’, https://forums.markzdanielewski.
com/forum/house-of-leaves/house-of-leaves-aa/53-hexcode-aiff.
25. Danielewski, House of Leaves, 478–9.
26. The character Johnny Truant is physically disfigured by his traumatic childhood: he is
scarred by his mother (boiling oil) and loses half a tooth to his foster father (a beating).
27. Danielewski, House of Leaves, 476.
28. Ibid., 477.
29. ‘Registry Titles with Descriptions and Expanded Essays’, Library of Congress, National Record-
ing Preservation Board, https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/
recording-registry/descriptions-and-essays/.
30. Cary O’Dell, ‘“Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)”: Max Mathews, John L. Kelly, Jr., and
Carol Lochbaum (1961)’, in ‘Registry Titles with Descriptions and Expanded Essays’,
Library of Congress, National Recording Preservation Board, https://www.loc.gov/static/
programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/DaisyBell.pdf.
31. Danielewski, House of Leaves, 423. The epigraph in question was taken from ‘Hello’, the
lead track on Poe’s 1995 album of the same name.
32. Danielewski, House of Leaves, 423.
33. Ibid. The difference between ‘a mark’ and ‘Mark’ in Grade 2 Braille is but the movement
of a single dot in a single cell from position 1 to position 3.
34. Ibid.
35. ‘Okay: I tackled the braille, because I wanted to see just how the last part was “illegible”
and decided to take a crack at the entire thing while I was at it’, posts one such user in the
House of Leaves forum. OriginalIdea, 06-30-2005, 03:37 AM, ‘Epigraphs’, https://forums.
markzdanielewski.com/forum/house-of-leaves/house-of-leaves-aa/3880-epigraphs.
36. The earliest reference to the Mark/a mark slippage I could find was the following post in
the House of Leaves forum: Booklad, 10-29-2001, 11:00 PM, ‘Footnote/Braille’, https://
forums.markzdanielewski.com/forum/house-of-leaves/house-of-leaves-aa/824-footnote-
braille.
37. N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality’, The Yale
Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2 (2003): 263–90 (278).
38. Danielewski, House of Leaves, back cover. As is the case throughout the book, the word
‘house’ appears in blue. The website www.p-o-e.com is no longer active. Later print-
ings direct readers to www.realpoe.com, which is also inactive. Following the release of
Haunted, Poe became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute over the control of her
music. She has kept a relatively low artistic profile in recent years, and to date has not
released another album.
39. Jill Pesselnich, ‘The Modern Age’, Billboard, 9 June 2001, 84.
40. The Conan O’Brien appearance is available on YouTube – at least for now. To put it chari-
tably, no part of the cringeworthy performance stands the test of time.
41. Pressman, ‘House of Leaves’, 114.
42. Ibid., 107–28.
43. Timewise, that is. It is the eighth track (of seventeen). Runtime on the first eight tracks is
35:30; on the final nine, 35:28. This is the kind of compulsive nonsense the novel engenders.
44. Pressman, ‘House of Leaves’, 115–16. For a full explanation of the trail of breadcrumbs lead-
ing from the novel to its soundtrack and onwards to The Whalestoe Letters (a standalone
volume of Pelafina’s letters published a half year after House of Leaves, most, but not all of

coded sound 227
which appear in the novel’s appendices), see Pressman, ‘House of Leaves’. Whalestoe, inci-
dentally, is an anagram for ‘whose tale’, further confirmation, it would seem, of the ‘Pelafina
solution’ to the central riddle. Pressman also notes that other aspects of Poe’s soundtrack also
support this reading, including the song ‘Spanish Doll’. Ibid., 126.
45. Pantheon is an imprint of Random House, owned by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann.
Select Bibliography
Aarseth, Espen J., Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Danielewski, Mark Z., House of Leaves (New York: Pantheon, 2000).
Hayles, N. Katherine, ‘Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves’, American Literature
74, no. 4 (2002): 779–806.
Poe, Haunted (New York: Atlantic Records, 2000).
St. Clair, Justin, Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature: Novel Listening (New York:
Routledge, 2013).
———, Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of ‘Books
That Sing’ (New York: Routledge, 2022).
Stewart, Garrett, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990).

15
Media Affordances of Literary Audio:

Interrelations of Format and Form
Jason Camlot
T here is an entire world of literary life and activity that has yet to be discovered
because it lies engraved on cylinders and discs or has been transduced into patterns
of iron oxide on long bands of tape, left to wait silently in cardboard sleeves or boxes.
Since the introduction of sound recording technologies in the last decade of the nine-
teenth century, and especially since the 1950s with the introduction of portable tape
recording, writers and artists have documented their performances of literary works,
events, and conversations with creative abandon and technical implication. This chap-
ter considers the significance of a selection of audio media technologies and formats
(wax cylinder, acetate flat disc, long-playing transcription disc, reel-to-reel tape, audio,
cassette tape, digital audio files [i.e. WAV, MP3]) for the historical forms that literary
sound recordings have taken over the past century. What impacts might the material
substances and formats of recording media, and the physical design and features of
historical recording media technologies, have had on the ways sound recording was
used to capture and voice the audible features of the literary? How have those media
informed our relationship to literary performance, events, activities, and the idea of
‘the literary’ itself? Rehearsing a series of miniature case studies from different periods
in the history of literature and sound recording to illustrate the relationship between
media affordances and audiotextual forms, this chapter will formulate concepts and
categories for analysing sonically mediated literary works. The chapter will close with
some speculation on the status of such material historical considerations in the context
of the digitisation of literary sound from analogue to digital formats, and on a newly
complex, ontological poetics of metadata that arises in our attempt to describe the
nature of a historical literary sound recording for use in our digitally mediated present.
I use the term ‘audiotext’ to describe the audible literary entity that functions in
relation to the affordances of media formats. As I have explained elsewhere, an audio-
text ‘is an interpretive concept by which sound is conceptualized as a signal with
ideational, aesthetic, social, cultural, and formal qualities of historical significance’.1
My focus in this chapter will mostly be on the formal qualities and affordances of
audiotexts as they interact with the affordances of media formats. I will now explain
what I mean when I posit this scenario of formal–formatic interaction.
Technology, Media, Format, Generic Form

Knowledge of the technology and media formats used to produce and replay an audio
record is useful for understanding an audiotext. In most cases today, this will entail

media affordances of literary audio 229
some understanding of the historical media technology used to produce the early sound
recording, as well as an understanding of other media through or to which that origi-
nal recording has been transferred for either convenience or preservation purposes.
It will also demand some appreciation of the differences between the digital media
technologies we are most likely using to hear and work with our audiotexts today,
and the earlier relevant forms. Why does it matter? Sound recording media in many
ways shape and continue to shape what we listen to and how and why we listen. An
instrument-centred understanding of sound recording represents one initial approach
to revealing the social meanings and cultural imaginary that surrounded the material
source of our object of study. Further, knowledge of how the machine worked, and
how it worked on the medium it employed for capture, preservation, and playback,
is necessary to grasp the practical techniques deployed by performers and users of the
technology, and functions as a basis for interpreting the applications, processes, and
protocols that informed its use. Beyond an attempt to grasp the historical situation
that informed the applications and social and cultural significance of sound recording
during a particular historical period, knowledge of the instruments of sound recording
and production is also relevant to an understanding of the processes of preservation,
migration, and transformation of the sounds we wish to study. All of this said, an
artefact-based understanding of the instrument (the phonograph, the gramophone, the
microphone and electrical recorder, the tape machine, the digital recorder and digital
audio workstation [DAW]) does not necessitate a deterministic approach to unpacking
the cultural and social processes that were associated with a particular media technol-
ogy. Rather, one can imagine a middle ground between technological realism (which
stresses the properties of objects in constraining human use of technological artefacts)
and constructivism (which views technologies in terms of open discursive practices
surrounding the object) by thinking of media and technologies in terms of their affor-
dances, that is, the ‘functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determin-
ing, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object’.2
New media (of different historical moments) are not necessarily epochal in their
influence, but exist in concert and negotiation with social and cultural structures that
existed before their introduction, and persist (in altered ways, ongoingly) long after
their appearance. As Carolyn Marvin has argued, the history of a new medium begins
when users and audiences become organised around it. The focus of social and cul-
tural significance related to a new medium, from this perspective, ‘is shifted from
the instrument to the drama in which existing groups perpetually negotiate power,
authority, representation, and knowledge with whatever resources are available’.3
Those resources may include the capacities of a new medium, the capabilities of older
media, and most likely will include an interesting combination of both, resulting in a
complex tangle of discursive threads to unravel and weave into an explicative, histori-
cal narrative.
The very terms ‘technology’ and ‘media’ (and ‘format’ – a term I have privileged
in my title) are rich with meaning and the beneficiaries of elaborate critical heritages,
most productively over the last twenty-five years, developed in the fields of sociology,
and communications and media studies. ‘Rich’ may be perceived by some as a euphe-
mism for ‘slippery’ or ‘imprecise’ but I am less interested in providing a single defini-
tion of each term than in presenting the critical potential of these terms as they can be
mobilised in particular critical situations towards a diverse range of aims and ends.
And so, in line with theorists of the social construction of technology (a theory that has

230 jason camlot
earned its own acronymic acronym, SCOT), I am content to approach ‘technology’

as a term with multiple layers that refers to material artefacts (say, the phonograph),
activities and processes (phonographic record making and playback), and the mani-
festations of knowledge about these first two categories in the forms of design and
technical applications (phonographic invention and modification).4
Paying attention to media formats helps us understand the historical specificity
of a medium and enables us to discuss issues ranging from the material and design
features of a medium to protocols and processes of use (and intentional misuse) to
different kinds of ideations associated with the medium. As Jonathan Sterne discusses
the importance of this critical category, ‘Format denotes a whole range of decisions
that affect the look, feel, experience, and workings of a medium. It also names a set
of rules according to which a technology can operate.’5 As with media technologies
themselves, media formats are often hidden from view until they become an issue, such
as when cars stopped being furnished with tape decks, or more recently, when your
1/8″ headphone jack can no longer fit into your iPhone without a Lightning adapter.
Suddenly, a media format you did not think much about becomes an artefact to behold
because you can no longer use it without confronting its specifications.
Beyond considering the format histories of audiotextual forms, it can be interesting
and useful to imagine an analytic schema for approaching questions of relationship
between literary forms and audio media formats, by cataloguing some of the most
prominent affordances of audio media technologies, and considering them in relation
to similarly prominent affordances of literary genres. Such a schema will provide a
useful conceptual framework for thinking about the often closely bound workings of
audiotextual forms and the material platforms and formats by and through which we
experience them. Caroline Levine has adapted the concept of affordances from design
theory to the consideration of text-based literary forms by asking such questions as,
‘What is a walled enclosure or a rhyming couplet capable of doing?’ She answers her
own question with the observation that ‘each shape or pattern, social or literary, lays
claim to a limited range of potentialities’.6 Epigrams are useful for expressing sting-
ing zingers, sonnets for the unfolding of a compressed train of thought and emotion,
haiku for communicating intensive, overdetermined images, novels for the extensive
exploration of character, intertwined plot, and subtle shifts in narrative perspective.
When avant-garde artists explore the boundaries of their chosen generic form – as
when Alain Robbe-Grillet experimented with the nouveau roman (the new novel)
by avoiding discernible plot, or David Antin with the talk poem when he composed
poems by talking for an hour before a live audience and then recorded, transcribed,
shaped, and published those talks as poems – they are pushing against the limits of
a genre’s expressive affordances. Sometimes the relationship between a generic form
and a media format results in a similar kind of limit-point confrontation, as when
early recording era record companies adapted novels by Charles Dickens to four-
minute wax cylinders.7
Some key affordances of audio media technologies that seem most relevant to liter-
ary audiotextual forms, and the formation of modes of literary audition and mediated
engagement fall into the following categories:
• Recordability (Read/Write): Can the media technology record and play media or
does it only play pre-recorded media?

• Portability: To what extent can the media technology be moved easily and thus be
used in a variety of spaces and contexts, for recording and playing?
• Storage Capacity: How much time can the media format hold and play back
without pause or disruption? As a time-based medium, this affordance of sound
recording media technologies has significant implications for the formal length and
performance speed of an audiotext. It determines the duration of an audiotext, in
ways that books (which can vary in length) do not usually determine the length of
a novel or collection of poems (unless a format constraint is wilfully imposed).
• Navigability: Can one easily stop, start, rewind, bookmark, and return to points along
the audio timeline, either during recording or during playback? How difficult or easy
is it to manage the audio during recording, and/or for listening as an audible text?
• Signal Clarity: Is the medium noisy (like a scratchy record or a hissy tape), thus
obscuring the audiotextual signal, or is the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) such that it
indicates a much higher ratio of signal to noise, thus effectively ‘erasing’ the sound
of the recording medium itself in favour of the audiotext?
• Frequency Spectrum: Does the medium afford a broad or narrow sonic spectrum,
thus either expanding the potential for subtlety in timbral range in the delivery of
an audiotext or compressing the expressive range of the spoken signal?
There are many other media affordances that are relevant to the generic forms that
audiotexts may take, depending on the level of specificity one wishes to explore in
one’s analysis, and the modes by which a medium was deployed in the production of
an audiotext. In all cases, an audiotext is shaped by more than one affordance of the
media technology used in production and playback, although the impact and implica-
tions of some affordances are usually more prominent than others in considering the
formal qualities of an audiotext.
Cylinder and Flat Disc Records

The first case study I will present, and the one I will linger on the longest as a techni-
cally rich yet simple example of the relationship between formats and forms, is that
of a poetry recitation recorded multiple times during the acoustic era of sound record-
ing. One of the most popular genres of literary recording during the first decades of
the twentieth century was the ‘dramatic recitation with orchestral accompaniment’,
and one of the most popular examples of that genre was Edgar L. Davenport’s perfor-
mance of a cowboy poem entitled ‘Lasca’, written by the English poet Frank Desprez.
In this rhyming, narrative poem, consisting, for the most part, of anapestic couplets of
varying beats, a cowboy tells of his love for a wild, passionate, and loyal Indigenous
woman named Lasca who rode by his side throughout his cattle-herding adventures,
and then died, pressed against him, as they sought refuge from a cattle stampede
beneath the corpse of the cowboy’s fallen mustang. The poem first appeared in print
in the London Society journal in 1882, and then was collected in Desprez’s Curtain
Raisers for Amateurs and Others (1886), before appearing in numerous recitation
anthologies throughout the early twentieth century.8 Published iterations of the poem
suggest that it was aimed at different audiences over time, ranging from theatre-goers
in a comic treatment of the theme in an early ‘curtain raiser’ staged before perfor-
mances of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, to middle-class London audiences in

232 jason camlot
its earliest printed versions, to American and English recitation circles via its appear-
ances in elocution manuals and recitation books, to Chautauqua audiences in public
performance, and to oral storytellers at cowboy poetry gatherings.9
Davenport recorded at least eight versions of the poem for different record compa-
nies between 1905 and 1920 (and it was recorded by others, as well).10 These recorded
versions ranged in length from a little over two minutes to nearly five minutes and
had varying arrangements of musical accompaniment. All of Davenport’s recorded
versions omit the opening five lines of the poem as it first appeared in London Society;
lines that identified the speaker of the narrative poem as a bored London urbanite
reviewer who was fed up with city life and found himself incited to burst into a tale of
frontier adventure and freedom. As these omitted lines state:
It’s all very well to write reviews,

And Carry umbrellas, and keep dry shoes,
And say what every one’s saying here,
And wear what everyone else must wear;
But to-night I’m sick of the whole affair [. . .]11
Removing this opening set-up from the audiotext strips the recitation of one particular
context for delivery, and enables Davenport to begin his performance in an energetic
canter, if not yet the fully fledged gallop that is reserved for the dramatic climax of the
poem which describes the speaker’s race to escape on his speedy mustang, with Lasca
clinging behind, from the life-threatening cattle stampede.
Before considering some of the particular differences between Davenport’s recorded
performances of the same poem, I will take a moment to outline the nature of the
recordings we are discussing, and elaborate on this question of the speed of Daven-
port’s delivery of the different excerpted versions of the poem across his recorded
performances. In the case of this set of audiotexts, the storage capacity of the medium
plays an important role in the content, inflection, and speed of delivery of the sounded
poem. Of the eight Davenport recordings of ‘Lasca’ I am aware of, and the seven I
have so far had the opportunity to listen to, six of them differ from each other in con-
tent, arrangement, and, to some extent, in the nature of the performance itself. Here
are the recordings in question:
LASCA 1905 Edison Gold Moulded Record Cylinder 9087 (2:13)

LASCA 1906 Victor matrix C-3283 12″ (4:01)
LASCA 1908 Victor 12″ 31529 (same as 1906) (4:01)
LASCA 1909 Edison Amberol Cylinder 296 (4:45)
LASCA 1909 Victor 12″ 35090 C-3283/4 (3:57)
LASCA 1910 Columbia 12″ A-5218 (4:27)
LASCA 1913 Edison Blue Amberol Cylinder 1868 (4:40)
LASCA 1920 Edison Diamond Disc 50575-L (4:15)
The 1908 Victor recoding seems to be a re-release of the earlier 1906 Victor recording,
and I have not been able to listen to the 1909 Victor release, which leaves us with the
six recordings in Table 15.1 to consider comparatively in terms of duration, length of
text, reading speed, and the integration of musical accompaniment.

TABLE 15.1
LASCA 1905 LASCA LASCA 1909 LASCA 1910 LASCA 1913 LASCA
Edison Gold 1906/1908 Edison Amberol Columbia Edison Blue 1920 Edison
Moulded Victor matrix Cylinder 296 12″ A-5218 Amberol Diamond
Record Cylinder C-3283/31529 Cylinder 1868 Disc
9087 50575-L
(2:13) (4:01) (4:45) (4:27) (4:40) (4:15)
359 words 631 words 662 words 740 words 663 words 658 words
172 WPM 174 WPM 149 WPM 166 WPM 151 WPM 159 WPM
9 seconds 22 seconds solo 18 seconds solo 16 seconds 16 seconds 6 seconds
announcement + music music solo music solo music solo music
solo music
51/359 words 382/631 words 93/662 words 93/740 words 93/663 words 93/658
backed by backed by backed by backed by backed by words
music = 14% music = 61% music = 14% music = 13% music = 14% backed by
music = 14%
Some basic comparative observations about these recordings might begin with facts
and speculation about the possible relationship between differential media formats,
the treatment of the recitation text, and the nature of the performer’s delivery of that
text. Of the 1905 recording we might observe that Edison Gold Moulded Cylinders –
developed in 1902 to improve upon earlier pantographic methods of cylinder
duplication – played at 160 rpm (revolutions per minute) with 100 TPI (threads per
inch), which resulted in the playtime of between 1.5 and 2.5 minutes.12 In the case of
this, the earliest of Davenport’s ‘Lasca’ recordings, the total playtime (including an
announcement and brief musical outro) is 2:13 (two minutes and thirteen seconds).
The text of the poem had to be significantly abridged for this recording due to the
media format, and the format also demanded a speedy reading pace, at an average of
172 words per minute (WPM). The Victor 12″ flat disc recording Davenport made just
a year later plays for nearly twice as long, and yet the pace of Davenport’s recitation is
even more frantic, at an average of 174 WPM, due to Davenport’s decision to increase
the length of the excerpt he recorded by 272 words. The 1909 Edison Amberol Cylin-
der format doubled the TPI capacity on the cylinder from 100 to 200, thus allowing
for recordings of over four minutes, in this instance, to a lengthy 4:45. This was push-
ing the storage capacity of the format to its outer limit. The forty-four seconds gained
(as compared with the 1906 Victor 12″), combined with four fewer seconds devoted to
orchestral music without speech, allowed Davenport to increase the size of the excerpt
even further (by about thirty words) and to slow down his average pace of reading
(149 WPM), particularly at the line ‘Lasca was dead!’ where he prolongs the phrase
significantly and pauses for a sob.
Davenport increased the size of the excerpt from the poem even further (by nearly
eighty words) for the Columbia record of the next year, a 12″ flat disc that played for
4:27. In order to accommodate this expansion, he was required to speed up his reading
to an average of 166 WPM. The 1913 Edison Blue Amberol Cylinder with the same
200 TPI as the Amberol Cylinder was similarly filled to near capacity at 4:40, and the
strategy of excerption and delivery speed are a near match with the 1909 recording, the

234 jason camlot
effect in both cases allowing for longer dramatic prolongations at key moments in the
text. The Edison Diamond Disc recording of 1920 – sold as a double-sided record that
coupled Davenport’s recitation of ‘Lasca’ with a recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Gunga
Din’ delivered by Harry E. Humphrey on the reverse side – does not seem to capitalise
on storage capacity associated with that format, which, with a unique 150 TPI on a 10″
flat disc, might have been able to store up to five minutes of sound. The result is a text
length and reading speed that is somewhere in the middle of the group, albeit with little
time left for the orchestra to play on its own at the end of the record.
Considering the integration of musical accompaniment, a significant difference is
noticeable between the Victor records as compared with the Edison and Columbia
recordings. The Victor production implements background music through over 60 per
cent of the text that is read, and also has the most music that is played solo without
voice of all these recordings. By comparison, length of the excerpt aside, the other
recorded versions have musical accompaniment for only 14 per cent of the text that
is read, always during the concluding strophe of the poem. Such considerations move
us away from the more strictly formal qualities of audiotextual form as they relate to
media format rehearsed (perhaps to a point of testing the reader’s patience) above,
into considerations of the commercial, organisational, and production contexts that
informed the application of media by distinct record companies to the production of
specific kinds of spoken recordings.
While all of these recordings function as dramatic recitations with musical accom-
paniment, one important distinction between the Victor recordings and the others is
the degree to which illustrative and dramatic elements of the production are stressed,
as compared with the speaker’s elocutionary performance as a feature, itself. The
1906/1908 recorded rendition of the poem produced by Victor represents a pronounced
example of the correlation of recitation and descriptive orchestral accompaniment for
the purpose of illustrative dramatisation.13 The record opens with a Mexican/Spanish-
sounding melody, complete with castanets that double as the galloping hoofs of the
vaquera (cowgirl). Following the introductory section without music, a first light and
buoyant melody commences upon the speaker’s description of Lasca as a free-spirited
rider of the Rio Grande, and of the playful nature of their relationship. The music stops
for a section in which her physical appearance is described, and for the quiet period the
speaker and Lasca sat together at night, forgetting to listen for the dangerous sounds
of weather and consequent stampede. Following this intimate, dramatic lull in the
narrative, the music resumes with a burst of kettle drum rolls, representing the thun-
derous sound of the impending cattle stampede, and the speaker responds as if to the
orchestral sound with the question loudly exclaimed, ‘Was that thunder?’ As if incited
by the orchestra into a new level of intensity, the recitation picks up speed, as does the
music, which now consists of wood block sounds to imitate the effect of the narrative
which tells how the speaker and Lasca ‘rode for their lives’. The hoof clopping persists
for the next seven lines, which describe the mustang’s flight from the frantically charg-
ing steers. The orchestra and reading voice then soften significantly for a four-line
section in which the speaker imagines a possible future in which he dies and must bid
adieu to Lasca and life in ‘the open air and the open sky’. Then the galloping hoof
sounds resume, this time as if on the prompt of the speaker’s announcement that ‘the
cattle were gaining’. The clopping sound persists until the speaker declares in a loud
voice, ‘Down came the mustang!’ Following this line the orchestra goes silent until it

resumes with a slow and solemn arrangement to accompany the speaker’s extensively
tremor-filled description of the burial of Lasca and the lasting effect it has had on him.
And then the orchestra swells in volume to play a resolving outro for approximately
twelve seconds, before the recording ends. This is a rich example of a fully orches-
trated and arranged dramatic recitation with musical accompaniment, with a selection
of mimetic sounds to reinforce the action that is described, an activating relationship
between spoken performance and orchestral sound, and a musical orchestration that
is, at points, designed to reinforce not just the action but the emotional message of the
speaker’s vocal actions. With the technology in question, the speaker and orchestra
would have recorded the entire piece together, allowing the speaker and musicians to
coordinate their expressive intentions as the disc was cut.
The 1920 Edison recording – and to some extent, all of the previous non-Victor
recordings – on the other hand, showcase Davenport’s elocutionary technique rather
than a fully fledged dramatic recitation with musical accompaniment.14 Music is heard
only in a brief introduction before the recitation begins, and is not explicitly linked
to the content of the poem, and thus does not establish relevant mood or setting. The
reading then runs for most of the recording without any musical accompaniment at all,
with a delivery that accentuates audible vibrato, prolongation of vowels, and rolled
Rs explicitly. The only two brief instances when musical accompaniment is brought
in behind the recitation occur after Lasca’s death has been declared. The orchestra
plays a slow and solemn melody as the speaker describes how he buried Lasca. Here
the speaker deploys vibrato and regular pauses to allow the strings to come through
between the description of the burial ritual and site: ‘I gouged out a grave a few feet
deep, / And the black snake glides and glitters and slides’. The orchestra drops out for
four lines as the speaker describes the buzzard floating overhead, ‘stately, like a ship
at sea’. And finally, the orchestra resumes its accompaniment for the final four lines of
the poem in which the speaker poses an existential question about the impact that his
loss of Lasca has had upon his ability to live in the present: ‘And I wonder why I do
not care / For things that are like the things that were’. As the poem resolves with these
lines, the pace of the recitation slows significantly and the elocutionary actions of voice
(prolongation and vibrato, in particular) become more pronounced. This combination
of slowed and pronounced delivery combined with use of music for dramatic effect
to colour the gravity of the summary speech heard in this last version of Davenport’s
recitation had precedent in all of the previous non-Victor recordings, as well. The
forms of these ‘Lasca’ audiotexts were thus partially shaped not only by the material
media formats, but by decisions made in the production departments of the commer-
cial organisations, the record companies, that made and sold these recordings, and
that aimed to define their sonic identity and brand in a marketplace of new listeners.
Electrical Lathe-Cut (Instantaneous Transcription) Disc

Davenport’s acoustic era recordings of ‘Lasca’ represent an early mode of the commer-
cial literary recording. The poem was recited in a professional recording studio by a
professional recording artist (one who knew how to take advantage of the affordances
of acoustic recording technologies, which entailed speaking loudly, if not yelling out-
right, into a horn, and, in these examples, coordinating speech with an orchestra).
The records were marketed and sold for both leisure and pedagogical listening. While

236 jason camlot
cylinder phonographs were read/write machines, and thus could be recorded on in the
home, these ‘Lasca’ cylinders, like the flat disc records, were meant for consumption
and were thus situated within an emerging commercial infrastructure for pre-recorded
sounds to be purchased for subsequent use at home, or in educational applications that
record companies like Victor and Columbia were beginning to develop in the early
teens and 1920s. Spoken recordings represented a small percentage of the commercial
market, overall, which consisted primarily of musical recordings of different kinds.
The next media format I will consider differs from acoustic era formats in some
significant ways. Electrical transcription recording lathes (sometimes known as
instantaneous disc recorders) first came into use in the mid-1920s primarily to make
high-quality recordings from the radio, or for rebroadcast on the radio, but not for
widespread commercial distribution.15 Further, this was an electrical recording tech-
nology that resulted in a wider frequency spectrum in its sound capture and so they
were quite high-fidelity devices. The records were usually at least 12″ in size (some-
times even larger) and could be cut either at 78 or 33.3 rpm, so could store signifi-
cantly more sound than acoustic era formats. They were made of aluminium, acetate
(with aluminium, glass, or cardboard base), or vinyl. Used primarily for capturing
and replaying jingles or broadcasts on the radio, many of these machines were com-
pact and lightweight enough to be installed in a variety of settings or even taken on
the road (as Alan Lomax did to make field recordings of folk singers, for example).16
While this particular media iteration of electrical recording technology did not have
a widespread commercial impact on the production of spoken records, it represents
a fascinating example of new affordances for the production of literary recordings
within academic settings, by poets and authors, as opposed to professional elocution-
ists and recording artists.
In 1933 T. S. Eliot performed experiments in the recitation of his poem The Waste
Land (among other poems) onto aluminium discs in a do-it-yourself recording lab
that was set up by Barnard College English Professor (and linguist) William Cabell
Greet. These ‘literary’ recordings, and a few by other writers such as Gertrude Stein,
Robert Frost, and Vachel Lindsay, pop up as a small series within a much larger collec-
tion of American and English dialect recordings that Greet developed for the purpose
of studying and teaching speech, pronunciation, and elocution. While several of the
recordings made in Greet’s lab were indeed released for use in teaching by the National
Council of Teachers of English, my focus on this media format will be the hands-
on, experimental affordances that it offered writers who were interested in recording
themselves reading their own works.17
Electrical disc recording technology worked by electromagnetic transduction
through the use of electrical microphones, amplifiers, loudspeakers, and electrical disc-
cutting and playing machines.18 The phases of electrical acoustic and playback tech-
nologies move from collecting, storing, and then decoding for playback. The collecting
phase transformed the air pressure (sound waves) of an acoustic event into electrical
energy with a microphone. During the storage phase, this energy was transmitted to
a storage medium, in the present case an aluminium or acetate disc, via the stylus of
a lathe that carved that electrical energy as a signal engraving onto the disc’s surface.
The playback phase essentially reversed the collection phase, transducing the patterns
engraved on the disc back into electrical energy through an amplifier and loudspeakers
so it could be heard as a reproduction of the recorded sound event.19

The microphone is an electromagnetic transducer used to convert acoustic sound

waves into ‘analogous’ electrical signals. Depending on the kind of microphone used,
metal plates separated by carbon granules (carbon microphone), a diaphragm with
embedded wire coil (dynamic microphone), corrugated ribbon (ribbon microphone),
or conductive metal disc (condenser microphone) are arranged to move in sympathy
with air waves in relation to a magnet-produced magnetic field.20 In the case of electric
disc recording, those signals were then sent through an amplifier to boost the fluctuat-
ing electrical current (the signal) before they were applied to a magnetically calibrated
cutting stylus which would record the vibrations within the parameters of its calibrated
magnetic field in a spiral groove onto a disc.21 Significantly increased amplitude (due to
the amplification of the electronic signal prior to cutting) and a wider frequency spec-
trum were just two of the numerous changes that differentiated electrically recorded
discs from acoustically recorded discs and cylinders. The wider frequency spectrum
captured in the electrical recording process allowed for far greater subtlety in the use
of volume and timbre in a speaker’s vocal delivery, these new affordances of the media
technology expanding the potential of the performer’s expressive range.22
The technical workings of this electronic recording process would lead to the
development of an explosion of technologies and techniques in professional recording,
and new kinds of professional recording studios. As Susan Schmidt Horning notes,
‘instantaneous recording gave rise to a recording studio business by making quality
recording possible without the need for elaborate and expensive processing facilities’.23
Most interesting and relevant to this particular case study is that the instantaneous
disc recorder of the kind used by Greet and the poets he invited to use it at Barnard
College was also part of an emerging amateur recording boom that took advantage of
the (relative) portability and simplicity of these new electronic recording devices. A key
element that made these disc recorders appealing for a wide range of amateur applica-
tions was the fact that one could play back and listen to a lathe-cut record immediately
after it had been made. As the name of one major manufacturer of these machines –
the Presto Recording Corporation – suggests, a key affordance of the device was the
instantaneity of movement from the recording to playback phases of the process.
This affordance of instantaneous playback had an important impact on T. S. Eliot’s
early poetry recordings, which were pursued in a spirit of experimentalism through trial,
audition, and retrial. The recordings Eliot made in Greet’s lab followed an iterative
process in which he tried multiple takes of a section of the poem before moving on to
record the next part. Through the process of recording followed by immediate playback,
Eliot was able to hear, analyse, and explore a range of methods for speaking a complexly
allusive and notoriously polyvocal modernist poem like The Waste Land out loud. The
twenty-four recordings (of approximately five minutes each) Eliot made on twelve two-
sided instantaneous discs document a process of takes and retakes in experimental liter-
ary performance, resulting in three or more recorded takes for each of the five sections
of the poem.24 The medium afforded an iterative process of recording and audition that
let Eliot pursue the realisation of a unique method of sounding the poem, characterised
by timbral and rhythmic rather than semantically intonational vocal actions and, over
all, a peculiarly monotonic mode of vocal performance for a poem largely composed of
citations from the characters of other works, of ‘different voices’.25
Some of the recorded takes from Eliot’s experiments in transcription disc record-
ing were selected, compiled, mastered, and released commercially by the Library of

238 jason camlot
Congress as part of its Twentieth Century Poetry in English recordings series.26 This
media migration from singular transcription disc to commercially released vinyl repre-
sents a shift in the literary affordances of flat disc records, from an amateur medium of
experimentation to a professional medium of consumption. The Library of Congress
poetry recordings series would soon be followed by an array of professional labels that
specialised in spoken word recordings, including Caedmon Records (1952), Spoken
Arts (1956), Yale Series of Recorded Poets (1959), and others. These labels developed
a new, high-fidelity sound for spoken poetry through studio recordings that evoked a
sense of proximity and intimacy to the poet ‘amplified by their preference for a more
“intimate ‘room’ sound” than as opposed to “a ‘hall’ sound”’.27 Beyond the sense of
proximity to the speaker’s voice afforded by the powerful preamplifiers and large-
diaphragm condenser microphones that these record companies used to record poets
reading from their works, these mid-century recordings also evoked a special sense of
the poet’s voice as sounding both present and disembodied, nearby and ‘numinous’28 at
once. This effect was, in part, the result of a newer electronic media technology coming
into use for studio recording, that of magnetic tape recording. As Derek Furr notes,
when listening to a Caedmon recording of Dylan Thomas reading ‘Do Not Go Gentle
into that Good Night’, ‘we hear a poem spoken elsewhere, not in the room with us, and
yet close at hand’.29 This effect is, in part, the result of the fact that Caedmon sound
engineers edited out ‘all extra-linguistic bodily noises that poets might make in the
course of a reading’, including coughs, swallows, and audible breaths.30 This particular
sound of poetry as disembodied presence was brought to the listener, in part, by the
affordance of audio tape to be cut, edited, and spliced back together, leaving unwanted
situating sounds on the cutting-room floor, and the numinous literary voice to sound
as if from a vacuum in the listener’s ears. Editability was one of many new affordances
of magnetic tape recording that would have implications for tape-recorded audiotexts
from the 1950s on.
Magnetic Audio Tape: Reel-to-Reel and Cassette

Magnetic tape recording applied the same transduction principles as electronic disc
recording but removed the step of mechanical disc cutting from the storage process.
Rather than convert vibrations into magnetically structured signals so that they could
be engraved on a flat disc, this technology sought a different medium
to store the electronic signals in some sort of memory bank to be reconverted into
sound at will. Such a system uses a length of tape that is coated with magnetic fer-
ric oxide: and this system of storing sound is therefore known as tape-recording.31
I quote this passage from Doug Crawford’s thorough handbook Tape Recording from
A to Z (1974) because it captures well the combined sense of arbitrariness (‘some sort
of memory bank’) and material specificity (‘length of tape that is coated with magnetic
ferric oxide’) that can inform our understanding of sound media technologies. Tape
recording enabled new literary uses of sound recording. The storage capacity of tape
was far more accommodating and flexible than that of cylinders and discs because the
recording and playback duration of a length of tape is easily extended by recording and
playing at slower speeds to extend the length of a tape. A tape could run, depending on

the machine, as slowly as 15/16 ips (inches per second) to 30 ips, although most con-
sumer machines used to record speech ran on the slower end of the spectrum at either
15/16, 1 7/8, or 3 3/4 ips. The storage capacity could be doubled with the turn of a
switch, thus allowing for significant extensions in duration when needed.
The portability of the tape recorder was also transformative for recording practice.
Where a Presto or Rek-O-Kut recording lathe with built-in amplifier for recording
and playback might weigh about 70 lb (in a lighter model), a Uher or Wollensak
tape machine weighed less than half that, and in some models could be worn like a
heavy satchel on the recordist’s shoulder, if necessary. Tape-recording machines were
thus comparatively portable and flexible as compared with earlier recording technolo-
gies, enabling the documentation of literary events and conversations, both public
and private; and this, along with their increasing availability for relatively low cost
on the consumer market, extended the reach of capturing literary occurrences, and
consequently, our understanding of what comprised a literary event. Further, as I have
already mentioned, tape could be edited, cut, spliced together, rearranged, and erased,
and was easily reused by erasure or taping over a previous recording, allowing users to
transform the audio of a recorded event after the fact, to combine recordings from dif-
ferent times and places (‘mixtapes’), among many other creative possibilities. In short,
tape expanded the generic range of literary audio through its ubiquity, portability, and
flexible applicability and also functioned as an important medium of literary creation.
Beyond the facility of documenting readings and shaping those events on tape
through edits in post-production, the portability and flexibility in use of the reel-to-
reel tape machine led some artists to understand and approach this media technology
as an instrument that embodied and enacted the existential situation of the artist,
and performed the ontological status of the event. Perhaps due to the visibility of the
medium (the machines were called ‘open reel’ tape recorders), they played with tape in
ways that drew upon and pushed the affordances of tape as a material enactment of
time axis capture and manipulation, of presence and time. So, poet, artist, and tape-
experimenter Roy Kiyooka would take his tape machine to the Cecil Hotel, a gather-
ing place for writers and artists in Vancouver in the 1960s, load up a thirty-minute
reel, press record, and then, as he explains in a transcript from one such recording:
I’ll let it run though for thirty minutes, and I get the buzzing signal that tells me it’s
at the end. I play it back and listen to it a bit, and then I rewind the whole thing
and do it again, and again, and again, cancelling out each successive thirty-minute
stretch. I can do that at the Cecil because the nature of what occurs as conversation
is that thing. It never stops, anyways. It never stops and it is totally impartial as to
what is uttered or said.32
The portability and ease in recording and playback of the medium, combined with
the medium’s materialisation of time as tape on a spool, as a visible, moving timeline
that can be recorded, played, erased, and recorded again, indefinitely, extended the
contours surrounding the artful event to all audible happenings in time. In this tape-
recording scenario, what is left on the tape determines what will become the historical
event on record. In this case, the recordist (Kiyooka) controls the temporal event by
recording it, listening to it, and then deciding to erase and record over it, either until
the iron ferrite particles have been exhausted and the tape is ruined or until he decides

240 jason camlot
to keep a take from the last span of time he has recorded, store that recording, and
begin again with a new blank tape. In similar exploratory spirit, Kiyooka’s poet col-
league Gerry Gilbert (another tape-o-phile) took spliced strands from recordings he
made during the 1960s and 70s, and bundled and deposited them in his archive in a
variety of small boxes and containers from everyday use that might otherwise (nor-
mally) have been discarded (Figure 15.1).33
These little bundled loops of recorded speech, boxed and framed in mass-produced
detritus, may be understood as Joseph Cornell-like installations that signify the practi-
cal, aesthetic, and sentimental import of tape as a material souvenir of time. While the
clips could be spliced back to tape on a longer reel and thus played and heard again –
the medium affords such action – Gilbert’s purpose, here, seems to have been similar to
that of the early tinfoil phonograph demonstrators, who would cut up and offer pieces
of a tinfoil recording for those in attendance to take away as a metonymic souvenir of
the playback they had just heard; as what Lisa Gitelman, in reference to that earlier
recording context, has described as a mute evocation of experience and event.34 The
material qualities of this analogue medium suggested the possibility of fixing speech on
a tangible strip of time one could see and hold.
The temporal and spatial evocations of the medium were also exploited in practice
by poets who integrated tape recordings into their performances. In the 1960s and 70s,
American Avant-Garde poet Jackson Mac Low regularly integrated tape recordings
into his readings by requesting and setting up multiple tape recorders in the venue,35
and playing recordings from past readings of a work that he would then read along
with, thus creating what he called ‘collages of various times and places, as well as
the simultaneity in this room’.36 In one documented reading held in Montreal (26
March 1971) he combined recordings from multiple past events. One machine played
a performance he had done with sound artist Max Neuhaus at the University of Illi-
nois in 1966. A second machine played a collaboration with Neuhaus, James Tenney,
and Jeanne Lee at the Town Hall in New York at a later date in 1966. This second
recording also held and played the sound of the Illinois event, as it was played as part
of the New York event. The Montreal event included the sounds of these previous
recordings along with the voices of Mac Low and audience members he invited to
participate in the reading of texts with him.37 The recording of this event might then
be used in a future performance, thus transporting the sound of time and place of this
moment elsewhere, again. Among other effects, these tape and voice performances
created a process of intersubjective collaboration across time and space, experienced
by participants and audience (in the words of Michael Nardone) as events of ‘roving
contexts and overlapping combinations of the poem’s utterers and utterances’ leading
to an ‘accumulative and reproductive noise’ that ‘assembles a multi-layered mesh of
sounds’.38 The resultant mesh signified the possibility and creative potential of col-
laborative simultaneity of past and present. Tape as a media technology and format
played an important role in the artist’s conception and realisation of this spatiotempo-
rally complex audiotextual form.
Even in more seemingly straightforward readings, where a poet stood at a podium
with a microphone and read works from a book or manuscript page, the extensive
storage capacity of reel-to-reel tape (due to its flexibility in recording and playback
speeds) allowed the live poetry reading to be documented in its full and often sprawl-
ing length, capturing not just the poems that were read but everything heard around

8496_Groth & Murphet.indd 241
Figure 15.1 MsC 14, Gerry Gilbert fonds in the Contemporary Literature Collection, Bennett Library. Photos by Deanna Fong.
07/11/23 1:42 PM
242 jason camlot
them. This capacity to capture incidental context – the din of the audience before
a reading began, the fumbling with the microphone, the shuffling of chairs, and so
on – as well as more deliberate context in the form of introductions and set-up talk
from host and poet, allowed tape to frame the live poetry reading as a form of in
situ, existential performance. Speech, talking, in addition to the reading of poems out
loud, became an important feature of the public poetry reading in the 1960s. Read-
ing represented only a small part of what constituted a poetry reading event, where
the featured poet would be expected to engage in extensive impromptu narratives
explaining their writing process and providing the personal and literary contexts that
helped situate the poems they selected to read. For example, in my analysis of the
recordings of the Sir George Williams University Poetry Series, staged in Montreal
between 1966 and 1975, and featuring over sixty poets in readings that always lasted
more than an hour, we can hear that, on average, about 25 per cent of the poet’s time
was spent talking as opposed to reading poems.39 In some cases, a reading might
consist of as much as 60 per cent talk versus actual reading.40 These expository ram-
blings sometimes became formulaic after repeated readings and might find their way
into print as essays in poetics, sometimes transcribed directly from the poetry reading
recordings as they were first spoken.41 While there are a number of reasons that the
poetry reading of the 1960s became what Stephen Fredman has called an ‘existential
practice – an art of contexts’,42 tape’s capacity to capture the long duration of that
existential practice, and the contextual sounds surrounding a literary performance,
helped underscore the poet’s sense of the extension of art into life, and of poetry
into talk.
Tape recording helped reveal the poetic nature of talk and other kinds of ephemeral
sounds to poets and sound artists. Explorations of the recording of the sounds of envi-
ronments and spaces through media by the likes of John Cage, R. Murray Schafer, Irv
Teibel, Hildegard Westercamp, and Alvin Lucier, among many others, took advantage
of the portability and high fidelity of tape, in many cases of the highly portable cassette
tape-recording machines, to extend the sources of composition from traditional instru-
ments to all sounds, and to reflect on the relationship between composition, audio
media, and everyday sounds we usually take for granted, or block out altogether. In
poetry and poetics, David Antin pursued an analogous exploration of the continuum
between live talk, tape-recorded speech, and printed poetry.43 Antin, a self-declared
‘talk poet’, explored ‘talk poetry’ as an artefact that first emerges as unscripted speech
delivered in live performance. His live talks were loosely imagined in advance, often
in response to a pre-assigned topic or title, but were delivered as impromptu talk,
the poem taking shape in the time he took to think it out loud before a live audi-
ence. Where impromptu talk is usually considered ephemeral (we do not record and
keep everything we say), Antin’s talk poems exist as poetic works due to his use of an
audio cassette recorder, the cassette recording being the first step towards his spoken
words’ transcription and typographical transformation into a printed work of poetry,
a published talk poem. Like many poets who began working, reading, and circulating
among poetry communities in the early tape era, Antin first used a reel-to-reel recorder
‘back in the early sixties – mainly to record poetry readings’, his and those of others. In
the 1960s he also used reel-to-reel tape to stage some experimental readings, preparing
loops of pre-recorded sounds to accompany his performances. As Antin described one
such event in New York from ‘around [19]66 or so’:

It was in relation to a reading organized by Bob Nichols to address the ongoing

Vietnam war. I recorded from radio all sorts of talk and music shows, baseball
games, interviews – radio junk on the two different channels and Elly [Antin’s
partner] would switch back and forth while I read the passages on pain from Witt-
genstein’s Philosophical Investigations. She manipulated the volume also intermit-
tently drowning me out or merely accompanying my recitation on pain.44
Antin’s interest in integrating sounds of radio ‘junk’ and ‘all sorts of talk’ into a per-
formance piece that used a tape reel loop eventually evolved into his creation of talk
poems. A talk poem is never a truly stable thing, but an entity that exists across time
and media. It exists as a live event in which he creates a poem by talking for about
forty-five minutes before an audience, and thus is an ephemeral entity tied to a specific
space and time. It exists as an audio recording of that event (a few of which have been
released as commercially available recordings45). And it exists as a printed poem that
serves as a typographical representation of the previous two manifestations. Antin
employs specific techniques of typography in the print versions of his talks in part to
represent the immediacy of the original, improvised performance, and yet this scru-
pulous performance of the immediacy in print has the reciprocal effect of highlighting
the impossibility of such a translation across media. While Antin has referred to the
book and audio tape versions of his performances as ‘imperfect recordings/ of transac-
tions that occur in real time’,46 and most critical work on Antin has tended to follow
suit by focusing on the relationship between the live talk and the printed talk poem,
exclusively, it is worth thinking seriously about the significance of cassette tape as the
overlooked step in the process and substance of the unstable, tripartite entity that is
a talk poem. As Antin began to tour delivering talk poems and then collecting them
for publication in books such as Talking (1970), Talking at the Boundaries (1976),
Tuning (1984), What It Means to Be Avant-Garde (1993), and i never knew what time
it was (2005), audio cassette technology fulfilled his need to use ‘something easy to
travel with and with reliable sound’ so he could ‘hear and transcribe’.47 The intermedia
genre of the talk poem arose, according to Antin, from a combination of intentional
experimentalism and the presence of an audio cassette recorder, of which he was an
early user:
Back in 1967 I was invited to give a talk at Cooper Union as part of a series on vari-
ous approaches to critical discourse. The talk I somewhat called ‘The Metaphysics
of Expectation – or the Real Meaning of Genre,’ was an experiment in impro-
vising from notes over very wide ranging areas from the diagnosis of disease to
shifts in molecular theory in the early 19th century, to discursive relations between
the works of two Impressionist painters, to contemporary questions regarding the
newest sculpture. I had lots of notes for what I thought I would talk about and I
wanted to hear how it turned out. So I took a small Sony cassette recorder. In the
end I never looked at my notes and the piece turned out to be the first talk poem,
though I had no name for its genre as yet.48
The Antin talk on analogue cassette tape – a medium that had widespread use by con-
sumers (for buying pre-recorded materials, and for recording from other media such as
LP records and radio) in the 1970s and 80s, and that then fell to the less versatile (read

244 jason camlot
only) medium of the compact disc (CD), but was briefly resuscitated again in the late
1990s due to the popularity of ‘books on tape’ – may sound like many speech events
(academic lectures, self-help seminars, stand-up comedy recordings, audio recorded
transcripts of psychotherapy) that are not poetry. As his origin story reveals, the talk
poem originates in his taping of an off-the-cuff lecture on topics about which he only
had disorganised ideas. The talk poem as a genre, and as an intermedial item, raises
important, foundational, ontological questions about the generic and aesthetic status
of the recorded poem in the twentieth century, and about the difficulty of describing
and identifying the nature of the mediated literary audiotext as a stable, discernible
entity. The complexity of an audiotext’s status as an entity increases when a signal
from an analogue medium (like a cylinder, flat disc record, or tape) is migrated (for the
purpose of convenience or long-term preservation) into a digital form.
Audiotextual Metadata: Describing Recorded Literary

Events across Media Formats
In his writings about the gramophone, Friedrich Kittler has argued that analogue audio
media playback (of the kind I have been discussing) quite literally reproduces the same
sound vibrations that have been stored on the analogue recording substrate (be it tin-
foil, wax, acetate, aluminium, vinyl, mylar, and so on).49 According to this claim, the
playback of analogue media represents a form of ‘time axis manipulation’50 wherein
prior time can be played and manipulated (sped up, slowed down, stopped, started,
interspliced) within a present time axis. In this conception of temporal representation,
the image of time captured by analogue media is fluid and continuous. By comparison,
digital audio media technologies suggest a different manner of representing sound in
time, one that is less fluid but far more transformable than any analogue audio media
could ever be. Digital audio represents sound by encoding it into numerical samples in
sequence. The discrete samplings taken of an audio signal in this mode of media are
microcosmic, usually with many tens of thousands of samples of the signal taken for
each second of sound (for instance, CD audio was usually sampled at a rate of 44,100
times per second). With so many samples in such a short space of time, human ears
cannot discern the spaces between the samples taken. But from media theorist Wolf-
gang Ernst’s perspective, the encoding of sound into samples that the conversion of
analogue audio to digital data entails represents a radically different way of represent-
ing time, and introduces the potential of microtemporalities, tiny, infinitesimal repre-
sentational slices of historical time, a fact that, in Ernst’s words, ‘produces a new form
of temporality in competition to the historical event’.51 Ernst is interested in the rela-
tionship between manifestations of time implicit in the historical media that capture
cultural events and the conceptions of time manifest in cultural history. One of Ernst’s
points on this subject is that contradictions often arise between the arguments about
how time works in our own narratives of cultural events and those about how time
works in the media that have captured the events we study. I raise these ideas about
the difference between analogue and digital media representations of sound to spark
interest in reading further on this subject in works such as Ernst’s Digital Memory and
the Archive and Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format.52
The one point I wish to make in this brief conclusion to my account of media
formats and audiotextual forms concerns the nature of sound as an entity as it exists

across historical media, and especially as it moves from analogue into digital form. I
will address this concern, here, as one of metadata description. Metadata is a struc-
tured form of data that provides descriptive information concerning the contents,
qualities, contexts, and material or other relevant characteristics of other forms of
data (such as a collection of digitised analogue audio recordings). Metadata is often
a first point through which a researcher or listener will discover a digital audio file
online. In addition to describing the nature of the audiotext and artefact, metadata
may also provide important information about the systems and processes of use
surrounding the entity, such as ‘data about where the resource is located, how it
is displayed online, its ownership, its condition’.53 What are the conditions of the
digitised audiotext as an entity? What happens (beyond the remediating process of
digitisation itself) to the audiotext of a wax cylinder, transcription disc, or analogue
tape recording? An enormous amount is potentially gained by digitisation, both in
terms of the long-term preservation of the audio signal (a digital preservation copy
may have the potential to last longer than an audiotape that is decaying from sticky
shed syndrome, or some other material form of degradation), and for the increased
capacity to filter, edit, transform, and circulate that signal as digital data across a
wide range of platforms.
The digitised audiotext greatly increases the possibility that a sound signal will
be separated from its original context of production and use, and thus from its
historical situations as they may have pertained to the media formats that once
stored it. A long documentary recording of a poetry reading event may be cut into
shorter audio files of individual poems – what Charles Bernstein has called ‘singles’,
the creation of which he has called for as a requirement for the digital presentation
of documentary literary recordings in the ‘PennSound Manifesto’ (2003).54 Certain
metadata may accompany that now rather fugitive audio file – the single – but what
can that accompanying metadata tell an interested user about that recording’s his-
torical situation, or about the significance of the previous media format by which the
signal had once been made available, and that archaic media format’s relationship
to the signal’s audiotextual form? What metadata schema exists to help capture the
mediated histories of documentary and other kinds of literary recordings that are
becoming available through the process of digitisation?55 The relationship between
digital audio and other audio formats reveals new and interesting questions about
the relative importance of knowing a literary recording’s media history, and how
best to represent that history in the technical and descriptive metadata that may
accompany a recording that is a digital representation of analogue captured sound.
It raises questions about the nature of the sound recording as a discernible entity, and
whether the thing we are describing is the material artefact, the audio that artefact
holds, or the original event that has been captured and migrated across media. Just
as audio tape once inspired poets to push the boundaries of time, space, and poetic
form, digital audio inspires new kinds of productive uncertainty around the situa-
tions of audiovisual artefacts that document historical performances of the sound,
social contexts, and life of literature. Understanding the media-historical parameters
that first shaped a literary recording, and maintaining an interest in understanding
the implications of the migration of historical audio signals across media, including
into digital formats, enriches the formal analysis of literary sound with historicist
concerns. Such understanding and interest is necessary for the ongoing development
of a literary historical sociology of audiotexts.

246 jason camlot
Notes
1. Jason Camlot, Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford: Stanford
2. Ian Hutchby, ‘Technologies, Texts and Affordances’, Sociology 35, no. 2 (2001): 441–56
(443–4).
3. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Commu-
nication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), 5.
4. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, ‘General Introduction’, in The Socio-
logical Construction of Technological Systems: New Direction in the Sociology and History
of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA;
London: MIT Press, 2012), xlii.
5. Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2012), 7.
6. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2015), 6.
7. See Jason Camlot, ‘Charles Dickens in Three Minutes or Less: Early Phonographic Fiction’,
in Phonopoetics, 71–99.
8. Peter Kirkpatrick, ‘Life and Love and “Lasca”’, Sydney Studies in English 36 (2010):
127–49 (128).
9. Ibid., 127–42.
10. Among Davenport’s recordings of ‘Lasca’ are: 1905 – Edison Gold Moulded Record Cylinder
9087; 1906 – Victor matrix C-3283 12″; 1908 – Victor 12″ 31529 (same as 1906); 1909 –
Edison Amberol Cylinder 296; 1909 – Victor 12″ 35090 C-3283/4; 1910 – Columbia 12″
A-5218; 1910 – U.S. Everlasting Cylinder 1381; 1911 – Indestructible Phonograph Co.
Cylinder 3143; 1913 – Edison Blue Amberol Cylinder 1868; 1920 – Edison Diamond Disc
50575-L. Discographical information from: Tim Brooks, ‘One Hit Wonders of the Acoustic
Era (and a Few Beyond . . .)’, Antique Phonograph Monthly 9, no. 2 (March 1990): 8–13
(8); Brian Rust, The Complete Entertainment Discography: From Mid-1890s to 1942 (New
Rochelle: Arlington House, 1973), 208–9; and the Library of Congress online catalogue.
11. Frank Desprez, ‘Lasca’, in London Society: An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing
Literature for the Hours of Relaxation 42 (1882): 484–6 (484).
12. ‘Edison Gold-Moulded Cylinders (1902–1912)’, UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive, http://cyl-
inders.library.ucsb.edu/history-goldmoulded.php.
13. The recording can be heard online at http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/
id/6043/ (accessed 1 June 2022).
14. The recording can be heard online at https://www.loc.gov/item/00694068/ (accessed 1
March 2017).
15. Geoffrey P. Hull, Thomas Hutchinson, and Richard Strasser, eds, The Music Business and
Recording Industry, 3rd edn (New York: Routledge, 2011), 327.
16. For a short video presentation and explanation of a transcription disc recorder used by
Alan Lomax in the field, held at the Library of Congress, see ‘Did you know Alan Lomax
used this old field recorded to record tens of thousands of folk song [sic]’, YouTube,
2 October 2011, https://youtu.be/ACa7NzesY4w.
17. For an extended discussion of T. S. Eliot’s experiments in recording his own spoken inter-
pretation of ‘The Waste Land’ in Greet’s lab, see Jason Camlot, ‘T.S. Eliot’s Recorded
Experiments in Modernist Verse Speaking’, in Phonopoetics, 137–67. For a detailed
account of Greet’s lab, the technologists behind his recordings, and the making of some
transcription disc records of William Carlos Williams reading his poetry in 1941, see Chris
Mustazza, ‘Provenance Report: William Carlos Williams’s 1942 Reading for the NCTE’,
Jacket2, 21 May 2014, https://jacket2.org/article/provenance-report.

18. Francis Rumsey and Tim McCormick, Sound and Recording, 6th edn (Oxford; Burlington:
Focal Press, 2009), 169.
19. Steve J. Wurtzler, Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass
Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 3–4.
20. Rumsey and McCormick, Sound and Recording, 48–53.
21. J. S. Chitode, Consumer Electronics (Pune: Technical Publications Pune, 2007), 5–7.
22. For a discussion of changes in vocal performance resulting from the introduction of elec-
tronic sound recording media, see Jacob Smith, Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound
Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 81–162.
23. Susan Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio
Recording from Edison to the LP (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 61.
For discussion of the home use of transcription recorders, and the emergence and affor-
dances of the professional electronic recording studio, see ibid., 57–62, 78–92.
24. For a full account of the number of takes Eliot made for each section (‘I. Burial of the
Dead’, ‘II. A Game of Chess’, ‘III. The Fire Sermon’, ‘IV. Death By Water’, and ‘V. What
the Thunder Said’), see Camlot, ‘T.S. Eliot’s Recorded Experiments’, 142–3.
25. The original, working title of the poem that would become The Waste Land was ‘He Do
the Police in Different Voices’. For a recent approach to parsing the different voices in this
poem using computational methods, see Julian Brooke, Adam Hammond, and Graeme
Hirst, ‘Distinguishing Voices in The Waste Land Using Computational Stylistics’, Linguis-
tic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT) 12, no. 2 (2015): 1–41, and their website, ‘He
Do the Police in Different Voices: A Website for Exploring Voices in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land’, http://hedothepolice.org/.
26. T. S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot Reading His Own Poems, 78 rpm mono 12″ records (Washington
DC: Library of Congress Recording Laboratory, [1946] 1949).
27. Jacob Smith, Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2011), 65.
28. Derek Furr, Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Rob-
ert Lowell (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 38.
29. Ibid., 41.
30. Sarah Parry, ‘The Inaudibility of “Good” Sound Editing: The Case of Caedmon Records’,
Performance Research 7, no. 1 (2002): 24–33 (30), quoted in Furr, Recorded Poetry, 41.
31. Doug Crawford, Tape Recording from A to Z (London: Kaye & Ward, 1974), 3–4.
32. Roy Kiyooka, ‘At the Cecil, 1970’, Roy Kiyooka fonds, Special Collections, Simon Fraser
University, digitised audiotape.
33. MsC 14, Gerry Gilbert fonds in the Contemporary Literature Collection, Bennett Library.
Photos by Deanna Fong.
34. Lisa Gitelman, ‘Souvenir Foils: On the Status of Print at the Origin of Recorded Sound’,
in New Media, 1740–1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003), 157–73 (166).
35. Mac Low made extensive demands on venues for equipment and technical support. One
audiovisual technician describes the request for equipment received from Mac Low in
advance of a performance at his university in this way: ‘he sent a letter . . . saying he
needed the following equipment and we looked at it and burst out laughing’. Mark Scho-
field, Interview with Christine Mitchell, 12 September 2013, 00:14:11, https://montreal.
spokenweb.ca/oral-literary-history/mark-schofield-interview-september-12th-2013/.
36. Jackson Mac Low, ‘Jackson Mac Low at SGWU, 1971’, SpokenWeb Montreal, 00:55:27,
https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/jackson-mac-low-at-sgwu-1971/.
37. For an extended discussion of Mac Low’s use of tape media in the creation and perfor-
mance of his poetry, see Michael Nardone, ‘LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN!: Jackson Mac
Low’s Phonopoetics’, Amodern 4 (March 2015), https://amodern.net/article/listen-listen-
listen/#rf19-5542.

248 jason camlot
38. Ibid.
39. For a literary historical account of the Sir George Williams University Poetry Series, see
Jason Camlot, ‘The Sound of Canadian Modernisms: The Sir George Williams University
Poetry Series, 1966–1974’, Journal of Canadian Studies: Revue d’études canadiennes 46,
no. 3 (2012): 28–59. Following the publication of this article I discovered that this series
ran through 1975, and so I correct the date range of the series here. That final year of the
series was not sound recorded.
40. Jason Camlot, ‘Robert Creeley in Transition 1967/1970: Changing Formats for the Public
Poetry Reading’, English Studies in Canada 42, no. 2–3 (2017): 215–45 (223–4).
41. For examples of this migration of impromptu speech from poetry readings into print, see
ibid., 222–3.
42. Stephen Fredman, ‘Creeley’s Contextual Practice: Interviews, Conversations, and Collabora-
tions’, in Form, Power and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work, ed. Stephen Fredman
and Steve McCaffery (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 181–202 (182).
43. For a discussion of Antin’s use of tape as a medium of poetic creation, see Hazel Smith and
Roger Dean, ‘Talking and Thinking: David Antin in Conversation with Hazel Smith and
Roger Dean’, Postmodern Culture 3, no. 3 (1993), http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/
issue.593/antin.593.
44. David Antin, email interview with author, 13 May 2005.
45. Two Antin talk recordings released for purchase are The Principle of Fit 2 (Washington
DC: The Watershed Foundation, 1980); and the archeology of home (Los Angeles: Astro
Artz, 1987).
46. David Antin, Tuning (New York: New Directions, 1984), 54.
47. David Antin, email interview with author, 13 May 2005.
48. Ibid.
49. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-
Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 60.
50. Ibid., 34.
51. Wolfgang Ernst, ‘From Media History to Zeitkritik’, Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6
(2013): 132–46 (142).
52. Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, trans. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2013); Sterne, MP3.
53. Daniel N. Joudrey and Arlene G. Taylor with the assistance of Katherine M. Wisser, The
Organization of Information, 4th edn (Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2018), 181–2.
54. Charles Bernstein, ‘PennSound Manifesto’, PennSound (2003), https://writing.upenn.edu/
pennsound/manifesto.php.
55. The SpokenWeb research network has introduced a metadata schema designed specifically
for the description of collections of literary audio recordings: SpokenWeb Metadata Scheme
and Cataloguing Process, https://spokenweb-metadata-scheme.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.
Select Bibliography
Camlot, Jason, Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford: Stanford
Ernst, Wolfgang, Digital Memory and the Archive, trans. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Feaster, Patrick, ‘Framing the Mechanical Voice: Generic Conventions of Early Sound Record-
ing’, Folklore Forum 32 (2001): 57–102.
Furr, Derek, Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert
Lowell (New York: Palgrave, 2010).

Gitelman, Lisa and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds, New Media, 1740–1915 (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2003).
Kittler, Friedrich A., Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
Schmidt Horning, Susan, Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio Recording
from Edison to the LP (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).
Smith, Jacob, Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures (Berkeley: University of
———, Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2008).
Sterne, Jonathan, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
Wurtzler, Steve J., Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

16
OH-EE-OH-EE-OH-EE-AW-EE-AW!: Sound
Descriptors in the Books of Tarzan as
Facilitators of Presence
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Introduction
I t might seem inadvisable in these morally proscriptive days to focus on Tarzan

as the example for this chapter. After all, the books, and certainly earlier films and
series based upon them, are overtly racist, explicitly white supremacist, supportive
of colonialist and imperialist agendas,1 and the author, Edgar Rice Burroughs, had
a peculiar fascination for, and belief in, the superiority of, of all things, the British
aristocracy. I do, however, have a relevant and highly personal reason for presenting
the Tarzan books as an example of how the conditions for presence can be created
through sound in literary works.
Between 1970 and 1978 I was a child in Kenya where my parents worked as teach-
ers. My family did not have a television and so, regularly each Saturday, I cycled across
the boarding school compound to a friend’s house to watch the morning children’s
programme of Voice of Kenya.2 My recollection is understandably a little hazy, but I
clearly recall enjoying grainy footage of early twentieth-century boxing bouts with such
luminaries as Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Max Schmeling interspersed with more
forgettable syndicated cartoons. But the highlight of the morning, eagerly anticipated
through the preceding week, was that great bull ape, the Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan,
perfectly personified in the athletic physique of the god-like Johnny Weissmuller. The
irony of such films, and their ideological baggage, being broadcast on the national
television service of an African country several years after gaining independence from
Britain were lost on my seven-year-old mind as the films’ cardboard-cut-out characters,
predictable plots, and satisfyingly expected outcomes unfailingly worked their magic
on my pre-adolescent imagination (see N. Frank Ukadike, who specifically mentions
Tarzan in the context of media and entertainment imported into Africa).3
Such childhood memories led me, later in life, to rediscover Tarzan through the
original books. What struck me upon reading them were the sound descriptors used in
a very deliberate and precise manner to paint an imaginary heart of darkness for those
readers who, like Burroughs, had never experienced Africa. An example from the third
of the Tarzan series is this:
From the dense jungles upon either side came the weird night cries of the carnivora –
the maniacal voice of the hyena, the coughing grunt of the panther, the deep and awful
roar of the lion. And with them strange, uncanny notes that the girl could not ascribe
to any particular night prowler – more terrible because of their mystery.4

sound descriptors as facilitators of presence 251
This excerpt bears all the hallmarks of the Burroughs style when it comes to vividly
painting in sound, and such descriptors of sound comprise the immersive technology
used to enable the reader’s presence in the world of Tarzan. There is a consistency
in the use of such technology that is found throughout the series – the sounds of
the African jungle are invariably strange, uncanny (a word that appears frequently in
Burroughs’s writing) and, in their mysteriousness, often impossible to ascribe to any
specific source. This is a fictional externality of ambiguity, unknowingness, and fear
constructed through sound, akin to the application of sound design to horror films and
survival-horror computer games, where sound is used to complement the dark recesses
and limited visual horizons typical of such imaginary worlds. As Conor Reid notes:
‘When Burroughs refers to the jungle, and it is one of the most frequently used nouns
in the entire Tarzan series, he is imagining any tropical, densely forested area and does
not draw any further technical or ecological distinctions.’5 Furthermore, this imagi-
nary world is ‘a vertical one’6 with visual horizons as restricted as in the audiovisual
horror genre; a world in which the limited visual horizon and the unfettered auditory
horizon permit free play to the fearful imagination.
There is a wealth of research and writing on the relationship between sound and
fear (and related emotions such as anxiety, urgency, suspense, terror, horror). For
example: in the design of warning signals and alarms;7 in creating the conditions for
presence in virtual reality;8 the audio design of computer games;9 and sound and cin-
ema.10 Even poetry recognises the fearful power of sound such as this excerpt from
Wordsworth that is particularly apt in the context of this chapter:
‘That’ roar, the prowling lion’s ‘Here I am,’

How fearful to the desert wide!11
So, it is no surprise that sound is a primary resource, coupled with removing vision, for
the creators of horror films and survival-horror computer games, no less so than the
frequent use of sound descriptors in the vertical space of the jungle is for Burroughs.
My academic research has thus far mainly focused on presence and the perception of
sound, and much of my early writing was on the use of sound to create the conditions
for presence or immersion in virtual worlds such as computer games. The motivation for
this chapter proceeds on the assumption that it is possible to apply what I have learned
from the study of sound and presence in computer games to other virtual worlds such as
those found in fictional literary works. After all, both operate by stimulating the imagi-
nation in order to engage the interactant with a constructed reality – ideally to immerse
the player/reader in a world far removed from their mundane reality. In order to test
this assumption, I must first present a short theoretical framework dealing with presence
and sound’s role in presence, which I then use for a brief analysis of presence-facilitating
sound descriptors in the first of the Tarzan novels.
The Framework
Presence
There are almost as many definitions of presence and forms of presence (for example,
subjective/objective presence, self presence, co-presence, social presence, and so on)
as there are articles on presence – I direct the interested reader initially to peruse the

252 mark grimshaw-aagaard
long-running journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments should a his-

tory of the terminological and conceptual debates be sought after – but they all relate in
some way to Marvin Minsky’s original use of the phrase ‘being there’ (see below). The
reader should note that, in contrast to the literature on virtual reality, the computer and
video game literature typically uses the term ‘immersion’ as a synonym for presence. As
noted below, some writers make a distinction between the two terms.
In its early conception, presence, or telepresence, is about robotics and the use of
sensors to feed back the robot’s conditions and operations to a remote operator, such
that it would be as if the robotic arm were merely a flesh-and-blood extension of the
human. As Minsky puts it, the teleoperator would have the ‘sense of “being there”’,12
and so hazardous jobs in nuclear reactors, mining, space exploration, and so forth
could easily be accomplished remotely in a safer, and no doubt more comfortable,
environment.
As computer games gained in popularity through the 1980s and 90s, and develop-
ments in computer graphics and processing power enabled the production of first-
person, 3-dimensional game worlds (the first example of the first-person shooter genre
being Catacomb 3-D (1991)), the term ‘immersion’ began to gain currency. It was,
and still is in many ways, a synonym for presence used in the field of computer games
(their production, marketing, and study), but it owes more of a debt to philosophical
antecedents than the more rationalistic concept of telepresence (thus, immersion or
presence in computer games is an aesthetic experience rather than a perceptual state to
be achieved in order to get a job done). It is closely related to concepts such as engage-
ment, engrossment, absorption, and transportation – being immersed in a work of
art or a novel, for example – and this allows one to go back a little further in history
when attempting to trace the roots of the immersive experience. Thus, the eighteenth-
century philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot could suggest that the artistry and
skill displayed in a painting by Jean-Baptiste Le Prince ‘puts you in the scene’, that
‘one is in the painting’, or, as Fried puts it, that the beholder and painting become ‘a
closed and self-sufficient system’;13 Diderot feels compelled to take part in and extend
the actions depicted in the painting.14 There are clear parallels here to later concep-
tions of presence in digital worlds with Fried describing Diderot’s state of absorption
as requiring an obliteration of the beholder’s presence in front of the painting and the
transportation of ‘the beholder’s physical presence to within the painting’.15
Alison McMahan provides three conditions required for immersion in a computer
game:
the user’s expectations of the game or environment must match the environment’s
conventions fairly closely [. . .] the user’s actions must have a non-trivial impact on
the environment [. . .] the conventions of the world must be consistent.16
Here, the key concepts are expectation, malleability, and consistency. The game player
comes to the game with a set of expectations from experience that the game’s system
should satisfy – in a first-person shooter, for example, there is an expectation of free
movement in all directions, a variety of weaponry, the sounds of combat, and so on.
The game’s environment must be malleable, and, using the same example, the player’s
actions should result in destruction and the death of other characters – a bomb brings
down a building, a bullet results in blood spatter. Finally, there should be no major

surprises – the game’s control mappings, for instance, must never change, but, equally,
the result of firing a weapon should be consistent in its sound, and the player should
never be presented with, say, the sound of a duck quacking rather than the expected
explosive bang.
There are those (I am one of them) who attempt to differentiate between the con-
cepts of presence and immersion for various reasons, not least of which is the extant
confusion and potential for confusion outlined above. But attempts to do so run the
risk of succumbing to technological determinism and even more confusion surround-
ing definitions, understandings, and usage made of terms such as ‘real’, ‘reality’, and
‘realism’. A brief discussion of this is worthwhile, though, because it opens the door to
imagination, a faculty that, as I will show, is necessary to the attainment of presence
in the worlds of literary fiction.
In writing about presence in virtual worlds such as those designed for virtual reality,
Mel Slater defines it as ‘the extent to which the unification of simulated sensory data
and perceptual processing produces a coherent “place” that you are “in” and in which
there may be the potential for you to act’.17 In this, despite a number of questions that
might arise – what exactly is simulated about the sensation that is provided? and at pre-
cisely what point does presence magically occur? – Slater is generally in agreement with
Minsky in that presence is the feeling of being in a place and being able to act within
that place. But Slater also acknowledges the existence of the concept of immersion and
takes pains to distinguish between that and presence. Accordingly, immersion is an
objective measurement of the fidelity of a virtual world’s sensation-delivery mechanism
‘to their equivalent real-world sensory modalities . . . [while] [p]resence is a human
reaction to immersion’.18 The technology of a virtual world can therefore be more or
less immersive depending on its degree of fidelity to an ideal. In answer to the question
of how immersive technology can create the conditions for presence, Slater suggests:
‘One way to induce presence is to increase realism.’19
This last is problematic for several reasons, not least because there is little discus-
sion in the field of virtual reality of what reality and realism are other than similar
appeals to that noted above to the fidelity of virtual-world sensory data to real-world
equivalents. There is a virtual world and then there is the real world, and the distinc-
tion is a given. I might take the view that presence is simply not (currently) possible
in virtual worlds, if presence in virtual worlds must be the same feeling, and achieved
the same way, as in our everyday existence. I could support this view by the fact that
most virtual worlds are purely audiovisual; very rarely is the tactile sensation avail-
able and even less so sensations of smell and taste let alone sensations of temperature
and mass.
Complicating matters further, no matter how present I might be in a computer
game world, I still retain a presence in that other world where my dog barking is able
to force my attention from the game. Gestalts of sensation compete for my attention,
and that attention can be directed, wittingly or unwittingly, from one to the other.
This might be equivalent to the notion of sensory immersion in computer games as
proposed by Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä:20 the sensation from one unified set of
sensations overwhelming those from another set. But this would be a little too reduc-
tionist because it ignores the role of imagination and experience, important faculties
and facilitators of presence that are too often overlooked in the pursuit of fidelity to
‘equivalent real-world sensory modalities’ as the means to presence.

To suggest that presence is impossible in virtual worlds, though, would be unchari-

table and, in my experience of hours-at-a-time playing first-person shooters in my
more youthful days, untrue. What must be at fault, then, are the what and the how of
Slater’s explanation. My own view is (a) that presence in one world or another is an
on–off switch but that the tipping point is directed by focus on one unified set of stim-
uli or another – gestalts of sensation; (b) that fidelity to so-called real-world stimuli is
neither necessary nor possible; and (c) related to (a), that distinctions between virtual
world and real world are mere obfuscations: the origin of a gestalt of sensation is of
little importance.
I hold that reality is the experience of a perceptually formed environment – in other
words, reality is individual and a result of a process of construction. Especially in a
fictional world such as a computer game or novel, Slater’s fidelity ‘to their equivalent
real-world sensory modalities’ is of little importance, and cleaving too much to such an
approach risks straightjacketing the imagination that is required to bring the environ-
ment into effect. I deal further with this below.
So where amidst all this is the locus of presence? What is the ‘there’ in which we
can reach the state of ‘being there’? Clearly the player is never physically in the game,
materially transported into the monitor despite being enveloped in sound from speak-
ers or headphones: ‘there’ is not a real place which I can take a tape measure to. It
is more akin to what Michel Foucault terms a heterotopia and exemplifies with the
metaphor of a mirror. A mirror is a utopia, a nowhere place, but, because it does exist
in externality, it is also a heterotopia exerting a ‘counteraction on the position’ the
viewer occupies, ‘a virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I see myself there,
there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that
enables me to see myself there where I am absent’.21 However, this is a concept that
is difficult to transfer to computer game worlds or novels – a mirror can be measured
and touched, a fictional world cannot – and Foucault originally presented the idea in
a 1967 lecture, long before the advent of computer games. My own conception is that
gestalts of sensation are transformed, with the aid of experience, into perceptual envi-
ronments, the experience of which is our current reality regardless of the source of that
sensation. This heterotopic environment is populated with other-presences – percepts
of those objects and events which are part of my gestalt – and it is in this environment
that our self has presence, the feeling of ‘being there’.22
Sound, Imagination, and Presence

Today, as I write, there are labourers at my home carrying out work.
Let me rephrase that. As I sit at my desk writing, the normal calm and even tenor
of my comfortable and tranquil domestic castle is disrupted jarringly by the yells of
strange men, the constant, annoying twang of otherwise forgettable Eastern European
pop music (all grounding bass removed by a tinny sound system boosted beyond the
point of distortion), the all-too-frequent nerve-shattering clang of metal shovel cast
into empty wheelbarrow, and, underpinning it all, the dark, satanic mill-like snarl and
grind of an earth excavator, incessant in its stone-crunching, monotonous cacophony.
In the best of circumstances, I would find such sounds disturbing to say the least,
especially as pen is put to paper, but, today, they provide a useful example of how the

use of sound descriptors can aid a third party (you, the reader) in, however fleetingly
and vicariously, experiencing something close to my current reality. The key to this is
how the perceptual environment is formed: a combination of sensation, experience,
and imagination.
There is a neurological foundation to imagination that is well researched under the
banners of aural and visual imagery (these two senses being the most thoroughly stud-
ied).23 Both forms of imagery are important for a discussion of sound descriptors in
literary fiction – the only relevant input sensation when reading is visual, but the printed
word is all the immersive technology that is required for our cognition to start fashion-
ing an environment in which to be present. Jesper Svenbro traces the genesis of the
written word as immersive technology (not his phrase but the parallel is valid) back to
the late sixth century bce, the dawn of the concept of silent reading: ‘the internalization
of the voice [. . .] corresponds to [. . .] “letters that speak,” [words] “speak,” they “cry
out” or even “sing.” The eye sees the sound. A written page can now become a scene.’24
Thus, we can conjure up particular percepts of image and sound where there are no
current sensations in those modalities.25 In the auditory modality, there is a wealth of
neurological evidence for this faculty whereby there is activation of the auditory cor-
tices of the brain in the absence of sound waves if a recognisable action is observed.26
For example, an audio-less film of a hammer forcefully striking an anvil produces
auditory activity similar to that shown when the audio of the event is present. This
requires familiarity with at least the intensity and amplitude envelope and the fre-
quency spectrum to be expected when two hard objects are seen colliding, but the
aural imagery is even more precise if the perceiver has experience of the sound of metal
striking metal or even of a hammer smashing down onto an anvil.
Equally, the analogue to aural imagery, visual imagery, can be triggered by the per-
ception of a sound source and its location in space. The pitter-patter of footsteps in a
computer game where there is no source to be seen on the screen allows for the position-
ing of the source behind my self’s presence in the environment, and so allows me to act
within the, in effect, 2-dimensionality of the virtual world as if it were 3-dimensional. In
this case, ‘footsteps’ is an audiovisual percept in my environment originating from sound
wave sensation and the visual imagery that is triggered in the absence of appropriate
light wave sensation. As with aural imagery, this functions regardless of the source of the
sensation – activity in my home space, a film, or a computer game.
The fashioning of percepts in the environment from aural and visual imagery is a
phenomenon that is a constant and typically involuntary process. So much so that we
could not be present without it. I sense a sound wave emanating from some direction
in relation to where I sit, I fashion the percept ‘car’ and perhaps imagine its direction
of travel and speed or even the type of vehicle. The same with aeroplanes overhead,
birds in the garden, doors shutting and family moving about in my home, and very
quickly these percepts coalesce into other-presences in the environment in which my
self is present and at the centre. Being present allows for action in externality – I can
walk towards a family member who is other-present in my environment.
To return to realism in virtual worlds (as fidelity to ‘real-world sensory modalities’)
and reality as the momentary experience of a perceptual environment, imagination’s
role is to fill in the gaps left by the shortcomings of the immersive technology of such
worlds. Imagination plays this role in shaping the environment even in our everyday
lives – hearing footsteps behind me, I can form visual imagery of a person walking

towards me (complete with footwear, floor surface, speed, weight, and so on) – but
it has even more importance where a variety of modalities are missing (such as tac-
tile, gustatory, and olfactory) and where aspects of a fictional world are created for
emotional effect. For further details on this, I direct the reader to other writings,27
but, here, a brief example from the world of cinema suffices: anyone who has ever
heard a SPAS shotgun fired in real life will know that it is nothing like the sound FX
of that same shotgun in the film Terminator 2.28 And yet, the constructed sound FX is
far more visceral than the original, and any subsequent attempts in later audiovisual
worlds to retain fidelity to the original, to be realistic, sound puny and emotionless by
comparison; so much so that the constructed sound FX is now much more verisimili-
tudinous in a fictional context than an authentic recording would be. As Michel Chion
has noted, there are sound conventions in cinema and ‘the impression of realism [these
conventions convey becomes] our reference for reality itself’.29
A final note will answer the question as to why we use imagination in the first place.
The world that is external to ourselves, externality, is fundamentally ambiguous, and
ambiguity begs resolution within our framework of experience about that externality.
The sound waves of footsteps, without knowledge of the fundamental aural form of
such an event, could have any number of meanings, resulting in any number of per-
cepts in my environment. There is a certain rhythm to footsteps, a certain amplitude
envelope and frequency spectrum that can be matched to our experience in order to
resolve the inherent ambiguity – any variations merely refine the resolution further
in terms of speed, weight, direction, even potential threat or specific person. If the
gestalt of sensation we receive from externality is lacking in its details or complement
of modalities, imagination is drawn upon even more in order to fashion some form
of percept to provide other-presence in our environment. The requirement to resolve
ambiguity, the existential need to know whether the sound I hear represents a threat or
not, is the trigger to combine the sensory input with experience and imagination and
so fashion an environment in which our self can be present.30
As already noted, though, literature uses only visual sensation in the first instance –
light reflected off the page in front of me creates dark and light patterns from which
my experienced brain is able to form structure. To return to my current situation. The
single sentence at the start of this section provides little grist from which to create a
vibrant environment replete with other-presences. The sentence is over almost before
it has been read, and that, coupled with the lack of descriptive information, gives
limited opportunity for the imagination to work on what little is provided before the
writing moves on. There is no grit in the oyster from which, over time, to fashion a lus-
trous pearl that is far more engaging than its predecessor. What follows that sentence,
though, does, I trust, slowly provide you, the reader, with enough descriptive language
for you to imagine to some extent the environment I am present in and to thus fashion
a simulacrum of that environment for your self to be present in.
Tarzan of the Apes

In building up to this analysis of presence-facilitating sound descriptors in the Tarzan
novels, I have sketched a framework for such analysis drawn from my past research
on the relationship between computer game sound and presence in the game’s virtual

world. There are some difficulties, as noted, in using a framework derived from one
field of study within another – novels use only the printed word, for instance, and so
do not make use of sound waves as sensory input. One might also question where the
possibility is for the reader’s action in the fictional world. Nevertheless, both computer
games and novels leverage their resources to engage the player or reader in fictional
worlds through a combination of the player’s or reader’s imagination and experience.
The main points of the framework are:
• The immersive technology of the medium delivers a gestalt of sensation which, the
gestalt being apprehended and attended to, provides the basis for the construction
of a perceptual environment.
• The self is present in the environment, a heterotopia (the fictional world) populated
with percepts.
• Percepts, the other-presences in our environment, are formed from sensory input
moulded by our imagination and experience.
• This experience is the knowledge we have gained of externality throughout life and
is used to resolve the inherent ambiguity of externality.
• The sensory input that ultimately leads to presence need not have fidelity to source –
aural and visual imagery fill in enough details to form percepts if the form of the
input can be roughly matched to experience – but must match expectation and be
consistent enough to provide stability to the environment, the ultimate form of
which is malleable as the player’s or reader’s imagination and knowledge allow.
To illustrate Burroughs’s use of sound descriptors, and to explain how they are instru-
mental for the reader’s feeling of presence in the imaginary world of the Tarzan series,
I now delve deeper into the first book in the series: Tarzan of the Apes.31 My approach
has been to extract sentences with sound descriptors that, in particular, depict the loca-
tions and the experiences of the events detailed throughout the book. Thus, I have not
made note of descriptors of the tenor of a human voice, for example, concentrating
instead on those that characterise the externality of Tarzan’s world for the benefit of
the readers.
The first point that can be noted is that the use of sound descriptors is markedly
different where such locations and experiences are in the jungle compared with those
that take place outside of it. With few exceptions, in those chapters that are not set in
Tarzan’s familiar world there are no notable sound descriptors of the type I am interested
in. These include chapter 1 (the action takes place mainly on a sailing ship), chapter 17
(the departure of another ship stranding a party of Americans on the beach), the first part
of chapter 18 (a found letter detailing the historical provenance of a chest of treasure),
chapter 25 (Tarzan’s possible genesis is suggested to him by the Frenchman D’Arnot),
and the final chapters 27 and 28 (Tarzan seeks out Jane in America). The sound descrip-
tors used here are scarce and mundane, depicting sounds that American readers of the
time might be expected to be familiar and comfortable with. Thus: ‘[A] week later, Rob-
ert Canler drew up before the farmhouse in his purring six cylinder.’32 Even the sound
descriptor itself is redolent of the known, cosy world of the reader, relaxed in a favourite
armchair, toes toasting before a fireplace, and a cat curled up in one’s lap as the novel
resolves with the hero and other (white) characters snug in the secure, civilised environs
of (white) America.

In chapter 26 (Tarzan is schooled in the ways of Western civilisation), the action

takes place at a colonial outpost, and there are sound descriptors aplenty here but, in
the main, they relate to an excursion back to the jungle that Tarzan takes and are used
to describe the fearful perception of the colonialists at the sounds they hear: ‘“God!
What was that?” suddenly cried one of the party, an Englishman, as Tarzan’s savage cry
came faintly to their ears.’33 The one notable exception in the chapter is this sentence:
Gradually he became accustomed to the strange noises and the odd ways of civi-
lization, so that presently none might know that two short months before, this
handsome Frenchman in immaculate white ducks, who laughed and chatted with
the gayest of them, had been swinging naked through primaeval forests to pounce
upon some unwary victim, which, raw, was to fill his savage belly.34
Here, Burroughs is perhaps drawing attention not only to diverse worlds of sound,
each unfamiliar to unaccustomed ears because the sounds are not a mundane part
of their civilisation, but also to the view that sound, especially language, separates
civilisation from savagery. In this, Burroughs shares something in common with the
ancient Greeks and Romans who labelled barbarians those whose language, to cul-
tivated ears at least, was nothing more than a stuttering, stammering sound (namely
‘barbar’). Although not originally a pejorative term, ‘barbarian’ came to be associated
with savagery and a lack of civilisation, an association particularly pronounced in the
Anglo-Saxon tradition (see Bruce R. Smith for further on this35) of which Burroughs
was, in his admiration for the British aristocracy, clearly a worshipper.
In all other chapters, sound descriptors are used freely to describe the soundscape
of the imagined African jungle, not from the aural perspective of Tarzan but from that
of the fictional Western interlopers and for the benefit of (the original) American read-
ers. To list just a few, these include: ‘But now he heard, outside, the sounds of many
voices, and long mournful howls, and mighty wailing’;36 ‘No, the white man did not
hear. Sheeta was crouching for the spring, and then, shrill and horrible, there rose
from the stillness of the jungle the awful cry of the challenging ape, and Sheeta turned,
crashing into the underbrush’;37 ‘Clayton came to his feet with a start. His blood ran
cold. Never in all his life had so fearful a sound smote upon his ears’;38 ‘Sabor emit-
ted a frightful shriek’;39 ‘“What a frightful sound!” cried Jane, “I shudder at the mere
thought of it. Do not tell me that a human throat voiced that hideous and fearsome
shriek”’;40 and ‘Every sound she magnified into the stealthy creeping of a sinuous and
malignant body.’41
Immersive technology is the objective means by which sensation is delivered to the
perceiver, leading, ideally, to the attainment of a feeling of presence. In a novel, the
only means of directly conveying sensation to the reader is the written word; the visual
modality, then, is the primary tool Burroughs has at his disposal. Where the immer-
sive technology of a computer game, for instance, can deliver photo-realistic imagery
and authentic recordings that are indexical (thus, fidelity ‘to their real-world sensory
modalities’), descriptive words can only be iconic. As noted previously, though, it
would be fallacious to suggest that only indexicality can induce presence; the shotgun
in Terminator 2 has little fidelity to source and neither, for that matter, do tin sheets
and coconut shells as theatrical stand-ins for thunder and galloping horses. None of
this calls a halt to the willing suspension of disbelief. Thus, it is entirely possible that

words, their direct meaning obfuscated under layers of convention and iconography,
can function as immersive technology. The sources which the words as immersive tech-
nology describe need only be suggested for the reader’s imagination and knowledge to
do the rest.
Two of the conditions for immersion (that is, presence) furnished by McMahan
are present in the novel. Stock sound descriptors are used time and again in briskly
economical fashion – strange, uncanny, terrible, savage, shrill, horrible, awful, fearful,
frightful, hideous, fearsome. Stock words and phrases demonstrate consistency and
this feeds into the reader’s expectations, creating a rudimentary framework within
which to ever more quickly navigate the externality of the novel and transform it to
an environment.
But expectations are also satisfied in another way for Burroughs’s American read-
ers. In the second decade of the twentieth century, at the tail end of the nineteenth
century’s doctrine of manifest destiny as it morphed into American imperialist and
colonialist ambitions and feeling immune from the storm clouds gathering over
Europe (to use a stock phrase), such readers would have felt confident and secure in
their God-given superiority and civilising mission.42 As noted by others (for example,
Jeff Berglund and Reid43), the Tarzan novels are a product of their time and reflect the
period’s fundamental binarism – ‘the modern and the primitive, civilised and savage,
urban and wild’.44 These binarisms are perfectly represented in Tarzan of the Apes not
only explicitly in the subject matter and plot but also in the use of sound descriptors.
Hence, the stock phrases are icons of the right-hand side of each binarism, all that is
unknown, unseen, to be feared and abjected. Referring to several of the Tarzan novels,
Reid suggests that the coast is ‘an intermediary space between the African jungle and
the wider world, the coast provides intelligibility and transparency to those trapped
within an obscure and mysterious landscape’.45 It is where Europeans and Americans
confront the boundary between civilisation and savagery. Although Reid overlooks the
use of sound descriptors to mark this liminality, such uses are abundant in the novel.
In chapter 2, Tarzan’s future parents contemplate their impending marooning on the
African shore:
Before dark the barkentine lay peacefully at anchor upon the bosom of the still,
mirror-like surface of the harbour [. . .] From the dark shadows of the mighty forest
came the wild calls of savage beasts – the deep roar of the lion, and, occasionally,
the shrill scream of a panther. The woman shrank closer to the man in terror-
stricken anticipation of the horrors lying in wait for them in the awful blackness of
the nights to come, when they should be alone upon that wild and lonely shore.46
And, during their first night ashore, ‘[s]carcely had they closed their eyes than the ter-
rifying cry of a panther rang out from the jungle behind them.’47 As in the audiovisual
horror genre, it is the shift from the visual to the aural modality that triggers the terror
in the dark.
To answer to the question I posed above – regarding the possibility for action in the
fictional world on the part of the reader – this relates to McMahan’s third condition,
namely ‘the user’s actions must have a non-trivial impact on the environment’: the
environment is malleable in that the basic framework set out by the writer is refined
and further shaped by the reader’s imagination and experience. Thus, the possibility

for presence depends on the quality of the environment which, in turn, depends on the
reader’s approach.
My academic approach for this study, explicitly seeking out in Tarzan of the Apes rel-
evant sound descriptors, militates against presence in Tarzan’s world. But I initially began
by reading the books again for pure escapist pleasure, allowing my imagination, drawn
in part from childhood experience, free rein. As a privileged child growing up in Africa,
I experienced first-hand and many times the externalities described by Burroughs for his
American readers. Although there exist no jungles in Kenya (and other African countries
I later lived in) of the type that Burroughs describes, and lions, in any case, are denizens
of the savannah, sounds of the creatures he writes about became an intimate and familiar
part of my world such that, even today, many years later and living in Denmark, I can
easily aurally imagine them. Thus, when I read of the ‘frightful shriek’ that Sabor emits,
my cognition cannot help but use that descriptor and my store of experience to furnish an
appropriate percept in my environment. Of course, a lioness does not shriek in the way
that a child or macaw might more accurately be described as shrieking, but my experi-
ence is rummaged through to bring forth the more appropriate, but no less impressive,
auditory imagery of a snarling half-roar that I know from direct experience to be voiced
by such a creature. Burroughs’s overwhelming, almost incantatory, and consistent use of
sound descriptors when conjuring up the African jungle and its creatures for his readers
soon populates my environment, such that it rapidly gains the necessary other-presences
for my self to attain presence among. As the creator of that environment, I act within and
upon the environment by providing ever more details from my experience. Thus, I can
picture Sabor, crouched in a defensive posture, a snarl on her face as she is cornered, and
so can go even further in fashioning my environment than can many other readers. It is
not necessary for Burroughs, in my case at least, to use so many words – just the phrase
‘frightful shriek’. And this brings me to my next point.
Throughout this chapter, I have made use of the term ‘percept’. As I have described
it, a percept is an other-presence in the environment which results from the use of
imagination and experience to resolve the ambiguity of externality.48 But, in the con-
text of this chapter, it is also useful to conceive of the percept as a metonym. Each
percept carries with it a lot of baggage, and some of that baggage is highly personal
while some is shared across groups of readers. To return to Sabor’s ‘frightful shriek’,
the percept that results has a host of associations, some of which might trigger the
creation of other percepts, refining and adding detail to the reader’s environment. For
me, with my experience, not only are there visual and aural imagery directly related
to lions, but there are also other percepts drawn from my childhood such as the pale
yellow savannah, the shimmering heat, the smell of the red earth after rain, the aural
imagery of the still vividly remembered high-pitched, frightful squeal of a warthog
wriggling in toothed jaws. All of this metonymic association enriches my environment
and makes it all the easier to be present within it.
And this brings me to the naïve American reader for whom Burroughs originally
wrote. By naïve, I mean unlikely to have had the experiences I have had and living at
a time before audiovisual media was able to import daily the sounds and images of
the African jungle into American homes. What are such readers to make of Sabor’s
‘frightful shriek’ having little or no experience of the authentic roar of a lioness?
The unknown is an ambiguity that must perforce be resolved by the imagination, an
imagination easily triggered and directed by fear. Restricting vision and so bringing

sound FX to the fore is a favourite trick of film and game producers working in the
horror genre. But an organic sound such as a shriek, and the aural imagery accompa-
nying it when sounds or words alone are used, triggers something primaeval within
us. In a study of the ‘chilling’ effect of the sound of fingernails scraping across a
blackboard, the authors speculate that the acoustic qualities of this uncomfortable
sound are similar to the warning calls of macaque monkeys, suggesting a link to
our primate ancestors’ responses to predators in the vicinity that remains a vestigial
presence in modern humans’ brains.49 As with such sound and the audio design of
horror films and survival-horror computer games, the auditory imagery provoked
by the writing populates the reader’s environment with the other-presences of dimly
glimpsed, shadowy shapes, lurking and threatening in the primaeval murkiness of the
ecology of fear. For Burroughs’s original readers, this is only compounded by their
imaginations working with the framework of the civilised–savage binarisms of the
period where civilisation and savagery respectively are metonyms for everything that
is known, homely, familiar, and safe and for everything that is unknown, foreign,
exotic, and to be feared.
It is in the unknown darkness of a visually restricted jungle that the sound descrip-
tors used so frequently and consistently by Burroughs prove their worth: utilising
the imagination through a canny use of uncanny sound descriptors, the reader is, as
Diderot might put it, transported to the jungle that forms with the reader ‘a closed and
self-sufficient system’, the environment in which they become present.
Notes
1. To a point. Chapter 21 of Tarzan of the Apes has the following: ‘To add to the fiendishness
of their cruel savagery was the poignant memory of still crueller barbarities practised upon
them and theirs by the white officers of that arch hypocrite, Leopold II of Belgium, because
of whose atrocities they had fled the Congo Free State – a pitiful remnant of what once had
been a mighty tribe.’ Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (Project Gutenberg, 2021),
chapter XXI, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/78/78-h/78-h.htm.
2. Since 1989, Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.
3. N. Frank Ukadike, ‘Anglophone African Media’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary
Media, 36 (1991): 74–80.
4. Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Beasts of Tarzan (Project Gutenberg, 1993), chapter IX, https://
www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/85/pg85-images.html.
5. Conor Reid, ‘“This Savage World Was an Open Book”: Genre and Landscape in Edgar Rice
Burroughs’s Tarzan Series’, Journal of Popular Culture 50, no. 1 (2017): 147–62 (148).
6. Ibid., 149.
7. Judy Edworthy, Sarah Loxley, and Ian Dennis, ‘Improving Auditory Warning Design: Rela-
tionship between Warning Sound Parameters and Perceived Urgency’, Human Factors 33,
no. 2 (1991): 205–31.
8. Stéphane Bouchard, Julie St-Jacques, Geneviève Robillard, and Patrice Renaud, ‘Anxiety
Increases the Feeling of Presence in Virtual Reality’, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual
Environments 17, no. 4 (2008): 376–91.
9. Tom Alexander Garner, Game Sound from Behind the Sofa: An Exploration into the Fear
Potential of Sound & Psychophysiological Approaches to Audio-Centric, Adaptive Game-
play (PhD thesis, University of Aalborg, 2013).
10. Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror
Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

11. William Wordsworth, ‘On the Power of Sound’ (1828), https://www.bartleby.com/145/

ww746.html (accessed 6 September 2022).
12. Marvin Minsky, ‘Telepresence’, Omni (1980): 45–51 (48).
13. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 121, 130, 131–2.
14. Ibid., 121.
15. Ibid., 131–2.
16. Alison McMahan, ‘Immersion, Engagement, and Presence: A New Method for Analyzing
3-D Video Games’, in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard
Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003), 67–86 (68–9).
17. Mel Slater, ‘A Note on Presence Terminology’, Presence Connect 3, no. 3 (2003): 2.
18. Ibid., 1–2.
19. Ibid., 4.
20. Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä, ‘Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience:
Analysing Immersion’, presented at Changing Views – Worlds in Play (16–20 June 2005).
21. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias’, trans. from Architecture, Mouvement,
Continuité 5 (1984): 46–9.
22. For a detailed explanation of this, I refer the reader to Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, ‘The
Importance of Sound to the Formation of Presence’, in The Oxford Handbook of Video
Game Music and Sound, ed. Will Gibbons and Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (New York:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023).
23. Sometimes referred to as auditory imagery/auralisation and visualisation respectively.
24. Jesper Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet
Lloyd (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 5.
25. A modality is a sensory-perceptual channel relating to hearing, vision, smell, and so on.
26. For example, Nico Bunzeck, Torsten Wuestenberg, Kai Lutz, Hans-Jochen Heinze, and
Lutz Jancke, ‘Scanning Silence: Mental Imagery of Complex Sounds’, NeuroImage 26, no.
4 (2005): 1119–27; David J. M. Kraemer, C. Neil Macrae, Adam E. Green, and William
M. Kelley, ‘Musical Imagery: Sound of Silence Activates Auditory Cortex’, Nature 434,
no. 7030 (2005): 158; Julien Voisin, Aurélie Bidet-Caulet, Olivier Bertrand, and Pierre
Fonlupt, ‘Listening in Silence Activates Auditory Areas: A Functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging Study’, The Journal of Neuroscience 26, no. 1 (2006): 273–8; and Andrew J. King,
‘Auditory Neuroscience: Activating the Cortex without Sound’, Current Biology 16, no. 11
(2006): R410–11.
27. For example, Karen Collins and Bill Kapralos, ‘Auditory Reality and Virtuality: Is Space
the Final Audio Frontier for Games?’; and Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, ‘Video Game Sound
Design and the Fetish of Realism’, both in The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music
and Sound, ed. Will Gibbons and Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, forthcoming 2023).
28. James Cameron, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991. See Shotgun Sound Design Decon-
structed from Terminator 2 for an explanation of the sound FX, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=tiq-oBeEn1M (accessed 28 August 2022).
29. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 108.
30. For more on ambiguity and presence, see Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, ‘Ambiguity and
Vagueness in Video Game Sound’, in The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and
Sound, ed. Will Gibbons and Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (New York: Oxford University
Press, forthcoming 2023).
31. Originally serialised in 1912 in the American pulp magazine The All-Story then published
in book form in 1914.
32. Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes, 315–16.
33. Ibid., 302.

34. Ibid., 297.

35. Bruce R. Smith, ‘Listening to the Wild Blue Yonder: The Challenges of Acoustic Ecology’,
in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford:
Berg, 2004), 21–41.
36. Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes, 109.
37. Ibid., 153.
38. Ibid., 154.
39. Ibid., 166.
40. Ibid., 169.
41. Ibid., 227.
42. Not to absolve Europeans of their share of guilt.
43. Jeff Berglund, ‘Write, Right, White, Rite: Literacy, Imperialism, Race, and Cannibalism in
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes’, Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (1999):
53–76; Reid, ‘“Savage World”’.
44. Reid, ‘“Savage World”’, 150.
45. Ibid.
46. Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes, 23–4.
47. Ibid., 30.
48. One can, of course, use the pure force of imagination and experience to fashion a percept.
49. D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake, and James Hillenbrand, ‘Psychoacoustics of a Chilling
Sound’, Perception & Psychophysics 39, no. 2 (1986): 77–80 (80).
Select Bibliography
Berglund, Jeff, ‘Write, Right, White, Rite: Literacy, Imperialism, Race, and Cannibalism in Edgar
Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes’, Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (1999): 53–76.
Ermi, Laura and Frans Mäyrä, ‘Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience: Analys-
ing Immersion’, presented at Changing Views – Worlds in Play (16–20 June 2005).
Foucault, Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias’, trans. from Architecture, Mouvement, Con-
tinuité, no. 5 (1984): 46–9.
Fried, Michael, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
Grimshaw-Aagaard, Mark, ‘The Importance of Sound to the Formation of Presence’, in The
Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound, ed. Will Gibbons and Mark Grim-
shaw-Aagaard (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023).
Halpern, D. Lynn, Randolph Blake, and James Hillenbrand, ‘Psychoacoustics of a Chilling
Sound’, Perception & Psychophysics 39, no. 2 (1986): 77–80.
McMahan, Alison, ‘Immersion, Engagement, and Presence: A New Method for Analyzing 3-D
Video Games’, in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron
(New York: Routledge, 2003), 67–86.
Minsky, Marvin, ‘Telepresence’, Omni (1980): 45–51.
Reid, Conor, ‘“This Savage World Was an Open Book”: Genre and Landscape in Edgar Rice
Burroughs’s Tarzan Series’, Journal of Popular Culture 50, no. 1 (2017): 147–62.
Slater, Mel, ‘A Note on Presence Terminology’, Presence Connect 3, no. 3 (2003).
Smith, Bruce R., ‘Listening to the Wild Blue Yonder: The Challenges of Acoustic Ecology’, in
Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford:
Berg, 2004), 21–42.
Svenbro, Jesper, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell

Part V:
Literature, War, Industry

17
An Auditory History of Early

Modernity: Listening to Enlightenment
and Industry in Britain, 1700–1900
Peter Denney
I n Britain, the arrival of modernity was frequently associated with sound. A water-
shed was reached in the nineteenth century, when the noise of industrialisation
came to be heard as a defining feature of modern life.1 For some commentators, the
unprecedented amplification of sound, generated by the factory, the railway, and other
innovations, prompted a celebration of power and progress. Other listeners, however,
regarded industrial noise with considerable anxiety as a form of sonic oppression,
which silenced human voices and damaged auditory environments. Literature, espe-
cially pastoral imagery, shaped the aural meanings attached to these negative expe-
riences of industrialisation.2 In the same period, new acoustic technologies like the
stethoscope and gramophone encouraged among the professional classes a culture of
close listening, which contributed to a heightened sensitivity to loud, unwanted sound,
along with an accompanying attempt to control urban sonic spaces.3 This ultimately
led, in 1864, to the British Parliament passing a law to limit street noise by enforcing
the removal of itinerant musicians.
The problem of street noise, however, had likewise been an issue in the eighteenth
century.4 During this earlier period, sound also expressed the pleasures and pains of
modern urban life. Well before the noise of industrialisation became associated with
a new social and economic order, which transformed work patterns, living condi-
tions, and class relations, the sonic effects of modernity generated substantial debate
and examination. Many commentators, for example, emphasised the importance of
spaces of regulated sound such as the coffee house and the urban pleasure ground for
practising a revamped form of civility suitable to Britain’s emergence as a commercial
and imperial power. Contrariwise, some critics condemned these spaces, centred in
London, for licensing sensory confusion, whether the noise of political dissension, vul-
gar unmusicality, or hedonistic luxury.5 From either perspective, however, liberty and
refinement were interpreted as acoustic experiences requiring discrimination between
desirable and unwanted sound in the performance of enlightened selfhood. Religious
movements, such as Methodism, similarly provoked interest in the codes of sonic
behaviour, of singing and preaching, needed to ensure effective management of the
emotions.6 In all these ways, the vexed attitude to noise in the Victorian era not only
resulted from the new kind of amplified, mechanical sound brought about by industri-
alisation; its origins also lay in the ideal of the bounded self,7 which was both shaped
and challenged by the urban auditory environments of the British Enlightenment.

268 peter denney
This chapter examines changing valuations of sound in Britain in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on recent case studies in the history of sound, it
focuses, in particular, on several spaces and concepts, which were paradigmatic of
distinctive phases of modernity, and which also possessed strong acoustic significance.
Coffee houses and pleasure gardens in the eighteenth century, and factories and streets
in the nineteenth, for instance, are shown to be key sites where shifting distinctions
between sound, noise, and quietness were explored, negotiated, and flouted in the for-
mation of modern identities. Specifically, the fashioning of sonic identities appropriate
for a modern nation necessitated an emphasis on regulated auditory environments.
Such spaces were also important in literature, whether Enlightenment periodical writ-
ing or Victorian fiction. While the chapter pays special attention to class, it recognises,
too, how class intersected with gender and race in shaping ‘ways of hearing’,8 from
polite conversation to music appreciation. In addition, by taking into account a long
arc of modernity, it argues that many conflicts over sound, which became a hallmark
of Victorian culture, had antecedents in the rather different auditory environments of
the Enlightenment world. Unlike the nineteenth-century focus on mechanical noise,
commentators in the eighteenth century concentrated on the sonic links between
modernity, civility, and sociability. And yet, as we shall see, these earlier ways of under-
standing sound were repurposed in later debates about industrialisation.
Listening to Enlightenment
During his stay in London, in 1727, the Swiss tourist César De Saussure recorded that
Englishmen were ‘taciturn by nature, especially when compared to the French’. Even
in a tavern, remarked De Saussure, there was ‘so little talk’ that it was possible to ‘hear
a fly buzz’ in the ‘long pauses’ that ‘interrupted’ conversation.9 Foreign visitors in the
eighteenth century were virtually unanimous in regarding taciturnity as a key charac-
teristic of English people, both men and women.10 Despite locating this behaviour in a
tavern rather than a more salubrious venue, however, De Saussure thought such trun-
cated conversation applied mainly to members of polite society. For, throughout his
trip, the labouring classes of London were depicted as ‘insolent’, ‘quarrelsome’, fond
of swearing, and enamoured of outdoor recreations, in which violence was accompa-
nied by ‘noise’.11 And yet, if a taciturn disposition was a marker of elite status, it also
had the potential to jeopardise participation in conversation, a practice vital to the
performance of politeness.
The ideal of politeness was a distinctively modern form of civility. It emerged in
Britain in the early eighteenth century as a means to manage the frictions of an increas-
ingly urban, commercial society. This polite identity was initially promoted in peri-
odicals, which identified in metropolitan life the basis of a new system of morality.
Most famously, in the Tatler and the Spectator, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
developed a new literary genre, the periodical essay, where a detached, fictional per-
sona provided illustrations of politeness and its violation in accounts of a wide range
of everyday topics directed to a broad constituency of readers, from the modestly
prosperous to the fabulously wealthy. For the most part, the role of sound in polite
society featured only indirectly in these Enlightenment ‘lifestyle magazines’.12 Never-
theless, it was prominent in discussions of music, conversation, and activities involving
public assembly. Befitting the irenic tone of the periodicals, the violation of acoustic

an auditory history of early modernity 269
norms, whether raucous festivity or inappropriate laughter, was generally treated as an

object of gentle satire rather than bitter invective. In their essays, Addison and Steele
attempted to prevent political rancour by uniting the middle class and landed gentry
around a shared commitment to sociability and cultural refinement. Acting courte-
ously and tastefully in company was held to be conducive to the political stability
necessary for economic growth.13
At this time, London was a centre of international trade with a bustling, booming
population, but initially it was not known to be a particularly polite city. The streets
were crowded, and grime pervaded even fashionable squares.14 In the 1710s and 20s,
the spread of politeness had to compete with a maelstrom of noise, as the metropolis
reverberated with, among other sonic phenomena, the clatter of coaches and carts,
the clamour of crowds, the din of labourers undertaking manual work, and the loud
voices of ballad singers and street vendors. Throughout the day, wrote John Gay,
‘all the Streets with passing Cries resound[ed]’, while the ‘Pavement’ thudded with
‘trampling Feet’.15 In the Spectator, edited by Addison and Steele, an irritated citizen
argued for the regulation of street cries partly because such noise evoked disorder and
partly because it violated standards of aesthetic decorum. The presence of these largely
plebeian sounds in London obviously offended many affluent members of society, but
they were tolerated as an unavoidable, if not desirable, aspect of modern urban life.
Accordingly, objections to street noise during this period were frequently represented
in a tone of wry amusement rather than furious indignation. In addition, no campaign
was waged to introduce laws to eliminate the sounds of hawkers and popular musi-
cians.16 Still, the distaste for plebeian noise intensified among wealthy residents of
London as they embraced a polite identity, which separated them from their social
inferiors. This widening social distance contributed to the growing geographical seg-
regation of the metropolis into rich and poor districts. In consequence, such districts
were depicted as possessing different acoustic profiles. At a time of political crisis in
1779, Elizabeth Montagu opined that discontented inhabitants ‘raved’ in the slums of
St Giles, while complaints were ‘softly whisper’d’ in the fashionable West End, with
its elegant mansions and tidy streets.17 And yet the location of shopping precincts
and other key venues meant that elite city-dwellers could not shield themselves from
unwelcome aural shocks. Instead, sociability was sought in designated spaces, where
protocols or fees aimed to prevent disagreeable sonic behaviour from ruining the plea-
sures of politeness.
In the eighteenth century, anyone with a pretension to gentility had to master the
art of polite conversation, striking a correct balance between speaking and listening.
Conversation was crucial to civility and its related programme of modernity, for it was
held to facilitate a smooth, amiable interaction between strangers in an urban world,
where differences could easily lead to misunderstanding or conflict. The main goal of
conversation, most people agreed, was to be agreeable in company. For Addison and
Steele, a vital feature of polite conversation was informality. In their opinion, as noted
in 1711, an ‘unconstrained Carriage, and a certain Openness of Behaviour’ were essen-
tial signs of ‘Good Breeding’.18 Importantly, this informal conversation neither licensed
nor repressed the emotions; rather, it provided a context in which they could be guided
by reason, expressed as refined affections rather than unruly passions. Despite such
seeming casualness, a large number of guidebooks were published in the eighteenth
century to teach the rules of polite conversation to individuals keen to affirm their

270 peter denney
gentility.19 These rules were countless. Indeed, there were so many of them that people,
insecure in their polite status, must have felt anxious whenever they engaged in the
practice lest the slightest blunder undercut their claim to gentility. The rules of polite
conversation addressed matters such as talking too loudly, too fast, or too much; not
pausing to give others an opportunity to speak; interrupting fellow interlocutors; using
vulgar language; talking with excessive levity; and whispering to someone in private,
while others were discussing a different subject.20 As indicated by these rules, mastery
of conversation involved interlocutors being attentive to the sound of their speech
quite as much as to its propositional content. It also meant listening intently to both
the spoken words of others and the ways in which they were communicated in terms
of tone, pace, and volume. Quiet, disciplined listening was thus a key component of
refined conversation. As the author of one conduct manual stated, the polite gentle-
man ‘ought to be more willing to hear, than to speak [. . .] a just moderation herein is
best, not to be over-Silent nor Talkative’.21 The same point was made by Addison, who
also linked moderation to the management of sound. In fact, the fictional author of his
periodical, Mr Spectator, was depicted as a man who enjoyed polite conversation pre-
cisely because it was an activity in which a preference for hearing instead of speaking
still allowed individuals to be agreeable in company. For Addison, such conversation
was best located in regulated sonic spaces like the coffee house, a site of urban sociabil-
ity removed from the commotion of street life.
Sonic Spaces of Civility

Coffee houses proliferated in London in the first half of the eighteenth century, when
they came to be emblematic of the distinctive modernity of this unique global city.22
People frequented coffee houses to do more than drink a fashionable beverage. For
the cost of a penny per cup, men, predominantly, were able to discuss politics, trans-
act business, talk about books and plays, read newspapers, acquire information, and
generally enjoy the pleasures of conversation. The appeal of coffee houses lay in their
function as centres of communication and conviviality. They also served as venues for
the wide range of clubs that grew in popularity during the same period.23
This connection between clubs and coffee houses contributed to the specialisation
of the latter, as groups with divergent interests or occupations met in different loca-
tions. As a result, coffee houses were perceived to vary in the sounds of their conversa-
tion depending on the class or character of their clientele. In 1759, for example, Oliver
Goldsmith noted that ‘passionate’ men could ‘vent’ their ‘rage among the old orators at
Slaughter’s’, damning the nation at every chance, while ‘phlegmatic’ individuals could
‘sit in silence at the Hum-Drum Club in Ivy Lane’.24 Unsurprisingly, Addison also men-
tioned the Hum-Drum Club, praising the ‘peaceable’ character of its members, who
allegedly sat and smoked together without speaking.25 Meanwhile, Samuel Johnson
similarly condemned the ‘fierce vociferations’ of ‘passionate men’ for obstructing the
‘course of conversation’ and interrupting the ‘quiet’ of anyone within earshot of their
‘clamours’.26 Addison and Steele were concerned that, by facilitating debate, coffee
houses had the potential to fuel animosity rather than foster amiability. Moreover,
the extent to which individuals succeeded in controlling their passions was registered
in the sounds of their conversation. Speakers who were ‘talkative’ or ‘loud’ in ‘mixed

company’, declared Steele, undermined sociability by displaying a lack of concern for

others. They were no different in this sense to the gentleman in one establishment who
spent half an hour clearing his throat by ‘coughing and spitting’, before proceeding
to sing, hum, and dance in the middle of the open room.27 In response to this kind of
impulsive behaviour, Addison and Steele aimed to promote in coffee houses a model of
refined conversation in which the passions of interlocutors were restrained by reason.
Such coffee houses avoided ‘Mirthful Meetings’. Rather, they were regulated auditory
environments, where moderate, orderly speech enabled citizens to remain in ‘quiet
Possession of the present Instant’.28 As John Hill asserted in 1753, the ‘mixed conver-
sation of Coffee-houses’ was beneficial only if it was ‘restrained within any bounds
of order and regularity’, in part by people listening ‘with attention’.29 Removed from
loud, irregular, or sudden sounds, the polite self fashioned in coffee houses was both
amiable and unruffled, sensitive to others but unswayed by external circumstances.
As spaces of quiet, polite conversation, the coffee houses celebrated by the Specta-
tor included only the elite classes in its idealised account of civility.30 But there were
rowdy as well as refined coffee houses frequented by wealthy men, whose meetings
might involve libertine pleasures as opposed to rational pursuits. Such hubs of alleged
immorality were criticised for their discordant noise. So, too, were the less respectable
coffee houses attended by artisans, who, in the opinion of Lewis Theobold in 1717,
engaged in an ‘unintelligible’, ‘absurd’ style of conversation characterised by long,
loud harangues. If such ‘Declamations’ could not be ‘silenc’d’, declared Theobold,
they should ‘at least be restrain’d to a certain Duration’.31 One major problem with
these plebeian coffee houses, critics agreed, was that their noise distracted polite citi-
zens from serious pursuits conducive to improvement.32
The coffee house was a masculine environment which mostly excluded women.
And while Addison and Steele specifically represented women as valued members of
polite society through their participation in conversation, it nevertheless remained a
highly gendered activity. In 1710, Steele remarked that women had ‘naturally a Great
genius for being talkative’, a trait linked to their supposed limited capacity to bring
their emotions under rational control.33 On the other hand, though, women were also
praised for their silence. And much emphasis was given to their acquiring the skill of
attentive listening as a precondition for joining polite society. In a conduct manual
published in 1760, for instance, Charles Allen advised that ‘young ladies should be
more apt to hear than to speak’.34 The same rule, as we have seen, was enjoined on
men by Addison, among others. But applied to women, it clearly enabled them to
be included in polite society in a position of inferiority, as passive rather than active
contributors to conversation. At the same time, men, too, were redefined through
this valorisation of silence, as a feminisation of elite culture led to the creation of a
new masculine identity based on refinement, restraint, and responsiveness to others
through disciplined listening.
A similarly important site of modernity was the pleasure garden, a commodified
landscape in which listening to music and participating in conversation complemented
a range of visual entertainments, while providing an escape from the noise of crowded
urban streets. The most famous pleasure gardens were Vauxhall and Ranelagh in
London. These spaces were eighteenth-century equivalents of theme parks, confected
rural wonderlands in which city-dwellers fashioned a polite identity through fash-
ionable consumption disguised as cultural sophistication.35 To facilitate this process,

272 peter denney
they also encompassed highly contrived auditory environments. One experiment, for
instance, involved groups of musicians playing in hidden locations to create the illu-
sion of natural features generating ‘musical sounds’.36 A pastoral soundtrack thus
complemented the sylvan landscape. In addition, an entry fee attempted to deny access
to the labouring classes, reducing the potential for plebeian sounds to disturb the
refined sociability of patrons.
At Vauxhall, before the gentrifying efforts of Jonathan Tyers in the 1730s, a mix-
ture of social classes had often participated in impromptu, collective music-making.
When Tyers improved the gardens, however, music became an organised, controlled,
and commercialised activity. Performances were scheduled for set times, and structures
were added such as the elevated, circular pavilion or orchestra, which separated musi-
cians from customers, while enhancing amplification through a domed roof. Moreover,
a new level of attentiveness was encouraged in auditors, who would stand still and
silent to listen to songs by a solo vocalist. This disciplined listening anticipated modern
concert etiquette well before it became commonplace in the nineteenth century. After
the singing, however, there was a period of instrumental music, and patrons returned
to their promenading and talking, no longer taking notice of the performances except
as pleasant sounds heard in the background.37 At Ranelagh, music was also regarded
as one of the premier entertainments in the gardens. Indeed, a grand indoor setting, the
Rotunda, was built in 1742, making it the first dedicated concert venue in Europe.38
Here, promenading and talking were also considered as ‘pleasures’ to be enjoyed dur-
ing musical performances. And yet, the Rotunda was designed to minimise extraneous
sounds through the use of a mat on the floor, which prevented visitors from being
disturbed by the footsteps of the assembly. By ensuring that there would be no ‘noise’
made by the ‘heels’ of the ‘company’, asserted a publicist for the gardens, this mat
meant that music could be ‘heard in every part of the rotundo’, while ‘conversation’
was ‘not interrupted by a disagreeable clangor’.39 Revealingly, then, in urban pleasure
gardens, talking during musical performances was regarded as consistent with polite-
ness, but refined sociability required a degree of concentration, which was regarded as
incompatible with non-purposive sounds like those associated with the crowd.
Sound and Social Identity

As politeness emphasised regulated speaking and disciplined listening as a means to
achieve enlightened selfhood, social distinctions came to be elaborated by differences
in sonic behaviour. Whether in coffee houses or pleasure gardens, the elite classes rep-
resented their own spaces of assembly as controlled auditory environments conducive
to the exercise of reason. The refined, rational sociability of these spaces was dem-
onstrated by comparing them with centres of plebeian leisure, especially alehouses,
where convivial sounds were condemned as unneighbourly noise, detrimental to mod-
ern civility. As a moralist complained in 1758, the ‘Noise and Quarrels’ of alehouses
disturbed and terrified local inhabitants, being even more of a nuisance than the din of
a blacksmith’s hammer.40 In the early nineteenth century, many commentators argued
that industrialisation exacerbated this alleged problem of noisy sociability among
working-class frequenters of alehouses. Critics of industrialisation contended that fac-
tory workers sought solace in boozy noise due to their demoralising living conditions,

including incessant labour, squalid accommodation, and dysfunctional domesticity.

In manufacturing towns like Manchester, asserted Peter Gaskell in 1833, ‘low beer
houses’ had increased in number, while Saturday night was celebrated with a ‘hubbub
of discordant sounds’, as working-class residents found temporary satisfaction in ‘jan-
gling, swearing, drunkenness, noisy vociferation, confusion worse confounded, riot
and debauchery’.41 At this time, many members of the middle class in Manchester, as
in other industrial towns, were moving at a rapid rate to the suburbs in pursuit of clean
air, greenery, and quiet surroundings.42 The result was a city in which social groups
became segregated into residential areas with distinct acoustic profiles. For affluent
citizens, the flight to the suburbs was in part a reaction against the perceived sonic
disorder of the urban core, but in normalising quiet environments, it also heightened
intolerance of the sounds of working-class spaces.
The role of sound in elaborating class differences in Britain rose in importance in the
early nineteenth century as social segregation affected not only living spaces but prac-
tices of work, leisure, religion, and much else. In many domains, respectability came to
be associated with quietness. Conversely, noise indicated vulgarity. As declared by the
protagonist in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Pelham, published in 1828:
the distinguishing trait of people accustomed to good society, is a calm, imperturb-

able quiet, which pervades all their actions and habits [. . .] while low persons
cannot take up either a spoon or an affront without making such an amazing noise
about it.43
The character, Henry Pelham, was a dandy, a man of heightened sensory appreciation,
with a notable interest in gastronomic delicacies and fashionable clothes. His dandyism,
however, was also represented in acoustic terms. In the novel, the dandy was depicted as
a certain kind of libertine, whose freedom from conventional morality was, on occasion,
indicated by an enjoyment of the ‘roar’ of hedonistic aristocratic sociability.44 For the
most part, though, Pelham heard noisy activity with disdain, whether the ‘shrill voices’
of plebeian street hawkers or the shouts of affluent devotees of the turf.45 Indeed, at the
racetrack, he affirmed his dandyism by remaining silent in the crowd. With its emphasis
on quiet comportment, this hyper-refinement constituted an exaggerated version of a
form of masculine behaviour typical of gentility in both its aristocratic and middle-class
iterations. But for the dandy, quietness was a self-conscious, affected performance more
than an informal, naturalised behaviour, as it had been for Addison and Steele. If self-
regulation was a precondition of gentility, its display via quiet conduct could signify
simulation as much as courtesy.
Nevertheless, through quiet conduct, affluent individuals were able to embody the
restraint and emotional control which had become hallmarks of status as well respect-
ability. The origins of this standard of behaviour stretched back to the eighteenth
century when, in accounts of politeness, noisy expression was denigrated as a failure
of self-discipline leading to the inconsiderate treatment of others. ‘Humming a tune to
ourselves,’ advised John Trusler in 1775, ‘drumming with our fingers, making a noise
with our feet, and such like, are all breaches of good manners, and indications of our
contempt for the persons present.’46 Bodily control was as crucial as emotional man-
agement to the performance of polite social identity. Unnecessary motion signified and
promoted distraction, not least through the generation of sound dismissed as noise.

274 peter denney
Whereas quietness connoted composure and self-possession, noisy activity evoked an

inner restlessness, which was inimical to the unhurried, relaxed demeanour a gentle-
man was required to exhibit even in crowded, public places.
Sound and Popular Religion

Beginning around the mid-eighteenth century, a revival of religious enthusiasm in
Britain, best exemplified by the rise of Methodism, transformed the auditory environ-
ments of many towns and villages, especially in mining and manufacturing regions.
Sound was central to Methodist worship. Its style of passionate piety was fostered
above all by energetic hymn-singing,47 but fervent preaching and spontaneous vocali-
sations also enlivened devotion and contributed to the appeal of the movement among
adherents, primarily people from plebeian backgrounds. Methodism provided arti-
sans and servants, both men and women, with opportunities to exercise leadership as
lay preachers, converting souls and inspiring fellow worshippers through loud, dra-
matic speech. The founder of the movement, John Wesley, urged his followers to ‘sing
lustily, and with good courage’,48 though he formulated rules to regulate as much as
stimulate vocal worship. Methodists embraced outdoor meetings attended by large
crowds. In such settings, preaching had to be loud and impassioned to be effective.
The sounds of singing, preaching, and general movement at outdoor meetings com-
municated to local inhabitants the vitality of this style of religion, whether perceived
as a curiosity or a nuisance.49
Perhaps nothing so violated polite conventions of sonic propriety and bodily comport-
ment as Methodism, especially before its shift to respectability in the early nineteenth
century. What followers perceived as the sound of joyful, heartfelt worship, a mode of
devotion prompted by the ‘witness of the spirit’, critics heard as the ‘hideous Noise’ of
dangerous fanaticism, volatile emotionalism, and gross sensualism.50 Methodist worship
posed a threat to polite identity because, in valorising feeling to an excessive degree, it
showed how self-abandonment could triumph over self-control, licensing extreme acous-
tic and affective experience at the expense of rational thought and conduct.51 In addition,
critics of Methodism were worried about the contagious nature of religious noise, which
threatened to dissolve the self in a manipulable, unstable crowd.
The noisy quality of Methodist worship was a source of anxiety for Leigh Hunt,
who conducted a vigorous campaign against religious enthusiasm in 1808 in a series of
essays in the Examiner, republished one year later as a separate pamphlet. As founding
editor of the Examiner, Hunt saw his periodical as continuing the work of Addison
and Steele in advancing, or reviving, a conversational model of politeness associated
with literary taste, though this was aimed at a more inclusive, heterogeneous reader-
ship.52 While there was a tension between Hunt’s aesthetic project and his reformist
political agenda, the genial conversational tone of his writing placed his persona above
party factionalism and demonstrated his liberality, refinement, and objectivity. As he
wrote in the prospectus to the magazine, the ‘steady observation’ of the periodical
essayist was enabled by escaping from the ‘noisy’, ‘moving multitude’ in order to bet-
ter contemplate the modern, urban world.53 For Hunt, popular religious enthusiasm
posed a threat to this ideal of disinterestedness, its sonic intensity being inimical to
enlightened political activity as well as an affront to polite taste.54 Methodists were

‘bawlers’, asserted Hunt, and as such, they lacked the ‘refinement’ of the ‘great author
of Christianity’, who was the embodiment of ‘meekness’.55 From this perspective, ple-
beian religious zeal was represented as a perversion of true religion, its noisy quality
an index of violence, vulgarity, and irrationality, traits which rendered such worship
incompatible with political and aesthetic judgement.
Privacy and Auditory Freedom

At the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, a common complaint about
the noise of the crowd, whether it was caused by public recreation or enthusiastic wor-
ship, was that it disturbed the refined privacy of the elite classes. Privacy had become
an established concept, and there was an expectation that certain spaces such as homes
or even holiday lodgings should provide a refuge from an increasingly noisy world
so that individuals could cultivate the self through reflection or intimate companion-
ship.56 Such an expectation of privacy implied a freedom from the noise of others, a
condition which was associated with emotional depth, especially after the Romantic
interest in interiority emphasised balancing sociability with solitude.57
Quiet surroundings, conducive to privacy, however, could be difficult to obtain in
urban environments in the early nineteenth century due to the porous quality of build-
ings and the population density of cities and towns in a rapidly industrialising nation.
There was no quietness for George Head, for instance, in 1836, when he stayed over-
night at Goole, situated halfway between Leeds and Hull, during his tour of manu-
facturing regions in northern England. Sitting in the parlour of an inn, where he was
attempting to read, Head was ‘disturbed by a very disagreeable noise’, as a congre-
gation of Primitive Methodists across the road began ‘singing’.58 Actually, in Head’s
opinion, this mode of devotion sounded more like quarrelling, or even an orgy, as he
dismissed this expression of religious freedom as an assault on his own personal liberty.
Gaining a following among factory workers, coal miners, and rural labourers,
Primitive Methodism, which seceded from the Wesleyan Connexion in 1810, was
renowned for its noisy culture.59 While Head’s annoyance initially derived from being
prevented from reading, his abhorrence of the noise of these ‘Ranters’ extended into
a more general critique of the barbarism of their intense, disorderly sonic behaviour.
Specifically, their ‘discordant tones’ were heard as evidence of their uncivilised state,
for they ‘roared and stamped in chorus, and howled’, he added, in a style compa-
rable to ‘a dance of Hottentots’.60 For their part, Primitive Methodists defended their
noisy religious practices on biblical grounds. Auditors whose ‘delicate feelings’ were
‘shocked’ by Primitive Methodism failed to recognise, wrote one believer, that the
Bible contained many illustrations of ‘sanctified noise’.61 For Head, by contrast, the
noisy culture of popular religious enthusiasm signalled an inability among participants
to govern their emotions. Moreover, these emotions were akin to bodily responses,
triggered by sound and unrefined by judgement. Head thus concluded that the ‘deep
emotions of the heart’ were ‘best expressed in moderate tones, or silence’, whereas
‘unbridled’ passions were ‘incompatible with the decencies of civilization’.62 If silence,
or regulated sound, was both a sign and precondition of civilisation, it was also crucial
to the enjoyment of privacy by which affluent individuals fashioned an identity com-
bining reason with emotional depth.

276 peter denney
Sonic Meanings of Civilisation

By the early nineteenth century, commentators routinely deployed a moral contrast
between quietness and noise as a means of mapping class and racial differences on an
account of modernity in which ways of hearing and engagements with sound indicated
distinctions between barbarism and civilisation. Applications of this system of sonic
classification varied widely according to context. Issues of class and race plainly inter-
sected in Head’s demeaning depiction of noisy religious worship as an activity aligning
working-class enthusiasts in northern England and Khoikhoi pastoralists in south-
western Africa. Similarly, the attack on street musicians in London linked their plebe-
ian and non-English origins to the ‘sonorous savagery’ of their performances, to quote
William Henry Wills in 1850, in a defence of ‘quiet neighbourhoods’ as fundamental to
a civilised society.63 And yet, there were also commentators who regarded civilisation
as defined by the production and experience of noise. In 1873, one journalist noted
that of the four primary soundmarks of modernity, only bell-ringing was pleasing to
the mind, with railway whistles, gongs, and celebratory cannons evoking a ‘barbarous’
character despite being an inescapable aspect of metropolitan life.64 Conversely, the
geographer William Woodbridge claimed that people in ‘Half-Civilised’ China were
‘orderly’ and ‘quiet’, though this sonic condition reflected a putative absence of ‘energy
or enterprise’, as despotism facilitated refinement at the expense of liberty.65 In all these
ways, the auditory account of civilisation occasioned considerable debate, not least
because the meanings of sound, noise, and quietness were shot through with contra-
dictions and ambiguities.
Some writers rejected the emphasis on quiet behaviour on the grounds that both
hearing and producing noise constituted a life-affirming, vitalising experience expres-
sive of joy, liberty, and conviviality as relevant to modernity as to any other age. ‘Man
is naturally a noisy animal’, asserted one observer in 1821.66 Noise-making, he added,
was a basic human propensity rather than an immoral indulgence or public nuisance.
This particular journalist recognised that noise, like music, had the power to trigger
strong emotions and influence the behaviour of auditors. Nevertheless, the self had to
be open to aural shocks, he claimed, if the heart was to be moved to sympathy. Simi-
larly, in the same year, Charles Lamb rushed out of a concert hall midway through an
opera recital because the silent attentiveness of the audience stifled his humanity. Once
in the ‘noisiest places of the crowded streets’, Lamb came alive again, finding ‘solace’
in the sounds of the metropolis.67
Other writers, however, celebrated the new habit of quiet, attentive appreciation,
which was increasingly becoming an expectation of audience behaviour not just in the
concert hall but in the theatre, art gallery, museum, and so on. When Charlotte Brontë
visited the Great Exhibition in 1851, for example, she not only admired the display
of industrial machinery and imperial wealth, but marvelled at the fact that, among
the 30,000 people attending on the same day, ‘not one loud noise was to be heard’.68
It was as if, in this instance, the quiet, orderly behaviour of exhibition visitors was as
much a part of the celebration of modernity as the spectacle of Britain’s technological
ingenuity and global power.
When nineteenth-century commentators identified quietness as one of the effects
of civilisation, they had in mind any number of developments, chief among them an
advance in knowledge, a rise in personal comfort, a reduction in informal violence,

and the refinement of manners through increased emotional control. Managed emo-
tions entailed regulated auditory environments, along with a suspicion of loud, sud-
den, or irregular sounds. According to Sharon Turner, in 1832, civilisation was typified
by a ‘general love of quiet and orderly life and manners’.69 The problem was that this
postulation was in tension with another sense of civilisation as progress, as the energy
responsible for Britain’s emergence as a global power, with London and a network of
industrial cities facilitating rapid economic growth and imperial expansion. As Richard
Vaughan explained in 1843, large, complex cities witnessed ‘constant vibration and
movement’, a perpetual occurrence of ‘distracting and exciting’ sensations, which were
‘unfriendly to the prosecution of works demanding the exercise of silent, continuous
and profound thought’. Intellectual activity, he concluded, was impossible in ‘crowded
places’ in close proximity to the ‘working-day multitude’.70 The paradox, then, was
that the educated professional classes were imbued with a fondness for quietness in an
increasingly noisy world. This was a dilemma noted in 1878 by the psychologist James
Sully, who contended that modern urban life increased the volume, quantity, abrupt-
ness, and unevenness of sound, while also imbuing affluent, cultivated individuals with
a habit of disciplined listening which rendered them much more sensitive to, and irri-
tated by, such invasive noise.71 The same paradox was at the heart of the campaign
against street music initiated by Charles Babbage and supported by Charles Dickens,
among other prominent writers. Organ grinders and ballad singers, however, were not
the only source of dissonance held to be degrading the metropolis. In 1895, the novel-
ist Ouida complained about the ‘hard, ugly, unpleasant noise’ produced during royal
events, describing it as a ‘barbarous practice’, which might bring joy to the ‘savage’,
but piled disgrace on a ‘civilised nation’.72 If such royal state events deployed sound
to secure an emotional attachment to the monarchy, here a racialised appeal to sonic
propriety emphasised that they did so by jeopardising the rational basis of civilisation,
as symbolised by quietness.
Listening to Industry
The meanings of noise and quietness in relation to civilisation also shaped perceptions
of industrialisation. Indeed, for many commentators, industrialisation was regarded
as an acoustic affair, which encapsulated the promises as well as the perils of moder-
nity. There were many different ways of hearing factories as dehumanising or awe-
inspiring, a sign of progress or a threat to morality, wretched or sublime. As a result,
factory sounds played a crucial role in evaluating the effects of industrialisation,
including on the sonic behaviour of the working class. Industrial towns were hellish
environments, wrote Thomas Carlyle, in which the ‘noise’ of ‘Power-mills’ coexisted
with the loud, jarring voices of factory workers.73 Other writers like Dickens, however,
similarly imagined something ‘demonic’, or even ‘savage’, in the ‘roar’ and ‘hissing’ of
factories, but emphasised that such ‘deafening sounds’ prevented workers from speak-
ing or being heard.74 Factory workers agreed. As remembered by William Dodd, a for-
mer factory boy, manufacturing labourers could hear ‘nothing but the rumbling noise
of the machinery’ or the ‘harsh’ commands of an ‘overlooker’.75 If quietness was an
index of civilisation, this was a state imposed on the working class by the uncivilised
conditions of their labour.

278 peter denney
Despite claiming that emotional depth required silence, George Head was an ardent
admirer of the noise of virtually every aspect of industrialisation, from cotton factories
to hydraulic presses, coal staithes to sausage-cutting machines. Such noise was inter-
preted in positive terms as an instantiation of power, of the ‘stupendous’, ‘mechani-
cal power’76 which underpinned Britain’s rise to global dominance on the back of
enhanced manufacturing production and expanded international trade. Intriguingly,
Head claimed that the ‘creaking’, ‘groaning’, ‘grating’, ‘rattling’, ‘thundering’ sounds of
industrial processes excited the ‘senses’ and riveted the ‘attention’.77 A sublime aesthetic
thus mediated his experience. Of an iron foundry in Leeds, for example, he expressed
astonishment at its various processes, which cumulatively generated the most ‘terrific’
and ‘stunning’ ‘din’ he had ever heard.78 Confronted by this sonic spectacle, he was lost
for words, silent in the midst of noise. For Head, then, the aural appreciation of indus-
try was a sublime experience, in which the veneration of mechanical power involved
hearing a noise that overwhelmed auditors. Of course, this highly aesthetic treatment of
the sounds of industrialisation required a mode of distant listening available to tourists,
but not to workers.
In the debate about the factory system, employers and their spokesmen were not
always as sanguine as Head about the exhilarating effects of industrial noise. However,
like him, many optimistic commentators failed to consider its effects on factory work-
ers. On the whole, the affluent classes were more anxious about controlling or elimi-
nating the social sounds of popular recreation or outdoor music, heard as dissonance,
than understanding and minimising the impact of the mechanical sounds of factories.79
Nevertheless, some defenders of factories did address the issue of noise as part of an
attempt to refute the notion that industrial labour was injurious to operatives. In 1835
Edward Baines, for instance, recorded that factory workers were completely unfazed
by the ‘noise and whirl of machinery’ as they had become ‘habituated to it’, unlike
middle-class visitors in whom it occasioned ‘unpleasant and confusing’ sensations.80 A
striking variation on this same theme was formulated, in 1847, by the Scottish geologist
and journalist Hugh Miller. Of Birmingham, a centre of metalworking specialising in
gunmaking as well as ‘toy’ and brass manufacturing, Miller wrote that in ‘no town in
the world’ were the ‘mechanical arts more noisy’. The ‘ring’ of hammers, the ‘unending
clang of metal’, the ‘unceasing clank of engines’, the hiss and roar of water and steam,
among other sounds, meant that people lived in an ‘atmosphere continually vibrating
with clamour’.81 Indeed, according to Miller, working-class residents of Birmingham
had become so habituated to the noise of industrial labour that they developed a desire
for noise to accompany every aspect of their lives, including recreation. By contrast,
quietness evoked emptiness and alienation. It was this fondness for all noise, Miller
speculated, that created a keen interest in music in Birmingham, which hosted more
concerts and performances than any town of comparable size in the empire.
And yet, in terms of music at work, industrialisation silenced the voices of manu-
facturing labourers. Singing had been a vital component of pre-industrial work for
most occupational groups before and during the eighteenth century. However, in
Victorian factories, many employers established rules to prohibit singing and other
forms of musical expression and oral communication on the grounds that these prac-
tices decreased productivity and incited disorder.82 Whistling was even banned in
some places, along with shouting, loud talking, and singing, to eliminate habits of
sociability associated with pre-industrial work. Famously, in 1844, Friedrich Engels

criticised a mill owner in Manchester for drawing up a list of rules, which included
issuing a fine for any ‘operative detected speaking to another, singing or whistling’.83
In addition, factory noise itself made it difficult for workers to speak to each other,
while dust and heat were not conducive to talking or singing.84 Such lack of fulfil-
ment at work prompted Peter Gaskell to worry that the ‘Babel-like sounds’ of mod-
ern industrial life, with its demoralising factories and crowded streets, had harmful
effects on the happiness, morality, and physical health of manufacturing labourers.85
Drawing on an influential Wordsworthian idea, he proposed that factory workers
should be provided with an opportunity to experience the ‘sights and sounds of
natural objects’ as a means to maintain their health, morality, and mental well-
being.86 Many other writers, including Dickens, similarly deployed pastoral imagery
to condemn or question the effects of industrial noise by contrasting it with a quiet,
harmonious rural soundscape. And factory workers themselves were attracted to the
opposition, incorporating it into their ballads as well as pamphlets to emphasise the
oppressive conditions of their auditory environments. Although based on a fiction,
this was not mere escapism but an important resource of resistance.
Perhaps no one articulated the contradictory sonic meanings of modernity, as exem-
plified by industrialisation, as clearly as Alexis de Tocqueville in his evocative account
of Manchester. Writing in 1835, de Tocqueville described Manchester as a Hades in
which people were continually disturbed, day and night, by a ‘thousand noises’. There
were the ‘footsteps of a busy crowd’, the ‘crunching wheels of machinery’, the ‘shriek
of steam from boilers’, the ‘regular beat of the looms’, and many other kinds of disso-
nance. Absent, however, were the ‘gay shouts of people amusing themselves, or music
heralding a holiday’. This was a town in which human voices were silenced by an all-
encompassing, never-ceasing noise. Combined with stench and darkness, such sonic
disruptions, concluded de Tocqueville, showed that, in Manchester, humanity had
attained ‘its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works
its miracles, and civilised man is turned back into a savage’.87
Notes
1. The focus on industrialisation as the defining sonic event in modernity began with
R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World
(Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, [1977] 1994), 71–82. See also the emphasis on industri-
alisation in recent general histories of noise such as Garret Keizer, The Unwanted Sound
of Everything We Want: A Book about Noise (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), 101–30;
Mike Goldsmith, Discord: The Story of Noise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
83–110; and David Hendy, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening (London:
Profile, 2013), 213–22.
2. Mark M. Smith, ‘The Garden in the Machine: Listening to Early American Industrializa-
tion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 39–57 (41–52).
3. John M. Picker, ‘Aural Anxieties and the Advent of Modernity’, in The Victorian World,
ed. Martin Hewitt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 603–18.
4. Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007), 121–9.
5. Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee House (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 223–4; William Tullett, ‘“The Macaroni’s Ambrosial

280 peter denney
Essences”: Perfume, Identity and Public Space in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal for
Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 2 (2015): 163–80 (167).
6. Phyllis Mack, ‘Listening to God in the Eighteenth Century’, in A Cultural History of the
Senses in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Anne C. Vila (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 85–107.
7. On the ideal of the bounded self in the eighteenth century, see especially Charles Taylor,
Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1989), 159–76; and Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and
Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 265–311.
8. On ‘ways of hearing’, see James Mansell, ‘Ways of Hearing: Sound, Culture and History’,
in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull (Abingdon: Routledge,
2019), 343–52.
9. Madame Van Muyden, ed., A Foreign View of England in 1725–1729: The Letters of
Monsieur César De Saussure to His Family (London: Caliban Books, 1995), 101.
10. Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 175–6.
11. Van Muyden, Foreign View of England, 78, 112, 175.
12. Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity and Gender in the Tatler and the
Spectator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 2.
13. Among many studies, see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England,
1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 59–121; John Brewer, The Pleasures
of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, 1997), 98–122; and Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civiliza-
tion in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 27–30, 76–83.
14. Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Achievement (New
York: Doubleday, 2020), 207.
15. John Gay, Trivia: Or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (London, 1716), 14, 34.
16. Cockayne, Hubbub, 122.
17. Elizabeth Montagu to Elizabeth Carter, 3 October 1779, Montagu Collection, Huntington
Library, MO 3485. On these segregated areas of London, see Jerry White, London in the
Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing (London: Bodley Head, 2012), 6–7;
and Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London: Penguin, 2000), 117–8
18. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, no. 119 (17 July 1711), in The Specta-
tor, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 4 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1945), 1:362.
19. Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 109–11.
20. John Barrell, ‘Awkward Silences’, in Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700–1850,
ed. Peter Denney, Bruce Buchan, David Ellison, and Karen Crawley (London: Routledge, 2020),
28–62 (44–5).
21. Richard Bulstrode, Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1715), 20
22. Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
2004), 187.
23. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational
World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 40–1.
24. Oliver Goldsmith, ‘A Description of Various Clubs’ (1759), in Collected Works, ed. Arthur
Friedman, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 3:6.
25. Addison and Steele, The Spectator, no. 9 (10 March 1711), in The Spectator, 1:29.
26. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 11 (24 April 1750), in The Rambler, ed. Walter Jackson
Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, vol. 3 of The Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale
27. Addison and Steele, The Spectator, no. 148 (20 August 1711), in The Spectator, 1:446.
28. Addison and Steele, The Spectator, no. 49 (26 April 1711), in The Spectator, 1:148–9. See
Markman Ellis, ‘The Buzz of Business: Soundscapes of Urbanisation in Eighteenth-Century
London’, in Sound, Space and Civility, 83–105 (98–9).

29. John Hill, The Inspector, 2 vols (London, 1753), 1:15.

30. Ellis, Coffee House, 196.
31. Lewis Theobold, The Censor, 2 vols (London, 1717), 2:215–16.
32. Ellis, ‘Buzz of Business’, 99–100.
33. Richard Steele, The Tatler, no. 157 (11 April 1710), in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3
vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 2:382.
34. Charles Allen, The Polite Lady (London, 1760), 87.
35. Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York:
Guildford Press, 1998), 122–8.
36. Anon., A Description of Vauxhall Gardens (London, 1762), 44.
37. Rachel Cowgill, ‘Performance Alfresco: Music-Making in London’s Pleasure Gardens’, in
The Pleasure Garden from Vauxhall to Coney Island, ed. Jonathan Conlin (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 100–26 (118).
38. Berta Joncus, ‘“To Propagate Sound for Sense”: Music for Diversion and Seduction at
Ranelagh Gardens’, London Journal 38, no. 1 (2013): 34–66 (35).
39. Anon., A Description of Ranelagh, Rotundo, and Gardens (London, 1762), 18.
40. Caleb Parfect, The Number of Alehouses Shewn to be Extremely Pernicious to the Publick
(London, 1758), 11.
41. Peter Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England (London, 1833), 113.
42. Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic
Books, 1987), 74–5; Alan Kidd, ‘From Township to Metropolis: Suburbs and the Shaping
of the Modern City’, in Manchester: Making the Modern City, ed. Alan Kidd and Terry
Wyke (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 304–6.
43. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pelham, or, Adventures of a Gentleman, 3 vols (London, 1828), 1:5.
44. Ibid., 1:180.
45. Ibid., 2:302.
46. John Trusler, Principles of Politeness, and of Knowing the World (London, 1775), 109.
47. David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2005), 68–74.
48. John Wesley, Select Hymns, 3rd edn (Bristol, 1770), 159.
49. Carys Brown, ‘Sound Faith: Religion and the Aural Environment of Towns in Northern
England, c.1740–1830’, Cultural and Social History 18, no. 4 (2021): 463–80 (473).
50. Anon., The Enthusiast, or Methodism Display’d (Portsmouth, 1753), 6; see Peter Denney,
‘The Sound of the Spirit: Auditory Enthusiasm and the Attack on Methodism in the Eighteenth
Century’, in Sound, Space and Civility, 123–44.
51. See Misty Anderson, Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm,
Belief and the Borders of the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012),
51–69.
52. See Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762–1830
53. Leigh Hunt, ‘Prospectus’, Examiner 1 (1808): 6.
54. See Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture
55. Leigh Hunt, An Attempt to Shew the Folly and Danger of Methodism (London, 1809), 5.
56. David Vincent, Privacy: A Short History (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 56–9, 77–8.
57. David Vincent, A History of Solitude (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 19–20.
58. George Head, A Home Tour through the Manufacturing Districts of England (London,
1836), 224.
59. Sandy Calder, The Origins of Primitive Methodism (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016),
121; David Bebbington, Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and
Global Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 116.
60. Head, Home Tour, 225.

282 peter denney
61. Thomas Church, Sketches of Primitive Methodism (London, 1847), 80.

62. Head, Home Tour, 225.
63. William Henry Willis, ‘The Monster Promenade Concerts’, Household Words 2, no. 30
(1850): 95; see John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), 45–52.
64. Anon., ‘Sound and Fury – Signifying Something’, All the Year Round 9, no. 230 (1873): 558.
65. William C. Woodbridge, A System of Universal Geography, on the Principles of Comparison
and Classification (Hartford, 1824), 210.
66. Anon., ‘Noise’, New Monthly Magazine 2, no. 7 (1821): 260.
67. Charles Lamb, ‘A Chapter on Ears’, London Magazine 3, no. 15 (1821): 264.
68. Charlotte Brontë, Selected Letters, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 190.
69. Sharon Turner, The Sacred History of the World, 3 vols (London, 1832), 2:478–9.
70. Richard Vaughan, The Age of Great Cities; Or Modern Civilization Viewed in its Relation
to Intelligence, Morals, and Religion (London, 1843), 110–11.
71. James Sully, ‘Civilisation and Noise’, Fortnightly Review 24, no. 143 (1878): 704–20
(709–16).
72. Ouida, Views and Opinions (London: Methuen, 1895), 16.
73. Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1839), in English and Other Critical Essays (London: J. M.
Dent, 1915), 221.
74. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), ed. Earl of Wicklow (London: Oxford
75. William Dodd, A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd: A Factory
Boy, 2nd edn (London, 1841), 38.
76. Head, Home Tour, 133, 343.
77. Ibid., 344.
78. Ibid., 134.
79. Goldsmith, Discord, 142.
80. Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London, 1835), 457.
81. Hugh Miller, First Impressions of England and its People (London, 1847), 230–1.
82. Marek Korczynski, Michael Pickering, and Emma Robertson, Rhythms of Labour: Music
at Work in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 148–9.
83. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), ed. David McLellan
84. Korczynski et al., Rhythms of Labour, 156–7.
85. Gaskell, Manufacturing Population, 116.
86. Ibid., 349.
87. Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, ed. J. P. Mayer (New Brunswick:
Transaction Books, 1988), 107–8.
Select Bibliography
Cockayne, Emily, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (New Haven: Yale
Cowgill, Rachel, ‘Performance Alfresco: Music-Making in London’s Pleasure Gardens’, in The
Pleasure Garden from Vauxhall to Coney Island, ed. Jonathan Conlin (Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 100–26.
Denney, Peter, ‘The Sound of the Spirit: Auditory Enthusiasm and the Attack on Methodism
in the Eighteenth Century’, in Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700–1850,
ed. Peter Denney, Bruce Buchan, David Ellison, and Karen Crawley (Abingdon: Routledge,
2019), 123–44.

Ellis, Markman, ‘The Buzz of Business: Soundscapes of Urbanisation in Eighteenth-Century

London’, in Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700–1850, ed. Peter Denney,
Bruce Buchan, David Ellison, and Karen Crawley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 83–105.
Goldsmith, Mike, Discord: The Story of Noise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Hendy, David, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening (London: Profile, 2013).
Joncus, Berta, ‘“To Propagate Sound for Sense”: Music for Diversion and Seduction at Ranelagh
Gardens’, London Journal 38, no. 1 (2013): 34–66.
Korczynski, Marek, Michael Pickering, and Emma Robertson, Rhythms of Labour: Music at
Work in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Mack, Phyllis, ‘Listening to God in the Eighteenth Century’, in A Cultural History of the Senses
in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Anne C. Vila (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 85–107.
Mansell, James, ‘Ways of Hearing: Sound, Culture and History’, in The Routledge Companion
to Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 343–52.
Mee, Jon, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762–1830 (Oxford:
Picker, John M., ‘Aural Anxieties and the Advent of Modernity’, in The Victorian World, ed.
Martin Hewitt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 603–18.
———, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Smith, Mark M., ‘The Garden in the Machine: Listening to Early American Industrialization’,
in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford:

18
‘This is/not was’: The Violence of

Circulation and the Sonics of
Submerged Language
Andrew Brooks
W hat is the sound of a story that cannot be told but must be told? This question
reimagines a statement by the poet M. NourbeSe Philip that appears in an essay
accompanying her long poem Zong!: ‘There is no telling this story; it must be told.’1
Philip’s statement refers to a massacre that took place on board a slave ship named
Zong as it transported its human cargo from the African West Coast to the British
plantation economy of Jamaica in 1781. Philip’s extended poetry cycle Zong! remedi-
ates the legal transcript of Gregson vs Gilbert, a 1783 English court document that is
the only remaining archival document of the massacre. The legal transcript that serves
as the source material for Philip’s poem indexes not a juridical process concerned with
justice for the dead but rather an insurance dispute in which the owners of the slave
ship Zong (Gregson) sued the underwriter (Gilbert) for failing to pay the insurance
claim for the ‘cargo’ that was destroyed. Philip’s statement speaks to the impossibility
of accounting for those lives who were reduced to chattel and recorded as numbers
in a ledger, as well as the necessity of historicising the terrible violence of the Middle
Passage without reproducing the spectacle of Black suffering.
My question is an invitation to listen to, rather than simply read, Philip’s poem.
What might we hear when we listen for what is otherwise inaudible in the archives?
What do we make of the noises and silences the poet finds in this document of
racial violence? What are the rhythms of constraint and escape, and how do they
reverberate into the present? This reframing of Philip’s question draws attention to
the presence of sound in the archive of written documents so often presumed to be
silent. To open our ears to the archive is to listen for the echoes that sound in the
spaces in between the words that comprise the record of slavery and subjugation.
It is an invitation to listen to the songs sung, the languages spoken, the screams of
anguish. To open our ears in this way requires an attention to history, as well as an
openness to speculation. This, of course, is a political gesture that reminds us the
archive is an always incomplete operation of judgement – a site of preservation and
destruction. The archive emerges from a procedure of power in which some artefacts
are deemed worthy of preservation while others are discarded. The task of critically
re-reading these repositories must involve listening for the sounds that resonate in
the spaces between what has been recorded. Poetry is a literary mode attuned to the
transformation of time and space – and of one into the other – and this renders it a

the sonics of submerged language 285
form uniquely placed to explore the space between record and speculation, language
and sound, word and silence. As Philip puts it:
silence is
the sound, the very sound between the words,
in the interstices of time divided by the word
between
outer and inner
space / silence
is
the boundary2
This essay suggests that listening to the submerged language in Philip’s poem leads us
towards an engagement with the violence of circulatory capitalism and speculative
finance, the birth of logistics and the counter-movement of logisticality, the afterlives
of slavery and the poetics of opacity.3 In the sounds and silences of the poem we might
locate a frequency that looks to the future, anticipating a world beyond the violent
grammar of racial capitalism.
Positions and Coordinates

To begin, some incomplete and well-rehearsed bearings. The orientation points that
follow are incomplete not only because the historical record of this massacre is partial –
both lost to the sea with the lives of those thrown overboard and a product of the
inherently fragmented nature of the archive – but because the reclamation of a violence
which leaves no trace other than enumeration is simply impossible (‘there is no telling
this story’). Yet, since 1781, the story of the Zong has been told, and interpreted, many
times over, from abolitionist pamphlets, to paintings, to historical studies,4 to aca-
demic projects,5 to contemporary novels6 and poems. The spectacle of Black death was
instrumentalised in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anti-slavery campaigns,
with the historian James Walvin noting, ‘The line of dissent from the Zong case to the
successful campaign for the abolition of slavery was direct and unbroken, however
protracted and uneven.’7
The story of the Zong is rendered in J. M. W. Turner’s 1840 painting The Slave Ship
(Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon coming on) where the
ship appears as a vessel of European modernity, the violence of the historical period
mirrored by the violence of the storm that bears down on the ship. The blur of Turner’s
scene in which the ocean fuses with the sky, bodies become inseparable from waves,
and the ship disappears into the horizon captures the horror of the Middle Passage.
Turner’s thick layering of paint creates a canvas full of noise and turbulence. The
force of nature conjoins with the violence of ‘Man’ in a scene that encodes the sonic
– the screams of those thrown to ocean, the howling wind, the crashing waves, the
creaking ship, the squawking of sea birds, the ferocious splashing of ocean creatures
dragging the living to their watery graves – in the two-dimensional plane of the paint-
ing. ‘Turner transcended the principle of traditional landscape: the principle that the
landscape is something which unfolds before you’, writes John Berger.8 In Turner’s

286 andrew brooks
paintings, Berger elaborates, ‘the scene begins to extend beyond its formal edges. It
begins to work its way round the spectator in an effort to outflank and surround him.’9
The Slave Ship possesses this quality, surrounding the viewer by depicting the event
in motion, capturing the vibrational intensity of the scene. The painting reverberates
beyond the edges of canvas and into the viewer to be registered not merely visually but
through the flesh. Turner’s depiction of the Zong massacre bears a generic title that
marks it as an event both singular and typical: an event that stands in for so many
other events that passed largely unremarked upon in the annals of history. For Paul
Gilroy, the slave ship is best understood as ‘a living, micro-cultural, micro-political
system in motion’, one marked by violence as well as resistance.10 Reading Turner’s
painting of the massacre in his theorisation of the Black Atlantic, Gilroy draws atten-
tion to the slave ship as that which not only involved the circulation of commodities
and the flow of capital, but also involved the circulation of culture and sociality, ideas
and beliefs, customs and sentiments, songs and speech.
Ian Baucom’s retelling of the Zong draws on Giovanni Arrighi’s historical sche-
matic for the development of capitalism as a world system, reading the trans-Atlantic
slave trade in relation to a phase of capitalism weighted towards circulation rather
than production.11 Baucom argues that the slave was treated not merely as a commod-
ity but as a speculative financial object, and the emergence of this international trade
created the conditions for the ascendance of speculative financial forms like credit,
insurance, and liability that structure our present more than two hundred years later.
In Baucom’s reading, the cyclical recurrence of a circulatory phase of capitalism cre-
ates the conditions where speculative capital coexists with speculative forms of cul-
ture, and in the latter we can find different modes of historicising and, in turn, different
ways of conceptualising futurity. If speculative financial forms are once again desper-
ately deployed in the contemporary moment in a bid to defer to recurring crises that
arise from steadily declining rates of global manufacturing over the past half century,
then the speculative reconstruction of historical violence under a previous phase of
capitalism dominated by circulation might provide insight into the movement towards
a different future. That is, we might ask ourselves, what are the epistemological and
political costs of not attending to the sounds of this massacre in the historical record?
Such a question is an invitation to tune our ears to silences in the archive in order that
we might hear the echoes of screams that index the violence of circulatory capital-
ism, as well as reckon with the lost voices and sounds that resisted the imperative of
logistics and its logics of enclosure and subjugation. With these established yet always
incomplete accounts in mind, I offer a truncated summary of the events of the Zong.
The slave ship Zong was owned by group of Liverpool merchants looking to capi-
talise on the burgeoning slave trade. The traffic in human cargo – what Stefano Harney
calls ‘the birth of modern logistics’12 – would mark the city, following Ian Baucom’s
formulation, as an unofficial capital of the long twentieth century, facilitating the flow
of commodities and capital across the Atlantic.13 The ship was acquired from Dutch
merchants with William Gregson and his two sons the majority owners, and was cap-
tained by Luke Collingwood. In 1781 – having spent some months anchored off the
coast of Guinea in West Africa where the captain ‘acquired’ some 440 African people
as slaves, more than twice the number the vessel was designed to hold – the Zong set
sail with a crew of seventeen for Jamaica where those held captive would be sold to toil
on plantations. The trans-Atlantic crossing, typically a six to nine week journey, ended

up taking four months due to navigational errors. During the voyage, Collingwood
and his crew threw somewhere between 130 and 150 of the enslaved people overboard
to their death with the justification that this was carried out for ‘the preservation of the
rest’.14 Collingwood’s actions were explained via an appeal to a lack of provisions: it
was ‘for want of water’ that some were thrown overboard to the mercy of the ocean.
But Collingwood’s actions were not motivated simply by a lack of provisions, but also
by the conditions of the insurance policy that covered the human ‘cargo’ aboard the
ship. Treated as commodities rather than persons, the enslaved Africans aboard the
Zong were insured at a value of £30 per head (a total of £13,200) under a policy that
covered the ship’s owners for any losses incurred during the voyage, except for those
that were a result of ‘natural death’. John Wesket explains the legal conventions of
maritime insurance that were established as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade:
The insurer takes upon himself the risk of the loss, capture, and death of slaves, or
any other unavoidable accident to them: but natural death is always understood
to be excepted – by natural death is meant, not only when it happens by disease or
sickness, but also when the captive destroys himself though despair, which often
happens: but when slaves are killed, or thrown into the sea in order to quell an
insurrection on their part, then the insurers must answer.15
Collingwood’s actions aboard the Zong were motivated by a desire to minimise unin-
surable losses, to shift the financial burden of the loss from the ship’s owners (Gregson)
to the underwriter (Gilbert). As Philip puts it, ‘the massacre of African slaves would
prove to be more financially advantageous to the owners of the ship and its cargo
than if the slaves were allowed to die of “natural causes”’.16 The legal transcript of
this insurance dispute forms the basis of Philip’s poem cycle. It is one of the only
surviving records of the victims of the massacre and yet the bureaucratic language of
the legal document works to silence any trace of the victims’ identities.17 ‘What we
know of the trans-Atlantic slave trade’, writes Baucom, ‘is that among the other vio-
lences it inflicted on millions of human beings was the violence of becoming a “type”:
a type of person, or, terribly, not even that, a type of nonperson, a type of property,
a type of commodity, a type of money.’18 The production of this type of commodity
cannot be thought outside the production of racism and anti-Black violence, and the
retelling of the story of the Zong often reproduces the description of Black suffer-
ing as that which spurs liberal conceptions of civilisation and progress. Too often,
Blackness is subsumed within the scene of suffering where it becomes a vehicle for
the narration of inequality in which the Black body becomes trapped within the log-
ics of racialisation, proof of the reproduction of race as a structure of oppression.
This circular logic involves the mutation of one form of subjugation into another, or
what Saidiya Hartman calls ‘the afterlife of slavery’ (think here of the way policing
and incarceration have extended racialised oppression since the formal abolition of
slavery as just one example).19 But as Katherine McKittrick tells us, ‘description is
not liberation’.20 And so we must remember, following Fred Moten, that the type of
commodity transported, traded, speculated on in the trans-Atlantic slave trade was
‘the commodity who speaks’.21 Here it would be more accurate to say that what we
are referring to is the commodity who sounds, a formulation that captures not only
the forms of speech that come to signify the possessive individualism that underpins

288 andrew brooks
liberal conceptions of subjectivity but more importantly, the noise of those excluded
from the racialising grammar of this category.22 This, of course, is central to the work
of Moten and Hartman, attuned as it is to the way Blackness is yoked to the violence
of anti-Blackness yet always exceeds and therefore disrupts white supremacy. Against
the tendency to focus only on the abstractions and violences of slavery, how are we
to listen to the sounds and echoes that cut against description and representation
and move us instead towards an encounter with liberation? What might we learn by
listening for the echoes and reverberations of the voices of those who were rendered
commodity objects? What is the sound of a story (and a history) that cannot be told
and cannot be recovered?
From Zong to Zong!

Philip’s account of the Zong offers one approach to this impossible question. The
book consists of a long poem in six parts that uses the legal transcript of Gregson vs
Gilbert as a phonic and linguistic database; a glossary of terms likely heard aboard
the Zong that includes Arabic, Dutch, Fon, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin,
Portuguese, Spanish, Shona, Twi, West African Patois, and Yoruba and that reflects the
internationalism of shipping; a manifest of the African groups and languages, animals,
body parts, crew, food and drink, figures of nature, and women’s names that appear
in the poem; a fragmented ‘notanda’ that describes the process of writing the poem;
and finally, the transcript of the ruling that the poem is derived from. The poem frag-
ments the official archive, constructing what Philip calls a ‘recombinant antinarrative’
in which the force of the language of the law to pass judgment, transform relations,
and record history is interrupted.23 The opposition to narrative is a rejection of a
teleological account of the massacre (and by extension, of history itself) in which the
reproduction of Black exclusion is mobilised as the grounds for the articulation and
transformation of whiteness. Philip’s act of refusal is not a rejection of narrativity
per se but a rejection of the master narrative of liberalism and modernity which is
reproduced again and again across the historical record. Against this master narrative,
Philip discovers a sonic trace that exceeds the official archive, a surplus that troubles
meaning and opens towards a poetics of the unknowable and the unsayable. This
‘recombinant antinarrative’ – full of sound and silence – refuses to allow the language
of the law to make sense, or rather, transforms this language into its own dissonant
field of sense-making.
The first transformation from language to sound occurs in the title of the poem.
Philip’s addition of an exclamation mark transforms Zong from the proper name of
the ship (a name that is, in itself, an error of inscription – a modulation from the Dutch
word Zorg, which in English means ‘care’), to the exclamation Zong! The accidental
name change occurred during a repainting of the ship’s signage, and Philip enacts a
further transformation, morphing the word into a cry of voice: ‘Zong! is chant! Shout!
And ululation! Zong! is moan! Mutter! Howl! And shriek! Zong! is “pure utterance.”
Zong! is Song!’24 The transformation from word to utterance, language to song, iden-
tifies a surplus that moves in excess of the regulatory force of language and its capacity
to transform or constrain bodies within social fields. Philip’s intervention transforms
the word Zong from a signifier to what Gilles Deleuze calls an ‘utterable’, which he
describes as a material that carries force beyond signification:

Even with its verbal elements, this is neither a language system nor a language. It
is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed
linguistically even though it is not amorphous and is formed semiotically, aestheti-
cally and pragmatically. It is a condition, anterior by right to what it conditions. It
is not an enunciation, and these are not utterances. It is an utterable. We mean that,
when language gets hold of this material (and it necessarily does so), then it gives
rise to utterances which come to dominate or even replace the images and signs,
and which refer in turn to pertinent features of the language system, syntagms and
paradigms, completely different from those we started with.25
To hear Zong! as a chant, a shout, a moan, a shriek, a howl, a song is to listen for a
force that disrupts signification, to listen for the noises and silences that signal excess
rather than lack, sounds that simultaneously reveal the historical contingency of racial
capitalism and an insistent movement beyond the existing terms of order. The meta-
morphosis of Zong to Zong! – word to song – is a movement of anteriority and escape,
a movement before and beyond the regulative. Such sounds denote a surplus that
cannot be reduced to fixed identity (and its reliance on both a conceptual and lin-
guistic grammar) but can be understood as a force animating a movement of escape
and antagonism able to produce shared identifications. This mutation can be heard
in Philip’s durational readings and performances of the work which are often collec-
tive, involving a chorus of readers and sometimes also musicians and dancers who
improvise with the poem’s soundscape. These performances often leave the poet and
the performers physically exhausted, their bodies registering the relation of the sounds
they produce to constraint and escape, pain and pleasure, meaning and noise. In an
introduction to a collective reading of the poem in Glasgow in 2013, Philip invites the
audience to embrace the polyvocality of the text:
The proposal here is to engage in the process of consenting to be more than one
voice. [. . .] When I say read together, I don’t necessarily mean read in unison. [. . .]
There are no rules here tonight. You may begin where you want to, I invite you to.26
This invitation to read together, to move laterally through the poem from different
points of departure, extends the resistance to coherence and meaning that animates
the poem cycle. It is an invitation to ‘be in sharp contrast to what the ship was, which
was a set of rules and regulations’.27
The slippage from speech to song (and back again) is central to the aesthetics and
politics of Philip’s poetics. It is in the multiplicity of the sonic that Philip is able to con-
struct a recombinant poetics of indeterminacy that documents the Middle Passage with-
out simply reproducing a description of Black suffering. The consideration of sound is
not just an aesthetico-political question that pertains to this poem but a formal question
about poetry itself. In an essay exploring that intangible quality or spirit that Federico
García Lorca called ‘duende’, Nathaniel Mackey makes the case that the sonic and the
musical shape what poetry does as distinct from other literary forms. Mackey invokes
Louis Zukofsky’s definition of poetry as ‘a function whose lower limit is speech and
whose upper limit is song’.28 For Mackey, this upper limit moves the poet beyond them-
selves, beyond their univocality and towards what Robert Duncan calls ‘the trouble of
an unbound reference’.29 The musicality of poetry is not simply a historical fact of the

290 andrew brooks
form but remains essential to the capacity for poetry to tap into frequencies that move
beneath, beyond, or outside the normative limits of language. Mackey explains that
Zukofsky ‘uses the integral sign from calculus to suggest that we are integrating that
lower limit, speech, and that upper limit, song. Poetry is an integral function.’30 But
integration is also deformation with the upper limit estranging the lower one, such that
meaning – in language, of history and subjectivity – might become unmoored.
Stutters, Noises, Fugitivity

The integration of the lower limit (speech) and upper limit (song) of poetry continues
in ‘Os’, the first of twenty-six poems that comprise the opening sequence of Zong!.
In ‘Zong #1’, words emerge from and dissolve into elongated vowel-sounds, sibi-
lants, fricatives, dentals, plosives, labials, grunts, stutters, and moans.31 The poem
splinters and fragments words and phrases from the legal transcript such as ‘water was
good’, ‘water was sour’, ‘want of water’, ‘one day/s’, and ‘won dey’. Here the dissolu-
tion of language into heavy and elastic vowel-dominated sounds is suggestive of water
– both as presence and absence, ocean and drinking supplies – that is so central to the
events at hand. The phrases speak to the lack of adequate supplies of drinking water to
sustain the crew of the ship and the entire hold of imprisoned human cargo, and were
spoken to justify the killing of some of the enslaved in order to preserve their insurable
value and the value of those that remained. Here we might recall another poem of the
ocean, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and its famous
lines: ‘Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink’.32 Philip’s poem allows us
to hear the ocean and the rapidly evaporating drinking supplies while reminding us
of the presence of the law as it reaches across the vastness of the ocean. The poem
remains constrained by the language of the law, nodding to the continued centrality
of legal language in the perpetuation of racial violence today, yet the authority of the
legal account of events is called into question by the fragmentation of language into a
noise anterior to it. In the hands of the poet, the language of the transcript is made to
stutter, breaking apart and interrupting itself as it dissolves into sound, a process that
invokes the expansiveness of the ocean itself which contains both silent depths and
furious roars and everything in between.
In Zong! it is language, not speech, that stutters. A stutter is commonly taken to
be an interruption in the flow of speech, often involving the repetition, distortion,
prolongation, or suspension of phonemes. It is an interruption to the flow of speech
as signification, a disruption to the perceived stability of the voice as an ideal object
that has come to represent the liberal subject of post-Enlightenment thought. Here
the stutter is cast as an impediment of speech, as that which impairs coherence. But
if coherence presumes a singular and self-possessed subject in command of their own
faculties, then perhaps the stutter offers a way of approaching that which coherence
excludes, what Harney and Moten describe as ‘unformed objects, deformed subjects’
who in their irreducible sociality refuse to be made into discrete units recorded in a led-
ger and transported in the hold of the ship.33 The stutter reveals the voice to be always
already multiple, insisting on variation and movement. Mackey identifies a structural
resonance between stuttering and staggering or stumbling which he connects to the
Fon-Yoruba orisha (spirit) Legba – the god of thresholds and crossroads, one who
presides over spaces of contact. Mackey notes that Legba ‘walks with a limp because
his legs are of unequal length, one of them anchored in the world of humans and the

other in that of the gods’.34 His ‘impairment’ grants him the power of movement that
exceeds himself, a movement of continuous variation that straddles two worlds and
brings them into relation with one another. Mackey writes:
His limp the offbeat or eccentric accent . . . he’s the master musician and dancer,
declared first among the orishas because only he could simultaneously play a gong,
a bell, a drum, and a flute while dancing. The master of polyrhythmicity and het-
erogeneity, he suffers not from deformity but multiformity, a ‘defective’ capacity
in a homogeneous order given over to uniform rule. [. . .] Impairment taken to a
higher ground, remediated, translates damage and disarray into dance.35
In another essay, Mackey identifies the spirit of Legba in saxophonist John Coltrane’s
ability to simultaneously sound multiple ‘lines of articulation – doubling the voice, split-
ting the voice, breaking the voice, tearing it’.36 And again, he identifies this quality in
Mississippi Fred McDowell’s performance of the blues song ‘Everybody’s Down on Me’:
He is talking about being betrayed, and he is saying that you need an unruly, outra-
geous sound when you feel there is no other way you can get satisfaction. What you
can say, what can be stated within the limits of conventionally articulate speech, is
not enough. What you need is this sound. Notice too how he starts stumbling, how
he stumbles as he tries to talk about that sound, stumbles until the sound itself comes
to his rescue. Notice how the sound itself rescues crippled speech, which, again, is
the eloquence of Legba, the limping eloquence, the limping enablement of Legba.37
The stutter is an opening to a polyrhythmicity that moves one beyond convention and
beyond the proprietary. The voice that splits and reaches beyond conventional speech is
a voice that exceeds the singular ‘I’, suggesting instead a heterogeneous collective ‘we’.
But the generativity of the stutter cannot be detached from constraint either. Consider
the body that stumbles and interrupts itself or the economic systems that transform
humans into commodities, producing innumerable forms of violence. The construction
of any normative order requires the imposition of rules and constraints: the interruption
that is the stutter can only be understood against the normative order that it interrupts.
To acknowledge this is not to fetishise constraint but to note the existence of an incessant
movement of escape that resists and disrupts the scene of constraint, whether it be the
hold of ship or conventional grammar or the relation between these two sites of regu-
lation. The stutter, then, is a movement animated by a spirit of fugitivity that emerges
from that figure, the fugitive, who is marked by enslavement and bondage yet escapes
the clutches of captivity. The ceaseless movement implied by fugitivity, Mackey tells us,
‘asserts itself on an aesthetic level, at the level of poetics’.38 Mackey identifies this fugitive
spirit in his reading of Amiri Baraka’s poetics, pointing to Baraka’s acknowledgement of
the influence of music on his writing as that which introduces a polyvocality that moves
beyond his own voice, suggesting a form of sociality that refuses ownership:
[Baraka] writes of a solo by saxophonist John Tchicai on an Archie Shepp album,

‘It slides away from the proposed’. That gets into, again, the cultivation of another
voice, a voice that is other than that proposed by one’s intentions, tangential to
one’s intentions, angular, oblique – the obliquity of an unbound reference. That
sliding away wants out.39

292 andrew brooks
But perhaps to say that fugitivity refuses possession is not quite right. Rather, as
Mackey tells us, fugitivity suggests a different order of possession: ‘Possession means
that something beyond your grasp of it grabs you, that something that gets away from
you [. . .] gives you a voice.’40 Such fugitive possession disfigures the claim to owner-
ship that is written into laws that uphold private property and, by extension, the self-
possessed subject that conditions the property relation. As Moten puts it, fugitivity ‘is
a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed’.
He continues: ‘This is to say that it moves outside the intentions of the one who
speaks and writes, moving outside their own adherence to the law and to propriety.’41
This movement beyond the proper and proposed can be heard in the splitting of the
voice that occurs in musical performances involving overtones and multiphonics, or
in a voice that slides away from tempered tunings, or in a scream that cuts song. The
sonic dimension of fugitivity is an expression of excess, a lyric surplus that cannot be
reduced to semantic meaning.
A dispossessive form of possession that ‘moves outside the intentions of the one who
speaks and writes’, cutting and augmenting the authorial voice and foregrounding its
multiplicity, is literalised in Zong! Philip credits an imagined ancestor, Setaey Adamu
Boateng, as a co-author of the text. The gesture suggests the presence and cultivation
of another voice, a voice who stands in for the many voices lost to the ocean, or the
many lost ancestors severed by the Atlantic. A running footnote sits at the bottom of
each page in the first section of the poem. The notes list a series of names in a tiny sub-
script: ‘Mausz Suwena Ogunsheye Ziyad Ogwambi Keturah’, ‘Aba Chimanga Naeema
Oba Eshe’, and ‘Wafor Yao Siyolo Bolade Kibibi Kamau’.42 These are Yoruba names, a
speculative calling of the dead that counters the reduction of the enslaved to numbers
in a ledger, quantities of a commodity to be tallied, valued, insured, sold. One man,
one woman, one child. Kamau, Naeema, Oba. For Arlene Keizer, these are ‘fugitive
footnotes’ that reveal the ‘competing principles of overlap and incommensurability’
in Philip’s poetics.43 Philip’s speculative practice of naming the dead constitutes a re-
sounding that reverberates into the present. By locating and sounding Yoruba names in
a legal document written in formal, legal English, the poet performs an acoustic split-
ting that unsettles the proprietary nature of both the legal document and language of
the coloniser. The sounding of these names is a sonic haunting of the language of the
law, a spectral presence that echoes from below.
The fugitive relation of constraint and escape plays out on a formal level in Zong!:
the poem itself is constrained by its source material, by the incomplete record that is
the legal transcript. The mutilation of the document, the violent fragmentation of the
source material, can be read as reckoning with the violence of captivity and enslave-
ment. In order for one to be reduced to a type, traded as a commodity, recorded in a
ledger as a number, one must first be stripped of the capacity to signify according to
Enlightenment markers of subjectivity and humanity. This distinction between subject
and object can be understood, as Hortense Spillers teaches us, as a distinction between
body and flesh, which she tells us ‘is the central distinction between captive and liber-
ated subject-positions’.44 For Spillers, flesh signifies the theft of the body which erases,
among other markers of subjectivity, gendered difference, simultaneously reducing
the captive body to a thing at the same time that it marks it ‘as a source of irresist-
ible, destructive sensuality’.45 Flesh makes material the abstractions of race with the
absence of a subject position providing ‘a physical and biological expression of “other-
ness”’.46 This transformation from subject to flesh is written with whips and chains:

‘If we think of the “flesh” as a primary narrative,’ Spillers tells us, ‘then we mean its
seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” over-
board.’47 Philip’s fragmentation of the archive then might be thought as a reckoning
with the violence that marks the flesh of the slave. She writes: ‘I mutilate the text as the
fabric of African life and the lives of these men, women and children were mutilated.’48
The poem slides between stutters and screams, attentive not only to the fragmenta-
tion of language and grammar but also to violences that mark flesh and compel it to
sound. The final two sections – ‘Ferrum’ and ‘Ebora’ – are the noisiest of the poem
cycle. There is a violence to the way the text fragments as words are torn apart, slip-
ping from semantic signification into cries and shrieks and moans. In ‘Ferrum’, the
penultimate section of the cycle, we can hear the trace of scream as an uncontainable
outpouring that cleaves language – a vestige of the violence written onto the flesh of
those held captive, as well as an expression of a material, sonic excess that disrupts
meaning. Flesh, as Spillers teaches us, does not only signify constraint and captivity but
also precedes the body and, as such, also precedes the racialising grammar that accom-
panies the body as marker of individuated subjectivity that is inextricably linked to a
notion of self-possession grounded in the perceived rationality of language and speech.
The poem’s final section, ‘Ebora’, presents the text as in a layered manner – a literal
overwriting at odds with insurance overwriting. Here the text is rendered in a light-
ened or washed-out font. The phonic trace of the scream is submerged in this section
of the poem cycle, as if sounding from the depths of the ocean – an echo refusing to
fade out. The sense of disorientation is amplified by the overwriting which generates
moments of pure noise in which visual lettering dissolves into static, sounding amongst
the sinking traces of legalese. To hear the scream merely as an index of trauma is to
risk the reproduction of Black suffering as a spectacle for consumption that ties the
scream to the violence of anti-Blackness. But this fails to hear what the scream – and its
reanimation in Black art – instantiates. Reflecting on another famous textual scream –
namely Hartman’s reading of Frederick’s Douglass’s famous account of the beating of
his Aunt Hester49 – Moten writes:
Black art neither sutures nor is sutured to trauma. There’s no remembering, no

healing. There is, rather, a perpetual cutting, a constancy of expansive and enfold-
ing rupture and wound, a rewind that tends to exhaust the metaphysics upon which
the idea of redress is grounded.50
Here the scream is encountered as a sound that cannot be uncoupled from anti-Black
violence while at the same time cannot be defined by it. Instead, we can hear the
scream as a fugitive sound that cuts interpretation. The content of the scream cannot
be represented but rather is encountered as a force, and it is this force that Philip cap-
tures in her poem.
In the stutters and screams that sound in and through the text of Zong! we can
locate multiple directions of escape: a line of escape from the burden of narrativity and
reproduction of what Hartman calls ‘the scene of subjection’;51 a line of escape found
in the analytic of the flesh which confronts the violence of enslavement by viscerally
breaking apart the word in order to locate that which precedes – and so also evades –
the calculative terms of Western modernity; and the decomposition of language itself
which is broken down to its molecular elements as symbols and letters that float free
from signification. The process of cutting, slicing, breaking, splintering, fragmenting,

294 andrew brooks
fracturing, moving, heaping, and reassembling the language of the law disrupts the
repetition of a narration of history that emerges from this archive, by asking us to
listen to the flesh that the archive obscures.
Stuttering Logistics
The earlier sections of the poem cycle – ‘Os’ and ‘Dicta’ – play with a form that cannot
be separated from reduction and constraint: the ledger. The ledger, a format for record
keeping that took on increased importance during the seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century expansion of colonialism and the rise of speculative finance that accompanied
it, was a crucial technology to the process of reducing Black life to a crude calculus that
took the preservation of private property, the recording of commercial endeavours, and
the accumulation of surplus value as its primary objectives. I want to suggest that the
ledger is also a form of silencing that, in the context of the Middle Passage, reduces
Black personhood to quantitative measurement. The history of the ledger can be traced
to earlier instances of mercantile capitalism but would take on a renewed significance
during the period of England’s hegemony over the capitalist world system, spurring the
development of the insurance industry and playing a central role as evidence in legal
disputes. The ledger enabled mercantile capitalists to monitor stock, account for private
property, and track credit and debt relations, in short, to exercise control over the flow
of commodities, including those commodities held in the hold of the ship.
The ledger then is a technology of logistics, which Jasper Bernes describes as ‘war
by other means, war by means of trade’.52 Modern logistics translates the tactics
and strategies of war into principles of trade and practices of finance central to the
reproduction of capital. It is an operation that concerns itself with the movement of
commodities from one place to another, the ‘science’ of controlling the flow of com-
modities which requires the enclosure of both space and subjects. What, then, is the
sound of this war by other means? Harney and Moten argue that ‘modern logistics is
founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak’.53
The work of such transportation is an art of silencing, one that refuses to recognise
the speech of the enslaved, as well as the many other sounds of fugitive sociality, as
a condition for the justification of slavery. But to figure logistics merely as an art of
silence is only half the story, for this act of silencing enables the sound of commodity
production to fill the empty space in such a way that elides the historical contingency
of this sound. For Harney and Moten, the sound of logistics is the regular rhythm of
individuation:
There is a rhythm making a world, and the time and space this rhythm beats out
invites individuation in this world. This is a rhythm that has been around for five
hundred years. But now it sounds to itself like the only rhythm, the rhythm of the
world, and of the individuals who strive to live in that world. It is the rhythm of
commodity production by commodities, internally disrupted at its origin. The first
beat renders each commodity separate, bordered, isolated from the next. The sec-
ond beat renders every thing equal to every other thing. The first beat makes every
thing discrete. The second beat makes everything the same. [. . .] It sounds out by
expropriating any other movement of the beat. It asserts that nothing else can be
heard, that nothing else need be felt.54

Logistics, then, is at once a silencing, as well as the production of a standardised and

metronomic beat that dispenses with differentiation, variation, improvisation. The
sound of modern logistics relies upon the (re)production of a racialising rhythm in
which the enslaved is violently silenced in order to be transformed from subject to
flesh, voice to abstraction, person to chattel, being to number.
Philip evokes the science of logistics through the form of the ledger with its adja-
cent columns. But in Philip’s hands the ledger is always slightly askew. In ‘Zong #4’,
the text of the poem appears in two thin columns: the vertical alignment is suggestive
of a distinct category in an account book yet the column on the left does not perfectly
align with the one on the right.55 Instead they are stuttered, throwing the horizontal
reading that defines the ledger slightly off balance.
The poem’s opening couplet, ‘this is / not was’, disrupts the chronological passage
of time. The calculus of the ledger is not fixed in the past – the insistence on the present
tense suggesting that the time of slavery is still ongoing. The movement of the words
‘should’, ‘this’, ‘be’, and ‘not’ from one side of the ledger to the other complicates the
moral distance that is put between this historical violence and the present. The triplet
‘this be / not / should be’ refuses the legal speculation that surrounds the events of the
Zong, reminding us that the violence was inflicted on people rather than abstractions
assigned a monetary value. Cut adrift from their sentences, the words pass from one
side of the ledger to the other, progressively rearranging themselves into units of sound
that pattern into the rhythmic mantra: ‘this / should / not / be’. The repetition of words
coalesces as a chant, but these sequences are repetitions with difference, involving
subtle shifts in tense and shifting accents as the words change position in defiance of
the ledger’s rigidity. The rhythm that builds is one of variation, challenging both the
reductive silence of the ledger and the one-two rhythm of commodity production it
implies. Here the poem, through the force of the chant, becomes didactic, refusing to
be contained by the logic of the ledger and condemning the violence that the nexus of
logistics, speculative finance, and insurance produces. The final word of the poem –
‘is’ – sits outside the margins of the ledger, complicating the assertion that ‘this should
not be’ with a state of being verb that implies a temporal continuity from the events
of the Zong to the present. In Philip’s hand, the ledger and its calculus is made to stut-
ter through an agrammatical play of tense that generates a rhythmic movement that
refuses to become predictable. One snags on the movement from past to present tense,
stumbles over the incapacity to remain in either location.
Circulation and Logisticality

In the stuttered movement of language across the ledger we can also register something of
the operation of capital in circulation which is, of course, not disconnected from the stut-
tering of time given that we find ourselves now in another moment defined by circulation,
financialisation, and logistics. That is, can the poem’s evocation of the ledger as a technol-
ogy inextricably connected to circulatory capitalism direct us to examine the emergence
of a credit system whose flourishing was a condition of modern logistics? And might
the poem’s refusal of both the operation of silencing that logistics depends upon and the
equally violent standardised rhythm of commodity production encourage us to listen for
those surplus sounds that exceed semantic meaning, and in doing so, also suggest a way
of apprehending the force of fugitivity that moves beyond the grammar of racialisation?

296 andrew brooks
Baucom writes of the Liverpool merchants profiting from the slave trade, ‘They
were not just selling slaves on the far side of the Atlantic, they were lending money
across the Atlantic.’56 These merchants financed slave ships whose crew purchased or
otherwise obtained cargoes of slaves and transported them to the plantations of the
Americas where they assigned the cargo to a local factor or sales agent. After selling
the slaves and taking their commission, the proceeds were transferred to the original
merchant in the form of an interest-bearing bill of exchange.57 These interest-bearing
bills of exchange, which typically ranged from three months to three years, were either
held in order to receive the full payment plus interest or traded on to meet operational
shortfalls and/or fund the expansion of a merchant’s operations.
The recursive and recombinant movement of language in Philip’s poem cycle, and
the movement of language back and forth across the ledger indexes the flexible move-
ment of money across the Atlantic that modern logistics sets in motion. The poem –
with its attention to recursive movements, turbulence, and noise – speaks to the gen-
erativity of capital and its violent capacity to accumulate surplus from speculation.
Philip’s poem hints at the cyclical movement of capital where phases dominated by
production ultimately lead to the flooding of the market with commodities which,
in turn, results in money capital becoming somewhat detached from the commodity
form, creating the conditions where accumulation proceeds through financial deals.
This is the rhythm of commodity production scaled up to sound out the ‘recurrent
pattern of historical capitalism as a world system’.58 But as we have already estab-
lished, the stutters and screams and shrieks and cries that unfold throughout Zong! are
sounds that index a movement that exceeds even the flexibility of speculative finance.
If speculative finance is yet another scene of constraint, then this poem – and the fugi-
tive sounds that animate it – are on the run from this too.
What then are we to make of a surplus that cannot be contained? Logistics concerns
itself with movement of commodities which in turn enables the transformation of the
commodity into a species of money. But the transportation of commodities presumes
that the commodity itself can be enclosed, separated, possessed. What are we to make of
the commodity who sounds and in sounding refuses the individuation of the hold? How
are we to hear a story that cannot be told but must be told? These are the questions that
Philip’s poem asks again and again. The fragmentation of the archive reveals the pres-
ence of flesh that in shrieking and howling and moaning and singing perpetually disrupts
the given grounds of representation as an outpouring of excess that cannot be reduced
to a singular or coherent communicative message. To stutter or to scream are not marks
of insufficiency, nor can they be understood only as traces of the trauma of anti-Black
violence, but rather they are noises that mark the flesh as affectable and therefore also
as inherently social. Harney and Moten posit logisticality as a mode of undercommon
sociality that defies the logic of silence and enclosure so integral to logistics. ‘Logistics
could not contain what it relegated to the hold’, they write.59 ‘Logisticality’ is a term that
stands in opposition to the silencing and abstraction of logistics, gesturing to that which
evades and escapes the attempt to transform flesh into commodities. They explain:
There is a social capacity to instantiate again and again the exhaustion of the stand-
point as undercommon ground that logistics knows as unknowable, calculates as
an absence that it cannot have but always longs for, that it cannot, but longs, to be
or, at least, to be around, to surround.60

The transformation into chattel relies on broken kinship bonds, processes of decul-
turation, and forced atomisation. But logistics never achieved this. Something travelled
in the hold of the ship: a whisper, a song, a scream, a howl, a murmur, a touch, a
shared feeling. As Cedric Robinson points out in a critique of Karl Marx’s relegation
of slavery to a historical stage of capital’s development, ‘Marx had not realised that
the cargoes of labourers also contained critical mixes and admixtures of language and
thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality.’61 Despite the
attempt to render the hold a space of silence, recorded in the historical record only
by the abstractive logics of the enumeration, sound moved with those who were forc-
ibly shipped. And with that sound, so moved feeling and consciousness and sociality
and resistance.
As Philip’s stuttering of the archive unfolds, we bear witness to more and more of this
fugitive logisticality. In the section titled ‘Ferrum’ the fragmentation of language is pushed
to its extreme – words break into noises and utterables, fragments of language asso-
ciated with histories of shipping and colonisation (French, Spanish, Latin, Portuguese,
Italian, and Dutch, for example) come up against and trade places with West African
languages and dialectics (Shona, Twi, Fon, Yoruba). Philip draws a multilingualism out of
the archive and locates the continuity of language and culture within the scene of subjec-
tion. Sounds associated with flesh such as stammers and the irregular accents fragmenting
phonemes drift across the page. The poem vocalises the ‘critical mixes and admixtures of
language and thought’ that Robinson describes.
What is produced is a polyvocal improvisation, a spontaneous irruption of the
many voices, which indeed were already there, but which sound as uncontainable
surplus. Legba is made to appear in this section, his name stuttered across the page in
a literalisation of the rhythmic surplus that is his godly gift:
ba le g ba l eg ba / leg b a leg ba62
For Moten, this surplus is at the heart of logisticality. He writes:
the one who is shipped is also a smuggler, carrying something – and what he carries
is, first and foremost, a kind of radical, non-locatability. The point is, there’s a cer-
tain way of thinking about that impossibility of being located, of that exhaustion
of location, that can only be understood as deprivation.63
What Moten describes as the exhaustion of location is another way of articulating

fugitivity, which in its relentless movement evades location and ‘slides away from the
proposed’.64 The fragmentation of the archive into surplus sound and noise can be
heard as a refusal to locate meaning. The recombinatory process that Philip subjects
the source text to can be heard as an insistence of the possibility of rhythmic and
semantic variation in language. The refusal to make order from the cacophony of
voices sounding in multiple languages can be heard as an attempt to unsettle the lan-
guage that history is written in, forcing it to stutter until it begins to break apart. The
excess and polyrhythmicity of Philip’s poetics offers a way of registering the continuity
of variation, the capacity for meaning to be unsettled, for histories to be reimagined,
for futures beyond the grammar of racialisation.

298 andrew brooks
Coda: Silences, Voids, Opacity

If the stutter is an interruption that starts and stops and which sets free the generative
polyrhythmicity of a limping Legba, then it is also that which foregrounds silence in
speech and language. Amongst the breakdown of language, between the repetition and
stammering of phonemes, on either side of fragmented plosives, there is silence which
is the most direct example of that which coherence excludes. Silence plays a crucial
role in Zong!: the spaces that open between the fragments of language and song and
noise that appear on the page are voids that cannot be filled, absences that cannot be
recovered. And yet these silences are not static nor still, they are constitutively different
to the silencing of logistics which seeks absolute negation and total control. By con-
trast, the absence of both language and noise in Philip’s poem offers a space to listen
for what Duncan called ‘the trouble of unbound reference’, or what I have narrated, by
way of Mackey and Moten and the Black radical tradition, as the fugitive impulse. In
these breaks, we can listen for a temporality that simultaneously indexes an unknow-
able past and an uncertain future, for frequencies that suggest not the passing of time
but its accumulation. Formally, the silences on the page encourage a reading that does
not only move from left to right and top to bottom but transversally through the text
in multidirectional ways. Here the text becomes a fluid structure, and the reader or
listener becomes an active participant in the construction of a counter-archive, sensing
both for a submerged history and for new relations of language.
The voids and silences that structure Zong! work across registers of subjection to
different possibilities for feeling and meaning. Such silences sound, and in sounding,
acknowledge the impossibility of knowing – an order indebted to what Édouard Glis-
sant refers to as ‘the right to opacity’.65 For Glissant, opacity is of central importance to
both epistemology and politics, in that it produces new modes of (un)knowing that must
be continuously negotiated and renegotiated. Glissant suggests that the ‘right to opacity
[. . . is not an . . .] enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an
irreducible singularity’.66 His notion of opacity interrupts the demand to make objects
of inquiry transparent by emphasising instead their fundamental differences. Opacity
brings differences into relation without demanding that these differences be understand-
able or resolvable: ‘opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand
these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its
components.’67 Here, opacity opens on to a heterogeneous space of unknowability –
simultaneously a site for encountering an irrecoverable trauma and a place of radical
non-locatability in which one might feel the uncertain shape of undercommon sociality,
‘to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you’,
as Harney and Moten put it in their own recursive poetics.68 Philip’s use of negative
space enacts this kind of opacity as both an order of knowledge and a production of
multiplicity. Opening a space between speech and noise, song and silence, history and
opacity, Philip encourages us to listen to the nothingness that arises when she makes
language confront its limits. The silences of Philip’s text gesture towards a type of under-
common sociality: one that can be found when one remains in the hold of the ship and
attends to the forces that move there; that is situating itself but not surrendering to the
realms of both social and corporeal death. Here Philip’s statement that has guided this
essay – ‘there is no telling this story; it must be told’ – turns out not to be a paradox at
all. The politics of opacity that guide the project allow Philip to return to this scene of
violence without narrativising it and without reproducing it as a spectacle. Her attention

to constraint and escape allows an account of the Zong massacre that acknowledges the
terrible violence of the Middle Passage without being defined by it. When we listen to
this poem, we hear the generative noise of excess and multiplicity. By making language
stutter, Philip reveals silence to be a crucially noisy site from which knowledge – official
and unarchived – is made. Listening to the stutters and the silences might be a way of
inhabiting the void, a space from which we might begin to enact different futures.
Notes
1. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 189.
2. M. NourbeSe Philip, Blank: Essays and Interviews (Toronto: Bookthug, 2017), 261.
3. Logisticality is a concept developed by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten as a counter-
movement to ‘the capitalist science of logistics’. Logisticality is one of a series of modalities
that Harney and Moten first presented in The Undercommons. For Harney and Moten,
these modalities are genealogically linked to the Black radical tradition, implying a collec-
tive form of politics that exceeds and disrupts the force of individuation so central to the
imposition of colonialism and capitalism. They pit these undercommon modalities – which
foreground movement and sociality – against a series of terms that imply constraint such
as logistics, education, and policy. Logisticality cannot be understood outside of logistics
which is driven by a desire to enable efficient circulation of commodities and the unim-
peded accumulation of capital, and yet describes the movement of people, culture, beliefs,
traditions, and orientations that exceeds and unsettles the logistical imperative. Stefano
Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New
York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 97, 134.
4. James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (New York: HarperCollins, 1992);
James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery (New Haven: Yale
5. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso,
1993); Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philoso-
phy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Anita Rupprecht, ‘“A Very
Uncommon Case”: Representations of the Zong and the British Campaign to Abolish the
Slave Trade’, The Journal of Legal History 28, no. 3 (2007): 329–46; Christina Sharpe, In
the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Katherine
McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).
6. Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997).
7. Walvin, Black Ivory, 16.
8. John Berger, Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible (London: Penguin, 2020), 32.
9. Ibid.
10. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 4.
11. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic.
12. Niccolò Cuppini and Mattia Frapporti, ‘Logistics Genealogies: A Dialogue with Stefano
Harney’, Social Text 36, 3, no. 136 (2018): 95–110 (96).
13. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 48–53.
14. Gregson vs Gilbert, quoted in Philip, Zong!, 210. There is variation in the different
accounts of the Zong massacre with regards to the number of people killed. The transcript
of Gregson vs Gilbert puts the figure at 150; Baucom suggests 132; and Walvin notes the
absence of a clear record, noting that different accounts from the time included 150, 142,
and 132 deaths. See Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic; Walvin, Black Ivory; and Walvin,
Zong. Katherine McKittrick reads the uncertainty around the death toll as a refutation
of the presumed fixity and stability of data: ‘The death tabulation is, as I read it, best
understood as a range of numbers gathered from many texts and sources. The inability

300 andrew brooks
to count the dead allows us to doubt knowable data and a singular analytical frame,
and therefore open ourselves up to another set of questions that follow alongside and
after the Zong . . . Any discussion of archival loss asks that we recognize the archives as
tracking the incomplete project of freedom. This incompletion opens up the work of imag-
ination – iterations of black life that cannot be contained by official history.’ McKittrick,
Dear Science, 142–3.
15. John Wesket, quoted in Walvin, Zong, 112; emphasis in original.
16. Philip, Zong!, 189.
17. The transcript is actually an appeal of the original finding. Initially, the court found in
favour of the owner (Gregson); however, the insurer (Gilbert) appealed the decision to the
Court of the King’s Bench, which ruled a new trial should be held. The transcript is of this
decision and is the last official record of the Zong case. Philip elaborates, ‘I have found no
evidence that a new trial was ever held as ordered, or whether the Messrs Gregson ever
received payment for their murdered slaves . . .’. Philip, Zong!, 189.
18. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 11.
19. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6. See also Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection:
Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1997).
20. McKittrick, Dear Science, 128.
21. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 8.
22. For more on the idealised voice of the self-possessed liberal subject and a discussion of
modes of listening attuned to the sounds and noises of those subjects excluded from this
category, see Andrew Brooks, ‘Fugitive Listening: Sounds from the Undercommons’, The-
ory, Culture & Society 37, no. 6 (2020): 25–45.
24. Ibid., 207.
25. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 29, emphasis in original.
26. M. NourbeSe Philip, ‘ZONG!’, Arika, https://arika.org.uk/zong/ (accessed 12 September
2022).
27. Ibid.
28. Nathaniel Mackey, ‘Cante Moro’, in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Tech-
nologies, ed. Adalaide Morris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997),
194–212 (203).
29. Robert Duncan, Caesar’s Gate: Poems, 1949–50 (Berkeley: Sand Dollar, 1972), xxii.
30. Mackey, ‘Cante Moro’, 203.
31. Philip, Zong!, 3–4.
32. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (New York: Dover, 1970), 20.
33. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
(New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 93.
34. Nathaniel Mackey, ‘Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol’, Callaloo 10 (1987):
29–54 (40).
35. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 206.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 200.
40. Ibid., 203–4.
41. Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 131.
42. Philip, Zong!, 3–5.

43. Arlene Keizer, ‘First Reading of M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Zong!” #6’, Jacket 2, 14 February
2014, https://jacket2.org/commentary/first-reading-m-nourbese-philips-zong-6-2 (accessed
28 April 2022).
44. Hortense Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics
17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81 (67).
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
49. See Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Moten, In the Break.
50. Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), ix.
51. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.
52. Jasper Bernes, ‘Logistics, Counterlogistics and the Communist Prospect’, in Endnotes 3:
Gender, Race, Class and Other Misfortunes (2013): 172–201 (185).
54. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete (New York: Minor Compositions,
2021), 55.
56. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 61.
57. Ibid.
58. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our
Times (London: Verso, 2010), 6.
60. Ibid.
61. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 121.
65. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1997), 189.
66. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190.
67. Ibid., 93.
Select Bibliography
Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).
Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
(New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).
Mackey, Nathaniel, ‘Cante Moro’, in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technolo-
gies, ed. Adalaide Morris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 194–212.
———, ‘Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol’, Callaloo 10 (1987): 29–54.
McKittrick, Katherine, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2021).
Moten, Fred, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2003).
———, Stolen Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
Philip, M. NourbeSe, Zong! (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).

19
Shriek and Hum: Industrial Noise

and Productivity
David Ellison
T his chapter takes its title from an essay written by the American anti-noise cam-
paigner Julia Barnett Rice, in which she complains that ‘the “hum” of industry
has now made way for the shriek of industry, and it is perhaps well to call attention
here to the fact that noise is not an essential part of progress’.1 Although written in
1907, this is something of a late entry in a much longer and well-documented urban
battle against irruptive noise, but the terms differ here.2 For one, Rice does not object
to a class of sound but rather to a narrow subset. That is to say that both shriek and
hum may find their origin in industry, but only one of these is apparently injurious.
By shriek, Rice meant the piercing steam whistles issuing from passing tugboats and,
by extension, the toll these took on recuperating patients (sailors, for the most part)
within earshot of the river; a banshee scream into convalescent ears. To make matters
worse, Rice came to understand that the frequent whistles were nothing more than a
sort of sociable nod among skippers, rather than urgent signals to converging craft.3
The hum of industry displaced by shriek was different; Rice specifies no point of origin
or reception, social or otherwise. As such, hum is something of an open category, a
catch-all for the constituent noises of the modern city – crowds, transport, construc-
tion, and manufacture, for a start – combining into something that she chooses to
describe in such comparatively benign terms: scaled up, it is the soundscape of the
dynamic metropolis; scaled down, it might emerge innocently enough from Rice her-
self moving through the echoey corridors of her Italianate mansion on the Hudson.
This division of industrial sound into tolerable hum and excruciating shriek furnishes
the occasion to – finally – separate noise from progress.
This association too has a long history, albeit one marked by ambivalence. Noise
is at once the irrepressible sign of growth and the long-suffering price paid by those
who stood to gain from it and those who did not.4 The sympathy that Rice voices for
those beleaguered patients, as much as her demand for a newly muted sonic order,
emerges out of industrial hum as the ground against which the punishing figure of
shriek is discerned. Rather than suggesting that hum is, at the very least, one of the
enabling conditions for Rice’s expression of an expansive, sympathetic, and liberal
concern, let me rephrase this as the question I consider here: from where does this
benign modern hum originate? Moreover, how does it become one of the distinctive
noise signatures of modernity? In what follows I briefly trace the alignment of shriek
with the selectively injurious character of industry, before turning to the less familiar
emergence of hum as a capacitating ground for ‘higher’ feeling and thought. I will

shriek and hum 303
proceed here through a series of written encounters, some avowedly fictional, some
less so, with machines that make noise. The archive summoned here is fitful and,
as Steven Connor observes of the history of technology, composed of anachronistic
loops,5 but cumulatively it lends support to a generalisation: that the critical and per-
sistent distinction between industrial and machine noise – shriek and hum – was first
modelled in writing about automata.
Deafening Factories
Not surprisingly, hum is not foremost among the sounds recorded in British factories
where, from the early nineteenth century onwards, workers and owners were occa-
sionally asked to describe or defend the intense noises associated with production. In
his 1844 survey of the British factory system, child labour enthusiast William Cooke
Taylor devotes several pages to the so-called Tenters (a contraction of ‘Attenders’),
women employed to closely observe the working of steam-powered machine-frames in
cotton mills, stopping them when fouled and setting them going again when cleared.6
For the reform-minded – those Cooke Taylor names as the ‘enemies of factories’ –
Tenters toiled under hazardous conditions including dust, heat, and, notably, terrible
noise. He makes short work of these seeming ‘grievances’, either minimising the spe-
cific threat they posed to workers or denying them outright. Of noise, though, he
concedes that the ‘rattle of the shuttles’ was ‘very stunning until the ears get used to
it’, but the workers ‘unanimously declared that they did not find the noise at all pain-
ful’.7 Such was not the case for Cooke Taylor himself, who found the sound to be ‘very
disagreeable’ but then so too was ‘the tumult of a crowded thoroughfare in London,
which, indeed, is much the louder nuisance of the two’.8 Where Cooke Taylor can
only liken exposure to factory noise to the rough but inevitably temporary sensations
of urban life, the Tenters, uniquely suited to factory work, can apparently absorb its
continuous racket to no ill effect.
Other investigators approached industrial noise more rigorously, exploring meth-
ods to measure its intensity as well as proposing a range of mitigation efforts. Medical
researchers like John Fosbroke and Charles Turner Thackrah, for example, narrowed
in on the deafening impact of especially percussive labour, like boilermaking, identi-
fying a condition that would eventually come to be known, diagnostically, as noise-
induced hearing loss.9 And yet, even as evidence mounted for the damage wrought
by noise, workers were still seen to be largely unaffected, or – more tellingly – it
was believed that the effect only marginally diminished their productivity.10 Although
ostensibly concerned with hearing, such research implicitly tested the affinities between
workers and machines – mutually exposed to wear and tear, but still functioning with
a common purpose. This is well-established terrain, not least in the work of Karl
Marx,11 and I shall not dwell on it here except to call attention to an especially com-
pelling vision of the worker-machine ensemble found in Andrew Ure’s The Philosophy
of Manufactures (1835):
The main difficulty did not, to my apprehension, lie so much in the invention of a
proper self-acting mechanism for drawing out and twisting cotton into a continu-
ous thread, as in the distribution of the different members of the apparatus into
one co-operative body, in impelling each organ with its appropriate delicacy and

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speed, and above all, in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits
of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex
automaton.12
Ure marvels at Richard Arkwright’s technical and organisational innovations that

bound human variability of effort – by assent, no less – to the machine, resulting in
a compound mechanism he styles the automaton. He introduces the term early in
The Philosophy in his description of Jacques de Vaucanson’s autonomous mechanical
musicians, before applying it generally to the idea of the factory:
But I conceive that this title, in its strictest sense, involves the idea of a vast
automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in
uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being
subordinated to a self-regulated moving force.13
Much as Ure’s metaphor of the automaton visualises the novel hybridising properties
of factory thinking on worker-machines, The Philosophy proves surprisingly silent on
the new kinds of sensory impressions it made available. Ure never attends to the sounds
of the carding engines, throstles, or power looms, singly or in concert. This could be
because he wished to focus on the intellectual, technical, and economic achievements
of the factory in the abstract rather than in its bruising realities, or it might have some-
thing to do with the automaton’s characteristically silent operation, as if invoking the
metaphor was enough to mute the hybridising, distinctly proletarian machine noise
encountered in the factory. Although I will go on to argue that this is precisely what
the automaton delivers, they are, in practice, quite noisy in operation. Interestingly,
though, no one seems to hear that.
Consider the example of the fabled automata first exhibited in Neuchâtel in 1774.
Known as the Jaquet-Droz family, they consist of three figures, each modelling a spe-
cific artistic talent. One wrote letters in an elegant hand (l’écrivain), another made
sketches (le dessinateur), while the last played the harpsichord (la musicienne). A pam-
phlet published at the time of their exhibition celebrated the humanising gestures pro-
grammed into their performance:
The [musician] herself plays on her harpsichord various melodies in two or three
voices, with great precision. Since her head can move in all directions, as can the
eyes, she casts her glances at times to her hands, to the music, and to the audience;
her pliable body leans forward occasionally to have a closer look at the music; her
chest drops and rises alternately, in order to indicate the respiration.14
The writer, described by automata historians Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz as
‘among the most perfect (or if it is preferred, least imperfect) imitations of human
beings’,15 could produce any text of up to forty characters pre-programmed onto a disc
plate. In performance, though, the emphasis was less on the exactitude of the script
than on a student’s natural concern to demonstrate sound copying skills:
It places the initial letters neatly and leaves appropriate spaces between the words it
is writing. When it has finished writing one line, it goes successively to a following

shriek and hum 305
one, making sure there is a proper distance between the lines. While it is writing, its
eyes are fixed on its work; but once it has written a letter or word, it casts a glance
at the original from which it seems to be wanting to imitate the characters.16
Finally, the draughtsman appeared as a child seated on a stool:
[It] creates very neatly a few small drawings, of which it first draws the principal fea-
tures, observing both the up-stroke and the down-stroke, and then creates the shad-
ows and finally does some touching-up and corrects the imperfections of its work. For
this purpose, it shifts its hand from time to time as if to see more openly what it has
done, and blows the dust which develops from the pencil drawing. The various move-
ments of the eyes, the arms, and the hand imitate exactly the natural model.17
The draughtsman’s studious pencil is the product of cams mounted on a cylinder inside
his torso. All the data governing the direction and duration of the line, as well as the
scope of shading and the gestural hesitations and corrections, is read from notches
in the cams and then converted into movement through a series of scaled gears and
guide wires. Replacing the cam stacks expanded the draughtsman’s repertoire to four
subjects: the head of Louis XIV; Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in profile; a cupid
seated in a chariot drawn by butterflies; and a fine little dog. A minute pair of bellows
located inside the head produced the puff of air required for the draughtsman to blow
dust from the page.
In her account of Enlightenment automata, the cultural historian Jessica Riskin
frames these kinds of devices as forays into artificial life that proposed new ways
of understanding the material arrangements of the soul and the intellect.18 Here, my
approach is less attuned to the philosophical and more inclined towards locating the
automaton – a technology that both predates and precipitates the industrial revolution –
within efforts to establish new norms of non-industrialising machine proximity.
Literary accounts are especially important here as they dislodge the automaton from
the strictures of performance (outlined below), placing it within a propositional field
where the impressions and emotions stirred by it are privileged over the given skill it
demonstrates. Moreover, written accounts of automaton reception inevitably encoun-
ter the question of whether, or not, the machine is heard.
Were you to visit the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Neuchâtel, you could attend
a demonstration of the Jaquet-Droz automata that cleaves closely to the way the
devices were presented in the later eighteenth century. For the purposes of display, the
draughtsman is mounted on a wheeled platform so that the small audience can observe
the resulting drawing as it unfolds. When his sketch is completed, the draughtsman is
rotated 180 degrees to reveal the remarkably complex internal mechanism in motion.
This moment, always presented as a sort of coup de théâtre, is entirely premised on
not audibly perceiving the presence of the gears until the moment in which they are
properly revealed. A general survey of automata published in 1869 affirms the emo-
tional power of such devices in strictly visual terms: ‘It must first be understood that
in all automata the motive power is hidden from the spectator, and hence springs the
wonder and curiosity.’19 And yet, of course the moment the draughtsman, or indeed
any other automaton from this era, is put into motion, the loud and continuous bass
rasp of the spring-driven gears in operation fills the room with the sound of motive

306 david ellison
power. Again, for the revelation of the gears to produce a surprise, this noise must
remain unacknowledged by the audience until the draughtsman completes his drawing
and the little door in his back is opened to reveal his workings. He is then swivelled
on his wheeled platform, cycling between orientations as if presenting two apparently
incommensurate views. From the front, we see the ‘least imperfect’ simulation of a
human; from the back, a dizzying mechanical achievement. As Simon Schaffer notes,
such unimpeded access to the interior of the machine was – and is – ‘at least as vital as
the display of the marvellous performance itself’.20 The continuous noise of the gears
exceeds, and potentially undermines, the sublime distinction proffered between front
and back, near-human and emphatic machine. Except that it does not. In spite of its
volume and duration, the sound scarcely registers until it is appropriate for it to do so.
In lieu of any practical noise-damping within the automaton, the task of preserving the
pleasure of the reveal falls to the mediating ear of the auditor, who must compensate
for the state of technological immaturity by turning a deaf ear to the noisy object, or
rather, withdrawing attention from it, as if it were ventriloquism in reverse.
In his work On the Sensations of Tone (1875), Hermann Helmholtz addresses
this question of how auditors come to ignore or suppress sounds like the clicks,
wheezes, and squeaks that emerge from keyboards, frets, and valves in the course of
a musical performance: ‘Those who listen to music make themselves deaf to these
noises by purposely withdrawing attention from them.’21 William James calls this
faculty ‘selective attention’.22 To hear something, we must disengage our attention
from things that are irrelevant to it. To do otherwise would leave us with no capac-
ity for discrimination. Instead, and here too James relies on Helmholtz, we only
cater to sensations that alert us to things: ‘But what are things? Nothing, as we shall
abundantly see, but special groups of sensible qualities, which happen practically or
aesthetically to interest us.’23 We notice what interests us, practically and aestheti-
cally, and consign the rest to oblivion. For Helmholtz this is the process that allows
us to take pleasure in music, while muting the incidental noises inescapably bound
to its production. This de-sensibilising faculty is especially relevant to expressive
machines like the automaton which, in operation, produce stimuli in excess of their
desired output of (in the case of the Jaquet-Droz trio), drawing, writing, and music.
The clearest sign of this withdrawal of attention is supplied, paradoxically, by the
occasional resurgence of machine noise in the service of stagecraft. Sometimes the
machine is heard as a machine. As we shall see, it is in the historical and fictional
accounts of automata performance that a picture emerges of the way these devices
were recruited to thinking through the entanglements of industrial noise, parsing
them into shriek and hum. In some versions the automaton furnishes a distinctively
modern acoustic signature, a muted mechanical sound that both anticipates and
embodies urban hum. In other, more pessimistic accounts, such as that found in
Jerome K. Jerome’s Novel Notes, the automaton is revealed as a manqué, exposing
those around it to the full force of industrial violence.24
Novel Notes proceeds as a diary recording the narrator’s frustrated efforts to co-
author with three friends. The work features parodic debates about things like the correct
kind of manly protagonist, but also vignettes exchanged between the authors, including a
Hoffmannesque tale about the invention of a dancing automaton. Nicholaus Geibel, the
inventor, is described as ‘more than a mere mechanic, he was an artist’, a correction that
hinges on the open question of what to call those who work with this class of machines.

shriek and hum 307
Geibel overhears a group of young women complaining about the unwillingness of men
in their circle to dance for any extended period. From this a fantasy emerges:
‘All I ask of a partner is that he shall hold me firmly, take me round steadily, and
not get tired before I do.’
‘A clockwork figure would be the thing for you,’ said the girl who had interrupted.
‘Bravo!’ cried one of the others, clapping her hands, ‘what a capital idea!’
‘What’s a capital idea?’ they asked.
‘Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and
never run down.’25
Geibel takes this idle wish seriously, constructs an automaton along the lines described,
and delivers it to the ballroom:
Herr Geibel fixed the figure to her. Its right arm was screwed round her waist, and
held her firmly; its delicately jointed left hand was made to fasten itself upon her
right. The old toymaker showed her how to regulate its speed, and how to stop it,
and release herself.
‘It will take you round in a complete circle,’ he explained; ‘be careful that no
one knocks against you, and alters its course.’
After some initial resistance to the machine, the couple are soon whirling across the
floor, ‘“Oh, he’s just lovely,” she cried, laughing, “I could go on dancing with him all
my life.”’ The tempo picks up and soon couple after couple retreat exhausted, but the
inorganic automaton continues uninterrupted:
The women grew hysterical. The men shouted contradictory directions to one
another. Two of them made a bungling rush at the figure, which had the result of
forcing it out of its orbit in the centre of the room, and sending it crashing against
the walls and furniture. A stream of blood showed itself down the girl’s white
frock, and followed her along the floor. The affair was becoming horrible.
As the machine drags its unconscious partner, it keeps up a line of recorded patter:
And everlastingly it talked in that thin ghostly voice, repeating over and over the same
formula: ‘How charming you are looking to-night. What a lovely day it has been. Oh,
don’t be so cruel. I could go on dancing for ever – with you. Have you had supper?’
The joke, such as it is, is that this perfectly replicates the blithering patter of the men
whose inadequacies sparked the desire for the automaton in the first place:
‘And how stupidly they talk,’ [. . .] ‘They always say exactly the same things: “How
charming you are looking to-night.” “Do you often go to Vienna? Oh, you should,
it’s delightful.” “What a charming dress you have on.” “What a warm day it has
been.” “Do you like Wagner?” I do wish they’d think of something new.’
The vignette could have easily become a social satire where men and their machine
counterparts proved interchangeable or, worse, indistinguishable. Instead it veers

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towards the horror of that ‘thin ghostly voice’, revealing the automaton in a wholly
industrial light: unlike the Jaquet-Droz trio, there are only terrible gears; there is no
second, more artful, orientation supported here. The violence the young woman suffers
by being drawn into the machine is not unlike that encountered in Victorian industrial
fiction, effectively transforming the ballroom into the bloodied factory floor. Jerome’s
story is a minor entry in a larger catalogue of works that employed the automaton
motif to reflect on the accelerating and invasive pace of industrialisation, while embed-
ding the android into the cultural life of modernity.26
The Noise of the Turk

Built by Wolfgang von Kempelen in Bratislava in the early 1770s, the Turk, an infa-
mous chess-playing automaton, toured Europe and Britain for decades, attracting
crowds and provoking sceptics. I shall not rehearse the Turk’s rich cultural history as
object, as my interest here is more narrowly attuned to the device’s strategic noisiness,
which serves as something of a counterpoint to Jerome’s fatal android. The Turk’s
exhibition practice resembled that of the Jaquet-Droz trio with some telling modifi-
cations: the device was mounted on castors and fitted with doors to permit forensic
access to its inner workings prior to its activation. Unlike the Jaquet-Droz trio, whose
artistic accomplishments preceded the revelation of the gears, the Turk was avowedly
a machine first. By 1845 the Turk, now decades old, was once again touring London,
which speaks to the surprisingly durable cultural relevance of the device.27 The Illus-
trated London News thought it sufficiently significant to offer yet another account of
the automaton in performance:
The exhibitor commenced operations, by showing the interior of the chest, which was
divided by a partition into two unequal parts, both apparently so occupied by machin-
ery, that the concealment of a human being appeared impossible [. . .] The machine
was then turned round, and lights were again exhibited at the different openings, in
such a way that every corner seemed visible. At the same time, the Automaton’s robe
was turned over his head, so as to display the internal structure, which was seen to be
full of wheels, cylinders, and other clock-work; and, in this exposed state, the whole
apparatus was wheeled round, for the inspection of the visitors [. . .] As soon as an
antagonist appeared, the eyes of the figure were apparently directed to the board, and,
after some moments of seeming meditation, it began the battle. First, leisurely raising
its arm from the cushion on which it rested, the hand was directed towards the piece
to be played; the fingers then opened, took hold of the piece, and deposited it on the
proper square; while during the operation, a noise of wheel-work was heard, which
ceased only when the Automaton’s arm had returned to rest again on the cushion.28
As the use of ‘apparently’ and ‘appeared’ indicates, the otherwise exhaustive revela-
tion of the Turk’s internal works cloaked a deeper secret, albeit one that had been
revealed at least two decades earlier. In 1818 the Cambridge mathematician Robert
Willis employed an umbrella to discreetly measure the Turk’s cabinet work, calculating
that the internal volume was actually much larger than it appeared and could in fact
accommodate a concealed player.29 Where other sceptics had imagined small-statured

shriek and hum 309
players or thought they spied near-invisible guide wires operated from unseen corners,
Willis noticed that the key element in the deception was the noise from the gear train
masking the sound of the player moving in and out of position as the cabinet was
opened for examination.
This sonic aspect of the Turk’s performance was noted by David Brewster in
his Letters on Natural Magic (1832): ‘At every move made by the automaton, the
wheels of the machine are heard in action; the figure moves its head and seems to
look over every part of the chess-board.’30 The Turk’s deception relies wholly on the
unremarkability of gear train noise to conceal von Kempelen’s sham. By listening
against the grain, which is to say, consciously perceiving mechanical sounds, both
Willis and Brewster observe something else: that the noise conceals, yes, but that it also
coincides with the incidental sound of the thinking player within. If one path for the
automaton is burdened by its shared properties with the factory machine, the other
opens the possibility that its sounds in operation might be understood to signify – and
even capacitate – cognition.
Following von Kempelen’s death in 1804, the Turk was purchased by Johann
Maelzel who brought it to Berlin in 1814 where it was seen – and more or less
expropriated – by E. T. A. Hoffmann for his story The Automata (Die Automate)
(1814). Although fragmentary, this story pulls together some of the separate threads
I have been drawing out here. The plot, such as it is, resists summary, but in outline
it follows two aristocratic friends – sceptical Ludwig and the more open-hearted and
curious Ferdinand – who attend a performance by the Turk. Much like von Kem-
pelen’s original, the Turk generates wonder, but also attracts scrutiny and suspicion.
In Hoffmann’s version, though, the automaton no longer plays chess, but instead
delivers hushed oracular prophecy in response to questions whispered into its ear. The
answers provided are described as:
strikingly apposite to the character and affairs of the questioner, who would
frequently be startled by a mystical reference to the future, only possible, as it
would seem, to one cognizant of the hidden thoughts and feelings which dictated
the question.31
Ferdinand’s question to the Turk is unrecorded, but the answer leaves him shocked.
Later, in conversation with Ludwig, Ferdinand discloses that the Turk summoned a
vivid, partly imaginary encounter from his past. While staying at an inn, Ferdinand
had a dream prompted by the sounds of a woman singing Mio ben ricordati from
an adjoining room. On awakening, Ferdinand looked out of his window to see the
woman from his dream stepping into a carriage. As he explains to Ludwig, neither the
contents of this dream nor the subsequent sighting of the woman have been disclosed,
leaving him unable to account for the Turk’s uncanny knowledge and stricken by its
prediction that the next time he sees this woman, ‘you will be lost to her forever’.
Unconvinced by any of this, Ludwig seeks out Professor X: a philosopher with an
interest in mechanics who is rumoured to be the inventor of the Turk. During their
visit, Professor X conducts an ensemble of automaton musicians clearly modelled on
earlier groups by Vaucanson and Jaquet-Droz. Ludwig and Ferdinand are appalled by
the performance, but also inspired to discuss both the nature and future prospects of

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mechanically derived music. The story ends as Ferdinand is unexpectedly summoned

home by his father, and once again encounters the woman from his dream just as she
has married a Russian officer. As she catches sight of Ferdinand, she collapses into the
arms of Professor X. The Turk’s secret, the woman’s identity, and the nature of her
relationship to Professor X all remain unresolved.
In outline, Hoffmann’s story establishes two distinct mechanical domains. The
first of these comprises the oracular Turk, the experimental instruments that amplify
nature’s hidden sonorities as discussed by Ludwig and Ferdinand, and Ferdinand’s
dream woman – Hoffmann hints she may be of mechanical origin. Cumulatively, these
model an ideal combination of technical and aesthetic achievement. The second con-
tains Professor X’s mechanical orchestra, which Ludwig describes in withering terms:
All that machine music (in which I include the Professor’s own playing) makes
every bone in my body ache. I am sure I do not know when I shall ever get over
it! The fact of any human being’s doing anything in association with those lifeless
figures which counterfeit the appearance and movements of humanity has always,
to me, something fearful, unnatural, I may say terrible, about it.32
Machine playing is not just affronting; it infects the Professor’s musicianship in unspeci-
fied, but presumably mechanical, ways. Ludwig too is caught up, complaining of bone-
ache. To hear this orchestra is to be drawn into the ambit and impact of the machine,
to experience listening as if it were equivalent to fatiguing toil. Ludwig contrasts this
with hearing instruments played like the woodwinds and strings that both depend upon
and fully express the body without penalty or energy loss. Music from such a source, he
suggests, has the capacity to ‘evoke those tones which lay upon us a spell of such power,
and awaken that inexpressible feeling, akin to nothing else on earth – the sense of a
distant spirit world, and of our higher life in it’.33 Only this kind of music, Ludwig con-
tends, is capable of such transports. And yet, this capacity imagined here as uniquely
human is demonstrated by the Turk whose ability to penetrate Ferdinand’s mystery
coincides with summoning ‘one or two broken phrases of [Schubert’s] sorrowful mel-
ody, “mio ben ricordati”’.34 It is only under the enigmatic influence of the Turk that
Ferdinand hears once again the song and the ‘glorious voice’ of his dream woman. In
other words, the opposite of Professor X’s supposedly vulgar automata is not the gifted
human musician, but rather a different and superior form of automaton better attuned
to human desires. Hoffmann remains vague about the source of the Turk’s power, but
he did outline some of his ideas on machine music in a letter to his editor from 1814:
As little as the automata at first seem to adhere to the direction of the M.Z. [the Leipzig
Music Journal], I do believe that they are fitting for this journal because I found the
opportunity to talk about everything concerning the automaton, and therefore also
consider that type of musical artwork excellent, along with allowing the musical
Ludwig to say something ppp about the most recent attempts of the mechanics –
about the Nature-Music – about the complete tone – harmonica – harmonichord,
which could not find a better place than in the M.Z.35
Hoffmann, via Ludwig, concedes that some of the new self-playing instruments like
the harmonichord and the wind-blown storm harp may capture the ‘hidden-tones’ of
Nature-Music from the elements. These instruments share affinities with the Turk’s

shriek and hum 311
ability to bring encrypted things to the surface. When Ludwig speaks to the merits
of these instruments, he does so, according to Hoffmann, ‘ppp’. As Katherine Hirt
explains, these are dynamic notations: p abbreviates piano, or softly, while pp indicates
pianissimo, that is, even more softly. Much rarer, ‘ppp’ was ‘used in some nineteenth-
century works as dynamics became more extreme, [and] means very, very softly’.36
For his editor’s benefit, Hoffmann gives voice to an otherwise muted theme, that is, he
analogises his statement of intent in terms of a scarcely perceptible acoustic signature
affixed to the story. In the context of automata, that choice affirms the existence of
a fault line dividing the crude machine from its spiritualised alternative. Hoffmann
develops a distinction between, on the one hand, a modern, intellectually expansive
and etherealising set of machines burdened (in every sense) with very little in the way
of incidental operating noise (ppp), and on the other, assaultive, illiberal, and overtly
mechanical devices that weary the bones of those within their clanking ambit. These
are irreconcilable sensorial regimes.
If this all seems too abstract, too engrossed within The Automata’s congested nar-
rative, let me offer a more practical example of this exact distinction. In 1860 the
French illusionist and inventor Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin publishes his Memoirs.
They are a mixed bag – self-serving, fabulising, and occasionally contradictory – but
they nonetheless offer some useful insights into the practice of theatrical automata dis-
play. In this case, Robert-Houdin recounts some of the difficulties he faced exhibiting
his version of a writing automaton:
It was more extraordinary, though, that I had eventually to make an alteration to

the automaton for the following reasons: the public (I do not mean the educated
portion) generally understand nothing of the mechanical effects by which automata
are moved: but they are pleased to see them, and often value them by the multiplicity
of their parts. I had taken every care to render the mechanism of my writer as perfect
as possible, and set great store on making the clockwork noiseless. In doing so, I
wished to imitate nature, whose complicated instruments act almost imperceptibly.
Can it be credited that this very perfection, which I worked so hard to attain
was unfavourable to my automaton? On its first exhibition, I frequently heard
persons say: ‘That writer is first rate; but the mechanism is probably very simple. It
often requires a trifle to produce such great results.’
The idea struck me of rendering the clockwork a little less perfect so that a spin-
ning sound should be heard, something like cotton spinning. Then the worthy public
formed a very different estimate of my work, and the admiration increased in a ratio
to the intensity of the noise. Such exclamations as these were continually heard: ‘How
ingenious! What complicated machinery! What talent such combinations require!’
In order to obtain this result, I had rendered my automata less perfect; and I
was wrong. In this I followed the example of certain actors who overdo their parts
in order to produce a greater effect. They raise a laugh, but they infringe the rules
of art, and are rarely ranked among the first-rate artists. Eventually I got over my
susceptibility and my machine was restored to its first condition.37
Robert-Houdin’s device – operating ppp – cannot please an ‘uneducated’ audience whose

pleasure relies on hearing the machine qua machine. We learn from Robert-Houdin that,
for his audience, a mechanical object may undergo just such a necessary transformation
from rarefied to vulgar, from failure to commercial success, merely by raising the volume

312 david ellison
of the gear train above the threshold of perceptibility. No other alteration is required.
The solution may be simple, but the implications for Robert-Houdin’s artistry were dire.
Even though commercial failure would seem to be the inevitable outcome of his choice,
his capacity to reflect on stagecraft and artistic integrity follows, and is enabled by, the
return to mysterious near silence. One occasions the other.
Hum
Automata audiences were encouraged to observe the device in operation and then
probe the machine’s secret recesses. As reflected in the shape of the performance itself,
their experience was pleasurable, artistic, and philosophically propositional. The
muted sounds produced by the machines were, as noted above, partly the product
of phased inattention. Unlike Robert-Houdin’s, this audience formed an alternative,
non-industrial ensemble of human and machine. Moreover, this mutually produced
soundscape of automata performance acoustically simulates a form of spatial distance
from louder, more demonstrative, and less aesthetically rewarding machines. Autom-
ata in performance model the emergence of a new category of exceptional urban noise,
industrial in origin, but liberal and non-injurious in reception. This is urban hum
much as Julia Barnett Rice would recognise it: the composite and overlapping ambi-
ent sound of the city in motion, growth, and progress. It was, and is, irreducible to a
single source: ‘What is distinctive about the hum is its indistinctness and lack of clear
location. The effect and function of the hum seems to be to spread out and to make
uniform, smoothing out the jagged spikes of particularity.’38
While, as I have suggested here, hum is closely tied to representations of autom-
ata performance, it also begins to emerge as an unstated object of urban design.
As Olivier Balaÿ’s work on nineteenth-century urban soundscapes demonstrates,
changes to the shape and composition of, in this case, French city streets effectively
lowered their frequencies, and also sharply diminished their capacity to communi-
cate informational sound.39 The new wider streets both muted and combined the
noises emerging from workshops that opened to the flow of traffic. The wider the
street, the greater the masking effect and the less that pedestrians were able to differ-
entiate sounds, localise sources, or gauge distances. Under such modern conditions,
the city acoustically tends towards abstraction, an ideal setting for, among other
things, the unmolested production of cognitive labour. This is an accommodating
scene setting of sorts.
In 1878 the influential Victorian psychologist James Sully published an essay enti-
tled ‘Civilisation and Noise’. In many respects, it is entirely a product of its colonial
moment, arguing that sensitivity to noise is a sign of cultural development. In a city like
London, home to a chaotically diverse population at ‘different stages of sensibility’,
there will be those who are unmoved by sounds that, to the sensitive, are ‘analogous to
bodily hurts’.40 London recapitulates the greater globe, which is a particular challenge
for the advanced, sensorially sensitive citizen. And yet, in the margins of this otherwise
belligerent work, a small and telling concession appears in the form of a footnote:
It should be remembered that the noise of London streets is a continuous roar, and
consequently is much less likely to disturb attention than an intermittent noise of
much less intensity. In truth, a constant hum is known with many persons to favour
intellectual activity.41

shriek and hum 313
Sully describes the background hum of industrial modernity as an adjunct to intel-

lectual production, an important finding in an essay otherwise devoted to the sonic
assaults of urban life. From its origins in automata performance, through to tentative
declarations of its importance for workers and writers in the city, hum will assume a
position of the utmost importance in the mental and emotional lives of city dwellers
and labourers. From the mid-twentieth century, hum cedes to a new and more refined
version of precisely the same, non-industrial mechanical sound. Now it underpins
the efficient workplace, it secures privacy in corporate open-plan environments, and,
towards the end of the day, it nurtures sleep by forming a protective sonic cocoon
against remnant urban shriek. It is white noise – the ppp of efficient modernity.
Notes
1. Julia Barnett Rice, quoted in Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architec-
tural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2004), 121.
2. See Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of
Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); James G. Mansell,
The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2017); John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
and Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2015).
3. Thompson, Soundscape of Modernity, 121–2.
4. Ibid.
5. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 337.
6. William Cooke Taylor, Factories and the Factory System: From Parliamentary Documents
and Personal Examination (London: Jeremiah How, 1844), 38.
7. Ibid., 38–9.
8. Ibid., 39.
9. Floyd E. Thurston, ‘The Worker’s Ear: A History of Noise-Induced Hearing Loss’, American
Journal of Industrial Medicine 56, no. 3 (2013): 367–77 (370–1).
10. Ibid., 374.
11. On mechanised labour, see Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I,
ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr,
1909).
12. Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures; Or, An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral,
and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain (London: Charles
Knight, 1835), 15.
13. Ibid., 13–14.
14. Adelheid Voskuhl, ‘Producing Objects, Producing Texts: Accounts of Android Automata in
Late Eighteenth-Century Europe’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38 (2007):
422–44 (427).
15. Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, Automata: A Historical and Technological Study,
trans. Alec Reid (New York: Central Book Company, 1958), 289.
16. Voskuhl, ‘Producing Objects’, 427.
17. Ibid.
18. Jessica Riskin, Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 2.
19. ‘Automata, or Mechanical Toys’, in Peter Parley’s Annual for 1869: The Christmas and
New Year’s Present for Young People (London: Ben George, 1869), 306.

314 david ellison
20. Simon Schaffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed.
William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999), 126–65 (136).
21. Hermann L. F. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the
Theory of Music, trans. Alexander J. Ellis (New York: Longmans, Green, 1875), 109.
22. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1918), 284.
23. Ibid., 285.
24. Jerome K. Jerome, Novel Notes (London: Leadenhall Press, 1893; Project Gutenberg,
2005), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2037/2037-h/2037-h.htm.
25. Ibid., chapter XI. All further quotes are from chapter XI.
26. See Adelheid Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures
of the Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 204.
27. The same year that a game of chess was played via telegraph by men separated by a dis-
tance of 88 miles.
28. ‘The Automaton Chess-Player Redivivus’, The Illustrated London News, 20 December
1845, 5; italics added.
29. Robert Willis, An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton Chess Player, of Mr de Kempelen
(London: Printed for J. Booth, 1821).
30. David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1832), 323.
31. E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Best Tales of Hoffmann, ed. E. F. Bleiler, trans. Major Alexander
Ewing (New York: Dover, 1967), 122.
32. Ibid., 95.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 93.
35. E. T. A. Hoffmann, quoted in Katherine Hirt, When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit
and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (New York: Walter de Gruyter,
2010), 37.
36. Ibid., 38.
37. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, Ambassador, Author, and Conjuror
(London: Chapman Hall, 1860), 153.
38. Steven Connor, Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations (London:
Reaktion Books, 2014), 91.
39. Olivier Balaÿ, ‘The Soundscape of a City in the Nineteenth Century’, in Cultural Histories
of Noise: Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300–1918, ed. Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson
(New York: Routledge, 2016), 221–34.
40. James Sully, ‘Civilisation and Noise’, Fortnightly Review 24, no. 143 (1878): 704–20
(716–17).
41. Ibid., 714.
Select Bibliography
Balaÿ, Olivier, ‘The Soundscape of a City in the Nineteenth Century’, in Cultural Histories of
Noise: Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300–1918, ed. Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson (New
York: Routledge, 2016), 221–34.
Bijsterveld, Karin, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
Connor, Steven, Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations (London: Reaktion
Books, 2014).
———, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000).

shriek and hum 315
Hirt, Katherine, When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-
Century German Literature (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010).
Riskin, Jessica, Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Schaffer, Simon, ‘Enlightened Automata’, in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William
Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 126–65.
Thompson, Emily, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of
Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
Voskuhl, Adelheid, Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the
Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
———, ‘Producing Objects, Producing Texts: Accounts of Android Automata in Late Eighteenth-
Century Europe’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38 (2007): 422–44.

20
A Critical Poetics of Warfare

Mark Byron
W arfare is the event that drew poetry from its georgic home: in the West turning
the ploughshares of Hesiod to the iron weaponry set against the Trojan walls
of Homer; and in the East displacing the folk poetry of the Shang Dynasty with the
martial poetry of the Zhou. The striking of metal produces a rhythmic noise com-
mon to both industries, making both agriculture and warfare companionable to poetic
rhythms of different kinds. As the Homeric epics suggest, the deep implication of
poetry and warfare is embedded in oral tradition. The hereditary caste of bardic poets
in ancient and medieval Ireland performed their genealogical and historical repertoires
recounting the heroic military feats of chieftain kings (the Proto-Indo-European com-
pound gʷrH-dʰh₁-o-s from which the Proto-Celtic bardos stems translates as ‘praise-
maker’). The thematic ubiquity of warfare in poetry is in evidence in many of the
world’s most important cultural documents, including Enheduanna’s Old Sumerian
Hymn to Innana of the twenty-third century bce, the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata
(महाभारतम्) composed between the third century bce and the third century ce, the
tenth-century Persian epic Shahnameh (‫همانهاش‬, The Book of Kings), its near contem-
porary the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Maldon, and the oral poetry of Mayan antiquity
gathered in the pre-modern portions of the Songs of Dzitbalche. The competition and
alternation between martial and bucolic matters across the history of poetry prompt
consideration of prosodic technique: how does the poetry of warfare represent its
subject matter within its form? Is there an identifiable poetics of warfare? This chapter
traces out a preliminary response to these questions by critically examining a range
of poetic forms, spanning a historical range from antiquity to the present day, that
manifest the matter of war in their prosodic techniques. While making no claims for
their ubiquity, the sounds of war reverberate through the global history of poetics suf-
ficiently to suggest that the beat of drums and the clash of metal are sound patterns
basic to the performed rhythms of poetic song and speech.
They Shall Beat Swords from Ploughshares

Hesiod’s georgic Works and Days (Ἔργα καὶ Ἡμέραι) has long occupied a central place
in the origin story of Greek poetry: its didactic role in guiding Hesiod’s brother Perses
to a more carefully attuned agricultural method has prompted debate of its wider his-
torical implications. The poem has been read as a response to a long-running agrarian
crisis eventually resolved by Solon at the beginning of the sixth century bce, a rolling
crisis brought about by tensions between landowners and peasants and the practice
of dividing family land between numerous inheritors. This in turn fed the requirement

a critical poetics of warfare 317
for new lands and initiated an era of Greek expansion and colonisation of adjacent
geography.1 Whether or not Hesiod’s poem marks the shift from settled agriculture to
a culturally self-imposed response that led inevitably to warfare, his poem provides
the iconic schema of the Five Ages of Humanity: golden, when humans lived among
gods and were supported by the earth’s abundance; silver, when humans lived under
the rule of Zeus and were punished for their impiety; bronze, the age of warfare;
the heroic age, which marks a shift from division to just action, such as those who
fought at Troy; and the iron age, in which humans must labour to survive and division
rises up between them.2 The thematic continuity between agrarian labour and warfare
resounds in Hesiod’s poetics, namely the use of dactylic hexameter. This metrical struc-
ture combines a highly disciplined aural regularity (hexameters) with a compulsive
onward momentum (dactyls), patterning the sounds of the tilling of fields with the
resolute actions of warfare.
The Homeric poems share these prosodic features, deploying the elevated metrics
of dactylic hexameter to propel the action of warfare in Troy, followed by Odysseus’
long return to Ithaca, each episode prosodically impelled towards homeward shores.
Scholarly attention to the numerous battle scenes in the Iliad has turned to the ways in
which the ancient soundscape of warfare is represented in the poem, binding dramatic
action with prosodic techniques in an auditory environment that provides a phenom-
enological insight into the scenes of warfare.3 How this sensory environment is to be
represented is a question of central concern to several major translators of the poem:
Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles each place emphasis on producing a poem befit-
ting the ‘living language’ of Homer’s Greek, observing close adherence to the original
diction to retain the dramatic intensity of the action.4 The battle over Sarpedon’s body
in Book 16, felled by Patroclus who was wearing Achilles’ borrowed armour, provides
an exemplary aural metaphor of battle: the tumult likened to the sounds of woodcut-
ting. Richmond Lattimore’s translation of this scene deploys an inventive variation on
classic dactylic hexameter with a dense sequence of anapestic feet and anapest-iambic
and minor ionic (double unstressed followed by double stressed) combinations:
As the tumult goes up from men who are cutting

timber in the mountain valleys, and the sound is heard from far off,
such was the dull crashing that rose from earth of the wide ways,
from the bronze shields, the skins and the strong-covering ox-hides
As the swords and the leaf-headed spears stabbed against them. (16.633–7)5
The prosodic choice of anapestic meter over dactyls resonates: this translation of clas-
sical martial poetry into English carries over the energy of its source text but in the
preferred meter for martial themes in English poetry: Lord Byron’s ‘The Destruction
of Sennacherib’ is perhaps the most iconic English language poem in anapestic form,
followed by William Butler Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin, Book 3 of which is
composed in anapestic hexameter and deals with Oisin’s discovery of his dead warrior
companions.
Among the sounds of war in the Iliad – shouting, cries, general uproar – is the vital
(and ear-splitting) sound of the salpinx or war-trumpet. An iconic example occurs in
Book 18 when Achilles leads a battle cry made more forceful for his armour’s having
been confiscated by Hector from the body of the fallen Patroclus at the gates of Troy.

318 mark byron
Achilles enters battle with only his voice and visage for self-defence – Hephaestus is
busy at this moment crafting new armour and shield for Achilles – but the combina-
tion of his cry with the salpinx proves to be utterly overwhelming, a sign of apoca-
lyptic force: ‘the sound of the salpinx played exactly this role – a signal of triumph or
annihilation in war that was so potent as to be associated with the divine’.6
Virgil’s Georgics deals with the industry of agriculture, playing out the tensions of
labour and the potential hostility of the natural world, where poetry became a source
of instruction in husbanding resources.7 The influence of Cato and Varro on Virgil is
widely recognised: both poets focus on matters of agriculture, writing in the context of
civil unrest and the decline of the Roman Republic, and like Hesiod, enunciating the
lesson of cultural decline when farmers are dispossessed of their lands.8 The mini-epic
contained in Book IV, of the apiarist Aristaeus who regains his lost bees, marks a shift
from the golden age to one of labour, providing the basis for a grounded community
but also generating warfare in sedentary urbanised life. Virgil’s Aeneid stems from
the Trojan War, but again with a focus on statecraft and civilisation rather than war
specifically – although warfare as a subject plays an important role in the poem, most
prominently Books 7–12, which deal with the Latin War of the protean Roman state9
as well as Aeneas’ visit to the Underworld where he meets the heroes of the Trojan War
and the war for Thebes (and thus linking the two city-states).10 Virgil’s tomb epitaph
in Naples provides a neat precis of his poetics:
Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc

Parthenope; cecini Pascua, rura, duces.
(Mantua bore me, Calabria seized me, now Naples
holds me; I have sung pastures, farms, leaders.)11
The transition from farming to warfare and back again was ingrained in the Roman
political conscience from the earliest phases of its history. The enduring myth of the
autourgos, the citizen tilling his own land, began with Romulus, whose hut was tra-
ditionally located on the Palatine.12 It was essential to the veneration of Cincinnatus,
who was given dictatorial rule in 458 bce as leader of Roman forces against the invad-
ing Aequi, only to relinquish his powers as soon as victory was assured. Virgil drew
on this myth in the Georgics, providing a martial continuity with the Aeneid not only
in theme but also in sound, both texts taking the prosodic form of dactylic hexameter.
A major tension in the poem is the attempt to reconcile its martial themes with the
sonority of its prosody. While the poem’s dense ekphrasis has tended to skew literary
analysis in the direction of visual imagery, the latter half of Virgil’s epic contains dense
sound patternings particularly when dealing with matters of war, pitting aural disso-
nance against the stated claims for the poem’s status as elevated, harmonious carmen
or epic song.13
Virgil’s treatment of war provided a model for Prudentius in his fourth-century
allegory Psychomachia, in which Christianity is ultimately vindicated in the battle
between the Virtues and Vices. One measure of the sublimation of martial violence
is found in the Virtues being allocated female names, reflecting the Latin convention
of gendering abstract concepts in the feminine.14 Twelve centuries later John Milton
was to absorb Prudentius’ techniques of allegory in Paradise Lost, but in giving
his principal characters sufficient personhood, Milton succeeded in creating martial

scenes of real consequence: the battle for heaven between Christ and Satan in Book 6
establishes the metaphysical template for the subsequent battle on earth for the
human soul.15
Moving from the classical origins of war poetry to the early modern allegory of
Milton’s epic poem, this chapter evaluates the conceptual and sensory relation between
sound and noise in war poetry spanning industrial modernity broadly conceived: from
Walt Whitman’s Civil War poetry to poetry of the nuclear age. The poetics of warfare
engages in a critical dialectic between chaos and order, where prosody reiterates the
repetitions of artillery, beginning with the nexus between agriculture and martial activ-
ity bonded in the repetitive striking of metal upon metal (and earth, and human bod-
ies), and reaching an acute point of protest in the gestures to silence in habikusha poets
writing in the aftermath of the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where
the nuclear sublime fuses obscene chaos and destruction to a moment of detonation
filled with light but no sound.
The poetry of warfare ably captures the auditory imagination in the prosodic con-
ventions of alliteration and the mixing of metrical units to create uneven and surpris-
ing sound surfaces. But how does the industrialisation of warfare alter these auditory
effects? Does modern war poetry rely on magnified or even quite different auditory
effects, such as the rhetorical figures of epizeuxis and anaphora? How do poetic repre-
sentations of warfare attune to the mechanisation of war, when rapid repetitive gunfire
of increasing force replaces the striking of swords or even the accumulation of single-
shot weapons?
These questions are informed by specific concepts and concerns within the dis-
course of sound studies: the ways in which war poetry inflects and embodies the notion
of soundscape; the historic development of the relation between sound, noise, and
music, especially in an industrialised modernity; and the persistence of metaphysical
residues in considerations of war, death, sacrifice, and the technologised instruments
that enable such violence. R. Murray Schafer’s concept of soundscape – ‘simultane-
ously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment [. . .] both a
world and a culture constructed to make sense of that world’16 – has received renewed
scholarly attention in sound studies, particularly in recent attempts to historicise audi-
tory experiences within industrial modernity. The phenomenological persistence of
noise and the difficulty of evading ambient or intrusive mechanical sounds led to a
sharp increase in noise complaints and the establishment of noise abatement bodies
from the nineteenth century on.17 This profound change in the relation between the
human body and its umwelt – not only in terms of auditory perception but in tactile
and visceral perception of the vibrations and shocks of mechanical activity – led to
artistic reaction and response: ‘new forms of technology, such as the telephone, gramo-
phone, movie, train, automobile, zeppelin, and airplane had deeply influenced human
experience, generating a complete renewal of human sensibility’.18 The phenomeno-
logical experience of warfare in a newly industrialised soundscape provided an acute
case for artistic response, serving as ‘an emphatic model for an all-encompassing all
sound’ and as a machinic index of global capitalism and imperialism.19 The following
sections of this chapter will evaluate prominent points in this cultural history, from the
war poetry of Walt Whitman in the mid-nineteenth century and the aesthetic experi-
ments of the Italian Futurists in the early twentieth century to the hibakusha poets in
Japan following the Second World War.

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Sounding Industrial Warfare: Whitman and the Civil War

The commencement of the United States Civil War only six years after Walt Whitman
had published the first edition of Leaves of Grass on 4 July 1855 generated a new
direction in his poetics. The addition of the volume Drum-Taps to Leaves of Grass
in 1865 explicitly dealt with matters of warfare and its physical and social toll. The
critical reception of Whitman’s war writing – Drum-Taps, Sequel to Drum-Taps, and
the condensation of forty field and hospital notebooks into the journal Memoranda
During the War – varies across the political and ideological spectrum. Some critics
see Whitman’s reaction to war as one driven by nostalgia for an antebellum national
unity, while others read his work as an acknowledgement of war’s human devastation
and the necessity of defending the rights of all people within the Union, in line with his
lifelong democratic pronouncements. Whitman’s Preface to Leaves of Grass provides
crucial context for the question of poetry’s capacity to represent a nation at war:
The Americans of all nations at any time upon earth have probably the fullest
poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.
[. . .] Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action
untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently
moving in vast masses.20
If the ‘genius of the nation’ is embodied in its common people rather than its legisla-
tors, and if the English language is of sufficient scale to match the ‘grand American
expression’, it is the poet in whom this confluence of language and genius resides, and
whose temperament is adequate to the task of documenting the spiritual biography of
the nation. This of course includes war, and indeed war provides the greatest test of
Whitman’s claims for the poet.
His iconic poem ‘Beat! Beat! Drums!’ appears third in the volume Drum-Taps,
instigating an aural tone for the war poetry to come. Whitman’s use of epizeuxis mim-
ics the sound it describes (the beating of the drum), but it also carries the unnerving
reminder of the industrial nature of the war – the Civil War being often cited as among
the first modern wars in its deployment of mechanised and electric materiel such as
trains and repeating rifles along with traditional armaments such as knives and bayo-
nets.21 The opening line establishes this auditory field in the most immediate terms:
‘Beat! beat! drums! – blow! bugles! blow!’22 This formula begins each of the three
stanzas of the poem, followed in each case by Whitman’s customary anaphora:
Through the windows – through doors – burst like a ruthless force,

Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying (ll. 2–4)
Despite the violence of the imagery, of an incursion of irresistible force, this is not the
sound and action of artillery – it is the sound of drums and bugles, drumming up recruits
for the battles to come. This thumping music disrupts the activities of quiet rural life –
bridegroom and farmer are equally harassed from the objects of their labours – and the
regular noise of life such as ‘the rumble of wheels in the street’ (l. 9) is drowned out. The
activity of recruiting bands is not confined to rupturing the auditory field. It brings to a

halt the industry that marks out a healthy polity, with markets and courtrooms stifled
in the face of the irresistible belligerence of the music of war. This music is oblivious to
the world it shatters, seeking only the recruits that will keep the war machine in motion:
‘stop for no expostulation’ (l. 16), ‘mind not the weeper or prayer’ (l. 17). The music
of war denies even the actuality of death, becoming an inhuman and inhumane force
as though the final trumpet call of the apocalypse: ‘Make even the trestles to shake the
dead where they lie awaiting the hearses, / So strong you thump O terrible drums, so
loud you bugles blow’ (ll. 20–1). The final apostrophe is at once a recognition of defeat
before a superior force and a warning to those who may be captured by its noise: if the
march of war can be mimicked, then it can be parodied, providing the auditory space to
inoculate its listeners to the seductions of violent patriotism. This power is one obtain-
ing in the poet – Whitman tells of the poetic quality as ‘the free growth of metrical laws’
but also one that ‘is the most deadly force of the war’ which can ‘fetch parks of artillery
the best that engineer ever knew’.23 This power unchecked is an existential threat to the
nation, on a par with the wilful compulsion to battle and the machinery with which it
is accomplished.
The auditory immediacy of ‘Beat! Beat! Drums!’ can obscure the change war placed
upon Whitman’s outlook on his nation. In Memoranda During the War he basks in
nostalgic memory of the Battle of Fort Sumter that precipitated the Civil War: ‘Was
it not grand to have lived in such scenes and days, and be absorb’d by them, and
unloos’d by them?’24 For Luke Mancuso, Whitman’s gradual slide into nostalgia and
pessimism takes on figurations associated with a poetry of consolation, namely the
persistence of ghostly echoes:
By rewriting history through the discourses of local sense memory (Brooklyn neigh-
bourhoods and hospitals), domestic sentimentalism (the images of civic home and
family), and patriotic mourning (the battlefields and cemeteries), Whitman moves
from a libertarian antebellum confidence in confederate harmony among the states,
to a more conservative recognition of the ghostly wounds that will always haunt
the Union victory.25
The exhaustion and devastation brought upon the nation by the Civil War sits at odds
with the alarum drummed up in Whitman’s most iconic war poem, but the message
of caution and fear emanating between its prosodic drumbeats tells a story of poetic
despair at the violence of the first major global industrial war.
Typographic Artillery: Italian Futurism and War

The artistic and literary movement ideally placed to develop an auditory aesthetics of
warfare was that of the Italian Futurists. Established in the first decade of the twentieth
century, Futurism emerged at a propitious moment to turn European warfare to its
purposes of extolling speed, violence, and the annihilation of tradition, including the
objects and works of culture. Filippo Marinetti’s definitive Manifesto del Futurismo
was first published in the newspaper Gazetta dell’Emilia on 5 February 1909 and the
French newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February of the same year. It was then republished
in Marinetti’s new magazine Poesia in April, reprinting the Italian and French texts
with an English translation. This assertive regime of dissemination is matched by the

322 mark byron
rhetoric of the Manifesto itself and is representative of the tone of Futurist aesthetics.
The ornaments of high culture are to be destroyed – ‘we want to demolish museums
and libraries’ – mere impediments to a plain reckoning with modern technology and
its governing factor of speed: ‘A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes,
like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more
beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.’26 This chauvinist violence and expression
of physical force finds its ideological home in the act of war: ‘We want to glorify war
– the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the
anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.’27 This bravado is
undercut somewhat by the opening sequence preceding the Manifesto proper, in which
Marinetti describes the exhilaration of driving his car at reckless speed through city
streets, only to swerve to avoid two cyclists and having his car careen into a muddy
ditch. At another point the bombastic rhetoric also lends some humour to Futurist
grandiloquence: ‘It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upset-
ting incendiary manifesto of ours.’28 Nevertheless, Marinetti’s aesthetic programme in
these formative years was also one of political commitment, demonstrated in his col-
laboration with Benito Mussolini to organise anti-neutrality demonstrations in Rome
in 1915 (for which they were both arrested), and his co-authorship of Il manifesto dei
fasci italiani di combattimento (Manifesto of the Italian Fasces of Combat) in 1919,
the founding document of Italian Fascism. Marinetti was to split later with Mussolini
over the latter’s resiling from his anti-clerical stance, and Marinetti’s intense disgust at
Mussolini’s anti-Semitic pronouncements.
Following service as a correspondent reporting on the Italo-Turkish War in Libya
in 1911 – which he described as ‘the most beautiful aesthetic spectacle of my life’29 –
Marinetti reported on the First Balkan War of 1912–13 for the vehemently right-wing
French newspaper L’Intransigeant. He witnessed the Siege of Adrianople (Edirne) which
provided inspiration for his sound-poem ‘Zang Tumb Tumb: Adrianopoli ottobre 1912.
Parole in libertà’ (Figure 20.1). As ringleader of the Futurists, Marinetti advocated for
Italy’s involvement in the First World War and volunteered with several other members
of the movement. He saw action near Lake Garda with the Lombard Battalion of Vol-
unteer Cyclists and Automobilists in 1915. After this unit was disbanded he produced a
stream of propagandistic speeches, journalism, and theatre, before returning to action in
late 1916 where he suffered serious injury as part of an artillery battalion, and contrib-
uted to a victory at Vittorio Veneto in 1918.30 His Futurist comrades Antonio Sant’Elia
and Umberto Boccioni were less fortunate and lost their lives in the war effort. This
ethos of armed violence as cultural purgation was one shared by many of the Futurists:
Carlo Carrà posed ‘Guerra o Rivoluzione: purifcatrici, ringiovanitrici’ (War or revolu-
tion: purifying and invigorating) in his manifesto Guerrapittura of 1915,31 and as a
collective they published the compilation Guerra sola igiene del mondo (War the world’s
only hygiene) also in 1915, the year Italy entered the First World War.32
The visual aesthetics of Futurism presents a plain case for the glorification of machin-
ery, and combined with the ‘war as hygiene’ ideology of the movement, translates into
an effective rhetoric of violence. Marinetti’s various tavole parolibere (free-word tables)
constitute a poetics in which semantic coherence functions at the level of the word, and
where iconicity is at least equal to indexicality – where the shape and typography of the
word comprises its meaning as much as its literal or figurative sense. This is manifested in

Figure 20.1 Front cover of Zang Tumb Tumb (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste
di Poesia, 1914). Public domain.
stark terms in perhaps his most famous tavola, ‘Après la Marne, Joffre visita le front en
auto’ (After the Marne, Joffre visited the front in an automobile; Figure 20.2): the word
‘belle’ is divided by a series of crosses, as though beauty must incorporate a war cemetery
to become whole as a concept; and where such clues as the capitalised words ‘GUERRE’
and ‘PRUSSIENS’ weave around oversized, disembodied letters. Here the parts of lan-
guage are expressions of violence; poetry is war. But there is more to Futurist poetics
than bravado and postures of violence. The glorification of machinery – including the
machinery of war – draws from perhaps unexpected sources. Despite the differences in
coloration, parts of the first Manifesto run very close to the kinds of democratic rhetoric
of Walt Whitman in his Preface to Leaves of Grass:
We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing
of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will
sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent
electric moons; [. . .] and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the
wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.33
This long passage moves from the recognition of crowds and their democratic impulses
and graduates to the inhuman collation of machines and engineering works. The
Futurists arrive at a location remote from Whitman’s radical sense of equality and
liberation, but they begin not too far from where he leaves off.

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Figure 20.2 ‘Après la Marne, Joffre visita le front en auto’ (After the Marne, Joffre
visited the front in an automobile), in tavola parolibere (free-word table)
(Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia, 1915). Public domain.
These experiments in typographic innovation registered the effects of sound in

poetic language (and non-language) and its relation to the modern industrialised
world, but did so at one remove from the auditory environment itself. Key figures
in the movement translated this ‘sound made visible’ in public performances where
the cacophony of machinery complemented the riotous contest between poetic and
dramatic declamation and the audience’s outrage.34 Yet the durable tension between
noise and poetry – captured in war poetry of previous epochs – became entrenched
in Futurist machinic cacophony rather than aural patternings of words echoing the
percussive sounds of war. The incursion of machinery into modern musical composi-
tion arose relatively early for the Futurists in the compositional theory and methods of
Luigi Russolo. His foundational manifesto The Art of Noises, published in 11 March
1913, has become a touchstone in sound studies but for much of the last century was
overshadowed by the showmanship of George Antheil’s mechanically inspired works
of the 1920s: Second Sonata, ‘The Airplane’ (1921), Sonata Sauvage (1922–3), Third
Sonata, ‘Death of Machines’ (1923), Mechanisms (c. 1923), and, notoriously, Ballet
Mécanique (first performed in 1925).
Russolo’s musicology drew heavily on the industrialisation of Italy in the early
years of the twentieth century, but sought a distinction from the percussive experi-
ments of Dada and Bruitism centred on performances in the Cabaret Voltaire in
Zurich, at which the chief percussionist Richard Huelsenbeck proclaimed that all of
Dada ‘beats a drum, wails, sneers and lashes out’.35 Russolo instead sought to develop

a coherent theory of musical noises divided into the six ‘families’ of roars and bangs,
whistling and hissing, whispers and gurgling, screeching and creaking, beating on met-
als and wood, and voices of animals and people. These noises and their various com-
binations would be performed on intonarumori, instruments designed to imitate them.
For Russolo the blunted emotional impact of traditional music would be remediated
by the introduction of new sounds: ‘the timbres of noise, including those of modern
war, should be added to the sounds of traditional instruments’.36 War sounds were
fundamental to this aural revolution, linking ‘mechanisation, the concept of progress,
and musical development in a very conventional opposition with “nature”’.37 Russolo
quotes from Marinetti’s parole in libertà texts in his manifesto, sharing with them the
notion that ‘the violent fact of war acted as a rhetorical device, persuading the reader-
listener of the inevitability of noise through its disciplinary role in the negotiation of
lives and states’.38 Rather than representing a diminishment of music into noise, the
poetry of war functioned for the Futurists as a purifying action, and Russolo’s intona-
rumori as a proxy for divinity in an industrialised modernity.39
Towards Non-Verbal Protest

Some of the more prominent poetic responses to modern warfare deploy familiar aural
patterns as constituent elements of their argument. W. B. Yeats’s meditation on the exe-
cution of the leaders of the Dublin Easter Rising, ‘Easter 1916’, is set in iambic tetram-
eter and iambic trimeter, and its ABAB rhyme scheme bears echoes of popular ballad’
structures, bringing the force of vernacular sound into an argument for Irish nationalist
persistence. W. H. Auden emulated this metrical arrangement in his poem ‘September 1,
1939’ – like Yeats’s poem, a meditation on historic political failure concluding with
the potential for positive transformation. Auden famously rejected this poem, having
omitted two late stanzas on its first publication in The New Republic on 18 October
1939, removing the stanza concluding with the line ‘We must love one another or die’
on its republication in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden in 1945, and finally calling
it ‘trash’ on its final reprint during Auden’s lifetime in Poetry of the Thirties in 1964.
For much of his life Auden refused permission to reprint the poem, having become
embarrassed at its self-serving rhetoric. The 1934 poem ‘O What Is That Sound’ emu-
lates Whitman’s prosody in ‘Drum Taps’, in which repetition and a pronounced uni-
form stanzaic structure reinforces the sounds of soldiers’ boots entering the town.40 The
poem is formed of nine ABAB quatrains internally divided into line pairs of call and
response: an iambic pentameter line pair is followed by a shorter iambic pair compris-
ing a tetrameter line and a final six-syllable line in which dactyls accelerate the pace of
reading. The first stanza establishes the poem’s scenario and its auditory scene:
O what is that sound which so thrills the ear

Down in the valley drumming, drumming?
Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,
The soldiers coming. (ll. 1–4)
As the first voice inquires of the soldiers’ actions and intentions, the responding voice
persistently plays down the menace, prefacing explanations with such words as ‘only’,
and ‘perhaps’, at odds with the aural repetition reinforcing the soldiers’ proximity.

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The poem concludes in a reversal much like Whitman’s poem, in which the responding
voice abruptly leaves the home and the soldiers force their way in: ‘Their boots are
heavy on the floor / And their eyes are burning’ (ll. 35–6).
The movement from ballad and folk song to the silence of poetic withdrawal initi-
ates its own legacy of protest poetry, in which sound becomes at once the focus of anti-
war argument and a means of critiquing rhetoric as impotent by displacing words with
non-linguistic sound and with silence. Perhaps the most famous modern example of aural
displacement is the instrumental rendition of the United States national anthem by Jimi
Hendrix at Woodstock on 18 August 1969. His guitar solo erases the words of the anthem
– the lyrics of Francis Scott Key’s 1814 song ‘Defence of Fort McHenry’ – and introduces
extensive feedback and distortion to emulate the soundscape of Vietnam: machine-gun
fire, the swooping of aircraft dropping napalm on villagers, and the haze of chemical
smoke and the violent silencing of human lives. These images entered American and global
public consciousness in the course of the war, largely by virtue of television news broad-
casts. Such lurid sound and vision of death and violence in the name of the United States
Armed Forces became sufficiently familiar and iconic during ‘the first television war’ that
the associations brought about in Hendrix’s guitar ‘noise’ resonate viscerally. The political
intent of Hendrix’s Woodstock performance of the anthem remains a matter of debate
among historians of music and popular culture: rather than being an improvised moment
of protest, he had performed the song in public at least sixty times, of which more than half
survive in bootleg or official recordings. His biographer Charles Shaar Murray represents
the dominant interpretive view of the Woodstock performance as:
probably the most complex and powerful work of art to deal with the Vietnam
War and its corrupting, distorting effect on successive generations of the American
psyche. One man with one guitar said more in three and a half minutes about that
peculiarly disgusting war and its reverberations than all the novels, memoirs, and
movies put together.41
Hendrix combined the anthem with ‘Taps’, the bugle call to commemorate fallen com-
rades used by the United States military from the time of the Civil War. Despite his
having used this combination many times earlier, including the first known perfor-
mance of the anthem in Columbia, Maryland on 16 August 196842 – not far from Fort
McHenry itself – the defiantly anti-Vietnam mood at Woodstock gives that particular
performance an unmistakably critical edge.
Silence: Hibakusha Poetics

The possibility of writing and publishing antiwar poetry is conditioned on the political
and social forces at play within a specific time and place, differing radically between
nations which may otherwise share deep bonds of violence and suffering within a the-
atre of conflict. Western poetic responses to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
are characterised by belatedness, obliquity, and humility, captured in Mary Jo Salter’s
searching, iconic poem of 1985, ‘Welcome to Hiroshima’.43 The poem opens amidst
fantasia of neon technology – ‘what you first see, stepping off the train’ (l. 1) – before
the violent intrusion of nuclear warfare and its aftermath:

you feel a thirst for history: what year
it started to be safe to breathe the air,

and when to drink the blood and scum afloat
on the Ohta River. (ll. 8–11)
This registration of the enduring catastrophe of radiation sickness gestures to the lim-
its of language to capture the world-collapsing horrors of nuclear weapons, both in
the starkness of the imagery and in the space dividing these fragmented parts of two
quatrains. This moment of silence is rapidly submerged in a tide of culinary references:
crucially, ‘mutations of cuisine’ (l. 15), as though the damage extends to the culture’s
genetic code. The poem moves into ‘the Peace Park’s floral hypocentre’ (l. 18) and
then to the memorial museum where the conflation of postwar Japanese fast food –
‘a pancake sandwich; a pizza someone tops / with a maraschino cherry’ (ll. 16–17) –
with the bodies of the bomb’s victims is brought into sharp focus: ‘through more glass
are served, as on a dish / of blistered grass, three mannequins’ (ll. 21–2). The shocking
effect of this poetic act of correlation is bound up in both human victims and food
items being represented in simulated models, circling back to Japan’s postwar pop
culture and its domestication of American iconography. The poem registers disgust at
this artifice in ‘bad taste’, ‘how re-created / horror mocks the grim original’ (ll. 28–9)
until halted in its tracks by the vision of a child’s wristwatch, stopped at the moment
of detonation, its message powerfully ‘mute’ (l. 33). The poem’s soundscape installs
an uneasy tone, mediating a flippant encounter with Japanese plastic and neon with a
confronting recognition of an enduring human catastrophe. The density of assonance
and alliteration – ‘blood and scum’, ‘memorial museum’, ‘re-created / horror mocks
the grim original’ – is stopped in its prosodic tracks before the poem’s flooring act of
repetition, both a reference to and an enactment of the stoppage of time at ground
zero: the child’s wristwatch ‘although mute, / it gestures with its hands at eight-fifteen /
and eight-fifteen and eight-fifteen again’ (ll. 34–6). This unmodulated repetition is one
prosodic step away from silence.
How did Japanese poets respond to the singular violence set upon those two cities
in August 1945? Writers such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi developed strategies by
which to address the unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust, centred upon their experi-
ences of Auschwitz and its revelation of industrial murder.44 Paul Celan became the
iconic poet of the Shoah, whose experiments in the German language – most promi-
nently in his poem ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’) – provided a mode of testimony against
the profound sense of cultural loss and existential violence suffered by the victims
of the Holocaust. In contrast Japanese mainstream literary culture was muted follow-
ing the atomic detonations, in step with official governmental silence on the subject
after Japan’s official surrender:
Postwar European literature was probably able to confront Auschwitz because of

the French cultural tradition, in particular the resistance movement of Humanité
during World War II. In the Japanese cultural tradition of literati consciousness –
flowers and birds, cool breezes, and a bright moon – there was no Humanité, so
there was no soil in which to cultivate the literature of resistance.45

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Yet an unofficial, if not quite underground movement of hibakusha poetry developed

almost immediately, addressing the devastation of the blasts and the immense suf-
fering of the survivors (hibakusha). These poets published in local journals – often
journals already under official scrutiny for their left-leaning or anarchist agendas –
and they tended to be completely excluded from the dominant literary culture centred
on Tokyo. While hibakusha poetry began by demarcating the two detonations over
Hiroshima and Nagasaki as generative events, it grew into a poetics of the atomic age
more generally, putting forward impassioned arguments for meaningful reparation
and nuclear non-proliferation. With the rise of anti-nuclear activism in the Japanese
mainstream, these poets have begun, posthumously, to be afforded due attention.
Sadako Kurihara has, over several decades, emerged as an important postwar poet
and as a leading hibakusha: ‘she is a woman; she writes from strong political convic-
tions; she lives in Hiroshima, not Tokyo; and she publishes her poems and essays in
journals that are hardly mainstream’.46 A native of Hiroshima who was thirty-two at
the time of the atomic detonation over her city, her activism grew from a common ori-
gin for many hibakusha, namely to compose poetry as a means of processing the dev-
astation of nuclear attack and its survival. Other writers chose silence following their
brief incursions into public literary activist space: for example, Yōko Ōta (大田洋子)
gained widespread recognition with the publication of her story Katei no yō na hikari
(‘A light as if from the depths’) in August 1945, City of Corpses (Shikabane no machi)
in 1948 (published in an uncensored edition in 1950) and Ningen ranru (‘Human tat-
ters’, 1951), but retreated into silence following the forceful intrusions of censorship.
Numerous hibakusha died by suicide (including Yōko Ōta in 1963), leaving Sadako
Kurihara an open field in which to write, but also the concentrated attention of gov-
ernment officials who distrusted her motives.
Kurihara’s first publication activity relating to the war and the atomic bomb was her
poem ‘Let us be Midwives! An untold story of the atomic bombing’, which appeared
in the inaugural March 1946 issue of the journal Chugoku bunka she began editing
with her husband Tadaichi. In his editorial Tadaichi drew the connection between the
bomb, its catastrophic impact on human bodies, and the capacity of those bodies to
intervene politically: ‘We who were born like the phoenix from the flames of the atomic
bomb must pay for world peace with our bodies.’47 Despite drawing lifelong oppro-
bium for his anarchist philosophy, Tadaichi eventually pursued a political career in
Hiroshima’s prefectural assembly. Both he and Sadako expressed anti-nationalist senti-
ments and protested US military action in Vietnam, including the extremely sensitive
topic of Japanese collusion, stemming from the US–Japan Security Treaty of 1960.
Sadako Kurihara’s longevity matched her productivity, very much in contrast to her
hibakusha contemporaries. Her poetry was resolutely activist across her career, and she
was instrumental in numerous movements during her life, ranging from anti-nuclear
proliferation movements, to actions seeking government accountability for war crimes,
to causes seeking better treatment of Korean hibakusha (of which there were some
70,000 in Hiroshima alone). She chose to publish in minor and local journals, hav-
ing been largely shut out from the national media in Japan. Kurihara’s central works
include Kuroi tamago (Black Eggs), first published in 1946 and accumulated into its
final form in a 1983 edition, and in 1984 Kurihara Sadako shishu (Poetry of Kurihara
Sadako), which collected her many shorter books of poetry in the intervening decades.
Her numerous essay collections of the 1970s–90s focus on Hiroshima, hibakusha, and

the antiwar movement. The first translations of her poetry into English occurred with
The Songs of Hiroshima first in 1962 and frequently reprinted, followed by Black Eggs
in 1994.
Kurihara’s political volubility and prolific output of poetry and essays are grounded
in the paradoxes of sound in an atomic explosion: first the silent flash of atomic detona-
tion, followed by the boom and sustained roar, and then the deep silence of ontological
and physical shock. As John Hersey reported in his landmark essay comprising the entire
31 August 1946 issue of the New Yorker, almost no one caught in the blasts of Hiro-
shima and Nagasaki recalled hearing any explosion to accompany the blinding flash
and the immense shock wave, as though the nuclear detonation exceeded the human
capacities of sound recognition.48 Kurihara addresses these phases of the explosion on
6 August 1945 in many of her poems, resonating outwards across decades as the fallout,
literal and political, works its course across modern and contemporary history. Silence
comprises a central theme of her poetry, but she is careful to distinguish it from any sense
of what came to be known as the ‘nuclear sublime’. This is not the awed silence of the
scientists, engineers, and politicians who witnessed the first experimental detonations
at the Trinity site in New Mexico on 16 July 1945, whose reactions became reified in
Robert Oppenheimer’s citation of the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become Death, the
destroyer of worlds.’49 This is the silence of defiant protest, of the demand for human
suffering to be recognised by the governments that inflict and condone it. The poems of
Kuroi tamago/Black Eggs, collected and collated over decades, return to the immediate
physical, visual and auditory effects of the blast – Kurihara was in her kitchen about four
kilometres from ground zero when the bomb detonated, having earlier sent her husband
to work at the Mitsubishi Precision Machine factory. This immediacy is registered in free
verse as well as more formal prosodic arrangements such as tankas, of which a represen-
tative cross-section demonstrates the tone and intent of her poetry.
Kurihara’s earlier poetry often takes the tanka form: the dominant lyric form in
medieval Japan revived and popularised in the early twentieth century, following the
format of thirty-one on (roughly, syllables) arranged over five lines in a 5-7-5-7-7 for-
mation. As a poetic genre it thus invokes the implied authority of tradition. Kurihara’s
deployment of the tanka as a lens with which to examine the human implications of
atomic weapons is highly charged and presents a major risk of disapproval and censor-
ship. Her tanka sequence ‘The Day of the Atomic Bomb’50 narrates the moment and
aftermath of the Hiroshima detonation, the ‘bluish-white flash’ (l. 2) or ‘the weird
blue flash’ (l. 7) signalling a radical change, here uneasiness prompted by the ‘strange
hue’ of the sky (l. 12). The short tanka stanzas nevertheless carry significant narrative
weight, with the poetic voice racing outside to the shelter and emerging to scenes of
devastation. Physical damage to buildings soon shifts to crying children – ‘Some / are
all bloody’ (ll. 36–7) – and exclamations of relief at their survival until the vision of ‘A
bizarre stormcloud / rising to a peak’ (ll. 56–7) and its accompanying thunder offers
a prophecy of ‘hell’ where ‘The Refugees all / have burns’ (ll. 71–2) and ‘clothes / are
seared / onto skin’ (ll. 73–5). The severe truncation of the lines in the tanka form mim-
ics the stripping away of clothing and flesh of the victims, as well as the suffocating
staccato patterns of speech by the bomb’s witness.
Other tanka sequences such as ‘Nightmare’51 also demonstrate their effectiveness in
narrating the horrors of radiation burns and the sheer scale of suffering in the bomb’s
immediate aftermath. The tendency to minimal expression manifests sound patterns

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as though speaking in shallow breaths, each short burst of words across each five-
line group realising the maximum quantum available to the traumatised witness. The
sequence ‘City Ravaged by Flames’,52 composed in October 1945, performs a similar
feat in its elegy for the city and its inhabitants. The focus on material damage – the
‘burnt tin’ shack roofs (l. 12), the ubiquitous rubble – turns in its final stanzas to
the scale of human loss and the pity expressed by absent ancestors in their cries ‘from
the world of the dead’ (l. 85). The poem takes a sharp turn to the traditional iconog-
raphy of the pine grove, ‘where the wind / once sighed: / only trunks remain, / burned
black’ (ll. 92–5). Words recede into the wind’s sigh, and the city of rubble gives way
to the pine grove, traditional symbol of longevity and protector against bad luck and
evil spirits. The pine grove at Miho is the setting for the iconic Noh play Hagoromo,
and the two elderly figures of the Noh play Takasago embody the spirits of the pines
at Takasago and Sumiyoshi. Give that the hashigakari or bridgeway to the Noh stage
is decorated with painted pine trees, their reduction to burned stumps in Kurihara’s
poetic sequence suggests a reckoning with irrevocable cultural damage.
The function of sound in Kurihara’s poetry ranges across and beyond the auditory
scale: the ghosts of the dead – ancestors as well as the bomb victims – echo and mur-
mur; the wind and its memory registers gently; vistas such as the pine grove inspire
meditative silence; and the obscene magnitude of the atomic blast bestows upon the
city, its people, and their lifelong memories an aftershock of fire, emergency vehicles,
and the cries of the wounded and dying. Kurihara returns to motifs of silence to reg-
ister the singularity of the nuclear event. In her 1952 poem ‘Ruins’,53 the opening line
draws a direct association between the city and annihilation, dilating to a vision of the
sudden absence of life and physical well-being:
Hiroshima: nothing, nothing –

old and young burned to death,
city blown away,
socket without an eyeball. (ll. 1–4)
The poem scans the devastated city as though recording the testimony of cinéma
vérité, homing in on scenes of biological putrescence: the ‘swarm of black flies [. . .]
Bred in the pulpy entrails and putrid flesh / of our dead’ (ll. 10–12) and the ‘white
larvae grow fat on bloody pus’ (l. 13). The poem is set in the year of its composition –
‘Seven years have passed’ (l. 17) – striking the reader with the durability of suffering,
raising the visceral imagery of decay to the historical, the figurative, and inevitably the
political dimension. For a city that ‘has lost everything’ (l. 24), silence becomes the one
durable certainty, functioning both as memorial and enraged dignity: ‘this city’s people
are silent, exactly as silent / as the ruins on August sixth’ (ll. 26–7). The companion
poems ‘Words – Come Back to Life!’ composed in October 1968, and ‘Words Died’,
composed in December 1969, challenge the efficacy of words to register adequate
testimony to the suffering of the hibakusha.54 The earlier poem states: ‘The words
born glistening / out of that burnt-out waste where the dead sleep – / have they died?’
(ll. 5–7). Words are ‘bathed in the blood of the young’ (l. 25) and are displaced by ‘the
song of the dead, song without words’ (l. 27). The later poem observes the silence of
people entering and leaving the house of a woman dying of radiation sickness. This
silence produces a ‘deep, uncrossable pool’ (l. 11), an accumulation of ‘thousands of

years of women crying’ (l. 15), which becomes the one true source of articulation,
displacing the silence of incapacitation with a posthumous reservoir of eloquent tes-
timony. Until the woman dies, however, ‘words are dead’ (l. 25). This preoccupation
with silence is a powerful mode of expression for Kurihara, yet as she notes, silence
is deeply bound up in the official and internalised channels of censorship suffered by
survivors: ‘The line about the silence of the hibakusha [in the poem ‘Ruins’] may sur-
prise the reader, but it was many years after the war before the dropping of the bomb
became a political issue, and many hibakusha remained silent their entire lives.’55
The free verse poem ‘When We Say Hiroshima’ was written in May 1972, almost
thirty years after the explosion.56 The poem examines the role of memorialisation of
the atomic bombs, and by virtue of this, comprises a forensic examination of what it
means to identify as hibakusha. The poem interrogates ideas of victimhood, reprising
conversations in which the name of Hiroshima is invoked along with the war crimes of
Pearl Harbour, the Rape of Nanjing, and the mass murders of women and children in
wartime Philippines, ‘thrown into trenches, doused with gasoline, / and burned alive’
(ll. 7–8). This horrific image binds victims of Japanese war crimes in the Pacific theatre
to the hibakusha, generating a solidarity among ‘Asia’s dead and her voiceless masses’
(l. 14) and casting a stark light upon matters of wartime culpability. The poem charts
an imperative for resistance to nationalism and warfare: ‘we must in fact lay down /
the arms we were supposed to lay down’ (ll. 20–1), a reference perhaps to delayed
public acknowledgement of war crimes as well as an admonishment to politicians
who seek to contravene Japan’s postwar constitutional requirement for disarmament.
This dismantling of the military–industrial complex, as it came to be known during
the Cold War,57 extends to Japan’s erstwhile occupiers: ‘We must get rid of all foreign
bases’ (l. 22). These contradictions implicating both Japanese and United States mili-
tary and political spheres work to perpetuate the dehumanisation of the hibakusha:
Until that day Hiroshima

will be a city of cruelty and bitter bad faith.
And we will be pariahs
burning with remnant radioactivity. (ll. 23–6)
The sounds of voices – hypothetical conversations, veiled accusations, and plain-

speaking challenges to historical revisionism and hypocrisy – produce a powerful rhe-
torical tone in the poem. Despite the auditory reverberations, at the centre of this
meditation on human dignity and its recognition is a defiance of historical silencing
and the suppression of victims’ voices: ‘we must first / wash the blood / off our own
hands’ (ll. 30–2), but a reply given ‘gently’ in the poem’s refrain.
Critical Futures of a Poetics of Warfare

The modern anglophone tradition of antiwar poetry stemming from Whitman’s ‘Drum
Taps’ and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ reached a point of
intensity in the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon in response to the hor-
rors of trench warfare in the First World War. Several modernist writers including
W. H. Auden, e.e. cummings, and Ezra Pound expressed their opposition to the vio-
lence of warfare and the political cynicism which enabled loss of life on such a scale in

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the modern age. The Second World War produced a welter of poetic responses by Rob-
ert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Stanley Kunitz, among others, and subsequent poetry
by Denise Levertov, James Dickey, W. S. Merwin, Robert Bly, and Muriel Rukeyser
condemned America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Yet the vanguard opposition
to warfare in the West turned from poetry and novels to popular music – evident in
Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Country Joe and the Fish, among many oth-
ers – lending an air of minority exceptionalism to antiwar poetry of the post-World
War II era in the West. This essay barely initiates a history of war poetry per se, but
instead draws on elements of such a history to evaluate how poetry might reflect and
critique the practices of warfare. In the end, perhaps the damage to poetry is too great,
and the critique of war is most effectively deployed in the raw sound of guitar feed-
back, or the defiant silence of the hibakusha.
Notes
1. For an account of archaic agrarian crisis in Attica, see Philip Brook Manville, The Origins
of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), especially
chapter 5, ‘Law, Society and Population at the Beginning of the Sixth Century’, 93–123. For
a rejection of the theory of Hesiod’s reaction to agrarian crisis, see Paul Millett, ‘Hesiod and
His World’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 30, no. 210 (1984): 84–115.
2. Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days: A New Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed. Kimberly
Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017), ll. 109–201. Ovid refines this
model into one of Four Ages in Book 1 of the Metamorphoses, and Thomas Love Peacock
satirises the entire schema in his essay ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’ of 1820, to which Percy
Bysshe Shelley responded in his Defence of Poetry of the following year.
3. For an account of recent scholarship and a critical evaluation of the sensory experience of
war in the Iliad, see Angela L. Pitts, ‘The Iliad, Force, and the Soundscapes of War’, Envi-
ronment, Space, Place 11, no. 1 (2019): 1–37.
4. For further discussion in the context of audio adaptations of the Iliad, especially Chris-
topher Logue’s long-term BBC radio adaptation of 1959–2005, see Emily Greenwood,
‘Sounding Out Homer: Christopher Logue’s Acoustic Homer’, Oral Tradition 24, no. 2
(2009): 503–18. Logue’s audio adaptation began with the production War Music for BBC
radio which centred on Books 16–19.
5. The Iliad of Homer, trans. and intro. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago and London: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1951), 347.
6. Sarah Nooter, ‘The War-Trumpet and the Sound of Domination in Ancient Greek Thought’,
Greek and Roman Music Studies 7 (2019): 235–49.
7. Virgil, Georgics: A New Verse Translation, trans. Janet Lembke (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2005), xiii.
8. Ibid., xvi.
9. See Timothy Joseph, ‘The Disunion of Catullus’ Fratres Unanimi at Virgil, Aeneid 7.335–6’,
Classical Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2009): 274–8.
10. See Stefano Rebeggiani, ‘Theban Myth in Virgil’s Aeneid: The Brothers at War’, Classical
Antiquity 39, no. 1 (2020): 95–125.
11. Virgil, Georgics, xxiv.
12. Nicholas Horsfall, A Companion to the Study of Virgil (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 68. The
durability of the autourgos myth is evident in such late classical texts as Publius Vegetius
Renatus’ prose work of 430–5 ce, De re militari, highlighting its genealogy from Cincin-
natus and Virgil. See Christopher Allmand, The De Re Militari of Vegetius: The Reception,
Transmission and Legacy of a Roman Text in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2011), especially the ‘Introduction’, 1–10, and ‘Analysis of the Manu-
scripts’, 17–46.
13. For an extended analysis of the dense aural patternings in Book 9, centred on the martial
scenes involving Ascanius and Turnus, see Lauren Curtis, ‘War Music: Soundscape and
Song in Vergil, Aeneid 9’, Vergilius 63 (2017): 37–62.
14. For a new translation and extensive commentary of the poem – including extensive treat-
ment of its classical sources, its sources in the writings of the Church Fathers, and its influ-
ence on later literature – see Mark Mastrangelo, ed., Prudentius’ Psychomachia (London:
Routledge, 2022).
15. For a discussion of the scholarly debate over Milton’s motivations in Book 6 – that is, to
promote an essentially pacifist view of warfare, or else to release some of the bellicose
energy mounting in the polity of his time – see John Wooten, ‘The Poet’s War: Violence
and Virtue in Paradise Lost’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 30, no. 1 (1990):
133–50. For a close analysis of Milton’s political context in relation to the English Revolu-
tion and how this manifests in depictions of war, and particularly how Milton responds to
Virgil’s treatment of war in the Aeneid, see David Loewenstein, ‘Writing Epic in the After-
math of Civil War: Paradise Lost, the Aeneid, and the Politics of Contemporary History’,
Milton Studies 59, no. 1 (2017): 165–98.
16. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture
of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 23.
17. Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise
in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2008), 1–3.
18. Ibid., 131.
19. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2001), 9.
20. Walt Whitman, ‘Preface’, in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed.
Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 5.
21. As a point of comparison, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’
relies heavily upon similar prosodic elements of dense alliteration and rhetorical figures
of anaphora in its narrative description of the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War.
Tennyson published this poem less than six weeks after the battle took place on 25 October
1854. Its short lines and insistent repetition capture in auditory terms the asymmetry of the
Light Brigade’s lances and sabres against Russian artillery fire.
22. Walt Whitman, ‘Beat! Beat! Drums!’, in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 419.
23. Walt Whitman, ‘Preface’, 9.
24. Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the War (Camden: Self-Published, 1875), 60, quoted
in Luke Mancuso, ‘Civil War’, in A Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Donald D. Kum-
mings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 290–310 (292–3).
25. Mancuso, ‘Civil War’, 291.
26. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909), reprinted
in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 19–24
(21). For a range of critical analyses of Futurism’s relationship to technology, see the essay
collection edited by Günter Berghaus, Futurism and the Technological Imagination (Leiden:
Brill, 2009).
27. Marinetti, ‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, 22.
28. Ibid.
29. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Critical Writings, new edn, ed. Günter Berghaus (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 220.
30. Ibid.
31. Carlo Carrà, Guerrapittura: futurism politico, dinamismo plastico, 12 disegni guerreschi,
parole in libertà (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia, 1915), 17.

334 mark byron
32. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ed., Guerra sola igiene del mondo (War the world’s only
hygiene) (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia, 1915).
33. Marinetti, ‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, 22.
34. For a critical account of Futurist negotiations with crowds and riots, both in public perfor-
mances and captured in theatre and painting, see Christine Poggi, ‘Folla/Follia: Futurism
and the Crowd’, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 3 (2002): 709–48.
35. Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Introduction’, in The Dada Almanac, ed. Richard Huelsenbeck,
trans. Malcolm Green (London: Atlas, 1993), 10. For an extended account of Dada music
in Zurich and elsewhere, see Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 45–56.
36. Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound, 142.
37. Brad Bucknell, ‘Aesthetics, Music, Noise’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 114–31 (116).
39. Bucknell, ‘Aesthetics’, 119, 124.
40. W. H. Auden, ‘O What Is That Sound’, in The Collected Poems of W. H. Auden, ed.
Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1994), 120–1.
41. Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Post-War Rock ’n’ Roll Rev-
olution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 24. In counterpoint, Harry Shapiro interprets
the Woodstock performance as a critique of countercultural passivity. See Harry Shapiro and
Caesar Glebbeek, Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy (New York: St Martin’s, 1991), 388. On the
Woodstock anthem’s role in Hendrix’s ‘cosmopolitan Afro-futurism’, see Paul Gilroy, ‘Along
the Watchtower’, in Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), 129–49.
42. Mark Clague, ‘“This is America”: Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner Journey as Psyche-
delic Citizenship’, Journal of the Society for American Music 8, no. 4 (2014): 435–78 (437).
43. Mary Jo Salter, ‘Welcome to Hiroshima’, in Henry Purcell in Japan (New York: Knopf,
1985), 59–61.
44. For an analysis of the role of silence in Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit (1958), especially the way the
text downplays allusions to vengeance in the Yiddish original, . . . Un di velt hot geshvign
(1956), see Alan Astro, ‘Revisiting Wiesel’s Night in Yiddish, French, and English’, Partial
Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 12, no. 1 (2014): 127–53. Wiesel
famously rebuffed Orson Welles’s proposal to produce a film based on La Nuit, stating
that film left no room for the silence between words. For a discussion of how Primo Levi
invokes Dante in Se questo è un uomo (1947) to navigate the linguistic limits to express the
barbarity of Auschwitz, see Tristan Kay, ‘Primo Levi, Dante, and Language in Auschwitz’,
Modern Language Review 117, no. 1 (2022): 66–100. For a more general evaluation of
the difficulties of writing and reading about Auschwitz, see Jessica Lang, Textual Silence:
Unreadability and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017); and
Sarah Liu, ‘The Illiterate Reader: Aphasia after Auschwitz’, Partial Answers: Journal of
Literature and the History of Ideas 7, no. 2 (2009): 319–42, who also treats Celan’s linguis-
tic and rhetorical experimentalism in ‘Todesfuge’.
45. Richard H. Minear, ‘Introduction’, in Sadako Kurihara, Black Eggs, trans. with an Introduc-
tion and notes by Richard H. Minear (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of
Michigan, 1994), 31.
46. Ibid., 1.
47. Tadaichi Kurihara, quoted in Minear, ‘Introduction’, 7.
48. John Hersey, Hiroshima (London: Penguin, 1946), 18.
49. Oppenheimer read the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit and reported his translation
which first appeared in ‘The Eternal Apprentice’, Time, 8 November 1948.
50. Kurihara, Black Eggs, 82–5.
51. Ibid., 86–90.

52. Ibid., 92–5.

53. Ibid., 185–6.
54. Ibid., 167, 168.
55. Ibid., 186.
56. Ibid., 226–7.
57. President Dwight D. Eisenhower is reported to have first used the term in his Farewell
Address on 17 January 1961, as reported by C-Span.
Select Bibliography
Apollonio, Umbro, ed., Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973).
Berghaus, Günter, ed., Futurism and the Technological Imagination (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
Bijsterveld, Karin, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2008).
Bucknell, Brad, ‘Aesthetics, Music, Noise’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2020), 114–31.
Curtis, Lauren, ‘War Music: Soundscape and Song in Vergil, Aeneid 9’, Vergilius 63 (2017):
37–62.
Greenwood, Emily, ‘Sounding Out Homer: Christopher Logue’s Acoustic Homer’, Oral Tradition
24, no. 2 (2009): 503–18.
Kahn, Douglas, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2001).
Lang, Jessica, Textual Silence: Unreadability and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers
Liu, Sarah, ‘The Illiterate Reader: Aphasia after Auschwitz’, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature
and the History of Ideas 7, no. 2 (2009): 319–42.
Nooter, Sarah, ‘The War-Trumpet and the Sound of Domination in Ancient Greek Thought’,
Greek and Roman Music Studies 7 (2019): 235–49.
Pitts, Angela L., ‘The Iliad, Force, and the Soundscapes of War’, Environment, Space, Place 11,
no. 1 (2019): 1–37.
Poggi, Christine, ‘Folla/Follia: Futurism and the Crowd’, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 3 (2002):
709–48.
Thompson, Emily, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of
Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

21
The Great War: Sonic Fragments in

Literature and Sound Studies
Michael Bull
I n The Pity of War: 1914–1918 the historian Niall Ferguson wrote, ‘There are,
of course, far too many books about the First World War. My reason for writing
another is not to repeat what others have said before.’1 Ferguson’s cautionary tale of
intellectual repetition has largely fallen on deaf ears in the academy as the torrent of
writings on the Great War have continued unabated, giving it the dubious distinction
of the most analysed war in human history. The thousands of ‘witness’ novels and
diaries continue to form an integral element of the framing of our understanding of
the war over a hundred years distant as first-hand testament resurfaces as an authentic
voice of conflict.2 At first glance the scholar of sound would seem to be at an advan-
tage in respect of Ferguson’s caution with no book having been devoted to the sonic
nature of that war in its totality.3 The resultant advantage given to the scholar of sound
may well mask more difficulties other than the risk of repetition. There may well be
valid reasons why the ‘Great War’ has not been given the sonic attention paid to more
recent conflicts that is not explained merely by the subject’s recent ascendency within
the academy. The foremost cultural historian of the period Jay Winter periodises the
difficulties of studying the Great War:
I believe there has been a change, in the sense that voices matter more now after the
end of the twentieth century than at its beginnings. The sound of the drum beat of
German guns at Verdun or the cry of wounded men on the Somme are things we
can never hear.4
The sound scholar is thus reduced to examining a few remaining sonic fragments,
old shellac records and sounds inscribed upon paper measuring the sonic trajectory
of shells.5 Yet it is this very distinction between the literal sonic vibrations of war and
the experiential nature of the sonic inscribed upon the page that this chapter meditates
upon in its discussion of war literature and sound studies.
The question remains, however, what would an analysis of the sonic nature of the
Great War sound like? This epistemological scepticism can be taken in at least two
ways, the first being that sound on its own does not have exclusive privilege over an
explanation of the Great War. I am largely in agreement with this point although I think
it mistakes the meaning and aims of the sonic in our understanding of the nature of
warfare. The second interpretation denies that any sonic analysis at present, whatever
its epistemology and methodology, possesses the tools to give a sufficient explanation

sonic fragments in literature and sound studies 337
of sonic warfare. To the extent that this might be the case, it is, I argue, more an issue
of sonic imagination in both theory and method than an inherent deficiency. The posi-
tion of this chapter is that sound studies at present possesses no agreed definition as to
what might constitute a war sound in nature or duration. Existing definitions of sonic
warfare are all epistemologically restrictive. For example, Friedrich Kittler’s definition
of war sounds is strangely dualistic:
for the shouts of warriors and the moaning of the dying were within the spectrum
of sounds humans make and hear all the time, with or without war. Noises of war
that are really only produced by war, simply to pour terror into everybody’s ears,
begin only with the warfare of modern states. These states can be identified, on the
one hand, by their monopolization of violence and, on the other, by the way they
maximize violence through weapons systems.6
Central to Kittler is the uniqueness of the production of modern technological war

sounds as against any phenomenology of experience. J. Martin Daughtry, in contrast,
has produced an impressive sonic analysis of the Iraq war in terms of ‘bellaphonic’
sounds, which
encompass sonic material that is less directly or conventionally associated with

warfare: the omnipresent civilian gas generators that appeared throughout Iraq
after the partial destruction of the electric grid in the wake of the major combat
operations in 2003; the sirens and other warning signals that punctuated life on the
military bases and urban areas during the war; the propaganda recordings, made
by all the major parties to the conflict, that proliferated in English and Arabic, on
radio, projected through mobile or stationary loudspeakers, and on the internet;
the live human voices whose presence, substance, and style were conditioned by the
ebb and flow of combat.7
Yet, despite its broader remit, it remains problematically dualistic in its separation of
‘everyday sounds’ and everyday sounds that only exist because of the situation of war.
In this chapter I take note of Mark Smith’s rallying call for sensory studies scholars
and by implication those from sound studies to challenge the precepts upon which sen-
sory history has been based, to a ‘desire to more actively critique the work that is being
produced in a way that simultaneously encourages the production of more scholarship
but also considers the core methodological and interpretive issues underwriting sen-
sory history’.8 This follows on from Jonathan Sterne’s advice that sound studies should
‘be grounded in a sense of its own partiality, its authors’ and readers’ knowledge that
all the key terms we might use to describe and analyse sound belong to multiple tradi-
tions, and are under debate’.9 With this advice in mind, this chapter works with a very
loose definition of sonic warfare: that any sound that is filtered through, understood,
experienced as a consequence of war can be considered a war sound. I am thinking
of an anguished Vera Brittain waiting for news. ‘The clock,’ she recalls, ‘marking off
each hour of dread, struck into the immobility of tension with the shattering effect of
a thunderclap.’10 The waiting for the footsteps of the postman, the sound of the letter
that drops to the floor or not; the silence of waiting day after day, year after year for
news of those colonial troops from Africa, India, and elsewhere fighting in Europe; the

338 michael bull
silence of conscientious objectors locked in Dartmoor Prison – in solitary confinement

– to the crash of glass as their homes are attacked by angry neighbours; the sounds of
birds, wind, and rain on the Western Front and elsewhere mediated by the experiences
of soldiers as they wait for the next shell to explode.11
Epistemologically the present chapter questions the notion of a unified theory of
sonic warfare, replacing it with a fragmented sonic epistemology that is both meta-
phorically and empirically based, whilst recognising that the fragmented is itself a
moment that desires totality – an idealist remnant of Western thought identified by
Theodor Adorno as the relation between subject and object rather than the meditation
on the contradiction between ‘the nonidentical under the aspect of identity’.12 It is this
very fragmentation between time and subjectivity that provides a crack through which
literature and sound studies simultaneously complement one another, whilst also at
times diverging from one another: a divergence represented in the present chapter as
the space between a phenomenology of experience and structural forms of matter –
or material. It is the space that both joins and distinguishes the literature of Samuel
Beckett, so admired by Adorno, and the structural matter of destruction articulated in
Adorno’s claim of Western progress defined by the development of the slingshot to the
atom bomb – the loudest sound imaginable.
The literature of the Great War, at its best, provides a rich sonic interiority that
questions notions of linearity. Ernst Bloch in a Proustian moment describes this as
nonsynchronism: ‘not all people exist in the same now. They do so only externally by
virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are
living at the same time with others.’13 The nature of this nonsynchronism is cognitive,
individual, cultural, and historical. The war novel is rich in its use of nonsynchronism,
voice, identity, and memory. Fragmentation is not confined to the ‘literal’ especially in
literature; ever since Freud, we have understood the nonlinear and fragmented nature
of experience as articulated in modernist literature, film, a range of technologies from
the telephone to the railways, and in medical understandings of trauma of the time. In
all of the above the sonic should not be reduced to its mere materiality – to vibration.
War literature at its best charts the human voice and the ‘inhuman’ shell, experience
and matter, one destroying the other – war voices populate space, inside and out – they
are everywhere: singing voices, suffering voices, intimate voices, the rasping voice of
orders, and the voice silenced in death and commemoration. Voices are grasped and lost
through time, resurrected as memory, real, half heard – imagined – persistent. The voice
as metaphor for both experience and suffering, the ambiguity of sound, and its wartime
recollection and significance is illustrated in a passage from Frederic Manning’s First
World War novel The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916. The central
character, Bourne, on hearing of the death of a trooper called Bates,
tried to remember who Bates was; and, at the effort of memory to recover him, he
seemed to hear a high, excited voice suddenly cry out, as though actually audible
to the whole dugout: ‘What’s ’e want to drag me into ’t for?’ And it was as though
Bates were bodily present there [. . .] He knew no more of Bill Bates than that one
phrase, passionately innocent: ‘What’s ’e want to drag me into ’t for?’14
The sound of Bates’s voice is dragged out of Bourne’s memory bank amidst all of the
myriad of sounds and experiences of the war. A singular sonic memory of identity erased.

This becomes a place of intersection and overlap between the literature of war and
sound studies. Related to this is the question of the duration of the sonic in war; when
does a sound begin and when does it end, which is both a theoretical and an empirical
question. Underlying this is a question concerning the literalness and materiality of the
sonic: vibration might be conceived of literally – the vibrations that occur as the shell
moves through space, the sonic impact as the bullet strikes the face of its victim mea-
sured in microseconds; or indeed culturally – as the sonic resonates through history,
through personal and cultural memory – in the form of nightmares, memorials, and
political and historical thought.15 This is a question of ‘reach’ as well as a question of
time and materiality. Does the sound of the shell also manifest itself in its design and
manufacture, and so on? If so, then the sound of the shell, for example, is a question
of culture, embodiment, technology, politics, and economics – that is to be filtered
through literature and sound studies. This informs how we might understand the telos
of the shell, the bullet and its history, and not merely the telos of the subject – the one
to destroy, the other to survive.
I will now meditate on two related fragments: one an unexploded shell, the other
a bullet that achieves its telos. One fails as its ‘percussion fuse’ does not detonate the
bomb – the fuse, the interior sound upon which its destructive power depends and
which lies beyond any phenomenology of sound. It rather traces the trajectory of
the shell – on its sonic conveyor belt towards its non-detonation and forward to the
present – to where it lies on a Flanders field, as sonic potential, to be dug up by a
French farmer and then detonated ‘out of time’, enabling the author to hear and reflect
upon temporal and sonic exteriority – the sound of a First World War shell in 2015.
The second example traces the bullet that explodes in the face of a soldier in 1918,
before moving to a contemporary sound installation commemorating the hundredth
anniversary of the end of the Great War held at the Imperial War Museum in London,
an installation based on the final shell sounds of the Great War deriving from early
sound ranging equipment inscribed onto paper, sonically recreated for the installation.
The materiality of inscription understood in the First World War primarily as sound
onto shellac is then speculatively connected to the sonic inscription upon the face of
the victim of the bullet that penetrates the flesh.
The Sonic Life of a Shell 1915

The UK produced over 258,000,000 shells of a variety of sizes and types in the Great
War,16 the majority of which were used on the Western Front, ‘of which an estimated
15 percent failed to explode’.17 The young Irish writer Patrick MacGill published The
Great Push: An Episode of the Great War in 1917, an account of his experiences at the
Battle of Loos in 1915 where he served as a stretcher bearer. The novel achieved great
popularity during the war before falling into literary obscurity. The novel remains a
visceral account of the war and is perhaps the most sonically aware novel written of
the war. MacGill is one of the few writers to describe the common phenomenon of a
shell failing to detonate:
a concussion shell whistled across the traverse in which I stood and in futile rage
dashed itself to pieces on the level field behind. Another followed, crying like a
child in pain, and finished its short, drunken career by burrowing into the red clay

340 michael bull
of the parados where it failed to explode. It passed close to my head, and fear went
down into the innermost part of me and held me for a moment.18
The elation associated with survival is short lived as the storm of steel continues:
‘the shells were loosened again; there was no escape from their frightful vitality, they
crushed, burrowed, exterminated; obstacles were broken down, and men’s lives were
flicked out like flies off a window pane’.19 Whilst MacGill’s description of the ‘failing’
shell is rare, the sonic and bodily experience of battle as a ‘dance of hell’ is common:
‘the overwhelming sensation of danger, the deafening noise, and the immediacy of
injury and death [which] produced a sensory overload’.20
MacGill experienced shrapnel shells on the battlefield, which accounted for the
most deaths and injury on the front on both sides. Douglas Hamilton’s contemporary
description of the behaviour of the shrapnel shell is instructive: ‘The number of lead
bullets carried in the 3 inch shrapnel shell ranges from 210 to 360 [. . .] the range of a
3-inch shrapnel shell is about 6500 yards [. . .] the duration of flight ranges from 21 to 25
seconds.’21 The technological development of the shell had transformed the experience
of warfare structurally and behaviourally with each shell showering its deadly contents
over wider and wider areas with increasing speed. The phenomenology of experience
articulated in witness accounts works within an extended, cumulative, and complex
amalgam of fragmentary time. The shell itself has a complex relation to its environ-
ment as it revolves in space, creating an ever-changing soundscape that is the focus of
countless descriptions of shell fire:
Into the rattle, the boom, the crash of the guns, there leaped a new tone. It rose
clearly above the rest of the din, which had almost dulled the consciousness. It
approached so shrilly, with such indescribable swiftness, with so fierce a threat,
that the noise seemed to be visible, as though you could actually see a screaming
semicircle rise in the air, bite its way to your very forehead, and snap there with a
short, hard, whiplike crack. A few feet away a little whirl of dust was puffed up,
and the invisible hailstones slapped rattling down upon the grass. Shrapnel!22
Shrapnel shells, unlike bullets which travelled in straight lines, arced above the ground,
exploding many feet above the intended targets whether in trenches or out in the open.
MacGill’s description is of his experience in no man’s land. The timing of detonation
was orchestrated by the shells’ percussive fuses. Timed percussion fuses were set so
as to optimise the destructive power of the shell – to explode at the ‘best’ time. The
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines these fuses as follows: ‘The striking of an
explosive powder so as to produce a spark and explode the charge in a firearm.’23
That which produces the destructive force of the shell is purely internal to the shell;
it cannot be heard on the shell’s exterior and plays no direct role in the sonic phenom-
enology of the soldier’s experience. The unexploded shell, or indeed the exploding shell,
is not fully understood either by the sound it makes as it shrieks through the air or by
its sonic duration – its twenty-five-second flight. Yet it is this which forms the bulk, and
maybe quite rightly so, of the many descriptions of shelling in the literature of the time.
An alternative perspective, equally incomplete, would be a materialist one in which
the sonic narrative of the shell is understood from the position of the shell itself, and not
from that of its victims. The telos of the shell, as we have noted, is to destroy. That is its

raison d’être. Shells are conduits of death that ‘resonate’ through everything else upon
which all other sounds reverberate, are a function of, whilst importantly, not being
reduced to them. Shells in the Great War are the embodiment of a Taylorist indus-
trial production line constituting a flow of death from the factory to the battlefield in
which whole economies were transformed like none before. The functions of the towns
behind the front, the hospitals, the trains, the supplies, the movement of labour, the
songs, the chatter, the propaganda, the silences, the munitions factories with all of their
constitutive sounds, transformed the economy into a war machine of the imperialist
prosecutors – Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Hungary, Russia, Turkey, the
USA, and Japan. The sounds of suffering of wounded troops echoing through hospitals,
battlefields, imaginings though time, the sounds of refugees trudging over roads, their
possessions rattling in the wind, the sounds of music recorded, played from homes,
music halls, battle fronts – all are functions in some way or another of the technologies
of war, as multiple and simultaneous ripples spread from stones dropped into a pond.
These sonic circles differ in aim and type: the ripples that are the end product of shells
as they are fired differ from the force field that takes the product of this dynamic in
the opposite direction – the finding, treating, and transportation of its victims. This is
beautifully captured by the injured artist Conrad Felixmüller:
Soon in a speeding Red Cross train. Rumbling pause. Lie in ghostly white. Red Cross
nurses, white-smocked orderlies and doctors in front of my large swollen face –
consumed [. . .] [I] howl in a deep, dark infinity. Still hearing beautiful cracklings
like glass from a knife cutting through skin into flesh, shredding sinews like leather.
Sawing leg bones like wood – Off! – Blood spurts in a red arc towards the window
over cities, villages, fields. Shreds of bandages fly past, bind up my stump. And howl
with the train in the dark red tunnel [. . .] plunges down the abyss until I feel bed.24
The Sonic Life of a Shell 2016

It is spring in Flanders, the sun bright, the countryside verdant – a flowering of new
life. Walking through the battlefield sites of Flanders, over a hundred years after the
last shell was fired, the military cemeteries, beautifully kept – Ypres, Somme, Pass-
chendaele with their interminable list of names of the dead inscribed into stone and
where remains of some are still found beneath the ground to this day. In spring the
wind moves gently through the trees in bud, many birds – goldcrests, nuthatches, and
others – sing their songs as soldiers often reported during the war:
There was something infinitely sweet and sad about it, as if the countryside were
singing gently to itself, in the midst of all our noise and confusion and muddy
work; so that you felt the nightingale’s song was the only real thing which would
remain when all the rest was long past and forgotten. It is such an old song too,
handed on from nightingale to nightingale through the summer nights of so many
innumerable years.25
Soon I come across signs in red and yellow – a skull and crossbones, words of warning,
‘DANGER DE MORT’. The earth remains polluted, largely dead in large areas of France
and Belgium, even after a hundred years – 100 km2 is out of bounds to the public – no

342 michael bull
one can live there, very little can grow there – nature remains despoiled by vast amounts
of chlorine, phosgene, mustard gas, arsenic poisons the soil, water undrinkable. Still
the deadly objects spill their deadly contents, contaminating everything they come into
contact with – lead debris of shrapnel containing non-biodegradable lead, mercury, zinc.
If one were to place ground microphones there, one would hear the silence of nature,
denuded of life; above ground, one would hear the rich sounds of birds as they fly free,
overhead. MacGill is long dead, his words remain on the page, yet the unexploded shells
continue to work beneath the feet. Pregnant with purpose, silently seeping their contents
into the earth, into the landscape that Henri Barbusse described as ‘fields of sterility’.26
There exist two alternative narratives to the life of shells: those that terminate their
existence between 1914 and 1918, and those that remain to this day, over one hundred
years since. Their narrative of sounds and silence diverge yet overlap. In spring, when
the fields are ploughed anew, bombs of every variety are uncovered, stored, and some-
times destroyed; some continue to kill the unlucky discoverer. The French government
employs a team of démineurs to safely detonate some of these shells. A warning siren
is sounded at 11.30 or 15.45 during week days to warn of an impending explosion.
This is the only time when it is possible to hear the ‘real’ sounds of First World War
shells in situ, rather than mediated and reproduced in film. The noise is similar – but
that is all. The sound is discrete, not continual; there is little danger as one stands at a
safe distance from the explosion. The reception of the sound differs, cognitively, emo-
tionally, and physically, but nonetheless, here is the sound – one hundred years after.
Sonic Fragments and Inscription: From the Western Front

to the Imperial War Museum
Many soldiers were shot in the face simply because they had no experience of trench
warfare: ‘They seemed to think they could pop their heads up over a trench and move
quickly enough to dodge the hail of machine-gun bullets.’27 Accounts of this are rela-
tively commonplace in the description of trench warfare. Louis Barthas was a corporal
in the French army, a barrel maker by trade, he assiduously kept detailed diaries of
his experiences and reflections on his four years in the Great War. Here he notes the
devastation wrought upon the face of a fellow soldier by an exploding bullet, a fate
that befell many thousands of others:
Another soldier who was crawling up suddenly leapt up and fell right in the middle
of us, but we were frozen with horror. This man had almost no face left. An explosive
bullet had blown up in his mouth, blasting out his cheeks, ripping out his tongue
(a piece of which hung down), and shattering his jaws, and blood poured copiously
from these horrible wounds [. . .] finally we were able to get him to a first-aid station.28
In Barthas’s account of the deadly effect of the explosive bullet on flesh, he is an observer
not a victim. Whilst the war had tipped the scales in favour of the sonic over the visual,
in many cases victims never heard the bullet, or sometimes the shell, that was to kill
or maim them. Bullets travelled faster than sound, as Arnold Bennett observed: ‘The
sounds reach your ears in inverse order – if you are alive.’29 Paradoxically, the bullets
killed or maimed in silence. The trauma of facial wounds often required years of newly

developed plastic surgery techniques in order to attempt to put the face of the soldier
together again; sometimes these methods had to resort to the use of personalised pros-
thetic masks.30
Many others died of their wounds on the battlefield:
At that moment, six shrapnel shells howl overhead. The line of NCOs take a direct
hit. A row of three topple over lifeless, like logs. A fourth had had his whole head
torn off. He stays upright for a few moments, like an enormous jar of tomato paste,
then keels over.31
For the most part, victims with severe facial injuries were not filmed, interviewed, or
written about in subsequent years. There remains only one account of facial injury
written by a combatant, Paul Alverdes, a German soldier whose throat was pierced
by a shell fragment. He wrote the 1929 novel Die Pfeifferstube in German (translated
as The Whistlers’ Room in English). Alverdes used his own experience of injury to
construct the experience of the disfigured in a German hospital ward. Those that had
severe throat injuries would breath through a tube inserted into their windpipe, creat-
ing a ‘stridor’ – a high-pitched, guttural breathing sound. Instead of inhaling through
the nose, the patient would inhale through the tube inserted in a hole in their throat:
When they breathed quickly or laughed, a soft piping note, like the squeaking of
mice, came from the silver mouth. Hence they were called the neck whistlers. Talk-
ing, after being for a long while practically dumb, gave them great trouble at first,
and they were glad to avoid it, particularly before strangers. When they wished
to speak they had to close the mouth of the pipe with the tip of the finger. Then a
thread-like stream of air found its way upwards through the throat and played on
the vocal chords, or what remained of them; and they, very unwillingly roused from
their torpor, emitted no more than a painful wheezing and croaking.32
The fragmentation of the shell, or in Barthas’s account, the bullet, is part of industrial
design both material and experiential – Barthas’s hapless victim’s face is destroyed
in a fraction of a second. There is an immediacy to sonic fragmentation in war and
a painful lengthy time of partial recovery, as Alverdes describes: the end result of an
uneven contest between flesh and steel. The paradox of violence and amelioration
of that violence through medicine was understood during the war by doctors such
as James Robb, writing in 1918 of plastic surgery as ‘the very antithesis of war; an
upbuilding to meet a tearing down: construction verses destruction, and [. . .] a work
that any member of the profession cannot but regard with pride’.33 In Germany the
disfigured were seen as a token of a world riven apart, as symbols of a broken society,
‘representatives of the futility of the Great War [. . . and the recognition that] not all
war wounds could be repaired’.34
The Imperial War Museum 2018

It is 2018, the hundredth anniversary of the end of the Great War. I am sitting in the
Imperial War Museum in London, headphones over my ears and hands over the head-
phones. I am listening to and ‘feeling’ a sound installation created by Coda to Coda,

344 michael bull
a sound installation lasting a little over a minute commissioned by the Imperial War
Museum to commemorate the final sounds of the First World War on the Western
Front. As I listen there is the ‘lifelike’ sound of a variety of shells whistling through
the air before exploding, then slowly fading away to be replaced by the sounds of
bird calls that resolve into silence. By placing my hands over my head, I also experi-
ence sonic vibrations deriving from the piece. As a sound piece, the aesthetics work
well. It is ‘as if’ I am eavesdropping on a momentous historical occasion. In addition
to the aesthetics of the piece, reminiscent of the ending of the 1930s American movie
All Quiet on the Western Front, the designers have been attentive to the ‘realism’
of the tape through the use of original sound pressure impulses used on the front
that assessed the direction and distance from which shells were fired along it.35 The
equipment measured the time it took for the sound impulses to reach the front. Will
Worsley, director and principal composer of Coda to Coda, stated, ‘we hope that
our audio interpretation of sound ranging techniques [. . .] enables visitors to project
themselves into that moment in history and gain an understanding of what the end of
the First World War may have sounded like’.36 Yet as I listen to the piece I am over-
come with a sense of unease. I look around; others, primarily young and eager, are at
desks listening intently to what I have just listened to. We are surrounded by the mate-
rial artefacts of the war housed in the museum dedicated to the memory of that war.
The sound of Coda to Coda’s piece was not that loud; it cannot be, or else our ears
would suffer damage. Equally, the sonic vibrations of the shells could be felt, but not
that much. Sonic ‘realism’ remains a myth of course, and so we are left with aesthetics
and perhaps the imagination. Yet it is something else about the soundscape that I have
listened to that is troubling me. The material inscription of the final sounds of war,
transformed from the materiality of the paper into the sound that I have just listened
to, feels too ‘literal’. The joining of ‘sonic realism’ or ‘sonic fidelity’ to aesthetics is
equally impressive and troubling. The sounds that I listen to through the headphones
bear little resemblance to the sounds of gunfire on that day. What could replicate the
sonic intensity of the ‘real thing’?
Whilst listening to Coda to Coda’s sound installation I am reminded of a statement
made by a serving trooper in the First World War after he had just left the cinema after
watching the film The Battle of the Somme in 1917. The film had been lauded for its
realistic depiction of the war, using only original war footage. The deficit ‘realism’ of
The Battle of the Somme was apparent to the trooper. On being asked about the film’s
realism, he answered, ‘Yes [. . .] about as like as a silhouette is like a real person, or
as a dream is like a waking experience. There is so much left out.’37 The materiality
of sonic representations of war, whilst shadow-like in themselves, might nevertheless
be constructive and informative. Yet there is something else troubling me about Coda
to Coda Coda’s piece. Its soundscape is contextual, geographically specific, but more
worrying as we listen to the dying sounds of the war and the rebirth of nature through
the sound of birdsong – a common trope of the time and subsequently – is that there
is one sound that is omitted: that of the sounds of the troops who were there, who
experienced and suffered. We hear no voices, merely birdsong and then silence. In
Coda to Coda’s sound installation the shadowy realism of the sonic is mingled with an
aesthetic silencing of those who experienced the war as the sounds of war die away to
be replaced by the sounds of nature.

Coda
Sound and matter – a common tale of inscription and transformation – Adorno’s
early dismissal of sound imperfectly inscripted onto shellac, music for pleasure and
propaganda during the First World War with songs like Keep Those Home Fires Burn-
ing played at the Western Front on portable phonographs and in the homes of those
far away from war creating virtual intimate connections. On the front, other forms
of inscription were being enacted – the setting up of early microphones – actually
barrels of oil dug into the ground – to measure time, sound, and distance of unseen
shells approaching – transcribed onto matter – recording sound visually – interpreted
in order to calculate how to respond and to target the source of destruction. So why
not add another sonic inscription, of flesh inscribed with sound? Sound need not cease
on impact but rather that sound is transformed, traduced into the disfigured face that
bears its sonic scars. These sonic scars are embodied, not just on the face but on
the psyche – time disassembled, frozen, returned – called shell-shock – made visible
through bodily movements, invisible as cognitive damage. Sound moves backwards
on the ‘production line of death’ and forwards into the personal and social narratives
etched into the psyche and faces of its victims. A meeting of literature and sound stud-
ies, of experience and materiel?
Notes
1. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: 1914–1918 (London: Penguin, 1998), xxiv.
2. Interest in reading witness accounts both during and after the Great War is unsurprising
as those affected by the war sought out what they considered accounts of ‘being-there’.
Yet contesting the ‘validity’ of voice was there at the beginning through the work of Jean
Norton Cru and others who demanded ‘accuracy’ rather than literature. Barbusse asked,
‘how could anyone imagine this, without having been here?’ Henri Barbusse, Under Fire,
trans. Robin Buss (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 303. This was not good enough for
Norton Cru, who accused Barbusse of ‘fiction’. Closer to the mark is Smith’s assessment
of Roland Dorgelès’s 1919 novel Wooden Crosses, ‘Dorgelès posited a narrator who could
solve the seemingly intractable problem of reconciling the authority of immediacy with the
requirements of narrative coherence. No one understood the possibilities of narrative bet-
ter than Dorgelès.’ Leonard V. Smith, The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of
the Great War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 53.
3. There has been little work on the sounds of the Great War in sound studies. Historical
accounts include Carolyn Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space
in Germany, 1933–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012); and Wojciech
Klimczyk and Agata Świerzowska, Music and Genocide (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015).
Accounts that situate soldiers’ use of sound and music in the recent wars in Iraq include
Jonathan Pieslak, Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2009); and J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound,
Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
4. Jay Winter, War Beyond Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 15–16.
5. Gascia Ouzounian, Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021). The transitory nature of the sonic as problematic
to historical investigation is overstated. Some of the most impressive work within sound
studies concerns historical knowledge, such as Mark M. Smith’s magisterial work on the
sounds of Antebellum America, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill:

346 michael bull
University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Andrew J. Rotter’s recent work on sensory
imperialism, Empire of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines
6. Friedrich Kittler, Operation Valhalla: Writings on War, Weapons, and Media, ed. and
trans. Ilinca Iurascu, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, and Michael Wutz (Durham, NC: Duke
7. Daughtry, Listening to War, 3.
8. Mark M. Smith, A Sensory History Manifesto (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press, 2021), 4.
9. Jonathan Sterne, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2012), 4.
10. Vera Brittain, quoted in Randall Stevenson, Literature and the Great War: 1914–1918
11. Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad (New York: New York Book Reviews,
2005). This is not to claim that literature has no silences to reveal. War writing is ‘inter-
twined with a political and sensory legacy of color blindness’. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The
Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2016), 5. On reading through the canon of Western literature, diaries, and
recollections of the Great War, one will find scant reference to any other than white Euro-
pean, Canadian, Australian, or American troops on the Western Front. A reader might be
mistaken in thinking that the war was solely a ‘white’ European conflict with virtually no
references to the large numbers of Indian, Algerian, or Senegalese troops that fought along-
side British and French troops. Whilst this ‘colonial’ absence has recently been addressed,
for the most part the cultural trope of Great War criticism has focused upon the class basis
and representativeness of much of the canon, of young disillusioned officers, largely public
school educated. ‘No great memoir or work of poetry emerged from the war in Africa, the
war at sea, or the battles in Asia and the Pacific . . . What has been lost sight of is not only
the true demographic scope of the war but its fundamental demographics.’ David Olusoga,
The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of the Empire (London: Head of Zeus, 2014), 40.
David Diop, author of the award-winning 2019 novel At Night All Blood is Black – the first
novel depicting the experience of Senegalese troops on the Western Front – explained that
despite their contribution to war being recognised, ‘the inner lives [. . .] their lived experi-
ence [. . .] had not really been told’. Angelique Chrisafis, ‘Interview: International Booker
Winner David Diop: “It’s war that’s savage, not the soldiers”’, The Guardian, 18 June 2021,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/18/international-booker-winner-david-diop-
its-war-thats-savage-not-the-soldiers. Nevertheless this historical silencing of alternative
forces is a contingent one that paradoxically highlights the important insights that literature
can provide, albeit sometimes in occluded form.
12. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973), 5.
13. Ernst Bloch, ‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics’, New German Critique
11 (1977): 22–38 (22).
14. Frederic Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916 (London: Folio
Books, 2012), xiii.
15. Mark Grimshaw and Tom Garner, Sonic Virtuality: Sound as Emergent Perception
16. George Dewar (1921), quoted in Philip Williams, Ordinance: Equipping the British Army
for the Great War (Stroud: The History Press, 2018), 45.
17. Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Protest and Patriotism in the First World
War (London: Arcadia Editions, 2011), xii.
18. Patrick MacGill, The Great Push: An Episode of the Great War (London: Herbert Jenkins,
1917), 160.
19. Ibid., 34.

20. Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War
21. Douglas T. Hamilton, High-Explosive Shell Manufacture: A Comprehensive Treatise on
the Forging, Machining and Heat Treatment of High-Explosive Shells and the Manufacture
of Cartridge Cases, Primers, and Fuses, Giving Complete Directions for Tool Equipment
and Methods of Setting (London: Ulan Press, 1915), 6.
22. Andreas Latzko, Men in Battle (London: Cassell, 1918), 74.
23. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), s.v.
percussion fuse.
24. Conrad Felixmüller, quoted in Linda F. McGreevy, Bitter Witness: Otto Dix and the Great
War (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 162.
25. Alexander Gillespie (1915), in Michael Guida, Listening to British Nature: Wartime Radio,
and Modern Life, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 30.
26. Barbusse, Under Fire, 7.
27. Fred Albee, quoted in Suzannah Biernoff, ‘The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World
War Britain’, Social History of Medicine 24, no. 3 (2011): 666–85 (666).
28. Louis Barthas, Poilu: The World War One Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrel-
maker 1914–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 43.
29. Arnold Bennett, quoted in Stevenson, Literature and the Great War, 70.
30. Lindsey Fitzharris, The Facemaker: One Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers
of World War I (London: Penguin, 2022).
31. Béla Zombory-Moldován, The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914 (New York: New
York Review Books, 2014), 57.
32. Paul Alverdes, The Whistlers’ Room (1929), trans. Basil Creighton (Whitefish: Kessinger,
2004), 29
33. James Robb, quoted in Brenna K. Pritchard, Boys on Blue Benches: Disfigured Veterans of
the First World War (Master’s thesis, Louisiana State University, 2016), 13.
34. Biernoff, ‘Rhetoric of Disfigurement’, 674.
35. ‘Sound ranging to work required for each localization station up to six microphones spe-
cially designed to pick up low frequencies. These microphones were distributed across a
length of eight kilometers and bound together by sixty kilometers of highly conductive
wire and by a string galvanometer. The deflections of the galvanometer, in turn, diverted
light rays into prisms and thus illuminated lines on a moving photographic filmstrip, which
could be processed in a matter of seconds. Catgut strings attached across a map gave the
position of the enemy’s artillery within 100 meters precision . . . a virtual army of British
physicists, engineers, and mathematicians . . . were . . . able to successfully locate no less
than 90% of German batteries in the Battle of Messines in May 1917.’ Arne Schirrmacher,
‘Sounds and Repercussions of War: Mobilization, Invention and Conversion of First World
War Science in Britain, France and Germany’, History and Technology 32, no. 3 (2016):
269–92 (273–4).
36. ‘Making a New World: Armistice Soundwave’, Coda to Coda, https://codatocoda.com/
blog/making-a-new-world-armistice-soundwave/ (accessed 3 January 2020).
37. Nicholas Reeves, ‘Cinema, Spectatorship and Propaganda: “Battle of the Somme” (1916)
and its Contemporary Audience’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 17,
no. 1 (1997): 5–28 (16).
Select Bibliography
Daughtry, J. Martin, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq

348 michael bull
Fitzharris, Lindsey, The Facemaker: One Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of
World War I (London: Penguin, 2022).
Ginzburg, Carlo, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2012).
Grimshaw, Mark and Tom Garner, Sonic Virtuality: Sound as Emergent Perception (Oxford:
Kittler, Friedrich, Operation Valhalla: Writings on War, Weapons, and Media, ed. and trans.
Ilinca Iurascu, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, and Michael Wutz (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2021).
Latzko, Andreas, Men in Battle (London: Cassell, 1918).
MacGill, Patrick, The Great Push: An Episode of the Great War (London: Herbert Jenkins,
1917).
Ouzounian, Gascia, Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts
Rotter, Andrew J., Empire of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines
Smith, Leonard V., The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2014).
Smith, Mark M., Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2001).
———, A Sensory History Manifesto (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2021).
Stevenson, Randall, Literature and the Great War: 1914–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
Weil, Simone and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad (New York: New York Book Reviews,
2005).
Winter, Jay, War Beyond Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Part VI:
Literature, Sonic Epistemology,
Language

22
Sonic Epistemologies
Holger Schulze
Two Forms of Sound Knowledge:

Corporeally Tacit and Explicitly Formalised
T his box in front of me is hollow – but is there something in it? Through the dense
wooden material, I surely can’t see what is in there. I wonder: how wide is this
hall, this alleyway, this cave or canyon now actually? I might not be able to estimate
the size of it in precise measuring units – and these units might not mean a lot to me.
How fresh are these apples, this asparagus, this melon, or these nuts? If I do not have
reliable information at hand about where and how they grew and by which means of
transportation and in what timespan they were delivered to the place where I am now,
I need to look for other ways to estimate their freshness. Does this dough still need a
bit more kneading or is it already in the adequate state to be put into the oven? How
could I know this? I do not find any precise guideline in my cookbook, but rather
advice to simply check if it is ready – but how could I know?
Most of these questions could be answered in the early twenty-first century by
some sort of advanced soft- and hardware technology as well as by chemical analysis,
by scanning tools and software applications for measuring and weighing. However,
meaningful answers to these questions could already be obtained not only in an era
before consumer electronics and computer technology, but even before electrification
and industrialisation. In premodern times, most of these rather trivial everyday ques-
tions were answered on a daily basis. No one activated a computer for this, clicked on
a file, or executed a software application. They were and still are being answered by a
set of bodily activities and trained sensibilities that engage with spaces, objects, materi-
als, and situations. Nevertheless, how does one actually do this?
In the rather peculiar space–time continuum you, the reader, and me, the author of
this chapter, apparently share, it seems necessary to engage with particular objects and
spaces physically if one wishes to learn more about their qualities, states, and contents.
Engaging with materials means activating them. One form of activation and one of
the least invasive is sonic activation: it needs, though, to be followed by an activity of
listening to the resulting sounds and evaluating them. What cannot be seen with one’s
eye, sensed with one’s fingertips or palms, tasted through one’s nose or tongue, still
can be investigated by stimulating it to produce an audible effect. Before the advent of
modern physical acoustics in the nineteenth century and long before the rather com-
mon computer modelling of material objects since the late twentieth century, one had
to rely on precisely these sound practices.1 They were common to countless crafts,
practices, and games: when completing household chores, when cooking or baking,

352 holger schulze
when performing everyday activities like hiking, buying produce at a grocery stand,
or planning to construct a new artefact or edifice. People tested the freshness of veg-
etables or fruits by breaking or tapping them, they pounded a lump of dough on a
wooden table to hear if it was ready to be further processed, or they tapped a wooden
or stone structure with a tool to confirm the degree of stability: has the mortar hard-
ened yet? In premodern times, those sound practices belonged to the trivial and largely
unreflected arsenal of everyday practical knowledge. Many of those practices are still
being employed today. No instrumentalist with a conservatoire education is or was
needed, no professor in experimental physics, and surely no engineer conducting care-
fully crafted experiments. Those sound practices were the skills of cooks and cleaners,
mothers and servants, craftsmen and builders, farmers and day labourers: the sound
knowledge of everyone – and especially of those social groups who worked mainly
with their bodies’ strength and perception, a corporeal knowledge of manual work
and common sensibilities.
These widely used, premodern sound practices constitute a corpus of activities and
skills that pre-dated and anticipated the sonic epistemologies of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Sonic epistemologies build upon these earlier and tacit forms
of knowledge. Sonic epistemologies employ in an explicitly defined and formalised
way those practices of activation and listening that grant an insight into a seemingly
obscure or inaccessible area of experience – without an explicit modelling in mind that
other, more scientific practices rely on. Since the modern rise of the so-called exact sci-
ences,2 their precision had been conceptualised mainly as a quality of discrete measur-
ing activities and exhaustively defined sign operations. Everyday practices and crafts
were gradually supported by new scientific knowledge, made more precise, expanded
into clear models and formulas, and tested with new instruments and test methods.
All the above practices in cooking, baking, or building can eventually be replaced by
a tool, a sensor, an experimental measuring instrument. These new scientific methods
rightfully claimed that they can rely solely on precise and measurable degrees, values,
and volumes. Their precision in numbers and formulas replaced the sense of precision
that had been common until then, and they were able to prove that they could actually
achieve far more correct results than ever before. A sense of listening and sensing, of
estimating with an experimenter’s own bodily sense was, however, always important
if not crucial for scientists and inventors in gathering new insights – be it in executing
first explorative studies or in finalising an assessment. Those same senses, though, were
usually not accepted as proof or valid argument in an academic treatise. The transla-
tion into an intelligible and legible string and the sign operations applied to it were
and still are the main means of communicating, discussing, and teaching new research
findings. Even sight, often rightfully framed as a dominant sensory mode in modern
societies, had been reduced to a sense of visual reading and deciphering, of accurately
following geometrical graphs or comparing optical qualities as if reading buildings,
reading situations, reading a graphic. Everything had to serve as a diagram: everything
had to be understood as a symbolic representation. It is, though, irrefutably clear that
with this preference – or might I say: idiosyncrasy – one corporeal and intellectual
activity is considered to be more accurate than all others. It is, historically speaking, a
clearly arbitrary and therefore idiosyncratic choice.3
Why is the eye’s capability to recognise visual markers, lines, and letters being
considered as more noble, reliable, trustworthy, and precise than the tongue, the nose,

sonic epistemologies 353
one’s sense of balance, or even the ear? There is not really a convincing argument that
can be made on the basis of anatomy or even the resolution or arithmetic precision
that one set of sensory organs and their particular usage should be prioritised over oth-
ers. To the contrary, strong arguments have even been made in favour of the precision
of listening over seeing.4 When reading numbers on the scales, on a thermometer, or on
any other display of a measuring instrument, there comes a point when it is necessary
for the person conducting this experiment to engage in a reading process. This pro-
cess, though, is characterised by a significant fuzziness, instability, by an all too often
rather vague spectrum being covered: does the needle of the instrument now cling
more to 11.1 or to 11.2? Can these digital numbers, fluctuating and oscillating, now
be rounded up to 5.345 or do they need to be rounded down to 5.344? Is it correct to
call this straight line in the digital representation of a spatial scan as being orthogonal
to another straight line? In all of these standard situations of various measuring activi-
ties some researchers, some more or less reliable persons in a fixed-term or open-ended
employment – after having lunch or with a hangover, being in love or suffering from
boredom – need to trust their eyes. It is now their task to fix this number in writing.
Writing, I might add, that again needs to be legible for other, collaborating researchers
in their team who will further work with this number in their next journal article to be
assessed in a peer review process.
Safety in numbers and characters is a modern achievement that fortified the logocen-
tric core of modern culture. In any given second of one’s life in the networked, electrified,
and commodified societies of the twenty-first century we benefit from this gargantuan
achievement. I would not be writing this chapter without these precise scientific discov-
eries and inventions; and you surely would not be reading these lines. Aside from this
foundation of modern knowledge in the sciences and industrialised production there
existed and still exists, though, a strand of practices that remain more strongly attached
and entangled with a broader range of bodily and sensory sensibilities.5 They remain
more broadly anchored than in seeing, reading, counting, and measuring.
Recently, a selected number of these broader sound practices have been trans-
formed and professionalised into sonic skills in science, medicine, and engineering.6
The premodern sound practices introduced earlier, however, do not radically differ
from those modern sonic skills: they differ mainly in respect to their employment
within a formalised, professionalised, and capitalised production context. But aside
from this small range of professionalised skills, there can still be found a rich corpus of
ancient and traditional sound practices that lies by definition buried in the archive of
a culture’s tacit knowledge.7 The fact that this corporeal knowledge is rarely explicit
or formalised, but most of the time implied in habit, in mimesis, and in learning from
an experienced person are its most remarkable constituents. It also presents its most
considerable obstacle to research: tacit sound knowledge can by its very definition not
be found in academic or any form of documented publications. However, this does not
mean that this knowledge is non-existent. It means, above all, that research methods
are required that are sufficient to explore this form of knowledge and its practices.
An anthropology of sound, for instance, investigates this realm of tacit sound
knowledge.8 It does not necessarily rely on written accounts. It relies on activities and
interactions where situated knowledges are being actualised:9 it performs a courageous
type of field research, practice-led and artistic research that dares to be entangled
within social relations, common habits, idiosyncratic desires, and all the crafts and

354 holger schulze
dreams, routines and ruptures, artefacts and sensibilities that shape any kind of cor-
poreal practice. Therefore, all current and historical research methods and approaches
that investigate everyday listening situations and practices do indeed contribute to the
research of sonic epistemologies: be it in the famous historical anthropology on bells
in nineteenth-century France by Alain Corbin,10 the epochal acoustemology by Steven
Feld he studied with the Kaluli in Papua New Guinea,11 the process of ululation or
other sound practices as studied by Louise Meintjes,12 or even the study of foraging
and cooking practices as studied by Melissa Van Drie:13 they all indeed encounter,
investigate, reconstruct, and analyse particular sonic epistemologies.
Professional Listening and Its Other:

Epistemologies of Sonic Labour in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries
During the height of experimental research and major differentiation of bourgeois
society in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the aforementioned
sound practices with an epistemological character did develop, differentiate, and reach
new degrees of expertise, recognition, and societal placement. The process of differen-
tiation and the division of labour clearly also affected the engagement with practices
involving sounding and listening. On the one hand, some sonically epistemic practices
within crafts and everyday chores could be elevated into businesses, proper profes-
sions; they were even developed into industrial production, or noble sciences. Through
this transformation some previously idiosyncratic and rather marginal sonic practices
gave way to recognised standards and abstractions. One can observe this process, for
instance, in how the idiosyncratic listening of acoustician Wallace Sabine gave way to
a reverberation formula, or how the individual auscultation practices of doctors were
more formalised and standardised through the introduction of and training in the
stethoscope. By these expansions and translations those earlier sonic practices were
employed as quantifiable methods of measuring and assessing certain qualities.
On the other hand, some other sound practices with an epistemic character did
not reach those noble heights. They sank down to remain everyday practices, domes-
tic practices, or personal, idiosyncratic tics or obsessions. Today, we might still find
them when doing our chores, when organising our life, or when simply moving across
the city, riding a bicycle or travelling on a train. Some of these practices include, for
instance, the echolocation of other persons in our vicinity, be it through their steps or
their effect on air circulation, heat distribution, or sound reflexion.
The two forms of knowledge introduced in the previous section were valued differ-
ently: the former being of a higher professional value, the latter being rather neglected
or even ignored, sometimes condescendingly assigned to lower classes, castes, genders,
and lifestyles. The separation of labour into production and industry supported by the
financialisation of European nations was clearly privileged in contrast to all the care
work, affective labour, and creative labour that was clearly positioned outside of the
realm of recognised, bourgeois professions, deemed appropriate for patriarchal execu-
tion, expansion, and representation of power.
The deeply researched historical developments of modernity within European and
US sound cultures resulted in this separation of previously laconic everyday sound

practices.14 In premodern approaches to sound, these practices almost seem to be

safely stored in a steady state. They appear as being shielded by religion, by decency,
piety, or even some sort of secret and regional guild regulations. Sound, music, and
instrumental practices clearly either had a taint of magic or were hidden behind the
familiar, common, and unquestionable. The modern urge, though, to connect areas
of knowledge, craft, design, practice, work, and exploitation in a new way and to
subject all of those to some personal interest generated then factually new knowledge,
new crafts, new designs and practices, and new forms of labour and of exploitation.
Concerning sound specifically, Jonathan Sterne concisely outlines this transformation
and its utilitarian and functional approach in modern times as follows: ‘In modern life,
sound becomes a problem: an object to be contemplated, reconstructed, and manipu-
lated, something that can be fragmented, industrialised, and bought and sold.’15
Sound is being objectified and brought to light as a material to be worked with, to
be used, to be altered and deformed, to be reproduced, to be commodified. A sonic
experience under modern conditions cannot any longer simply be a certain property
of a situation, a person, their preferences or inclinations, a social group or a particular
activity. It can no longer just idle tacitly and unreflected in our bodies, habits, every-
day routines, and shared encounters. Situated knowledge is not any longer allowed
to remain situated: it must be translated, transferred, and circulated. To the contrary,
it is the materially audible, recordable, the storable, transferable, and transformable
substance of sound that is from now on regarded as the only relevant emanation of
sound.16 Sound experiences as such are, consequently, considered more of an anecdotal
inspiration or at best some ephemeral resource in need of deeper inquiry by means
of all the apparatuses at hand. Sterne documents this shift by explicitly calling out
the audile techniques that are then further developed in the experimental sciences to
widely acknowledged methods, to expert crafts, and to certified protocols.17 How to
listen to what sort of audible material with the help and mediation of what apparatus
in particular becomes a subject of administration, commodification, and standardi-
sation. Karin Bijsterveld took up this observation and investigated the further for-
malisation in the twentieth century from a largely experimental and industrial starting
point into certified professions and their particular skills. Through researching car
sounds, the sounds of machines, and noise abatement she proposes an understanding
of the historical and sociological domestication of sound’s sciences and technologies.18
Therefore, she focuses on the sonic skills that were not so much developed because
of sound reproduction and media technologies, but that selectively reintroduce and
assimilate older, non-scientific, unprofessional, almost domestic and everyday prac-
tices into formalised professions.19 Sonic skills are both much older and much younger
than audile techniques: they formalise the previously unruly and instrumentalise listen-
ing and sensing to serve a particular goal within the expanding field of sonic labour.20
Within the nineteenth-century framework of a labour society it seems indeed per-
fectly logical and consistent to use, for instance, the new invention of the stethoscope,
of sonar technology, or of sound spectrography and all their manifold practices not
only for their originally intended purposes but to transfer their audile techniques to
other professional activities, such as automotive diagnostics, advanced surgery, in the
monitoring of a paper mill’s production, or in an intensive care unit.21 This massive
professionalisation of listening practices and all their highly detailed and differenti-
ated categories, their monitoring and evaluation practices, implies an expansion all

356 holger schulze
over social spheres and established professions in the twentieth century. Sonic labour
– defined as a form of labour that operates with, through, by, and within sound knowl-
edge22 – becomes a commonly sought and trained profession. Science and technology
studies has established a rich corpus of those practices, consisting of codifications and
definitions, of apparatuses and training routines that are still in place almost two cen-
turies later. They constitute what can be called a set of auditory epistemologies.
An auditory epistemology is defined as an epistemology that describes and analyses
how particular listening practices have been implemented into the canon of recog-
nised research methods in a culture of scientific research and technological application
through a process of invention, discourse, domestication, and commodification. The
famous study by Jonathan Sterne showed how the earliest apparatuses for record-
ing and reproducing sound actually were thought and conceptualised as commodi-
ties;23 Karin Bijsterveld and her research group presented the practices of engineers
and researchers to craft the material prerequisites for the desired sound experience in a
car – be it by means of noise abatement or car radio;24 Gascia Ouzounian investigated
how the imagination and desire of spatial listening was turned and naturalised into
the unquestioned standard in recording and reproducing music and sound as such for
decades;25 Emily Thompson presented a history of how the categories for noise mea-
suring and the practices for noise abatement and noise regulation were established in
the first half of the twentieth century;26 Mara Mills studied the cultural and scientific
frameworks that defined deafness within and outside of audio technology and hearing
cultures;27 and Viktoria Tkaczyk, Mara Mills, and Alexandra Hui explored the history
and practices of hearing tests.28
All of these modern auditory epistemologies investigate how forms of listening,
sounding, and other auditory practices have been adapted, formalised, and assimilated –
institutionally as well as economically – into an already existing scientific disposi-
tive. Epistemologies of this kind can explicate how the concept of sound and listening
came to play an increasingly important role in culture, in the sciences, in labour, and
in society in general. Research on auditory epistemologies is a critical and historical
work of reconstruction, source critique, and interpretation. Rightfully so, this strand
of research is often regarded as a genuine part of science and technology studies; it
arguably dominated the first two decades of sound studies since Karin Bijsterveld and
Trevor Pinch’s inaugural article from 2004, ‘Sound Studies: New Technologies and
Music’, published in the journal Social Studies of Science, and it shaped sound studies’
very first handbook.29
In contrast to this strand, however, another area of research expanded continu-
ously during the last twenty years, often conducted together with artistic research and
with a stronger practice-based approach of its authors and researchers. This strand
investigates a different set of practices of listening, sounding, and sensing: the other of
the aforementioned epistemologies, if you will. This set of practices has not yet been
assimilated into the scientific dispositive and its professions. These are the practices
that belong to the aforementioned tacit sound knowledge and often were or still are
common to crafts and games, to household maintenance, to care work, to performing
everyday activities, and to rather simple and material activities. These practices consti-
tute the corpus of sonic epistemologies.
Since the late twentieth century, sonic epistemologies have investigated the other,
repressed or rejected aspects of auditory epistemologies. They investigate those forms

of listening, sounding, and other auditory practices that an existing scientific dis-
positive has a hard time accepting, understanding, or even conceptualising, let alone
assimilating or adapting. These are forms of listening, sounding, and other auditory
practices that apparently are still too personal, too proprioceptive, too unstable, too
subjective, too affective, too intimate, too generative, too malleable, or too minuscule
and playful, too self-sufficient, too pleasurable, and seemingly too hard to exploit,
to formalise or even to be ‘fragmented, industrialised, and bought and sold’.30 The
assimilating urge and power of the scientific dispositive and its subsequent machinery
of capitalist commodification is not to be underestimated; however, why does it seem
to be so hard for it to finally assimilate also those practices and performative practices
that serve sonic epistemologies?
Whereas auditory epistemologies think, speak, and research about sound, sonic
epistemologies do actually think, speak, and research through sound. Research prac-
tices and epistemologies of auditory epistemologies are fully in accordance with and
they operate in continuation of the scientific dispositive. The listening and sounding
practices of sonic epistemologies to the contrary are clearly situated outside of this
dispositive. The first is effectively fortifying an existing apparatus of research; the lat-
ter might, however, weaken, disrupt, maybe even transform it. But how can this be
possible at all if the apparatus and its assimilating urge are so strong? How is it at all
thinkable to move away from a hegemonic dispositive?
The alternative to auditory epistemologies and their tendencies to professionalise,
to formalise, to industrialise, and to commodify sounds and sonic experience consists
in backing away from that utilitarian urge. It lies in ways of hearing, in listening quirks
and sonic artefacts, in aesthetics of the sensory and in affects when experiencing sounds
that might evade the urge to swift commodification, industrialisation, formalisation.
Still, one will be able or even feel challenged to employ a given sonic epistemology
in the most instrumental way, by formalising it, reifying it, and describing it through
sign operations; but in doing so one would actually not employ this sound practice at
all – but merely investigate it with the means of auditory epistemology, as if it were
just another sonic skill, just another exploitable technique, ripe for sonic labour. One
would misrepresent and reduce, deform and factually dumb down the actual corporeal
and sensory richness and complexity of this sonic epistemology. One would be writing
with well-established academic methods as operating techniques and practices about
some new operations and practices within the field of sounding, listening, and sensing –
but one would not be actually applying the very sound practices and their tacit sound
knowledge to investigate by sensing, listening, and sounding as operating techniques
and practices. It would be a misuse of sonic epistemologies.
Idiosyncratic Practices With:

Sonic Epistemologies of the Twenty-First Century
Institutions of contemporary research, design, crafts, entertainment, literature, and the
arts further differentiated in the twenty-first century. Epistemological approaches to
sound seem by now to be clearly assigned to activities in the university, in laboratories,
or independent, entrepreneurial research facilities. Founded mostly in the twentieth
and partly in the nineteenth century, those facilities still represent to this day the main

358 holger schulze
expertise regarding sound in medicine, the neurosciences, communication technology,

warfare, or auditory cognition. It is in the classical Foucauldian institutions – the
hospital, the university, the school, the prison – that research takes place and executes
its noble and highly profitable endeavours. These institutions mark at the same time
the nucleus of the modern nation state and its imperial hyperbole; they coincide with
and profit from modern extraction culture, its settler colonialism; and they coherently
build the foundation and the capital of the industrial and exploitative thanaticism that
led societies of the twentieth century to the destruction of human lives, of species by
the millions, and, it now seems, of the biosphere as we know it.31
However, the epistemological desire clearly is not restricted at all to those institu-
tions. They represent, on the one hand, the main players in the field of research in gen-
eral and sound research in particular, fostered by the massive private and state funding
they can allocate. On the other hand, it is also quite clear that independent artists and
performers, instrumentalists and composers, poets, essayists and designers, craftsmen,
and independent producers from all professions contribute incessantly to an ever grow-
ing archive of sound knowledge. In the twenty-first century, this truly wild archive of
sound practices, sound knowledge, and sonic epistemologies can be assessed as being
more accessible than ever before. Its nascent state can be observed, for instance, in the
artistic explorations by Pauline Oliveros since the 1970s, when she started to delve
into what she subsequently called Deep Listening in an inextricable amalgamation
of performance and meditation, instrumental practice and listening training, musical
score, performance description, and multisensory poetry.32 Another nucleus of sonic
epistemologies can be found in the rich work left by Maryanne Amacher since the
1980s: her explorations of material resonances and reverberations within and through
buildings, sites as well as corporeal emissions, even those within one’s inner ear, the
famous otoacoustic emissions, are her working ground, her material with which she
experimented and developed new situations for listening and experiencing.33 Yet
another starting point of sonic epistemologies can be found in Afrofuturism since the
1990s: the thinking of Kodwo Eshun and the work of Black Quantum Futurism rep-
resent a decolonial approach to sound knowledge that moves convincingly into Black
aurality and leaves the extractive idiosyncrasies of an established white aurality and its
dominant traditions in the sciences and humanities boldly behind.34
All of these approaches come from rather diverse backgrounds aesthetically, cultur-
ally, and historically. However, all of them represent a common motivation they share
with many other artistic practices that explore and promote sonic epistemologies: they
undertake a daring transversal and a subversive reversion and revision of existing insti-
tutional structures, assignments, and expertise. Moreover, all of them approach materi-
als, entities, groups of beings they focus on with an effort to establish a collaborative and
rather non-hierarchical, but structurally symmetrical situation of exchange. Their revi-
sion and discovery, their invention and renewal of methods, approaches, and forms of
knowledge, though, often leads to their being pushed to the side of non-scientific, rather
irrelevant experiments and plays with academic formats and traditions. In their find-
ings and discoveries, however, lie explosive contributions that transcend contemporary
institutional habits and scholarly mannerisms: precisely through their departure from
expected publication formats, familiar figures of thought, or use of established methods,
they actually represent a valuable yet extra-scientific intervention. Sonic epistemolo-
gies question, transform, and expand, by their very definition, a research institution’s

customs of conducting, documenting, and disseminating research. They represent gen-

erative nuclei – ripe for transformation and reinvention.
In the following, I will focus on three outstanding artistic works that exemplify the
strategies and the impact of sonic epistemologies: Sous les lunes de Jupiter (2018/2021)
by Gwendoline Robin, Numbers Station [Furtive Movements] (2015) by Mendi + Keith
Obadike, and Nightingales in Berlin (2019) by David Rothenberg. They document the
particular form of sonic thinking,35 sound knowledge,36 and sonic methodologies37 that
are inherent to sonic epistemologies and their research impact. Needless to say, these
three examples do not exhaust all possibilities, variations, constellations, and practices
of sonic epistemologies. But they allow a sufficiently broad insight into contemporary
examples of the early twenty-first century.
Gwendoline Robin works with particular materials, her corporeal motions, a given
space and floor, and surprising skills. In her performance Sous les lunes de Jupiter she
arranges a set of discs, rings, and a set of spheres and globes in two sequences, lined up
against each other rectangularly. The materials of which these moving objects consist
are stone and glass, steel or lead, wood or any other amalgamation of substances. In
her actual performance, she rolls and pushes, catches and energises this set of spheres
and discs, one after the other. The performance seems to be a sort of child’s play,
though with unclear rules, an open set of activities, an apparently highly skilled and
trained game of spheres and rings. Robin moves and steps quickly across the room, she
starts a sphere here, slows down another ring, accelerates a different sphere, catches
another one before crashing at the wall, puts yet another ring in motion, walks quickly
across the room to catch yet another sphere, and so on. Her movements are precise:
a dance and catch within a new, yet undiscovered ballgame of a mainly aesthetic and
sonic character. This ballgame underlines the peculiar material qualities of the loca-
tion, the climate and audience present, the alertness or mood of the performer. The
performer becomes a medium of analysing this situation, materially through her truly
unique ballgame – and being an audience member I can partake in and learn from her
performative investigation. This is the epistemic activity, the artistic research method,
Robin employs.
It is a universe she brings into motion: the rings of Saturn, glass discs or oxidising
rings flying in space; massive, metal globes rolling sluggishly, while smaller marbles or
balls quickly cross the whole performance space. Only rarely one globe crashes against
a glass ring and even breaks it: a myriad of particles suddenly traverses the entire floor.
This performance of about forty minutes relies, hence, on a form of material and per-
formative research Robin has worked on for decades. This long-term research is char-
acteristic of sonic epistemologies and connects them with similar long-term research
in the sciences. Robin’s selection of particular materials and forms, the production
of those rings or spheres, are direct results of this research. This also holds true for
her performative choreography, which relies on an openness similar to child’s play
including a variety of movements and interjections; it is not firmly choreographed. She
performs an improvisation reacting to the affordances made by a floor’s materials, sit-
uated humidity, heat or pressure, an audience’s attention paid to her, and the unstable
and volatile motions, detours, stops, or speed of her globes and discs. She dances with
walls and floors, discs and spheres, focused attention and excitement.
Mendi + Keith Obadike work in various contexts with recorded, processed, and
site-specific sounds, performances, and installations.38 One work, though, is a true

360 holger schulze
artistic intervention and inquiry into how to understand the sonic forms of commu-
nication that accompany one crucial specimen of everyday racism: the stop-and-frisk
practices as executed by police in the US. Number Station (Furtive Movements) is a
work that explores, exposes, reflects, deflects, transforms, and reorganises communi-
cations of the self-reported stop-and-frisk data of over 123 precincts within the New
York Police Department.39 The artists took and read a list of actually communicated
codings of city precincts and the amount of stop requests. The list, though, was sim-
ply a list of numbers: they read them out loud in a previously agreed manner.40 This
translation of secretive police communications into the public staging of a sound per-
formance by the two artists themselves was the main epistemic activity.
Reading numbers might appear as a rather empty or just minimalist activity. How-
ever, within the frame of structural racism, these numbers become meaningful as they
represent surveillance activities and everyday oppression and fear. Staged with a tape
machine, a mixing desk, headphones, and microphones into which the artists read the
numbers, this sequence is replete with affect and social critique.41 It is more than just
numbers: it is a sort of performative and anti-racist data mining and a sonification of
everyday harassments of the Black community in New York.
David Rothenberg worked for many years on Nightingales in Berlin (2019). He inves-
tigated the locations and sounds, the encounters and rhythms in which these birds inhabit
modern cities and landscapes alongside other beings. Rothenberg’s epistemic activities
involved in this endeavour include his listening and recording practice as well as his per-
formances and collaborations – not only with fellow musicians and instrumentalists but
also with the entities in question, here: the nightingales. Previous artists of the Western
compositional tradition managed to enrich their compositional figures, rhythms, and
melodies with references to and structures found in animals, natural phenomena, and
ecological systems; this is thoroughly different from what Rothenberg does. He actually
positions non-human collaborators like cicadas or whales, crickets, water bugs, leafhop-
pers or nightingales in an aesthetically symmetrical or even leading position. This poses
not a small challenge for a human performer as concert practices do generally require the
main, headlining performer to take the stage: Rothenberg instead focuses on the common
ensemble strategy of making room and setting the stage for fellow performers – in this
case: for performers who are nightingales or cicadas. This performance with non-human
actors in the sonosphere is the main epistemic activity in this work.
As with Robin or Obadike and Obadike, Rothenberg’s work, too, can primarily be
experienced and accessed by listening to and submerging oneself into the situation of a
performance or a recording thereof. The abbreviated descriptions, analytical findings,
or conceptual summaries an author can provide in a chapter like this are thoroughly
insufficient to represent what all of these works actually perform, demonstrate, con-
front one with – as a listener, as a visitor. In these descriptions, the inherent logic of
sonic epistemologies is in conflict with the inherent logic of academic writing. The
listening experience is, for works of a sonic epistemology, not an additional document,
not a case study, not an empirical source in the back: it actually is the substance of
its research activities. It takes place and it is stored in precisely these performances
and recordings. One definitely does not get a better or more concise insight into these
works when reading brief introductions like the ones in this chapter: they may only
serve as an invitation or even an urgent plea to actually listen or attend to the works
circumscribed therein.

Sous les lunes de Jupiter, Numbers Station [Furtive Movements], and Nightingales
in Berlin all collaborate in their very own explorative, critical, and aesthetic ways with
entities existing outside of the artists’ and researchers’ reach and control. They present
idiosyncratic performances with these entities, with floors, and police communication
and birds: they cut indeed and factually ‘across established methods and conventions
of many disciplines’.42 To that end these performances include performers with their
own sonic agency:43 in the process of performing symmetrically with them, peculiar
and diverse sonic methodologies are employed through which forms of sonic think-
ing take place and sound knowledge becomes manifest between the performers, their
performance, their recording, and their listeners, their audience.
This is the achievement of sonic epistemologies. It is stored in performances and
concerts, on recordings, and in a listening experience, that you or I made: in my case
on various days of the last decade when I encountered these works in various ver-
sions, recordings and performances in a diverse assortment of performance venues and
media repositories. Those are the places where sonic epistemologies can be encoun-
tered onstage.
I Am Listening to a Recording:
Creating Research as Institutional Critique
I am listening to a recording. I hear noises, interjections, and longer periods of no
sounds in particular, a sort of quietude. A kind of performed quietude? I have no idea
when this recording was made nor who actually did create it and to what purpose.
Still, I am enjoying it. I detect particular dynamics and articulations, certain memories
come up, different references or just allusions to other recordings. I hear a performer
move back and forth – and now: a solo starts? Still, I cannot detect the slightest musi-
cal structure in it. I keep following the sonic figurations, and my thinking and sensing
moves along with them.
The sonic epistemologies presented and discussed in this chapter represent an
approach to research that resembles closely a concept that was unfolded and investi-
gated in the last decade under the name of research creation.44 This approach ques-
tions the dispositive of scientific research and its adherence to societies embodying
the division of labour, its project management apparatus as well as its goal-oriented
conduct that aligns in various aspects to extraction culture. Natalie Loveless writes,
‘Rather than focusing on artistic labour as research, I am interested in the epistemo-
logical and ontological structures that deny it research status in the first place.’45 In
other words: how did it happen that research was defined in such a narrow way that
practices outside of the established canon of research protocols that includes counting,
measuring, reading, and interpreting appear as thoroughly unscientific and simply not
research related? They are granted a peculiar place on the side of research, as part of
research communication or research marketing, and also as a kind of entertaining pro-
gramme to accompany a conference or a workshop. However, in reality a lot of actual
practices in research are not analytical at all, but synthetical or – following the coinage
that Michel Serres proposed – syrrhetical.46 Practices of listening and sounding, craft-
ing and combining, mixing and relating make up sonic epistemologies and allow for
research issues to appear, to be formulated and investigated. They are therefore indeed

362 holger schulze
practices of actual research – though often not legitimately mentioned in research

applications, evaluations, or presentations. They figure mostly in the genre of anecdote
but are nevertheless crucial and structuring for most research. Sound and listening
practices can, in a sense, be seen as the substance and core of research, rather than its
side effect – but only if the professional and often coercive framework of research is
not tragically mistaken for its substance:
Rather than letting one’s research questions be conditioned by structures of legibility

and value given by, say, one’s self-identification as painter, early modern art histo-
rian, or feminist theorist, I suggested we might instead begin from our own version
of the questions that Haraway asks herself: ‘Whom and what do I touch when I
touch my dog?’ and ‘How is “becoming with” a practice of becoming worldly?’47
If research were indeed to return to these substantial and even personal questions and
issues, it would be open to occurrences in the affectively structured, material world
that some might even define as impossible: a world that you and I, alien and humanoid
as we are, actually experience and live in. This is what Salomé Voegelin suggests:
The access to this impossible lies not in the spectrogram or the score, it does not
lie in theory, neither structuralist or materialist, but in the activities on the margins
and in sound art, as a practice that owes nothing to knowledge and delivers so
much in relation to how we could understand the world.48
Sonic epistemologies lead that path through a performative critique of the institutions
that host and nurture research. Sonic epistemologies as research creation then are a
major vector of transformation of research mannerisms and frameworks:
research-creation invites us to reassess our inherited modes of publication and ped-

agogy in ways more attuned to the modes of creativity needed to face ecological
and economic crises that are actively remaking how we might conceive of the work
of the university today.49
Researchers of sonic epistemologies would then move more and more towards the
syrrhesis, the practices of synthesis as a major mode of their activities. They would
encounter the tacit forms of knowledge and they would recognise them not as a hier-
archical lower entity but as a symmetrical counterpart in a movement of interpenetra-
tion. And they would probably also foster a direly needed collective action – big and
small – in which we attend to the interpersonal and collective conditions that underpin
knowledge production conducted with care.50
I am turning my eyes away now from this text file. Suddenly, this question appears
in my mind:
Do you remember the last sound you heard before this question? What will you
hear in the near future?51
I can hear the sounds of a person outside speaking to their kids, some early morning
birds, and the fossil fuel engine of a garbage collector driving by, rather slowly. A gar-
den gate is being closed, smoothly, carefully.

Notes
1. Carla Maier, Transcultural Sound Practices: British Asian Dance Music as Cultural Transfor-
mation (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
2. See Michel Serres and Nayla Farouki, Le Trésor, dictionnaire des sciences (Paris: Flammarion,
1997).
3. Holger Schulze, ‘Idiosyncrasy as Method: Reflections on the Epistemic Continuum’, Seis-
mograf/DMT: Fluid Sounds, 30 August 2016, https://seismograf.org/fokus/fluid-sounds/
idiosyncracy-as-method.
4. See Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Im Reich von Δt. Medienprozesse als Spielfeld sonischer Zeit’, in
Sound Studies: Traditionen – Methoden, ed. Holger Schulze (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag,
2008), 125–42; Wolfgang Ernst, Sonic Time Machines: Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices,
and Implicit Sonicity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016); and Julia Kursell,
Epistemologie des Hörens Helmholtz’ physiologische Grundlegung der Musiktheorie (Pad-
erborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2018).
5. Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New
York: Continuum, 2010).
6. Karin Bijsterveld, Sonic Skills: Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineer-
ing (1920s–Present) (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
7. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1966).
8. See Holger Schulze, The Sonic Persona: An Anthropology of Sound (New York: Blooms-
bury, 2018); and Holger Schulze, ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of
Sound (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
9. Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privi-
lege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.
10. Alain Corbin, Village Bells: The Culture of the Senses in the Nineteenth-Century French
Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
11. Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
12. Louise Meintjes, Sound of Africa! Making Music Zuluin a South African Studio (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Louise Meintjes, Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics
after Apartheid (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
13. Melissa Van Drie, ‘The Food’, in Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound,
129–46.
14. See Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Cul-
ture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Veit Erlman,
ed., Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004);
Veit Erlman, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone,
2010); Sam Halliday, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and
the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); and Daniel Morat, ed., Sounds
of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe (New York:
Berghahn, 2014).
15. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 9.
16. See Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2004).
17. Sterne, Audible Past.
18. See, for example, Eefje Cleophas and Karin Bijsterveld, ‘Selling Sound: Testing, Designing,
and Marketing Sound in the European Car Industry’, in The Oxford Handbook of Sound
Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
102–24; and Karin Bijsterveld, Eefje Cleophas, Stephan Krebs, and Gijs Mom, Sound and
Safe: A History of Listening behind the Wheel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

364 holger schulze
19. Bijsterveld, Sonic Skills.

20. Holger Schulze, Sound Works: A Cultural Theory of Sound Design (London: Bloomsbury,
2019).
21. Cf. Pinch and Bijsterveld, Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies; Bijsterveld, Sonic Skills.
22. Schulze, Sound Works.
23. Sterne, Audible Past.
24. Cleophas and Bijsterveld, ‘Selling Sound’.
25. Gascia Ouzounian, Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts
26. Thompson, Soundscape of Modernity.
27. Mara Mills, ‘Deafness’, in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 45–54.
28. Viktoria Tkaczyk, Mara Mills, and Alexandra Hui, eds, Testing Hearing: The Making of
Modern Aurality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
29. Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch, ‘Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music’, Social
Studies of Science 34, no. 5 (2004): 635–48; Bijsterveld and Pinch, Oxford Handbook of
Sound Studies.
30. Sterne, Audible Past, 9.
31. Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2018); McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?
(New York: Verso, 2019).
32. Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations (Baltimore: Smith Publications American Music,
1974); Pauline Oliveros, Software for People: Collected Writings 1963–80 (Baltimore:
Printed Editions, 1984); Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice
(New York: iUniverse, 2005); Pauline Oliveros and Lawton Hall, eds, Sounding the Mar-
gins: Collected Writings 1992–2009 (Kingston: Deep Listening, 2010).
33. Maryanne Amacher, Sound Characters (Making The Third Ear) (New York: Tzadik Records,
1999); Maryanne Amacher, Sound Characters 2 (Making Sonic Spaces) (New York: Tzadik
Records, 2008); Maryanne Amacher, Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews,
ed. Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz (New York: Blank Forms, 2020); Amy Cimini, Wild Sound:
Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (New York: Oxford University Press,
2022).
34. Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet,
1998); Holger Schulze, Sonic Fiction (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
35. Bernd Herzogenrath, Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach (New York:
36. Deborah A. Kapchan, ed., Theorizing Sound Writing (Middletown: Wesleyan University
Press, 2017), 1–2.
37. Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen, eds, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies
(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
38. Mendi Obadike and Keith Obadike, ‘Conversations and Utopias. In Conversation with
Holger Schulze’, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art, ed. Sanne Krogh Groth and
Holger Schulze (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 267–72.
39. Mendi Obadike and Keith Obadike, Numbers Station [Furtive Movements] (New York: Ryan
Lee Gallery, 2015); Jessica Lynne, ‘Reading the Numbers of Stop-and-Frisk’, Hyperallergic,
15 September 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/237694/reading-the-numbers-of-stop-and-frisk/.
40. Naomi Waltham-Smith, Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), 38–48.
41. Soyoung Yoon, ‘Do a Number: The Facticity of the Voice, or Reading Stop-and-Frisk
Data’, Discourse 39, no. 3, Documentary Audibilities (2017): 397–424.
42. Rosi Braidotti, ‘Writing as a Nomadic Subject’, Comparative Critical Studies 11, no. 2–3
(2014): 163–84 (178).

43. Brandon LaBelle, Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance (London:
Goldsmiths Press, 2018).
44. Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk, ‘Creation-as-Research: Critical Making in Complex
Environments’, RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 40, no. 1 (2015):
49–52; Natalie Loveless, ‘Towards a Manifesto on Research-Creation’, RACAR: Revue
d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 40, no. 1 (2015): 52–4; Natalie Loveless, How
to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation (Durham, NC:
45. Loveless, ‘Towards a Manifesto’, 53.
46. Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey
and Peter Cowley (New York: Continuum, 2008), 161; Schulze, Sonic Persona, 58–66;
Schulze, Sonic Fiction, 83–103.
48. Salomé Voegelin, ‘Sonic Methodologies of Sound’, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic
Methodologies, ed. Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen (New York: Bloomsbury Academic,
2021), 269–80 (272).
50. Alison Mountz, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret
Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, and Winifred
Curran, ‘For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action
in the Neoliberal University’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14,
no. 4 (2015): 1235–59 (1254).
51. Oliveros, Deep Listening, 34.
Select Bibliography
Bull, Michael and Marcel Cobussen, eds, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies
(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
Erlman, Veit, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone, 2010).
Eshun, Kodwo, More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet, 1998).
Feld, Steven, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
Herzogenrath, Bernd, Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach (New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2018).
Kapchan, Deborah A., ed., Theorizing Sound Writing (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press,
2017).
LaBelle, Brandon, Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance (London: Goldsmiths
Press, 2018).
Oliveros, Pauline and Lawton Hall, eds, Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992–2009
(Kingston: Deep Listening, 2010).
Schulze, Holger, ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (New York:
Schulze, Holger, Sonic Fiction (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
———, The Sonic Persona: An Anthropology of Sound (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).
Serres, Michel, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and
Peter Cowley (New York: Continuum, 2008).
Voegelin, Salomé, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New
York: Continuum, 2010).

23
The Cultural Poetics of a Buoyancy

Sound from Amazonian Ecuador
Janis Nuckolls
Introduction
W hen attempting to compare one language’s concepts with those of another,

the existence of exuberances and deficiencies rears its head. This is particularly
apparent in translation. The linguist, rhetorician, and anthropologist Alton Becker,
whose analyses of Javanese shadow puppet performances have been lauded for their
engagement with the complex linguistic registers and multisensorial dimensions of this
genre, articulates this problem in the following paraphrase: every utterance is deficient
because it says less than what its speaker wishes to say, as well as exuberant because it
says more than what its speaker may be aware of.1 We can also approach the problem
of exuberances and deficiencies from a linguistic, systematic perspective which recog-
nises that what is replete and plentiful in one linguistic system may be impoverished or
unavailable in another. The Pastaza Kichwa language spoken in Amazonian Ecuador,
for example, is impoverished with respect to illocutionary verbs such as ‘to warn’, ‘to
announce’, ‘to proclaim’, ‘to threaten’, ‘to reassure’, and ‘to insist’, which populate
everyday English language discourse.
What makes these verbs ‘illocutionary’ is that they are used to report a locution, or
an act of speaking, but they can be used without specifying the actual words that were
said. For example, it would be possible for an English speaker to say the hypothetical
sentence in Example 1 without specifying anything else about the words actually spoken.
Example 1
John explained how to grab the catfish.
By contrast, a Kichwa-speaking person, having no comparable verb ‘explain’, would

have to use one of the very few verbs for speech acts that their language has, such as
nina ‘to say’, and then represent the words which were used for the explanation, as in
Example 2.
Example 2
Saying ‘grab the catfish with both hands’ John said.
The first sentence uses the illocutionary verb ‘explain’, while the second sentence illus-
trates the act of explaining with a speech report. Another difference between them is
that the first sentence seems quite acceptable for Standard Average European speakers,

a buoyancy sound from amazonian ecuador 367
while the second sentence sounds redundant, as it uses the same verb twice, which is
what a Kichwa speaker would do. The redundancy of the second sentence is neces-
sary because illocutionary verbs in Kichwa constitute an extremely small group. They
include: nina ‘to say’, which is often used to frame quoted speech; rimana ‘to speak,
tell’, which simply states that speaking took place, but not necessarily anything about
the content of what was spoken; kaparina ‘to shout’; and kamina ‘to insult’.
Despite the deficiency of speech act verbs in their language, Kichwa-speaking peo-
ple use lots of quoted speech, in their everyday conversations, narratives of personal
experiences, gossip, and in accounts of all kinds of happenings. It is tempting to see
cultural relevance in these prolific speech reports. One can infer, for example, that
Kichwa speakers prefer not to make assumptions about speakers’ reasons for speak-
ing. If a person’s motives for saying something are encapsulated in a speech act verb
such as ‘to scold’, then there is a danger of misrepresenting their intentions. If a per-
son’s words are quoted, however, then that person is being allowed to articulate their
own perspective, by means of their own words, and it is up to the listener to infer that
‘scolding’ or something else was intended by those words.2 Endowing all beings with
a perspective is a fundamental practice in Kichwa discourse, and is also encoded in
Kichwa grammar.3
Such comparisons between Kichwa speakers and Standard Average European speak-
ers invite discussions of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which is a wide-ranging body of
work motivated by assumptions about the interrelations between language structure,
discourse patterning, and cultural values and beliefs. In a strong form of this hypoth-
esis, which neither Edward Sapir nor Benjamin Whorf proposed, there is a close, causal
relationship between linguistic expression and cultural values. This strong form is evi-
dent in, and even mentioned in, the science fiction film Arrival, where a linguist learn-
ing the language of aliens who have arrived on Earth undergoes a reconfiguration in
her cognitive grasp of time. Because the alien language has no tense, her own thoughts
become nonlinear, and she is able to perceive future events of her life. Those who criti-
cise Sapir–Whorfianism are typically critiquing a strong form of this body of work.
Many anthropological linguists assume a moderate stance regarding Sapir–
Whorfianism. They assume that there are correlations between language structure
and usage and cultural values and beliefs, without assuming that such correspon-
dences can be simplistically framed as cause and effect correlations. An original but
neglected approach to Sapir–Whorfianism, that of Paul Friedrich, argues that it is not
just any old language but poetic language which influences thought and action.4 This
framework stems from Friedrich’s deep concern for poetic language, the imagina-
tion, and cultural symbols. Using Friedrich’s insight as a starting point, I analyse the
poetic semantics of a word from a prolific class of expressions called ideophones, to
demonstrate how this word’s sound qualities used in diverse discourse contexts com-
municate culturally salient meanings.
Specifically, this chapter will analyse the cultural and contextual semantics of
the ideophone polang, a buoyancy sound from Amazonian Ecuador. In addition to
its cultural salience for Kichwa-speaking people, polang’s varieties of meaning are
communicated by unusual sound qualities, including extremely variable intonation,
involving pitch, loudness, segmental lengthening, and unusual stress patterns, which
are typically considered too untidy to be included in a traditional descriptive linguistic
account. Such messy details of sound qualities point to an expanded view of language

368 janis nuckolls
which allows for poetic indeterminacy and principled creativity, all of which have
affinities with Pastaza Kichwa ways of life. Expanding the purview of language as
traditionally conceived by linguists, and going beyond phonetics and phonology, to
include prosodic sound is also congenial with cutting-edge research by cognitive lin-
guists on ideophones.5
Ideophones are imitative words that communicate sensory perceptions, emotions,
and cognitions with linguistic sounds as well as with so-called paralinguistic features,
especially intonation and gesture. Although the term ‘ideophone’ emerged within an
African context of research, it has been adopted by many linguists for comparable
words in diverse areas of the world. Alternative names have been used as well, to label
these words in other linguistic traditions. The term ‘expressives’ is used by linguists
of Southeast Asian languages, while ‘mimetics’ refers to them in Japanese, and ‘ono-
matopoeia’ has been the preferred term for English language examples such as tik tok,
twitter, and zoom.
Despite the likely universal status of ideophones, which are found in languages
of Africa, East Asia, South Asia, and Native North and South America, surprisingly
few studies of their cultural poetics exist, signal exceptions being Anthony Webster on
Navajo ideophones, my own work on Pastaza Kichwa, and Nathan Badenoch on Bit
(Austroasiatic, northern Laos) expressives.6 The poetic qualities of ideophones are cul-
turally significant because they exemplify a fundamentally important mode of commu-
nication, called demonstration or depiction,7 which is used by speakers of all languages,
whether they are uttering ideophones or not. Depiction can be understood most gener-
ally as a kind of illustration of meaning, rather than as a description of some state of
affairs. A reasonable expectation is that speakers of all languages will choose to depict
what is salient and meaningful from their day-to-day lived experiences.
A corollary of this expectation is that the depictive nature of ideophones will also
be poetic. Roman Jakobson explains the poetic function of language generally, as the
foregrounding of linguistic form for its own sake, and considers language’s poetic
function to be just as essential as its referential, metalingual, emotive, or any other
of its major functions.8 Ideophones exhibit this foregrounding, or ‘markedness’,9 in
a number of ways and through an array of resources, most notably the sounds of
language. Ideophones often feature marginal or unusual sounds which do not, or only
rarely, occur in their language’s ordinary lexicon.10 They may also feature unusual
sequences of sounds and syllable structures, or use intonational foregrounding such as
pitch, loudness or softness, and special prosodic lengthening, for example, to depict
temporal ongoingness or expansion in space.11
Because of their performative foregrounding through marked sounds, sequences of
sounds, stress patterns, and syllable structures, ideophones also differ from the ordi-
nary lexicon by their semantic flexibility. Their meanings are underspecified by design,
indeterminately flexible, and capable of infinite polysemous extensions.12 More will be
said about this later, but for now, consider Example 3. It illustrates how one ideophone
gyawng may rely on pronunciational foregrounding to depict the sad, mournful crying
sound of a tree which falls to the ground after being chopped.
Example 3
This tree is a saddener (when this happens). It goes gyaawng (and we say) now
perhaps it’s dying.

The initial gy- sound of gyawng is extremely rare as it is not found in the ordinary lexi-
con. The structure of this word is also marked because it ends in a consonantal sound -ng,
despite this language’s preference for vowel-final word endings. The expressive length-
ening of this ideophone’s sounds is also communicative because it depicts the duration
of the crying sound of a tree as it falls to the ground.
Although an ideophone which has exactly the same sense as gyawng does not exist
in English, the word ‘groan’, which is also imitative in origin, comes to mind as a
rough synonym.13 ‘Groan’ is only somewhat comparable to gyawng, however, since its
meaning is primarily depictive of human or animal sounds, while gyawng is exclusively
reserved for trees. Other examples of ideophones from different languages which are
somewhat comparable exist. For example, it is probably not a risky claim to state that
most languages have imitative words to depict the sounds of dogs, cats, and chickens.
A small sample of dog barking sounds includes woof woof from English, wou wou
from Cantonese, wan wan from Japanese, and hau hau from Polish.14
Yet, not every language’s lexicon matches up perfectly with every other, as was
illustrated by gyawng and groan. There may be no semantically comparable terms
between languages, and there may be nothing even roughly approximate when com-
paring terms from different languages. The Pastaza Kichwa ideophone polang, pro-
nounced [polʌng], with stress on -lang, which rhymes with English ‘lung’, is a case in
point. This ideophone is of particular interest because its principal meaning does not
seem to have a semantic equivalent, nor even an ideophone which is somewhat compa-
rable, in any other language.15 It may be defined, cursorily, as a movement from under
water to the surface of water. This definition, however, is just ‘the tip of the iceberg’,
a matter of ‘scratching the surface’ of all that is entailed by its use in diverse contexts.
Despite the fact that its meaning does not seem to be matched by other known
ideophones, polang does have an antonym, tsupu, which is comparable to the English
onomatopoeic word kerplunk. Both kerplunk and tsupu are imitative of the sound and
movement of something falling into water. This raises the question of why polang’s
sense seems to be so unusual. If its antonym tsupu can be found in a number of other
languages, including English, why is polang so singular?
One possible answer has to do with the ways in which the meaning of polang is
congenial with aspects of lived experience as seen through a cultural lens. For Pastaza
Kichwa people, their cultural lens takes account not only of the worlds that are com-
monly experienced in ordinary daily life but also of worlds said to exist within the
earth. Several speakers have related how beings exist both within the earth and under
water. They and their worlds are similar in some ways to normal human existence,
but differ from it in other crucial respects. For example, there are large inner spaces
created by tall trees with supportive buttress vines, which create cavernous quarters
where animals often live and are said to have lived in mythic times. Such spaces are
said to house forest spirits, including masters who guard their species and protect
them from human overhunting. Mythic accounts of autochthonous people dwelling
within the earth also exist. One such account relates a narrator’s father’s experience
of encountering an old woman deep in an uninhabited part of a forest, who was said
to have suddenly disappeared within a portal leading to a region within the earth.16
Underworlds of life also exist within the watery spaces of rivers and ponds. Anec-
dotal accounts from Kichwa speakers attest to people’s ecological knowledge of dif-
ferent riverine life forms’ habitats. Accounts also reveal the existence of spirit beings

370 janis nuckolls
who guard species living in water, just as forest spirits guard land-dwelling species.
Although these are unseen worlds, Kichwa speakers insist on their importance through
what they say about them, as well as how their poetic performances of ideophones
focus upon them.
Kichwa people’s focus on spirit beings within the earth and water is strikingly differ-
ent from typical Western, especially Christian, cosmologies, which consider spirit beings
to occupy a space that is above normal human existence, in a heavenly realm, located
upward and skyward. Kichwa cosmologies, by contrast, overwhelmingly locate spirit
beings underwater or somewhere within the earth, in caves, hills, or arboreal interiors.
Their spiritual psychogeography is one of the unique aspects of Pastaza Kichwa culture,
which is notable because of the way it contrasts with Kichwa speakers’ own Christian
beliefs. Although Catholicism and Evangelical Christianity have become established
and influential among both Pastaza Kichwa and their neighbours, the Upper Napo
Kichwa, Christianity has never completely erased indigenous animistic beliefs.
The significance of worlds unseen by humans extends into the mundane, daily life
activities of people as well. Being aware of and knowledgeable about such unseen
spaces is part of the essential, practical knowledge which is necessary not only for sur-
vival but for aesthetic appreciation and enjoyment. The importance of this is evident in
the description in Example 4 by a speaker, Sra. Luisa Cadena, who briefly suspended
her account of an anaconda’s underwater pursuit of a tapir to explain how the other
onlookers of this dramatic event considered what an anaconda’s view of the world
might look like.
Example 4
1. Chiga, payga, chimi shina kwintawnguna, runagunaga.
‘And so they talk like this.’
2. Payga imainata nukanchi kay rikunchi? nin, kasna.
‘As for him,17 you know how we see what is here (above water)? they say,
“It’s just like this (for him also).”’18
This brief extract reveals not only that there is an underwater world of life relevant for
humans to consider, but that the world of humans is also relevant for underwater beings,
who have their own perspectives on human activities. In Example 5, Sra. Cadena repre-
sents how the speakers she quotes expanded with more detail on what the anaconda’s
underwater view of human activity might actually look like.
Example 5
1. Pay chasnashi kanoatas rikug an: polaaaang, riuuuuun, ima waytauuun.
‘He sees whatever canoe is polaaaang (gliding by), go-innng, whatever is swim-
innng.’
2. Tukwitashi rikun.
‘He apparently sees everything.’
3. Chasna ashashi chasna kasag an.
‘That’s how, they say, he is able to hunt.’19
By acknowledging this underwater perspective of the anaconda, people are able to

bring a certain caution to their activities, but also, importantly, they expand their

world, by including the perspectives of different life forms that surround them. By
endowing all living beings with a perspective, Kichwa speakers animate their world.
Ideophones assist in this animation because they deploy linguistic sounds to fore-
ground the energies of all life, whether those energies are evident by their sounds,
movements, or images.
When the Unseen Becomes Suddenly Visible

I turn now to an analysis of the meanings of the ideophone polang, which are only
roughly sketched by the following definition of its primary sense:20 polang depicts the
way something rises from under water and is suddenly evident as it breaks through to
the water’s surface. It may focus on the duration of the upward thrusting movement or
its momentary, punctual occurrence.
Although this definition is basically informative of polang’s meaning, it is deficient.
I turn therefore to an examination of instances of polang’s usage by speakers, to illus-
trate what is left out by this definition. The following example of polang’s usage takes
us back to the earlier narrative mentioned, involving the pursuit of a tapir by an ana-
conda. The people who were present for this event had at first assumed that the tapir
was trying to escape from a jaguar, and had even discussed whether they should shoot
the jaguar and try to sell its skin, or possibly shoot the tapir for its meat. In the follow-
ing example from this narrative, Example 6, the onlookers are now able to see what
they have, until this instant, only been able to speculate about. The narrator describes
the moment they all saw for the first time the anaconda that was pursuing the tapir,
as it emerged from under water to the surface. The narrator first describes, in lines 1
through 5, the thrashing sounds it made and how the swirling appearance of the water
resembled the spiral shape of a snail’s shell.
Example 6
1. Na chiga kawww rak-ga, mulinnng!
‘So then he goes kawww (thrashing sound), and mulinnng (makes a whirlpool)!’
2. Ima shinacha churu sikita shina rara!
‘How, kind of like a snail’s shell he made (the water look)!’
3. Chiga chasna uyarik, rikuranchi, rikushami shayawranchi.
‘And so then, as it sounded like that, we were watching, standing there, we were
watching.’
4. Wagra riun.
‘The tapir is going.’
5. Imaynashi ranga rawn?
‘What is he going to do?’21
In line 6, below, the narrator describes the dramatic moment when the anaconda is
seen by the bystanders for the very first time. Her pronunciation of polang could not
be more expressively depictive, and specific to this moment in the narrative. She dra-
matically draws out the l sound to express the duration of its upward thrusting move-
ment. She also aspirates this sound, making it breathy, to give it greater intonational
force. Moreover, her intonation is decidedly lower in pitch, which adds a feeling of
strength and power due to the fact that lower-pitched sounds are typically associated

372 janis nuckolls
with larger, more powerful beings, a finding referred to by linguists as the frequency
code.22 The overall sense, which is not in the original definition of polang but seems
‘loud and clear’ within this context, is that the movement from under water to the
surface has been accomplished by an extremely powerful and menacing force.
6. Pollllhang wamburin, riki!

‘He floats to the surface pollllhang, look!’
Once it rises to the surface, it is only a matter of a few more quick moves before the
anaconda is able to overcome the tapir. In this particular example, the basic meaning
of polang, which is a depiction of something rising from below the water to its sur-
face, is highly foregrounded by the qualities of its pronunciation, in a way that vividly
communicates contextual nuances of power, and even ominousness. The narrator’s
skilful use of unique performative embellishments through her intonational expressiv-
ity speaks volumes about what is happening in this narrative, and also about what is
inevitably going to happen. With her articulation of polang, she essentially makes it
clear that the tapir has no chance whatsoever of escaping from the anaconda.
A very different example of what polang can communicate occurs in Example 7,
from an interview between a speaker named Eulodia and my colleague Tod Swanson.
We have here a depiction of how fish are said to rise to the water’s surface on sunny
days. Sunny days in a rainforest are relished and enjoyed by people who tire, at times,
of the abundance of rain, and of cloudy, overcast days. The narrator projects an affec-
tive mood of happiness onto fish as well, as they are said to be making themselves
visible to all by rising to the water’s surface.
Example 7
Yakwi tiyag aychawas, kushiyasha polaang polaaanng wamburig man.
‘Even the fish living in the water, becoming happy, are floaters (coming up to the
surface), polaang polaaanng.’23
She articulates polang with a very different intonation from that expressed in line 6 of
Example 6. This is a leisurely, rather than a forceful, rising to the water’s surface. The
leisureliness of her pronunciation is matched by her gestures, which are not very effort-
ful as her arms stay close to her body. Her intonation is also very similar to her normal
speaking pitch. It is not louder or softer, nor is it lower pitched or higher pitched than
her regular voice. The main performative feature of her pronunciation of polang is its
lengthening. She draws out its second syllable to depict an extended rising movement
of the fish as they arrive at the water’s surface in a seemingly relaxed fashion.
The uses of the ideophone polang illustrate the crucial contributions to depictive-
ness made not only by its sounds but by its gestures as well to communicate the subtle-
ties of its meanings. The coordination between sounds and gestures to communicate
ideophonic meaning is not unique to Pastaza Kichwa speakers. Gestures are co-present
with ideophones in reports from around the world.24 A useful way of envisioning
the relationship between ideophones and gestures is found in earlier work by Dwight
Bolinger, who originally suggested a continuum between movements of the vocal tract,
such as those involving pitch modulations, and other, visible movements of the body.25

Example 8 foregrounds how close coordination between ideophones, the perfor-

mative qualities of their pronunciation and the gestures accompanying them, may be.
It is drawn from an account of a shamanic experience, rather than from ordinary life.
In this account, a shaman under the influence of ayahuasca is said to be able to call
forth the presence of a baka marina, literally ‘sea cow’, which is a manatee. Kichwa
consider the manatee to be an underwater spirit being. Evidence for this spirit being’s
presence is said to be constituted by a detail which is not typically the focus of narra-
tive accounts for Kichwa speakers, but which reveals the importance of careful and
close attention to perceptions from ordinary experience. The manatee’s presence is
said to be evident when its excrement rises up to the water’s surface, suddenly bursting
into visibility.
Example 8
Baka marinata rikungimi chi kuchai; chiga wagra shina polang ismara; na wagra
isma!
‘(After he said) “watch for a manatee in that water,” well then polang it defecated;
now it was manatee poop (which rose up to the water’s surface)!’26
The speaker’s pronunciation of polang is quite distinctive from the previous examples.
This is not a pronunciation which depicts a deliberate and powerful rising to the sur-
face, as was presented in Example 6, line 6. Nor is this a pronunciation which depicts
a slow, relaxed emergence, as was presented in Example 7. This example features a
sudden burst which causes something to become visible on the water’s surface.
The suddenness of the excrement’s appearance is iconically imitated by the way the
speaker pronounces polang, with an initial p sound that is created by forcefully eject-
ing the airstream from the glottis, deep within the vocal tract. Ejective consonants are
part of the regular sound inventories of various languages around the world, although
they are not normally used by speakers of Pastaza Kichwa. In this example, the ejective
[p’] sound is like a miniature explosion of air, which effectively imitates the sudden
bursting that is happening in the water.27 The speaker also gestures this emergence
in a very effortful manner. She actually looks above, briefly, as her arms both move
upward, to gesture this movement of the excrement and its sudden emergence onto the
water’s surface.
Although the sudden visibility of an animal’s excrement on the water’s surface
might seem to be a minor, homely detail from ordinary life, it was highly significant
for the bystanders who were present, as it confirmed the shaman’s announcement of
the manatee as a water spirit guarding its fellow denizens.
When What is Visible Moves across Water

I turn now to a second meaning of polang used by Kichwa people: polang may also
depict the way something floats and moves across the surface of water, either by gliding
along smoothly or by intermittently bobbing.28 I interpret this meaning as secondary,
and derived from polang’s original sense because it is derivable from that original sense.
It is not difficult to imagine how the buoyancy of something that floats or swims from
under water to the surface could be conceptually extended to encompass a buoyant

374 janis nuckolls
movement of something gliding across the water’s surface. This second sense of polang
occurred in line 1 of Example 5, from the account of an anaconda’s pursuit of a tapir.
It is reproduced here as Example 9.
Example 9
Pay chasnashi kanoatas rikug an: polaaaang, riuuuuun, ima waytauuun.
‘He sees whatever canoe is polaaaang (gliding by), go-innng, whatever is swim-innng.’29
With this description, the narrator essentially adopts the perspective of an anaconda
as it is under the water and observing what is visibly moving across the water’s sur-
face. The narrator’s intonational extension of polang and the verb riu ‘is going’ con-
veys a buoyant, unrestricted movement across the water, as well as an affective mood
that is difficult to attribute to any one feature of its pronunciation. This mood is
something like ‘carefree’, ‘unconcerned’, and ‘free’. It is perhaps the slightly higher
pitched pronunciation of its extended syllables that contributes to these nuances of
meaning. In any case, the scene being depicted is ironically suggestive, since the care-
free mood of those beings floating unconcernedly along the water’s surface means
that they are clueless about the fact that they are being watched from below by a
potential predator.
Another illustration of polang’s second sense of buoyancy is featured in Example 10.
It spontaneously occurred while the speaker Eulodia and I were walking along the Napo
River in the summer of 2019. I was attempting to learn how Kichwa’s colour terms
could be applied to rocks along the shore. Eulodia was suddenly reminded of a light-
hearted ‘just so’ story, involving a whimsical description of what river foam might say
to a rock while trying to entice the rock to accompany it as it effortlessly floats down-
river. According to her tale, the foam tries to persuade a rock to follow it as it buoy-
antly floats along. The rock, being a rock, of course cannot do so. In highlighting the
contrasting qualities between the rock and the foam, the speaker uses polang, in line 5,
to depict the lightness of the foam as it effortlessly floats along the water’s surface.
Example 10
1. Haku nikpiwas, mana munangichu? Masna haku nikpiwas, mana munangichu?
‘Despite saying “Let’s go!, Don’t you want to (come with me)?”, no matter how
much the foam said “Don’t you want to come?”, it wouldn’t come.’
2. Kunanga riunimi nukaga, chasnama asha chari, mana nukata munasha, ichuringi.
‘(So the foam announced) As for me, now I’m going, as it seems to be the case
that you don’t want me. I’m abandoning you!’
3. Ñashi yakuiga puskushi chasna nisha rig aun, kay rumita (laughter).
‘And so that’s what the foam was saying to that stone, as it went along (laughter).’
4. Payga llashag ashaga kay rumiga mana riungya.
‘As for the stone, being heavy, it’s not going anywhere.’
5. Chiga puskuga payga pangalla asha polannng payga riura.
‘And so the foam, being as light as a leaf, it was going along polannng.’30
The speaker’s performative embellishment of polang beautifully conveys the utterly

light and carefree nature of its meaning in this context, by using the foam as an exem-
plar of these qualities.

Sonic Poetics from Linguistic, Anthropological, and

Literary Pedagogical Perspectives
The examples that have been analysed in this chapter illustrate the rich possibilities
for meaning when we acknowledge the expressive intonational qualities of sound.
Considering its first sense, where it depicts a movement from under water to the sur-
face, and depending on its articulation within specific contexts, the ideophone polang
may depict a threatening and powerful movement. Polang may also depict a non-
threatening, leisurely movement to the surface, or a sudden burst of visibility. In its
second sense, where the buoyancy of movement across the water’s surface is described,
polang may imitate the buoyancy of a canoe gliding across the water, of river foam
floating effortlessly by, or numerous other possibilities which space does not allow for
discussion. Depending on its specific contexts, this effortless gliding may be seen from
a perspective of vulnerability, as a potential predator watches this gliding from below,
or of freedom and effortlessness, as the foam sails across the water. The clusters of
sensory and perceptual experiences which are expressed with polang, including break-
through visibility, watery buoyancy, and lightness, have not yet been attested in any
other ideophone-rich language.
Formal linguistics as a discipline has been preoccupied with sound segments which
establish contrasts in order to distinguish basic kinds of meanings. The semantic differ-
ence between pit ‘a hole’ and bit ‘a small portion of something’, for example, is due to
the contrastive sound segments /p/ and /b/, which are distinctive phonemes in English.
Going beyond segmental sounds, however, invites a far more expansive and potentially
infinite set of dimensions for meaning. As the cognitive linguist Mark Dingemanse
states, ‘Language provides a multidimensional possibility space for iconic associations
between aspects of form and meaning.’31
Sociolinguists and anthropological linguists have also recognised for some time
the significance of going beyond the segmental sounds of language. Work by John J.
Gumperz has pioneered the concept of ‘contextualization cues’, which can be con-
ceived as micro-signals given off by the intonational qualities with which utterances
are articulated but also include a speaker’s word choice, gaze, pauses, and gestures.32
Ideophones are clear examples of bundles of contextualisation cues, which may include
marked sounds, unusual combinations of sounds, syllable structures, stress patterns,
and many types of prosodic foregrounding, all of which steer our attention to their
possible meanings.
Given the significance of linguistic sounds beyond the level of the segment, a ques-
tion arises. How and why have ideophones, which are considered expressive resources
for people of all ages, and are found throughout the world’s languages, become asso-
ciated with English language picture books for children? This is one context where
ideophones can run rampant. Anyone who has ever read a picture book to a child
featuring examples of the typical sounds said to be uttered by non-humans has used
ideophones, as in Example 11.
Example 11
Oh, the duck says ‘Quack’,
and the cow says ‘Moo’,
the old red rooster says ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo’.

376 janis nuckolls
The sheep says ‘Baa’,

and the cat says ‘Meow’,
but I say ‘Good Morning’
when I see you!33
What few realise is that we are touching back, with these whimsical practices, into the
world of Jan Amos Comensky, who is now more commonly known by his Latinised
name Comenius. Comenius was a visionary who believed in universal education for all
and in the everyday vernacular languages used by most people. He also believed that
learning facts could be enjoyable if supported by images, and that learning, importantly,
must involve the senses. His book Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The World of Things Obvi-
ous to the Senses Drawn in Pictures) was one of the earliest encyclopedias as well as the
first picture book for children. Although originally written in Latin in 1658, it was soon
translated into German, English, Italian, French, Hungarian, and Czech.
Despite the fact that Orbis Pictus was an early example of a ‘hit’, and said to be the
most popular book in Europe for about two hundred years after its initial publication,
it has now been largely forgotten, although Comenius’s principles remain foundational
for modern educational practices. One element of Orbis Pictus that has not been for-
gotten is found in the first few pages, where Comenius introduces ‘a lively and vocal
alphabet’ by listing onomatopoeic sounds of animals and natural forces, which are
said to provide the raw material for alphabetic sounds.34
During Comenius’s lifetime, onomatopoeic words were taken more seriously than
they are now. At this time, onomatopoeia was considered ‘a force for re-invention,
for freshness in language’, and the term itself was borrowed into English from Greek
during the Renaissance as part of a prestigious rhetoric along with other classical
terms for poetic figures.35 Onomatopoeia literally translates as ‘word-making’ and
had two meanings for sixteenth-century speakers. On the one hand, it was used to
describe the invention of ‘English’ words to replace words of Romance origins. Endsay
was invented, for example, to replace ‘conclusion’, and yeartide for ‘anniversary’. Its
other meaning, which is now the only meaning most people are aware of, is defined in
Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique as: ‘A woorde making called of the Grecians
onomatopoia is when wee make wordes of oure owne mynde, suche as bee deriued
from the nature of thinges.’36
Not long after The Arte of Rhetorique appeared, Puttenham’s Arte of Englishe
Poesie explained onomatopoeia in the following way, emphasising the freedom or
‘libertie’ it allowed speakers to invent new words:
we devise a new name to any thing consonant, as neere as we can to the nature
thereof, as to say flashing of lightening, clashing of blades, clinking of fetters,
chinking of mony; [. . .] or we give special names to the voices of dombe beasts, as
to say, a horse neigheth, a lyo[n] brayes, a swine grunts, a hen cackeleth, a dogge
howles, and a hundred mo such new names as any man hath libertie to devise.37
Despite its popular appeal at this time, onomatopoeia as a word-forming technique for
imitative sounds eventually lost respectability for philosophers of language, especially
those asking questions about the origins of language. Was language a divine gift or
gradually created by evolving humans? If gradually created, was onomatopoeia one of

the earliest forms of linguistic expression? Some theorists, rejecting the idea of a gradu-
ally evolving scenario and rejecting onomatopoeia as well, contemptuously labelled
this stance the ‘bow-wow theory’ of language origins.38
Although they have lost status among philosophers of language, English onomato-
poeic words continue to be used, many taking refuge, not only within children’s pic-
ture books, but also in comic strips, as well as in names for blogs, apps, platforms, and
tools such as Boing Boing, TikTok, Zoom, Crunch, BuzzFeed, Snapchat, and Twit-
ter.39 Despite the fact that onomatopoeia may be considered whimsical and unserious
in English, such words have been shown to be a highly respectable expressive resource
for Pastaza Kichwa speakers. A convincing explanation for onomatopoeia’s down-
graded status for English language speakers has to do with its reliance on expressive
sounds. Luca Nobile has persuasively argued that orality has gone backstage because
alphabetic writing has had the effect of objectifying language, shunting off to the side
its fundamentally oral nature:
The traditional experience of written language (let us leave aside digital writing for
the moment) is intrinsically characterized by an objectification of language, that is,
by its transformation into a silent and persistent signifying object, separated from
its natural sound, and permanently existing before our eyes. This external, persis-
tent and silent object, produced by the hands and perceived by the eyes, is used by
a writer to communicate with a reader who is typically elsewhere and in another
time, and to refer to a sensitive and pragmatic reality that is also usually absent
from the place and time in which the text is written or read.40
The data presented here in the form of naturally occurring stories and conversations
has clarified the myriad of meanings inherent in the oral verbal performances of ideo-
phones for Pastaza Kichwa speakers. Their sound qualities make incalculable contri-
butions to speakers’ communicative abilities. To cite an ideophone out of context as
a ‘word’ with a ‘meaning’ or set of meanings is to greatly reduce its expressive pos-
sibilities. To use an ideophone in a specific context with all of its performative sound
qualities is to express its exuberant and infinite possibilities.
Notes
1. Alton Becker, ‘The Linguistics of Particularity: Interpreting Subordination in a Javanese
Text’, Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1984):
425–36 (426), https://doi.org/10.3765/bls.v10i0.1963.
2. Janis Nuckolls and Tod Swanson, ‘Respectable Uncertainty and Pathetic Truth in Amazonian
Quichua-Speaking Culture’, in Metacognitive Diversity: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed.
Joëlle Proust and Martin Fortier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 170–92, https://
doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198789710.003.0009.
3. Janis B. Nuckolls, ‘Deictic Selves and Others in Pastaza Quichua Utterances’, Anthropo-
logical Linguistics 50, no. 1 (2008): 67–89, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27667625.
4. Friedrich, Paul, Language, Context, and the Imagination: Essays by Paul Friedrich, selected
and with an Introduction by Anwar S. Dil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979).
5. Mark Dingemanse, ‘Redrawing the Margins of Language: Lessons from Research on Ideo-
phones’, Glossa 3, no. 1 (2018): 4, https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.444; Mark Dingemanse, Will
Schuerman, Eva Reinisch, Sylvia Tufvesson, and Holger Mitterer, ‘What Sound Symbolism

378 janis nuckolls
Can and Cannot Do: Testing the Iconicity of Ideophones from Five Languages’, Language
92, no. 2 (2016): e117–33, https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2016.0034.
6. Anthony K. Webster, ‘“To give an imagination to the listeners”: The Neglected Poet-
ics of Navajo Ideophony’, Semiotica 171 (2008): 343–65, https://doi.org/10.1515/
SEMI.2008.081; Anthony K. Webster, ‘“So it’s got three meanings dil dil:” Seductive
Ideophony and the Sounds of Navajo Poetry’, Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue can-
adienne de linguistique 62, no. 2 (2017): 173–95, https://doi.org/10.1017/cnj.2017.11;
Janis B. Nuckolls, ‘Quechua Texts of Perception’, Semiotica 103, no. 1–2 (1995): 145–69,
https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1995.103.1-2.145; Janis B. Nuckolls, ‘The Neglected Poet-
ics of Ideophony’, in Catherine O’Neil, Mary Scoggin, and Kevin Tuite, eds, Language,
Culture, and the Individual: A Tribute to Paul Friedrich (Munich: Lincom Europa, 2006),
39–50; Janis B. Nuckolls, ‘The Mindful Animism of Ideophony in Pastaza and Upper
Napo Kichwa’, ETHOS, Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 50, no. 3
(2022): 295–314, https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12356; Nathan Badenoch, ‘Silence, Cessa-
tion and Stasis: The Ethnopoetics of “Absence” in Bit Expressives’, Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology 32, no. 1 (2021): 94–115, https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12314.
7. Herbert H. Clark, ‘Depicting in Communication’, in Human Language: From Genes and
Brains to Behavior, ed. Peter Hagoort (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 235–45.
8. Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in Style in Language, ed.
Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 350–77.
9. Dingemanse, ‘Redrawing the Margins of Language’, 7.
10. Janis B. Nuckolls, Elizabeth Nielsen, Joseph A. Stanley, and Roseanna Hopper, ‘The System-
atic Stretching and Contracting of Ideophonic Phonology in Pastaza Quichua’, International
Journal of American Linguistics 82, no. 1 (2016): 95–116, https://doi.org/10.1086/684425.
11. Dingemanse et al., ‘What Sound Symbolism Can and Cannot Do’.
12. Natsuko Tsujimura, ‘How Flexible Should the Grammar of Mimetics Be? A View From
Japanese Poetry’, in The Grammar of Japanese Mimetics: Perspectives from Structure,
Acquisition, and Translation, ed. Noriko Iwasaki, Peter Sells, and Kimi Akita (London:
Routledge, 2016), 103–28, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315646695.
13. Douglas Harper, ‘groan (v.)’, Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/
search?q=groan (accessed 30 May 2022).
14. Arthur L. Thompson and Youngah Do, ‘Defining Iconicity: An Articulation-Based Meth-
odology for Explaining the Phonological Structure of Ideophones’, Glossa 4, no. 1 (2019):
72, https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.872.
15. The claim for polang’s uniqueness is based on searching published materials on ideo-
phones, and posing an informal query to an online discussion forum, the Linguistic Typol-
ogy Group. There may be semantic analogues of polang somewhere in the world. As of the
present moment, however, they are not attested.
16. Quechua Research Group, ‘GOPR0194’, YouTube, 15 April 2017, 12:44, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=0xTR-uqua34.
17. The pronoun ‘him’ is used for the anaconda, by analogy with a common English language
practice which employs ‘he’ and ‘him’ as default, gender-neutral pronouns for some non-
human life forms.
18. L. Cadena, Watching the Black Anaconda Vanquish a Tapir, Quechua Collection of Janis B.
Nuckolls, The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, recorded by Janis B.
Nuckolls (1988), 277, https://islandora-ailla.lib.utexas.edu/islandora/object/ailla:200281.
19. Cadena, Watching, 277.
20. Examples of this ideophone’s usages may be found in Janis Nuckolls, Tod Swanson,
Christina Collicott, Alexander Rice, Sydney Ludlow, Lisa Warren Carne, and Austin
Howard, ‘polan’, The Quechua Ideophonic Dictionary, https://quechuarealwords.byu.
edu/?ideophone=polan (accessed 18 May 2022).

22. John J. Ohala, ‘The Frequency Code Underlies the Sound-Symbolic Use of Voice Pitch’, in
Sound Symbolism, ed. Leanne Hinton, Johanna Nichols, and John J. Ohala (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994), 325–47, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511751806.022.
23. Nuckolls et al., ‘polan’, video 2.
24. Mark Dingemanse, ‘Ideophones and Gesture in Everyday Speech’, Gesture 13, no. 2
(2013): 143–65, https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.13.2.02din; Sotaro Kita, ‘Two-Dimensional
Semantic Analysis of Japanese Mimetics’, Linguistics 35, no. 2 (1997): 379–416, https://
doi.org/10.1515/ling.1997.35.2.379; Doreen H. Klassen, ‘You can’t have silence with your
palms up’: Ideophones, Gesture, and Iconicity in Zimbabwean Shona Women’s ngano (sto-
rysong) Performance (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1998), PQDT Open, https://
www.proquest.com/docview/304506089; Daniel P. Kunene, ‘Speaking the Act: The Ideo-
phone as Linguistic Rebel’, in Ideophones, ed. F. K. Erhard Voeltz and Christa Kilian-Hartz
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001), 83–192, https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.44.15kun; Elena
Mihas, ‘Composite Ideophone-Gesture Utterances in the Ashéninka Perené “Community
of Practice,” an Amazonian Arawak Society from Central-Eastern Peru’, Gesture 13, no. 1
(2013): 28–62, https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.13.1.02mih; Sabine Reiter, Ideophones
in Awetí (PhD dissertation, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 2011), MACAU:
Open Access Repository of Kiel University, https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:gbv:8-
diss-125116; William J. Samarin, ‘Survey of Bantu Ideophones’, African Language Studies
12 (1971): 130–68, https://hdl.handle.net/1807/67168.
25. Dwight Bolinger, Intonation and Its Parts: Melody in Spoken English (Stanford: Stanford
26. Nuckolls et al., ‘polan’.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
30. Nuckolls et al., ‘polan’.
31. Dingemanse, ‘Redrawing the Margins of Language’, 19.
32. John J. Gumperz, Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
130–52, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611834. For an illuminating explication
of the import of Gumperz’s contributions, see also Stephen C. Levinson, ‘Contextualiz-
ing “Contextualization Cues”’, in Language and Interaction: Discussions with John J.
Gumperz, ed. Susan L. Eerdmans, Carlo L. Prevignano, and Paul J. Thibault (Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, 2003), 31–9, https://doi.org/10.1075/z.117.04lev.
33. King County Library System, Good Morning Song, https://kcls.org/content/good-morning-
song/ (accessed 27 May 2022).
34. This is Comenius’s statement about the alphabet and the images, found in his introduc-
tion to Orbis Pictus: ‘First it will afford a device for learning to read more easily than
hitherto, especially having a symbolical alphabet set before it, to wit, the characters of
the several letters, with the image of that creature, whose voice that letter goeth about
to imitate, pictur’d by it.’ John A. Comenius, The Orbis Pictus of John Amos Comenius,
trans. Charles Hoole (Project Gutenberg, [1658] 2009), xvi, https://www.gutenberg.org/
files/28299/28299-h/28299-h.htm.
35. Colette Moore, ‘An Ideological History of the English Term Onomatopoeia’, in Studies
in the History of the English Language VI: Evidence and Method in Histories of English,
ed. Michael Adams, Laurel J. Brinton, and R. D. Fulk (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015),
307–22 (311), https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110345957
36. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, Renascence Editions (Eugene: University of Oregon,
[1553] 1998), 164, https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/774/arte.
pdf.
37. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (Project Gutenberg, [1589] 2005), Book III,
chapter XVII, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16420/pg16420.html.

380 janis nuckolls
38. The term ‘bow-wow theory’ of language origins is attributed to Max Müller. For a discus-
sion of the debates over language origins and the possible role played by onomatopoeia,
see Jacopo D’Alonzo, ‘Ludwig Noiré and the Debate on Language Origins in the 19th
Century’, Historiographia Linguistica 44, no. 1 (2017): 47–71, https://doi.org/10.1075/
hl.44.1.02dal.
39. Boing, an imitation of the sound and movement of a compressed spring being released, orig-
inated in the 1950s (‘boing, int. and n.2’, OED Online, 2021, https://www.oed.com/view/
Entry/21027). Tick-tock is traced to the 1840s (‘tick-tock, n.’, OED Online, 2020, https://
www.oed.com/view/Entry/201783). Zoom, describing fast movement towards something,
was first used in the 1850s and later became popular in the early 1900s within aviation dis-
course (‘zoom, int.’, OED Online, 2022, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/233042; ‘zoom,
v.1’, OED Online, 2022, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/233041). Crunch, from the
early 1800s, is believed to be a variant of craunch, from the 1600s (‘craunch | cranch, v.’,
OED Online, 2021, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/43945; ‘crunch, v.’, OED Online,
2021, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/45234). Buzz goes back to the late fifteenth cen-
tury (‘buzz, v.1’, OED Online, 2022, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/21027), as does
snap (‘snap, n.’, OED Online, 2021, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/182997). Twitter is
traced back to the late fourteenth century (‘twitter, v.1’, OED Online, 2022, https://www.
oed.com/view/Entry/208195).
40. Luca Nobile, ‘Sound Symbolism in the Age of Digital Orality. A Perspective on Language
beyond “Nature” and “Culture”’, Signifiances (Signifying) 3, no. 1 (2019): xxxvi–lxviii
(lii), https://doi.org/10.18145/signifiances.v3i1.248.
Select Bibliography
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Friedrich, Paul, Language, Context, and the Imagination: Essays by Paul Friedrich, selected and
with an Introduction by Anwar S. Dil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979).
Gumperz, John J., Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), https://
doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611834.
Levinson, Stephen C., ‘Contextualizing “Contextualization Cues”’, in Language and Interaction:
Discussions with John J. Gumperz, ed. Susan L. Eerdmans, Carlo L. Prevignano, and Paul J.
Thibault (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003), 31–9, https://doi.org/10.1075/z.117.04lev.
Moore, Colette, ‘An Ideological History of the English Term Onomatopoeia’, in Studies in the
History of the English Language VI: Evidence and Method in Histories of English, ed.
Michael Adams, Laurel J. Brinton, and R. D. Fulk (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015),
307–22, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110345957.
Nobile, Luca, ‘Sound Symbolism in the Age of Digital Orality. A Perspective on Language
beyond “Nature” and “Culture”’, Signifiances (Signifying) 3, no. 1 (2019): xxxvi–lxviii,
https://doi.org/10.18145/signifiances.v3i1.248.

Nuckolls, Janis B., ‘The Neglected Poetics of Ideophony’, in Language, Culture, and the Indi-
vidual: A Tribute to Paul Friedrich, ed. Catherine O’Neil, Mary Scoggin, and Kevin Tuite
(Munich: Lincom Europa, 2006), 39–50.
Nuckolls, Janis and Tod Swanson, ‘Respectable Uncertainty and Pathetic Truth in Amazonian
Quichua-Speaking Culture’, in Metacognitive Diversity: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed.
Joëlle Proust and Martin Fortier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 170–92, https://
doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198789710.003.0009.
Nuckolls, Janis, Tod Swanson, and Charles Alger, ‘Gyawn’, The Quechua Ideophonic Dictionary,
https://quechuarealwords.byu.edu/?ideophone=gyawn (accessed 18 May 2022).
Tsujimura, Natsuko, ‘How Flexible Should the Grammar of Mimetics Be? A View From Japanese
Poetry’, in The Grammar of Japanese Mimetics: Perspectives from Structure, Acquisition,
and Translation, ed. Noriko Iwasaki, Peter Sells, and Kimi Akita (London: Routledge, 2016),
103–28, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315646695.

24
Havoc Ornithologies
Jody Berland
H earing birdsong draws our rapt attention to the beauty of the natural world.
The lark, the nightingale, the owl, the raven: each bird’s sound carries layers of
feeling, memory, place, symbolism, and experience in the human stories in which they
appear. Responding to the sounds of birds through words and images has occurred
across centuries and across human cultures, and their appearance in stories conveys a
wide variety of meanings and affects. The shape and vibrancy of affective and allegori-
cal responses to the sounds of birds vastly exceeds our ability to categorise them. As
Leonard Lutwack writes in Birds in Literature:
Familiarity and transcendence have given birds a wider range of meaning and
symbol in literature than any other animal. The resemblance of their activity to
common patterns of human family behavior makes them exceptionally suitable
for anthropomorphic imaginary that links man to the common forms of nature.1
The sound of a bird singing was probably the first music heard by humans. Birds evoke
mysteries of art, expression, plenitude, language, and loss as we witness their flight
across our horizons. They also remind us of where we belong and how fragile that
belonging is. We see in a murmuration a twisting cloud of vibrant life that augurs its
own departure. We hear in a series of chirps a polyphony of omen and invention. The
clouds through which we observe these fugitive moments are layered with stories and
images being overtaken by digital clouds in which animal sounds intersect with data.
In some instances the data is all that remains of the life of that species. Responding to
the rapid disappearance of bird species and populations today, birdsong is heard and
lamented as pointing to an end rather than a beginning to this sonic relationship. The
loss of birds appears everywhere we look and listen, so that the sounds of birds signal
and resist an imminent silence.
Perhaps then, beginning with the ‘beauty’ of their song (as I have done, above)
limits what listening to birds or listening to one another listening to birds might
teach us. The birds’ difference from us as species, their familiarity and proximity to
all human cultures, their ties to seasons and places, their irresistible musicality, and
their perceived freedom from human constraints have inspired many metaphorical,
mythic, and narrative references. As I will argue, the desire to create beauty through
the representation of birds’ nature holds a complicated relationship with the under-
lying metaphysics of Western humanism, wherein humans are sole possessors of
language, art, beauty, and meaning. For centuries, writers and readers learned to
imagine human life as categorically distinct and supreme, entitled to mastery of the

havoc ornithologies 383
world because of our unique capacity for language. Equally powerful now, however,
is the impulse to repair the disastrous bifurcation between humans and the rest of the
living world. The urge to translate something untranslatable, like the song of a bird,
into human language then comes to conflict with an equally potent need to come to
a closer imaginative understanding of that which is fundamentally other from us,
like the language of birds. These urges, simultaneous and incongruous, are powerful
forces shaping narrative and expressive dimensions in Western fiction and poetry of
the modern period.
It transpires that the culture that has richly celebrated birds throughout its litera-
ture and art has also threatened their future. It is no accident that the book that cata-
lysed the modern environmental movement, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, takes as its
title the disappearing sounds of birds. We now inhabit a different era. The geologists
have named this era the Anthropocene, when ‘the forces of human existence began to
overwhelm all other biological, geological, and meteorological forms and forces . . .
the moment when human existence became the determinant form of planetary exis-
tence – and a malignant form at that’.2 I do not reiterate the geologists’ terminology
without qualms; as critics have emphasised, the term is a ‘charismatic mega-category’
which sweeps away differences among peoples, species, and places in the world, and
crowds many narratives under its roof.3 I accept this criticism. I use the term here as
shorthand to refer to the challenge that real and anticipated planetary catastrophes
present to all of us, and in this context to situate the work of authors and critics who
attempt to challenge how people in Western and Westernised cultures understand and
describe the physical universe and our place in it.4
Authors in many cultures have written of birds in their poetry and fiction; this
chapter cannot provide a survey of authors or literary traditions.5 My purpose here is
to explore how English language literature that features sounds made by birds invites
an ‘Anthropocene reading’, which ‘demands attention to texts’ afterlives (and perhaps
their pre-lives) [. . .] and to their ever-emergent futurity’.6 An Anthropocene reading
offers poignant insights into the history of literary birds. It explores whether or how
authors seek to encounter a bird and perhaps be changed by it or embrace familiar and
beloved word-images associated with birds that convey something about themselves or
their milieu. If much writing is a balancing act between these possibilities, an Anthro-
pocene reading asks how these options are embraced, contested, felt, or altered in the
face of crisis. It asks us to consider how language and aesthetic choices might bear
upon the flourishing of those birds or the sustainability of our relations with them.
Close readings of sound, hearing, and agency in written texts can help to illuminate
this problematic.
If all music by human or bird is, among other things, sound in flight, coming into
presence only to depart, writers of the Romantic period expressed a special connection
with the presence/absence of the winged bird’s song. In the Romantic aesthetic, words
function as both carriers of deep personal emotion and emblems of the inadequacy
of words. For such writers it is the bird’s sublime musicality and its capacity to leave
the ground that creates the possibility of rapture. As Graeme Gibson writes, ‘the bird
knows something he doesn’t [. . .] [I]ts song is filled with the passionate energy of life;
and that, after all, is at the heart of everything, including Hope itself’.7 In moments of
heightened feeling, the poet, like a dancer, finds solace by evoking something less or
more than human.

384 jody berland
Some deem the common association of birds with transcendence to be rooted not
in rapture but in an ancient sorrow, for looking at birds reminds humans of their
heaviness, their bondage to earth and feet, leading to what Mircea Eliade calls a ‘nos-
talgia for flight’.8 Contesting such universalising views, also advanced by scholars Carl
Jung and Joseph Campbell, Thomas Gannon disputes the claim that the association of
flight with transcendence is universal.9 How humans translate the songs of birds into
literature in the seventeenth century, by Shakespeare for instance, when birds were
found at the window of every home, is quite different from their appearance in the
nineteenth century, when the experience of hearing birds sing acquired narrative and
metaphorical complexity in response to industrialism, urbanisation, and evolutionary
theory. Poets agree about the power of hearing the song of the bird in other words but
not about its meaning or even its mood. The frequency with which birdsong preoccu-
pies the poets does not guarantee consensus on the matter. It does not even guarantee
curiosity about it. Yet questions about meaning and mood are surely central to how we
might hope to understand and cohabit with the sounds of birds. We need to examine
these feelings and debates more closely as we untangle the strings of this tradition.
Heightened; flight; ascendant; uplifted; these are expressions of a desire for deliv-
erance that lifts one both from and through the body. Birds are the most common
metaphor in the poetic imagination because they combine flight with sound. The urge
for connection evoked by birdsong leaves its mark in the richness of literary responses
to birds’ voices. Such narratives reach for something that cannot easily be articulated,
that cannot be confined to the readymade tools for interpreting and appropriating
the natural world we have inherited from an instrumentalised, commodified, colo-
nial Western mentality. ‘Writing is always a rough translation of wordlessness into
words.’10 Wordlessness can be embraced outside of words, in music, a dance, a lifting,
a waiting, a listening, a silence, a carnival of other voices, not ours. When early evolu-
tionary science advanced the crudest functionalist ideas – birds sing only to compete,
whether for mate or territory – the idea that birdsong resonates intimately with the
writer’s soul was more warmly embraced and reaffirmed. The bird’s voice promised
to reconnect spirit to place and to counter the disorientation of industrialised culture.
At the same time the sound seemed ever more elusive. Just as music can only exist in
time, each moment supplanted by the next until it ends, so the bird gifts its listeners
with song and flies away. The metaphorical power of the bird was often voiced in
terms of this marriage of flight and fading sound, its poignant incapacity to remain.
The inability to fully possess its music is a fundamental trope in Romantic writing.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the nightingale, so embedded in myth, song,
poetry, and symbol that it has become a vehicle for an incomparable density of mean-
ings and feelings. We turn now to a discussion of that body of words.
The Nightingale
It has been said in various fanciful and anthropological contexts that ‘poets in other
words sing like birds, and birds sing like poets’.11 The simile suggests not only the beauty
one enjoys in hearing the song of a bird, but also something more fundamental con-
necting poets and birds through their relationship to time and their impulse to make
art. The Nightingale exemplifies this simile in much ancient literature, philosophy, myth,
folk tales, and of course in poetry. Shakespeare made so many references to birds that

someone compiled a book entitled The Ornithology of Shakespeare, published in 1871.12

Perhaps best known is this passage between Romeo and Juliet, reluctantly greeting the
dawn: ‘It was the nightingale,’ Juliet protests, ‘and not the lark, / That pierc’d the fearful
hollow of thine ear; / Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree; / Believe me, love, it
was the nightingale.’ Romeo responds, ‘It was the lark, the herald of the morn.’13 They
both knows he is right. These allusions would not have excited controversy; the bird’s
presence is defined here by its relationship to actual, not metaphorical sound and time.
Shakespeare’s many allusions to birds are profoundly lyrical but they also reflect extensive
observation of birds and understanding of their ways, which was not unusual at the time.
But this consensus was not to last. The most intensive critical discussion of an
encounter between birdsong and literature appears in the commentary surrounding
John Keats’s poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘perhaps the best-known poem in the Eng-
lish language’.14 The poem was composed in 1819, when Keats was twenty-three,
just two years before his death. The flurry of critical debate following this ‘page of
inexhaustible and insatiable beauty’, as Jorge Luis Borges so tenderly describes it,15
concerns the penultimate stanza, which reads as follows:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.16
Could Keats really imagine that the living bird whose voice he hears had survived from
ancient times and might live forever? What would be the point of such imagining? To
explore this controversy, we turn to Jorge Luis Borges, writer and professor of English
literature at Buenos Aires University, who had a deep interest in the debates surround-
ing this poem. Borges carefully studied and produced marginal notes on the critical
debates about Keats’s Nightingale and later wrote a poem dedicated to Keats.17
In the realm of human–animal relations, Borges is best known for his anti-encyclopedia
of animal species which Michel Foucault claimed had inspired him to write The Order of
Things. Perhaps this text is familiar to you, but to understand what is at stake in the poetry
of Nightingales, it is helpful to have it before us:
This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter
that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought –
our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all
the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the
wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and
threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.
This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that
‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor (b) embalmed (c) tame

386 jody berland
(d) suckling pigs (e) sirens (f) fabulous (g) stray dogs (h) included in the present
classification (i) frenzied (j) innumerable (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
(l) et cetera (m) having just broken the water pitcher (n) that from a long way off
look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in
one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic
charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impos-
sibility of thinking that.18
Obviously this ‘Chinese encyclopaedia’ is no more logical in its composition of animal

species than the poetic supposition that a living, singing bird could live forever. What
draws Borges to Keats’s Nightingale is his emphasis on the fable as a narrative that can
disrupt systems of thought. To put it in Borges’s terms, the Nightingale is an example
of an archetype that shapes one culture’s perception of meaning and value, and dis-
rupts another’s: an object, an animal, the song of a bird. A fable gives a character like
a bird (or a fox, or a hare, and so on) a stable or transcendent meaning reduced to an
essential quality. This purification endows the animal with magical capacities. These
capacities do not depend on the animal’s place in other systems of thought. For Keats
the fable is that the bird is eternal, that is to say, that it is an archetype, and that he
can hear it, and ask it questions. As Borges writes in The Book of Imaginary Beings,
Plato (if he were invited to join in this discussion) would tell us that the child had
already seen the tiger in a primal world of archetypes, and that now on seeing the
tiger he recognizes it. Schopenhauer (even more wondrously) would tell us that the
child looks at the tigers without fear because he is aware that he is the tigers and
the tigers are him or, more accurately, that both he and the tigers are but forms of
that single essence, the Will.19
The concept of the Nightingale Keats evokes pre-exists and inspires his experience
of hearing it, a point that Keats is hardly trying to disguise.20 Indeed his description
of the Nightingale could be read as deeply Platonic, but it is more accurate to say it
aims for the Platonic, in that it embraces an image of the Nightingale as an eternal
being, separate from the embodied, sadly changing world of mortal beings. But Plato
fails Keats, or Keats fails Plato, for as Andrew Culver puts it, ‘Keats happily aban-
dons reason and patience in the poem. He almost wilfully subverts Plato’s demands in
favour of an imaginative retreat into a sorrowful vision.’21 That is to say, he recalls his
own situation, ‘return[ing] from the high vision, to look back down to the ground’.22
Plunged into melancholy by personal and social disturbances that have overwhelmed
him – the death of his brother, his own illness, his poverty, his dislike of changing
beliefs about worth and survival, loneliness, unrequited love – Keats allows the unseen
bird to release the passionate dark feelings that attend his listening. It is as though the
bird is a necessary presence to unlock his feelings.
Elsewhere he writes:
Where’s the Poet? Show him! show him!

[. . .]
’Tis the man who with a bird, Wren or eagle, finds his way to
All its instincts.23

It was this struggle between uncorrupted myth and the more disruptive release of
creative instinct, between Nightingale and the nightingale, that inspired Borges’s inter-
est and his later poem for Keats, in which the poet joins the Nightingale and the Greek
urn in eternal memory:
[. . .] O posthumous Keats
snatched away from the earth, blinded by time,
the nightingale on high and the Greek urn
are your eternity, o fleeting one.
You were the fire. In panic memory
you are not ashes now. You are glory.24
As Borges documents, the controversy about ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ began soon after
Keats’s death, when his friend Charles Brown endeavoured to write a memoir of his
life. The controversy concerns Brown’s account of the moment in which Keats com-
posed the poem in Brown’s garden. The poem could not have been inspired by a
nightingale, argued critics of Brown’s memoir, because nightingales do not sing in the
morning; furthermore, ‘nightingales are famously secretive, nesting by preference in
woodland undergrowth. They do not nest near houses. Nor is it the nesting female
who sings [. . .]’.25
In other words, Keats (and presumably Brown as well) has no interest in the bird
uttering the song; he invokes its mythic presence only to give voice to what he feels
and hears. What is this myth interceding between Keats and the actual singing bird?
The story of the mythic Nightingale – that unchanging entity that might have been at
home in Plato’s archetypes or Borges’s taxonomy – was first published by Ovid in his
Metamorphoses in 8 ce. She was born from the transformation of Philomela, daugh-
ter of the king of Athens, into a nightingale, after being raped by her brother-in-law,
while her sister, Progne, was changed into a swallow. The story parallels the myth of
Daphne, daughter of the goddess Diana, who was transformed into a tree as she was
being assaulted by Eros. This latter transformation is immortalised in a stunning sculp-
ture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini which captures in marble that moment where her head
is thrown back and her hands and toes begin to transform into branches. Bernini’s
Daphne is exhibited in the Villa Borghese in Rome, very near the last house in which
Keats lived and where he died. Daphne and Philomela were so beautiful their human
forms were desired and destroyed by kings and gods. The combination of beauty, vio-
lence, and mythic transformation inspired works of great beauty in the early modern
period, illuminating what ecofeminists have rightly described as the violent patriarchal
domination of the natural world. The Nightingale – we can identify this mythic charac-
ter by this capitalisation – who had been Philomela thus appears as female (Philomel)
in countless poems drawing upon this myth.
But, as Judith Chernaik observes, ‘It does not take a professional ornithologist
to know that it is the male nightingale, not the female, who sings.’ Keats composed
his poem, she notes, through a ‘seamless’ combination of ‘intense personal feelings,
literary inspiration and realistic observation, each element recast in his own way’.26
Whether it was a thrush, rather than a nightingale, that moved him to write the poem,
as Chernaik suggests, was surely beside the point; what centuries-old tale of death and

388 jody berland
transformation accompanies a thrush? The recognition of a thrush might have soothed

his anguish, though, Gannon suggests, had he sought a different kind of relationship
with birds; ‘the inspirational propensity of such songbirds as the skylark, oriole, and
various thrushes for vocal outburst, often in the morning and in the spring, render
them fit as emblems for the archetypal process of psychic rebirth’.27
Borges takes care to document an accusation of ornithological indifference in his
notes on Keats’s critics:
Miss Lowell writes . . . ‘In calling the nightingale immortal bird & contrasting its
eternity of life with man’s short existence, any one with a spark of poetic or imagina-
tive or poetic feeling [sic] realises at once that Keats is not referring to the particular
nightingale singing at that instant, but to the species nightingale.’ Sir Sidney Colvine
thinks that ‘what Keats has in mind is not the song-bird at all, but the bird-song,
thought of as something self-existing & apart, imperishable through the ages.’28
This imperishable Nightingale bears layers of association accrued through literature and
myth: intense feeling, spring, night, beauty, death, renewal, communion with nature. It is
also a sign around which a long argument was waged between poets and in the minds of
individual writers as well. Keats’s experience of listening to the song of the Nightingale can
be read in the context of a debate between Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who pub-
lished his own, more ornithologically correct and more acerbic poem, ‘The Nightingale: A
Conversation Poem, April 1798’:
And hark! the Nightingale begins its song.

‘Most musical, most melancholy’ bird!
A melancholy bird? Oh! idle thought!
In Nature there is nothing melancholy.
But some night-wandering man whose heart was pierced
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper, or neglected love,
(And so, poor wretch! he filled all things with himself,
And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
Of his own sorrow), [. . .]
And many a poet echoes the conceit;
Poet who hath been building up the rhyme
When he had better far have stretched his limbs
Beside a brook in mossy forest-dell,
By sun or moon-light, to the influxes
Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements
Surrendering his whole spirit, of his song
And of his fame forgetful! [. . .]
and so his song
Should make all Nature lovelier, and itself
Be loved like Nature! But ’twill not be so29
Coleridge evidently knew his Nightingales; he studied them, he complained of their

noise at night;30 in a mildly didactic manner he presents their song as a metonym for

the beautifully ordered natural world in order to chastise his fellow poets who, rather
than contemplating ‘Nature’, were immersed in their own melancholy. Coleridge’s
ideas were greatly influenced by the work of Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s
grandfather), whose writing on evolutionary biology sprang from a ‘naturalist’ obser-
vation of animal behaviour and remains. In the older Darwin’s opinion, the life of the
animal was driven by adversarial contest for mate and territory through which the
strongest member of the species could propagate and survive. If Nature is a law, as
Darwin understood it, there is no place for dissenting human feeling. I find it hard to
imagine Erasmus Darwin (in contrast to his grandson) listening to birds. Nightingales,
like many songbirds, improvise and embellish their phrases in a capricious manner far
exceeding the requirements he describes. Coleridge may have found the Nightingale’s
song beautiful – he has not robbed the word of its capitalisation – but his admiration
for Darwin’s ideas emboldened Coleridge to rebuke his fellow poets, who would have
‘filled all things with himself / And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale / Of his
own sorrow’. In our time, Nobel Prize for Literature Laureate Bob Dylan, adapting a
traditional song, puts the poet’s sorrowful self-absorption more succinctly:
I got a bird that whistles

I got a bird that sings
I got a bird that whistles
I got a bird that sings
But [if] I ain’ a-got Corrina
Life don’t mean a thing.31
You can see in Coleridge’s ‘conversational poem’ his commitment to more ordinary
language and a more naturalistically attuned attention to the song of the bird as it
draws listeners into communion with the natural world. But what does he mean by
‘Nature’? His capitalisation of the word suggests an older understanding granting
Nature a transcendent or creator status, a definition that sits uneasily with his insis-
tence on the empirical bird perched by the empirical creek calling on us to respect nat-
ural law. Coleridge is blending several ideas about nature circulating at the time; the
ancient concept of Nature as a goddess (this version appears again later in this chapter
in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls); the ensuing understanding of nature as
a constellation of explicable laws, as propounded by Darwin; and the Romantic view
of Nature as a remedy to the ills of society.32 His poem challenges the appropriation
of the bird as a symbol for human emotions, but he does not concern himself with the
bird’s capacity for meaning or aesthetic pleasure. The bird might sing, but it is not an
artist: its song and variations are nature’s imprint, nothing more.
While Coleridge directs our attention to the ordinariness and immediacy of hearing
actual birds while visiting an actual brook, Keats surrenders to passionate feelings that
are deeply engraved by myths and literary traditions that layer or displace time in a dif-
ferent way. His aesthetic strategy resists the naturalism described in Darwin’s writings
and, where it came to survival of the fittest, experienced vividly in his own life. ‘What
really spoils the singing of the Nightingale’, Keats explained in a letter, ‘was not moral
philosophy but [according to one commentary] natural philosophy of so pessimistic a
kind that it forbids any hope of harmonising the sensuous love of beauty with a help-
fully benevolistic [sic] view of the universe’.33 Where Coleridge capitalises Nature, Keats

390 jody berland
italicises the word as referring to something contrary to kindness. While Coleridge’s bird
offers a lesson in the duty claimed by natural philosophy, Keats responds with wonder
to the echoes of his presence from an unseen bird. It is a nocturnal visitor, the nightin-
gale, heard but not seen, and so twice removed, once by its mythic aura and again by its
invisibility. Its appearance as disembodied voice in Keats’s poem anticipates then what
film theorist Michel Chion calls the ‘acousmetre’, a character in cinema whose special
power stems from the fact that it can be heard but not seen. This sonic presence lends it
a ghostly, disembodied power which would be deflated or de-mytholised by being shown
(‘deacousmatisation’).34 Hearing this bird sing in a garden at night constellates for Keats
diverse meanings in uncertain relation to one another. The Nightingale is an eternal
symbol and cannot die, yet it is a ghost of itself, as he himself will be soon enough. His
desire to respond to the nightingale crashes against the despondent condition of his life –
‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!’ – and the discordance of this encounter
produces a work of great affective power.
These debates about how poets should write about birds have complicated encoun-
ters between writers and songbirds and created new quandaries for literary minds.
As Bethan Roberts writes in her survey, ‘Throughout its literary history, the [Night-
ingale] is always positioned somewhere between real bird, in its natural habitat, and
literary symbol, the balance between the two ever shifting.’35 In addition to Milton
and Shakespeare, Coleridge and Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley (‘a poet is a nightingale
who sits in darkness, and seems to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds’36) and
Borges, there was William Wordsworth (‘O nightingale! thou surely art / A creature of
a ‘fiery heart’: / These notes of thine – they pierce and pierce; / Tumultuous harmony
and fierce!’37) and countless others. In ‘Poetic Birds and Material Forms in the Long
Nineteenth Century’, Clara Dawson observes that when they turned to birds for inspi-
ration, Romantic and Victorian poets were mining ‘a tradition as old as poetry itself’.
Drawing on new materialism and social history, she suggests that the question is not
whether these poetic encounters with birds were naturalistically accurate, but rather
how poetry sought to carry ‘the history of human–bird entanglements in the long
nineteenth century’ which was shaped by ‘the accelerated colonisation and destruc-
tion of many more-than-human species’.38 That was and is surely a cause for melan-
choly. Dawson’s revisiting of this milieu to discover shifting responses and feelings in
response to the ever growing exploitation of nature adds an important layer to my
‘Anthropocene reading’, with its aforementioned concern with ‘texts’ afterlives (and
perhaps their pre-lives), to the weird historical coincidences that attend their composi-
tion, and to their ever-emergent futurity’.39
Before taking a closer look at Anthropogenic aspects of the literary entanglement
between writer and bird, a final episode of the Nightingale saga is in order. Early in
the twentieth century, a different kind of visitation of the tradition was taking place.
By then the convention of the nightingale had become so entrenched, so overgrown
by a century (today, two centuries) of the ‘Romantic readings of the Romantics’,40
that it was vulnerable to a more cutting irony than that found in Coleridge. This
fatigue is clearly expressed in Michael Arlen’s story ‘When the Nightingale Sang in
Berkeley Square’, published in 1923 in his short story collection These Charming
People. The casually ironic tone in which the setting is introduced (his reference
below to hearing an unseen nightingale carries unsentimental echoes of Shakespeare,
Keats, and other writers) opens up to a story of betrayal, death, and abandonment

behind the cool wealth and elegant façade of Berkeley Square, which closes up again
around it. Arlen begins:
There is a tale that is told in London about a Nightingale, how it did this and that
and, finally, for no apparent reason, rested and sang in Berkeley Square. A well-
known poet, critic, and commentator heard it, and it is further alleged that he was
sober. Some men, of course, now say that it was not a nightingale at all, but only
the South wind singing in the trees of the square, but it is a fact that some men
will say anything. And some men have formed a Saint James’s Square school of
thought, but it was in Berkeley Square that the poet, critic, and commentator, who
was sober, distinctly heard the song of the nightingale, on a night in the heart of the
drought of the year 1921.41
It is not only the over-familiar figure of the Nightingale, but also the critical debate
that surrounds it that inspired Arlen’s jaded tone. Such a lot of words about a little
bird! The title of this story was subsequently ‘stolen’ (in the words of the composer)
for the song ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, whose lyrics briefly mention
the unlikelihood of hearing a nightingale sing in Berkeley Square. This conventional
romantic song about the capacity of love to cloud the line between fact and fiction,
symbolised by the elusive bird, has been sung and recorded by countless performers,
largely without irony, for nearly a century.42 It is as though the many layers of the
Nightingale’s history had overcome the capacity to know what it sounds like or what
it means or why one might argue about such things in the first place. In that sense
the subject of this last episode in the nightingale saga is not the bird, nor the bird’s
song, nor the experience of hearing it, nor is it the death of the poet, or romantic love,
or betrayal, but rather, smashing these all together, it is the tenor of the culture as a
whole, and how it encounters the otherness of the bird’s music, that is at question.
Wrestling with Anthropocentrism

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793)43
A recent audiobook, Bird Songs and the Poems They Have Inspired (2013), combines
birdsong recordings with the poetry those birds inspired. The authors mention that
some birds featured in their collection ‘announce’ the coming of spring. How joyful
they sound! ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit!’, Shelley cries. ‘Teach me half the gladness / That
thy brain must know’ (‘To a Skylark’, 1822). But might it be a ‘pathetic fallacy’ (Joseph
Krutch and Peter Kellogg wonder) to attribute joy to a skylark? Can birds be ‘stirred
by something comparable to human emotions, or by emotions of any kind’?44 What a
thought! To think that birds might sing because they feel like singing! More than two
hundred years after Blake’s challenge, literary critics are still tangled in confusion. Like
the authors of this audiobook, they accuse him of anthropomorphism – the attribution
of human qualities to other species – on the grounds that emotions and the capacity to
communicate them belong exclusively to humans. There is not adequate space here to
address this ridiculous, long overturned idea.

392 jody berland
Using an animal symbolically to convey something about a person or a people is

not in itself reprehensible. Perhaps, though, looking at it from the vantage point of the
present era, a time when we are learning how profoundly and precariously everything
is connected, it is a bad habit, ‘a way of thinking that permits more overt forms of
exploitation’.45 The reliance on metaphorical birds to convey human affect without
regard for their unique personalities or circumstances or the destructive effects of our
human actions has become a subject of growing concern for critics, some of whom
perceive white European culture to be ruled by anthropocentric (the definition of value
or meaning with exclusive reference to human) perspectives. This critique charges
(some) humans with believing themselves to be a cognitively, morally, emotionally,
artistically, and technologically unique species, guided by (their own or God’s) reason
or belief. This unique status permits and requires them to remain sovereign over the
natural world – and of course over other humans perceived to be less endowed with
the ideology of human sovereignty, bolstered by the belief in the progressive capacities
of Western reason.46
Anthropocentrism permits writers to define the meaning and value of other species in
relation to human concepts and needs, as Coleridge complained with some justification
in ‘The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem’. ‘Who is to say’, asks Gannon,
that the impending ecological Armageddon is not, in large part, the result of our
‘seeing’ the bird, the animal, the very land, as but fit objects for mere poetry, for
occasional weekend outings to the country, and, at last, for some botched self-
therapy that makes us feel better (though only for a while) about ourselves?47
This is an unfair dig at the Romantic poets, as Gannon is the first to admit; the pull
they felt towards the natural world was an important reaction against capitalist indus-
trialisation, and their work has inspired writers, thinkers, and activists until today.
Rather than stemming from a moral weakness among writers drawn to find comfort
or inspiration in company with plants or animals, anthropocentrism is a historic devel-
opment ‘born from specific institutional and philosophical traditions’.48 As products
of this same history, we are realising we can no longer think of the human subject
as a sovereign, intelligent being blessed with dominion over the minor universe
of plants and animals. That universe is now collapsing in what has been called a
‘“biological annihilation” or “sixth mass extinction” [. . .] albeit the first to be driven
by humans’.49 Living in this time, driving ‘on a highway to climate hell with our foot
still on the accelerator’, as the UN Secretary-General recently warned,50 scholars
of literature are engaging with diverse critical tools drawn from the environmental
humanities, critical interdisciplinary animal studies, feminism, postcolonial thought,
Indigenous philosophy, and new materialism, in order to subject our habits of thought
to more rigorous reflection.
Birds have played an important role in starting us down this path. Anyone who
thinks about birds knows that their populations are diminishing at an alarming rate.
Rachel Carson made this a public issue when she exposed the effects of widespread
DDT use in the 1950s and memorialised the ‘silent spring’ she witnessed in its after-
math. ‘When you hear birds sing this spring [mixed medley of bird song], remember
Rachel Carson, who spoke for all who find a deep and imperative meaning in nature.’51

Her book Silent Spring (1962) takes as its epigraph lines from another poem by Keats,
‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ (1819):
The sedge has withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.52
As I have written elsewhere, Carson’s adoption of Silent Spring as the title of her book
makes the silence of the birds she discovered in her research outings a metonym for the
hubris of modern science and its paradigm of progress, much as Keats makes the silent
bird a metonym for the fragility of love.53 Carson was so moved by his description
of the uncanny silence of nearby birds that she chose his verse as her epigraph; at the
same time, her germinal publication helped to undercut the conventional use of birds
as symbols of human distress.54
Carson’s book is about DDT and its destruction of habitats and health. The dis-
turbing silence of the birds was not only a consequence of chemical poisoning, how-
ever. Another contributing factor was the popular trend of trapping songbirds for
personal pleasure and for competing in songbird competitions.55 People were driven to
capture and possess birds such as white myna birds or white starlings, now critically
endangered, because, as David Rothenberg puts it, ‘Bird song makes its most atten-
tive human listeners surge into poetry.’56 There is nothing wrong with the desire to
surge into poetry; one hopes that you, dear reader, will submit to this desire at every
opportunity. But is it not ironic that people endanger the birds they love by desiring
them, by relying on them for their own fulfilment or inspiration, by robbing them from
their habitats and threatening their species’ futures? The question echoes the stories
of Philomela and Daphne, mythic heroines destroyed and memorialised by their own
beauty. It also reminds me of a story told by Randy Malamud about the film Find-
ing Nemo, a popular animated feature depicting a clownfish’s fight for freedom. His
struggle moved families so powerfully that they went out and bought clownfish, and
little tanks to put them in, and brought them home so they could have one of their
own to look at.57 Surely there is a similar irony – but is it appropriate to think of it
this way? – in the fact that builders seeking to raise us ever higher to find a ‘bird’s-eye
view’ of the earth have erected towers whose illuminated windows kill millions more
songbirds in every year that passes.
Birds have been generous ‘[s]ymbols of [. . .] a human soul in need of surrogate
support’.58 For what lost or damaged buttress do birds provide compensation? We
humans are all entangled and interdependent with diverse lives and species. However
much the human soul might seek a closer connection to nature, our Anthropocene
reading suggests that the use of birds in Western literature to achieve this end has been
a problematically human-centred practice that reaffirms the ontological divide that
exists between human and bird. At the same time, criticising writers who use birds
as symbols of human experience because only human beings possess intrinsic value,
which is the charge of anthropocentrism, or criticising writers who attribute emotions
like grief, rapture, or revenge to other species because only humans have these feel-
ings, which is the charge of anthropomorphism, can ironically work to sustain this
same divide. Is it anthropocentric to appreciate a songbird’s ability to restore and
reassure us? Is it anthropomorphic to sense or know that animals think, feel, or sing

394 jody berland
just because they feel like it? How could the creation of a world that sustains birds
encourage a more hospitable recognition of the communicative and aesthetic capaci-
ties of non-human species, and nourish a closer attunement to their unique capacities?
The fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello addresses this problem in J. M. Coetzee’s
1999 novel The Lives of Animals, when she advocates for a poetics that ‘does not
try to find an idea in the animal, that is not about the animal, but is instead a record
of engagement with him [sic]’.59 Writing about her relationship with her dog, Donna
Haraway similarly advocates for adoption of the concept of ‘metaplasm’ as ‘the
remodelling of dog and human flesh, remolding the codes of life, in the history of
companion-species relating’. What is at stake for her is not the sound of the dog or
the metaphor the dog might provide, but the sharing of a life in which the exchange of
lives and fluids makes the idea of autonomy at a species or cellular level insupportable.
Haraway writes, ‘I believe that all ethical relating, within or between species, is knit
from the silk-strong thread of ongoing alertness to otherness-in-relation.’60
These authors brilliantly draw attention to problems in how we conceive our
relationships with other species. But these concerns about cross-species relations
arose much earlier, centuries before the term ‘Anthropocene’ had been proposed and
debated. Suspicion of the Western claim to superiority over all living things appears
in a number of texts that employ the songbird to illustrate their concerns. Western
humanism was founded on the assumption that humans alone possess faculties for
language, morals, and feeling, and for turning their feeling or experience into art. Yet
one of the foundational poets of this same Western humanism was one of its earli-
est critics. Many of us encountered Alexander Pope’s iconic observation, ‘The proper
study of mankind, is Man’, in introductory courses on the history of modern thought.
Perhaps less known is Pope’s reminder, in his ‘Essay on Man: Epistle III, Of the Nature
and State of Man, With Respect to Society’, that very little of what we celebrate in our
species is unique to it:
Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings?

Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings.
Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat?
Loves of his own and raptures swell the note.
The bounding steed you pompously bestride
Shares with his lord the pleasure and the pride.
Is thine alone the seed that strews the plain?
The birds of Heav’n shall vindicate their grain.61
‘Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings?’ It would be difficult to find a more lyrically
concise inquisition, so much so that the words seem to echo the sounds of which the
author speaks. And what about, ‘Is thine alone the seed that strews the plain? / The
birds of Heav’n shall vindicate their grain.’ This homily on (male) human pomposity
is surely indebted to the even earlier influence of Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-
century French philosopher whose Essaies, published in 1590, inaugurated the essay
form and ‘arguably herald[ed] the birth of the modern idea of the author as subject
(in both senses)’.62 In ‘Apology for Raimond Sebond’, among the finest of those first
essays, Montaigne harangues his readers for their arrogant, or as we might now put it,
anthropocentric assumptions:

Presumption is our natural and original disease. The most wretched and frail of
all creatures is man, and withal the proudest. [. . .] [H]e equals himself to God,
attributes to himself divine qualities, withdraws and separates himself from the the
crowd of other creatures, cuts out the shares of the animals, his fellows and compan-
ions, and distributes to them portions of faculties and force, as himself thinks fit.63
Montaigne’s essay lists numerous examples of animals and birds whose intelligence,
kindness, industry, and craft exhibit capacities then thought to be exclusively human.
Linking the vanity and greed of his contemporaries to their lack of curiosity about
these other creatures, Montaigne urges his readers to extend their attention outwards
to these creatures’ remarkable accomplishments. Traces of Montaigne’s interrogation
of human self-absorption appear in Hamlet’s self-doubting soliloquies, published just
a few years later. In this passage, Montaigne elaborates his attack on his contempo-
raries by describing and interpreting the sounds of birds around him:
And ’tis not to be supposed that nature should have denied that to us which she
has given to several other animals: for what is this faculty we observe in them, of
complaining, rejoicing, calling to one another for succour, and inviting each other
to love, which they do with the voice, other than speech? And why should they not
speak to one another? They speak to us, and we to them.64
Why should they not speak to one another, indeed? The question challenges readers to
listen differently to the voices, the twitters, the orchestras of birds as they make their
songs conversant with one another. Montaigne’s incitement is precisely concerned with
‘the silk-strong thread of ongoing alertness to otherness-in-relation’, as Haraway puts
it in the lovely passage cited above.65
Remarkably, then (and with apologies for moving backward in time in this anti-
progressive manner), and also sadly, the idea that humans could improve in moral-
ity and wisdom if they would acknowledge similarity and reciprocity across species
appeared long before words like ‘anthropocentrism’ appeared. Throughout the his-
tory of such interventions, the sounds of birds have played an important role. The
publication of Montaigne’s influential Essaies appeared midway between transforma-
tional publications by Copernicus and Galileo, which revealed that the sun did not
revolve around the earth, and by heretical implication, that the universe does not
revolve around ‘man’. The official doctrines had it wrong. The climate of today criti-
cally nudges us back to an ‘Anthropocene reading’ of these older texts.66 Montaigne,
like Coleridge, urges us not to assume that birds lack skill and artistry, or that they are
singing just to us; he urges us not to translate their songs to our habitual narratives and
vocabularies, without knowing more about what is going on with those same birds.
Returning to the twenty-first century, Thomas Gannon takes this problem of transla-
tion as the starting point for his book Skylark Meets Meadowlark: ‘I wondered at how lit-
tle of the actual bird I was still really “seeing,” overlaid as my raw perception was [. . .].’67
Call and Response

I have addressed elsewhere the historically contentious question of whether birds are
making music.68 Music is usually a practice of ‘making music together’, as Alfred
Schutz argues in his influential phenomenological study of musical performance. For

396 jody berland
Schutz, making music has to do with a simultaneity of temporal experience, growing

old together, time passing. He describes this shared experience as a ‘mutual tuning-in
[. . .] Each has to take into account what the other has to execute in simultaneity.’69
Similarly, Chion observes that sound ‘temporalizes’ cinema, whether or not there is
any movement on the screen.70 This sense of time passing through the sequence of
birds’ sounds is described in many poetic ornithologies.
Henry David Thoreau, known to have bitterly chastised Pope for stating that ‘the
proper study of mankind, is Man’,71 offers a different experience of listening to birds.
In this entry in his journal, memory, poetry, immortality and the promise of a new day
are simultaneously released by ‘the twittering of the birds’:
March 10, 1852

I was reminded, this morning before I rose, of those undescribed ambrosial
mornings of summer which I can remember, when a thousand birds were heard
gently twittering and ushering in the light, like the argument to a new canto of an
epic and heroic poem. The serenity, the infinite promise, of such a morning! The
song or twitter of birds drips from the leaves like dew. Then there was something
divine and immortal in our life. When I have waked up on my couch in the woods
and seen the day dawning, and heard the twittering of the birds.72
Five days later, he responds more passionately to the epic canto of the birds. Wishing
to demonstrate the general maxim that poets want to be birds, while clinging to his
personal faith in the completeness of his own experience, Thoreau bursts out, ‘May
my melody not be wanting to the season!’73 Bernie Krause also responds to a chorus
of birds in his study of wilderness orchestras, which he describes as different from but
somehow comparable to music composed for human voices.74
Don McKay offers an extended call and response in his extraordinary collections of
poetry about birds: songs of the song of the bird, as he titles them:
Something about
making music, something about making mind
from cries, calls, hormones, flyways, mimicry,
pissmarks on trees, habits, weather, dance,
deception, warblers navigating by Earth’s own
electromagnetic field, whose eerie aura radiates
from perturbations in its molten iron
core. Who knew this? Not me. Beyond the text I
take for world, they thrive upon
my absence and without my fine
hypersymbolic chat. They sing. They sign.
They signify. They mean. Were they
creatures of dream or speculative fiction we’d
be less perplexed.75
This is not yet a ‘poetics of cohabitation’ (in Haraway’s terms) although McKay’s poem
acknowledges that birds engage with each other with their own semiotic and aesthetic
resources and purposes, a truth which is surely a precondition for such a poetics.

McKay knows, however, that the birds he hears would ‘thrive upon my absence’ and
the acknowledgement that this cohabitation is more pleasurable for him than for the
birds challenges the relevance of his own perplexity.
Writing about an earlier poem by McKay, ‘Song for the Chipping Sparrow’, Travis
Mason writes:
McKay writes lyric poems that acknowledge a tradition of odes that pay hom-
age to birdsong while challenging the anthropocentric thrust of such tradition.
McKay paves the way for shifting the lyrical paradigm to consider such poetical
‘techniques’ as metaphor, rhythm, rhyme, and other verbal flourishes as ‘sensors,
listening devices like radio telescopes or sonar. It’s as though language which – so
we think – all mouth, were trying to grow ears.’76
I love the idea of language ‘trying to grow ears’. It draws the melancholy slant of the
Romantic experience of unfilled desire into a different key. Each encounter becomes
an opportunity for a less anthropocentric mode of listening within the noisy reality
of a multi-species sensorium. As McKay writes in ‘On Foot to the Bypass Esso Postal
Outlet’,
Maybe I will find myself back out here with the traffic,
picking up pop cans,
listening for the moment when a raven takes a piece of sky,
packs it like a snowball,
and speaks.77
McKay is listening for a sound that can overcome, metaphorically as well as soni-
cally, the noise of traffic. As bird populations fade or go extinct, a new kind of haunt-
ing emerges, qualitatively different from that presented by the unseen nightingale
addressed by Keats and yet resonant with the literature of the Romantics. Visiting a
monument to the extinct passenger pigeon, once a population of millions, Joshua Trey
Barnett writes, ‘The lush forests and wildflowers, the birds and mammals, the twining
rivers below take on a different feel in the wake of this reassessment; they come to
seem marked, or rather haunted, by an increasingly conspicuous loss.’78 This remem-
bered or imagined conversation between birds, trees, flowers, and other animals, less
and less available to one another, evokes a multitude of ghostly calls and responses.
While Keats’s bird is solitary and ghostlike, Thoreau and McKay are listening to many
birds. Listening to birds makes McKay think about music, and the plurality of lan-
guages, and how they may never be fully understood by one another, but how that
does not stop them from singing. Schutz’s description of ‘mutual tuning-in’ mentioned
above might apply to the changing dynamics of bird vocalists in concert with one
another as well as to human performers. Birds sing for the ears of other birds who call
and respond to one another, whether in the context of seduction, discord, warning, or
artful performance arising from an excess of spirit or emotion. Together birds com-
prise an orchestra of sound. Each voice seeks to be discernible in the mesh of sounds
they produce. When one voice disappears, as Krause describes in The Great Animal
Orchestra, performers and listeners must adapt to that particular space of silence and
create new and different tonalities.

398 jody berland
The endeavour to ‘grow ears’ – an ethical as well as aesthetic pursuit – is not lim-
ited to poetry but can be identified as a theme in some environmentally oriented sci-
ence fiction. In Charlie Jane Anders’s remarkable novel All the Birds in the Sky (2016),
the world of the near future is unravelling. The Unravelling that drives the story refers
to a constellation of wars, earthquakes, and superstorms that threaten disaster for
life on earth. Social response to the Unravelling is driven by two opposing groups:
the techno-startup geeks and the ancient society of witches, strongly committed to
two distinct and mutually hostile forms of knowledge. As a child, Patricia, who will
become a leading healer of the latter group, tries to help a wounded bird:
Patricia paused in a small clearing of maples near the back door. ‘It’s okay,’ she told
the bird. ‘I’ll take you home. There’s an old birdcage in the attic. I know where to
find it. It’s a nice cage, it has a perch and a swing. I’ll put you in there, I’ll tell my
parents. If anything happens to you, I will hold my breath until I faint. I’ll keep you
safe. I promise.’
‘No,’ the bird said. ‘Please! Don’t lock me up. I would prefer you just kill me now.’
[. . .]
Captivity is worse than death for a bird like me,’ the sparrow said. ‘You can hear
me talking. Right? [. . .] [T]hat means you have a duty to do the right thing. Please.’79
To her surprise, she understands the bird. Furthermore, she listens to him. They con-
verse. Recognising that she is a witch, although she is not quite seven, he leads her deep
into the forest to meet the great Tree and the Parliament of Birds.
The narrative of All the Birds in the Sky places the future of the Unravelling planet
in the hands of the heroine and her capacity to ‘grow ears’ and commune with a
Parliament of Birds overseen by the great Tree. The Tree in All the Birds in the Sky
parallels and, according to the author in personal correspondence, is indebted to the
Goddess Nature in Chaucer’s fantasy poem The Parliament of Fowls (there is also a
twelfth-century Persian poem The Conference of the Birds, recently staged as a musi-
cal in Vancouver, Canada). In Chaucer’s fantasy, the narrator falls into a dream and
witnesses the Goddess Nature summoning birds to a yearly ritual in which three birds
will vie for the love of the great eagle and then all will choose their mate:
Was set this noble goddess, Nature;

Of branches were her halls and her bowers
Wrought according to her art and measure;
Nor was there any fowl she does engender
That was not seen there in her presence,
To hear her judgement, and give audience.80
The birds summoned by Chaucer’s Goddess Nature, like the wounded bird who brings
Patricia to the modern Parliament of Birds, are distinguished by their voices. In introducing
them, Chaucer describes how they sound, what they reveal, whom or what they awake:
The crane, the giant with his trumpet-sound;

The thief, the chough; the chattering magpie;
The mocking jay; the heron there is found;

The lapwing false, to foil the searching eye;

The starling that betrays secrets on high;
The tame robin; and the cowardly kite;
The rooster, clock to hamlets at first light [. . .]81
Needless to say, there are differences in how these Parliaments proceed. In Chaucer’s
fantasy, Goddess Nature instructs the Parliament of Birds on love in the presence
of a dreaming man; in Anders’s novel, the Parliament of Birds interviews a six-year-
old girl who is discovering her highly attuned relationship with nature. To establish
whether they can help one another – whether Patricia is, in fact, a witch – the twenty-
first-century Parliament of Birds asks Patricia a question. Much later, in the debris-
strewn aftermath of the Unravelling, she arrives at an answer. I cannot tell you the
answer, obviously, so there is no point in relating the question, but the Tree’s query and
the reticence of her answer exemplify the capacity of science fiction to imagine post-
anthropocentric relations with allegorical/ethological birds. Patricia’s empathic power
to listen and understand is augmented when she crosses the science–magic divide by
teaming up with her childhood friend the techno-geek, who has invented an artifi-
cial intelligence named Peregrine. Her empathic ears and his creative technology are
needed to come together to save the planet.
The tumbling intersection of poetry and science is also the starting place for a book
of poetry featuring talking birds and ecological collapse: Madhur Anand’s Parasitic
Oscillations (2022). In ‘Portrait 2 [labium velocity (cm/s2)]’ she offers the following
opening reflection:
Birds are often no longer direct subjects of metaphor, but rather remain strange,
sometimes silent, a kind of menacing and stray capacitance (which can cause para-
sitic oscillations) but still harbingers of discovery and hope.82
‘Slow Dance’, an extraordinary seventeen-page prose-poem later in the same book,

engages with her mother’s stroke, and the nature of time, and the encounter of science
and art, and her own disappearance into the science of birds, as though the oscillations
that disturb their connections have made the discipline of poetry urgent but in some
sense unobtainable. ‘Slow Dance’ contains the following report of her investigations:
And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to say what it really is, that it is not
Superficial but a visible core then there is
no way out of the problem of pathos vs. ex-
perience. You will stay on, restive, serene in your
gesture which is neither embrace nor warning but which
holds something of both in pure affirmation that does-
n’t affirm anything. Turning the lines back and forth.
I heard on CBC that one of the most frequent
things a person asks to hear before death is songbirds.
But they do not specify which ones. Would I want ones
I have heard all my life or would I want a new one?
I have already decided I will recite the

400 jody berland
Gayatri Mantra if I should be so lucky as to

be with Mother when she dies. I will prefer a dead
language. Maybe that means I would want to hear extinct
Asian birds. Spotted green pigeon. Himalayan quail.
The balloon pops, the attention turns dully away.

When he asked me what I was working on, I showed him
the photographs of the specimens. I desired
not the specimens, but the arc of the narrative
that had brought me to the point of taking the photos
in the first place and then return to them from time
to time these past three years. The arc itself became arched,
oscillatory, unstable, and I wondered at
wonder. What was plain to see were the subjects lined up.
They were on their backs. They were labelled with dates. Their eyes
were filled with cotton. [. . .]
I had provided proof of my own name,
to enter the research museum in Tring, letters
to prove my occupation, and one more to outline
a fabrication of purpose: ‘she will write poems.’83
Anand’s moment of distraction assembles the language of the surface, the illness of
her mother, the disappearance of extinct birds, and the grief these entail, from which
she turns to the rendering of bird bodies as scientific specimens. The summation of
her purpose – ‘she will write poems’ – confirms that she will not turn away from grief.
Hers will not be the indifferent science advocated by Erasmus Darwin or condemned
by Rachel Carson. The grief shared by Carson and Anand displays the ‘anxious semi-
otics of listening’ that has disrupted people’s desire ‘for their own lives to resonate
with the birds around them [. . .] signs of absence and change can precipitate anxieties
that stem from the ambiguities implicit in the Anthropocene’s formulation of human
relations with other species’.84 There is nothing more poignantly disturbing than the
lonely call of the last bird of a species. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a recording
of the song of the last ōʻō bird, endemic to the island of Kauaʻi. The male was recorded
singing a mating call to a female that would never come. This final recording of this
Southeast Asian bird is surely ‘the saddest thing ever’.85 Like Patricia, but differently,
Anand is the listener who would hear that bird.
Moving across the boundaries of science, nature writing, politics, poetry, and
eulogy, as both Anders and Anand do, reveals that concepts of nature and culture,
human reason and non-human agency, sound and symbol, poet and bird, and the
disciplines of knowledge and meaning formed around them, have increasingly blurred
and bent towards one another. In some cultures, such boundaries did not make sense
to begin with. As Gannon reminds us,
How each culture’s nest (if you will) of tropes and iconography relates to the real
bird, to avian alterity, could be a major focus of any analysis of cultural discourse,
and would, I think, be more revelatory of a culture’s environmental values system
than previous topic studies of birds and literature could have imagined.86

While the silence of birds appears as loss in the writings addressed above, silence can
figure very differently in Indigenous writing. In Linda Hogan’s novel Solar Storms, for
instance, the narrator, a young Indigenous woman, returns to her birthplace where she
learns to reconnect with her grandmothers and with the wild nature that surrounds
and nurtures them. She relates the following experience of listening as she crosses a
lake to be with her grandmother:
I sat in a canoe and daydreamed out across the water at the place Ammah protected,
and I liked to see the island on my sleepless nights and mornings. I was told Ammah
was a silent god and rarely spoke. The reason for this was that all things – birdsongs,
the moon, even my own life – grow from rich and splendid silence.87
The silence which encompasses her own emerging capacity to listen is interrupted
when her grandmothers decide to contest a colonial takeover of northern Indigenous
lands to build a dam.
Plants and birds are regarded in Indigenous worldviews as sentient beings who
have agency in the creation and meaning of the world. They are makers of life with
independent spirits, equal to humans in creation stories, and endowed with the capac-
ity to assist humans who treat them with care and respect. Ravens and crows are both
symbol and creature. As Nicole Sault observes, ‘Birds are [in these cultures] under-
stood as members of kinship categories, such as clans, that incorporate many kinds
of beings in reciprocal networks of rights and responsibilities.’88 In American Indian
Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism, Joni Adamson calls this space
between humans and other species the ‘middle place’.89 In this space, birds create
worlds. These writings from our Indigenous teachers remind us that the capacity of
birds to comfort or assist humans is closely related to the capacity for humans to ‘grow
ears’, to attend to the language and beings of birds, those whose names we know and
those waiting for us to be reminded, and those on the precipice of disappearance.
Songbirds have been central to mythic and romantic writings that continue to
enchant us. The absence of their sound was pivotal to the founding of the modern
environmental movement, and in the wake of this movement, to changing ideas about
listening to and engaging with birds in literature. My backwards and forwards read-
ing of bird soundscapes across the years concludes in the present, in Canada, where
hundreds of activists dressed as birds and caribou assembled to remind the UN global
summit on biodiversity, COP 15, that world leaders must work harder to save one
million plants and animals from extinction.
Notes
1. Leonard Lutwack, Birds in Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), xi.
2. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016), 10. As many scholars have noted, the controversy is not about the
‘cene’ but about the ‘anthro’ – which humans should be held responsible for this terrifying
transformation?
3. Zoe Todd, ‘Indigenizing the Anthropocene’, in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among
Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin
(London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 241–54 (246), http://www.openhumanitiespress.
org/books/titles/art-in-the-anthropocene/. See also Elizabeth Reddy, ‘What Does It Mean to

402 jody berland
Do Anthropology in the Anthropocene?’, Platypus: The CASTAC Blog, 8 April 2014, https://
blog.castac.org/2014/04/what-does-it-mean-to-do-anthropology-in-the-anthropocene/
(accessed 1 May 2023).
4. An incomplete list: Davis and Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene; Dipesh Chakrabarty,
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021);
Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World
(London: Verso, 2018); Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming
Barbarism (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015); and Travis Holloway, How to Live at
the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford: Stanford
Briefs, 2022).
5. An incomplete list: Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song
in Kaluli Expression, 30th anniversary edn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012);
Thomas C. Gannon, Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Roman-
tic and Contemporary Native American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2010); Lutwack, Birds in Literature; Travis V. Mason, Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical
Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013);
David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song (New York:
Basic Books, 2006); Sonia Tidemann and Andrew Gosler, eds, Ethno-Ornithology: Birds,
Indigenous Peoples, Culture and Society (London: Routledge, 2010); and Bethan Roberts,
Nightingale (London: Reaktion Books, 2021).
6. Jesse Oak Taylor, ‘Mourning Species: In Memoriam in an Age of Extinction’, in Ecological
Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, ed. Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 42–62 (57). For a rich discussion of Anthro-
pocene reading of poetic birds, see Clara Dawson, ‘Poetic Birds and Material Forms in the
Long Nineteenth Century’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
29, no. 3 (2022): 595–608.
7. Graeme Gibson, ed., The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany (Toronto: Double-
day, 2021), 305.
8. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1972), 480. Mason comments: ‘The earliest humans [. . .] would not have had the
capacity to recognize their desire for what it was; they would have known only a feeling
– or felt a feeling – of lightness upon witnessing birds in flight.’ Mason, Ornithologies of
Desire, 63. Or upon listening to them.
9. Gannon, Skylark Meets Meadowlark, 4. His observation is borne out by research collected
in Tidemann and Gosler, Ethno-Ornithology.
10. Charles Simic, quoted in Don McKay, Lurch (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 2021), 27.
11. Joseph Wood Krutch and Peter Kellogg, Bird Songs in Literature: Bird Songs and the
Poems They Have Inspired (Ashland: Blackstone Audiobooks, 2013).
12. James Harting, The Ornithology of Shakespeare, Critically Examined, Explained and
Illustrated (1871; Distributed Proofreaders), http://www.pgdp.net.
13. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 3.5.1–6.
14. Bethan Roberts, Nightingale, London: Reaktion Press, 2022, 9.
15. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Nightingale of Keats’, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms, in Keats, Borges
and the Nightingale: A Celebration of the Borges Manuscripts at the Keats-Shelley House
with an Essay by Jason Wilson (Rome: Keats-Shelley Hours Press, 2012), 9.
16. John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, in Complete Poems (Richmond: Alma Classics, 2019),
295.
17. See Keats, Borges and the Nightingale..
18. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New
York: Vintage, 1970), xv.

19. Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 13.
20. This idea inspired Borges’s ode to Keats, ‘El ruisenor de Keats’ or ‘Keats’ Nightingale’, pub-
lished in Spanish in 1952, translated by Stephen Kessler as ‘To John Keats (1795–1821)’,
http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2017/09/1015-to-john-keats-1795-1821-jorge-
luis.html.
21. Andrew Culver, ‘A Discussion of Plato and John Keats’, Andrew Culver’s Weblog, 5 June
2008, https://andrewculver1.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/a-discussion-of-plato-and-john-
keats/ (accessed 30 November 2022).
22. Gannon, Skylark Meets Meadowlark, 178.
23. John Keats, ‘Where’s the Poet?’, ll. 8–10, quoted in Gannon, Skylark Meets Meadowlark,
172.
24. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘To the Nightingale’, trans. Stephen Kessler, in Selected Poems, ed. Alexan-
der Coleman (London: Penguin, 2000), 356.
25. Judith Chernaik, ‘Keats and Charles Brown’s Memoir: Was Keats’s Nightingale Really a
Thrush?’, The Keats-Shelley Review 35, no. 1 (2021): 56–63 (58).
26. Ibid.
28. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Borges Manuscript’, in Keats, Borges and the Nightingale; ‘[sic]’
and marks in original.
29. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem, April, 1798’, http://
www.online-literature.com/coleridge/642/.
30. Chernaik, ‘Keats and Charles Brown’s Memoir’, 60.
31. Bob Dylan, ‘Corrina, Corrina’, Warner Bros., 1962, 1966; Special Rider Music, 1990, 1994.
32. Raymond Williams, ‘Nature’, in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford:
33. Hoxie N. Fairchild, ‘Keats and the Struggle-for-Existence Tradition’, PMLA 64, no. 1
(1949): 98–114 (98).
34. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudio Gorbman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 129–31.
35. Roberts, Nightingale, 61.
36. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Selected Poetry and Prose of Percy Bysshe
Shelley, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Modern Library, 1951), 500.
37. William Wordsworth, ‘O nightingale, thou surely art!’, https://www.poetry.com/
poem/42284/o-nightingale%21-thou-surely-art.
38. Dawson, ‘Poetic Birds’, 595.
39. Taylor, ‘In Memoriam’, 57.
41. Michael Arlen, ‘When the Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, in These Charming People
(London: W. Collins, 1923), 15–37 (15).
42. Look for a fascinating account of this translation from short story to song to recording
history by Ian Newman, in a University of Notre Dame lecture series entitled ‘London in
Song’, which can be accessed at https://think.nd.edu/bq/lbc-2-4/. Newman shares a Spotify
playlist of recordings of the song by diverse artists and dramas in which they appeared; per-
formers include Nat King Cole, Vera Lynn, Frank Sinatra, Carmen McRae, Rod Stewart,
Tory Amos, and (my personal favourite in the present context) Ian Hunter and the
Rant Band: ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/
track/5i1paYw8zfQxCHWQwVWfcw.
43. William Blake, ‘A Memorable Fancy’, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793). The
words are spoken to the poet by a ‘Mighty Devil’. Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey
Keenes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 150.

404 jody berland
44. Krutch and Kellogg, Bird Songs. The strain of functionalist evolutionary theory insisting
that bird song has no meaning aside from utilitarian drives has clung to the question of bird
musicality far longer than it has persuaded ornithologists. See note 53.
45. Susan Fisher, quoted in Mason, Ornithologies of Desire, xv.
46. I explore this theme at length in Jody Berland, ‘Weathering the North: Climate, Colonial-
ism and the Mediated Body’, in North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of
Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 210–41. Cf. Kelly Struthers Montford
and Chloe Taylor, Colonialism and Animality (London: Routledge, 2020).
47. Gannon, Skylark Meets Meadowlark, xii.
48. Adam Weitzenfeld and Melanie Joy, ‘An Overview of Anthropocentrism, Humanism, and
Speciesism in Critical Animal Theory’, Counterpoints 448, ‘Defining Critical Animals
Studies: An Intersectional Social Justice Approach for Liberation’ (2014): 3–27 (5).
49. Richie Nimmo, ‘Posthumanist Praxis and the Paradoxes of Agency, Responsibility, and
Organization in the “Anthropocene”’, in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Organiza-
tion Studies, ed. Linda Tallberg and Lindsay Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2023), 42–56 (44).
50. António Guterres, ‘Secretary-General’s Remarks to High-Level Opening of COP27’, 7
November 2022, United Nations, https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2022-11-07/
secretary-generals-remarks-high-level-opening-of-cop27.
51. Bob Sundstrom, ‘Rachel Carson and Silent Spring: Can You Imagine a World Without
Birds?’, Birdnote, 14 April 2022, https://www.birdnote.org/listen/shows/rachel-carson-
and-silent-spring.
52. Carson, Silent Spring, epigraph. Carson was ‘devastated not only by the silence of the
birds but also by the readiness of her fellow scientists to break their objects of study into
manageable bits [. . .] Like (Bernie) Krause, she was haunted by a nightmare: her fellow
scientists’ refusal to know.’ Jody Berland, Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in
Network Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 189.
53. Berland, Virtual Menageries, 190.
54. I analyse the ‘Nature CD’ industry combining bird and human music for therapeutically
oriented sound tracks in Jody Berland, ‘“That Old Familiar Tweet Tweet Tweet”: Birdsong,
Music, Affect, Extinction’, in Virtual Menageries, 175–200.
55. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 99. See also Mason,
Ornithologies of Desire, 118.
56. Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 54.
57. Randy Malamud, ‘Americans Do Weird Things with Animals, or, Why Did the Chicken
Cross the Road?’, in Animal Encounters, ed. Manuela S. Rossini and Tom Tyler (London:
Brill, 2009), 73–96.
59. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 51.
60. Donna Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness
(Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 50.
61. Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Man, Epistle III’, https://theotherpages.org/poems/pope-e3.
html (accessed 20 September 2022).
62. Lucasta Miller, ‘The Elastic Glory of the Essay’, The Guardian, Books, 5 May 2011.
63. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Apology for Raimond Sebond’, in The Essays of Montaigne, Com-
plete, trans. Charles Cotton (Project Gutenberg, 2001), chapter XII; italics added, https://
www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#chap12 (accessed 20 October 2022).
64. Ibid.; italics added, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#chap12
(accessed 20 October 2022).
65. Haraway, Companion Species, 50.
66. ‘Can any thing be imagined so ridiculous [Montaigne asks], that this miserable and
wretched creature, who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all

things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to
know the least part, much less to command the whole?’ Montaigne, ‘Apology for Raimond
Sebond’, chapter XII.
67. Gannon, Skylark Meets Meadowlark, xi.
68. Berland, ‘“That Old Familiar Tweet Tweet Tweet”’.
69. Alfred Schutz and Fred Kersten, ‘Fragments on the Phenomenology of Music’, Music and
Man 2, no. 1–2 (1976): 5–71, doi:10.1080/01411897608574487.
70. Chion, Audio-Vision, 14.
71. Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1906).
72. Henry David Thoreau, Journal, March 10, 1852, in Journal, 3, September 16 1851–April
30 1852, ed. Bradford Torrey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 99.
73. Thoreau, Journal, March 15, 1852, in Journal, 3, 100.
74. Bernie Krause, The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s
Wild Places (New York: Little, Brown, 2012).
75. Don McKay, ‘Biosemiosis: Some Issues’, in Lurch, 12–13 (12).
76. Mason, Ornithologies of Desire, 121.
77. Don McKay, ‘On Foot to the Bypass Esso Postal Outlet’, quoted in Mason, Ornithologies
of Desire, 223.
78. Joshua Trey Barnett, Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence
(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2022), 118.
79. Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky (New York: Tor Books, 2017), 13–14.
80. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls, trans. A. S. Kline, https://www.poetryintranslation.
com/klineasfowls.php.
81. Ibid.
82. Madhur Anand, Parasitic Oscillations (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 2022), 6; origi-
nal italics.
83. Ibid., 95–6; original italics.
84. Andrew Whitehouse, ‘Listening to Birds in the Anthropocene: The Anxious Semiotics of
Sound in a Human-Dominated World’, Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 (2015): 53–71
(53), doi:10.1215/22011919-3615898.
85. ‘The Last Bird of Its Kind, Singing for a Mate That Will Never Come, is the Saddest
Thing Ever’, TwistedSifter, 21 October 2020, https://twistedsifter.com/videos/last-bird-of-
its-kind-singing-for-mate-that-will-never-come/.
87. Linda Hogan, Solar Storms (New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995), 265.
88. Nicole Sault, ‘For the Birds: How Ethno-Ornithology Opens Doors to Understanding Rela-
tionships with Others’, Journal of Ethnobiology 36, no. 4 (2016): 715–16.
89. Joni Adamson, American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The
Middle Place (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001).

Notes on Contributors
Tamlyn Avery is a Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Queensland,

Australia. Her research interests include literature, race, music, and modernism, and
her previous publications have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, American
Literature, Modernism/Modernity, The Oxford Handbook of African American Women’s
Writing, The Mississippi Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has recently published The
Regional Development of the American Bildungsroman, 1900–1960 with Edinburgh
University Press (2023) and is co-editor of Revisiting the Poetics and Politics of Mod-
ernism: The Women of 1922 (forthcoming). She is an editor of the journal of modern-
ist arts and letters, Affirmations: of the modern, the official journal of the Australasian
Modernist Studies Network.
Jody Berland is Professor Emerita and Senior Scholar in the Department of Human-
ities, and Graduate Programs in Communication and Culture, Social and Political
Thought, and Science and Technology Studies, York University. She is the author of
North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space (2009) and Virtual
Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures (2019), and numerous articles
on music, culture, and environment; founding editor of Topia: Canadian Journal of
Cultural Studies, and co-editor of Cultures of Militarization and other books. Her
book Digital Animalities: Media Representations of Nonhuman Life, co-edited with
Thomas Lamarre, is forthcoming.
Andrew Brooks is an artist, writer, and teacher who lives on unceded Wangal land. He
is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of New South Wales. Along with Astrid
Lorange, he is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate, and their book Home-
work was published in 2021. He is also a member of the publishing collective Rosa Press.
Michael Bull is Professor of Sound Studies at the University of Sussex. He is widely

published in the field and has recently written the monograph Sirens (2020) together
with editing the fifty-two-chapter Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies
(with Marcel Cobussen) (also 2020). He is the founding editor of the journals Senses
and Society and Sound Studies as well as being the editor of his two-book series: The
Study of Sound and Sound in Urban and Popular Culture.

notes on contributors 407
Mark Byron is Associate Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Sydney.

He is author of the monographs Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (2014) and Samuel Beckett’s
Geological Imagination (2020), and with Sophia Barnes produced the critical manu-
script edition Ezra Pound’s and Olga Rudge’s The Blue Spill (2019). Byron co-edited a
dossier with Stefano Rosignoli on Samuel Beckett and the Middle Ages in the Journal
of Beckett Studies 25, no. 1 (2016), and is editor of the essay collection The New Ezra
Pound Studies (2019). He is President of the Ezra Pound Society.
Jason Camlot is Professor of English at Concordia and University Research Chair (Tier I)
in Literature and Sound Studies. His critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of
Early Literary Recordings (2019), Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (2008),
and the co-edited collections CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with
Katherine McLeod, 2019) and Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st
Century (2007).
Peter Denney is Associate Professor in History at Griffith University. His research

focuses on the literature and history of Britain in the long eighteenth century, paying
particular attention to landscape, poverty, the senses, popular culture, and political
radicalism. He has recently co-edited Sound, Space and Civility in the British World,
1700–1850 (2019), Politics and Emotions in Romantic Periodicals (2019), and Trans-
cultural Ecocriticism: Global, Romantic and Decolonial Perspectives (2021). He is
currently completing a monograph on landscape and soundscape in Britain from
Defoe to Cobbett.
David Ellison is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Cultural History in the
School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University. He is also a
member of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research. His research interests
in noise are reflected in publications such as On Discomfort: Moments in a Mod-
ern History of Architectural Culture (with Andrew Leach, 2016) and Sound, Space
and Civility in the British World, 1700–1850 (with Peter Denney, Bruce Buchan, and
Karen Crawley, 2019).
Imogen Free is an AHRC funded PhD student at King’s College London (MPhil Uni-
versity of Cambridge, BA KCL), writing a doctoral thesis on late modernist women’s
writing and the politics of sound. She was the co-organiser, with Professor Anna
Snaith, of the 2023 conference ‘Sounding Modernism’ at King’s College London, and
her article ‘“Outside the Machine”: Stasis and Conflict in the Work of Jean Rhys’ was
recently published by Women: A Cultural Review (2020).
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard is the Obel Professor of Music at Aalborg University,

Denmark. He has published widely across subjects as diverse as sound, biofeedback in
computer games, virtuality, the Uncanny Valley, presence/immersion, and IT systems.
Mark is series editor for the series Palgrave Studies in Sound, and his books include the
anthologies Game Sound Technology & Player Interaction (2011), The Oxford Hand-
book of Virtuality (2014), The Oxford Handbook of Sound & Imagination (2019),
and the co-authored monographs Sonic Virtuality (2015) and The Recording, Mixing,
& Mastering Reference Handbook (2019).

408 notes on contributors
Helen Groth is Professor of English in the School of Arts and Media at the Univer-
sity of New South Wales. She is the author of Victorian Photography and Literary
Nostalgia (2004) and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen
Practices (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and co-author of Dreams and Moder-
nity: A Cultural History (2013). She is the co-editor of a number of books and
special journal issues, most recently Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Medi-
ation in Modern Literature and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Writing
the Global Riot (2023).
Sam Halliday teaches in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University
of London. He is the author of Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature,
Culture and the Arts (2013) and Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne,
Melville, Twain and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity (2007). His next book
will be entitled Ralph Ellison and Cinema.
K. C. Harrison has taught at the University of Minnesota since receiving her PhD in
English from Yale University in 2010. Her classes in the Youth Studies Program, the
Social Justice Minor, and the First Year Experience for the College of Education and
Human Development focus on amplifying marginalised voices while critically analys-
ing received discourses that uphold White supremacy, Islamophobia, and heterosex-
ism. Her work as a community activist addressing intersections of US criminal legal
and immigration systems grew out of her dissertation work considering how Ellison’s
‘lower frequencies’ echo forward through American sonic and literary landscapes.
Astrid Lorange is a Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at the University of New South
Wales. Her work addresses the question of how reading practices and publics emerge in
response to crisis and in the construction of collective understandings of survival and resis-
tance. She is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate, an editor at Rosa Press,
and the author of Homework (with Andrew Brooks, 2021), Labour and Other Poems
(2020), and How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein (2014).
Noelle Morrissette is Program Director of African American and African Dias-

pora Studies and Associate Professor of English. She is the author of Anne Spencer
Between Worlds (2023) and James Weldon Johnson’s Modern Soundscapes (2013)
and the editor of New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography
of an Ex-Colored Man (2017). A proud graduate of the University of Massachusetts-
Amherst (BA), Morrissette completed her graduate degrees in African Studies (MA)
and African American Studies and English literature (PhD) at Yale University. She
is the recipient, most recently, of an H. D. fellowship in American literature at the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and a Lillian Gary
Taylor visiting fellowship at the University of Virginia Special Collections for her
book about Spencer.
Julian Murphet is Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at the Univer-
sity of Adelaide. He is the author of the forthcoming Modern Character: 1888–1905
(2023) and Twentieth-Century Prison Writing: A Literary Guide (Edinburgh Univer-
sity Press, 2023).

notes on contributors 409
Janis Nuckolls is a professor of Anthropological Linguistics at Brigham Young Uni-

versity, with interests in sound symbolism, grammar, discourse, ideophones, and ges-
ture. Most of her published work has focused on Pastaza Quichua, a dialect of the
Quechua family of languages spoken in Amazonian Ecuador. Her most recent book,
co-authored with Tod Swanson, entitled Amazonian Quichua Language and Life:
Introduction to Grammar, Ecology, and Discourse from Pastaza and Upper Napo
Quichua, was published in November 2020. Future projects will be focused on clarify-
ing the polysystematic nature of Pastaza Quichua grammar, gesture, and intonation.
Richard Cullen Rath is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of

Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He teaches courses on race and ethnicity, Native Americans, new
media, sound studies, and the senses. He is the author of How Early America Sounded
(2003). He is also an experimental musician and soundscape artist whose work has
featured in international venues.
Justin St. Clair is an Associate Professor of English at the University of South Alabama.
He is the author of Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature: Novel Listen-
ing (2013), and his recent work on sound and literature includes contributions to The
Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies (2020), The Edinburgh Companion
to Literature and Music (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Thomas Pynchon in Con-
text (2019), and The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (2019).
Holger Schulze is full professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen and

principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His research focuses on the cultural
history of the senses, sound in popular culture, and the anthropology of media. He was
visiting professor at the Musashino Art University Tokyo, the University of New South
Wales Sydney, and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He produced radio features
for Deutschlandfunk Kultur, and collaborated with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Berlin. He writes for Seismograf, Merkur, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and Positionen.
Publications include Sonic Fiction (2020), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art
(2020, co-edited), and The Sonic Persona (2018).
Bruce R. Smith is Dean’s Professor of English and Professor of Theatre at the University
of Southern California. He is the author of seven books, including The Acoustic World
of Early Modern England (1999), The Key of Green (2009), Phenomenal Shakespeare
(2010), and Shakespeare and Masculinity (2000, reissued 2012).
Miranda Stanyon is a Senior Research Fellow in English and Theatre Studies at the Uni-
versity of Melbourne, where she currently holds an Australian Research Council Discover
Early Career Researcher Award. Her publications include Resounding the Sublime: Music
in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670–1850 (2021) and the edited
collection with Sarah Hibberd, Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture,
1680–1880 (2020).
David Toop has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening,
music, and materials since 1970, encompassing improvised music performance, writing,
electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations, and opera.

410 notes on contributors
It includes eight acclaimed books, including Ocean of Sound, Sinister Resonance, Into
the Maelstrom, Flutter Echo, and Inflamed Invisible. His solo records include New and
Rediscovered Musical Instruments, Entities Inertias Faint Beings, and Apparition Paint-
ings. His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual were released
on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows. He is Emeritus Professor of Audio Culture and Improvi-
sation at London College of Communication.
Tamsen O. Wolff is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Princeton

University, where she specialises in modern and contemporary drama. She has pub-
lished two books, Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century
American Drama and Juno’s Swans, a novel. Wolff is a director, a dramaturg, and an
Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework. She received her PhD in Theatre and
English from Columbia University.

Index
abolition, 21, 133, 149, 173, 285, audience, 61, 88, 108, 116–26, 130,
287 133–9, 162, 204, 208–12, 218,
Abu Hamdan, Lawrence, 21, 24–5, 222–3, 229–32, 240, 242–3, 276,
179 289, 304–6, 311–12, 324, 347, 359,
acousmatic, 4, 11–12, 157–63, 167–79, 361, 398
182, 187–9 audile techniques, 355
acoustic jurisprudence, 10, 21–7 audiotext, 228–38, 244–5
acoustic space, 59, 75n19 aural imagery, 173, 255–62, 267, 318,
acoustics, testimonial, 23, 179 320, 326
actor, 6, 9, 23, 25, 116–19, 121, 125–7, aurality, 12, 14, 16, 32, 182–3, 186,
129, 132, 135–6, 155, 360 191–3, 211, 216, 358
Addison, Joseph, 268–74 Austen, Jane, 45–58
Adorno, Theodor W., 81, 84, 88, 202, automata, 13, 208, 303–13
338
affect, 5, 9, 11, 20–6, 81, 122, 126, Bakhtin, Mikhail, 120, 216
176, 184–5, 188, 193, 269, 274, Baraka, Amiri (aka LeRoi Jones), 12,
357, 360–2, 374, 382, 390, 392 28, 202, 206–9, 291
agriculture, 317–19 barbarian, 68–9, 258
alehouses, 272 Barthes, Roland, 84
Amacher, Maryanne, 358 Bassel, Leah, 35
ambience (ambient sound), 10, 22, 26, Beats, the, 206
45, 90, 101, 129, 319 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 81, 84, 89
Anthropocene, 383, 393–5, 400 Berkman, Alexander, 169–72, 176, 178
anthropocentrism, 14, 391–9 Bernstein, Leonard, 156, 159–61
anthropology of sound, 72, 353–4 Bijsterveld, Karin, 101, 355–6
Antin, David, 230, 242–3, 248n biopolitics, 178, 182, 184, 192–3
anxiety, 12, 28, 46, 182–93, 201, 204, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of
251, 267, 274 Color), 59–63, 72–4
Armstrong, Louis, 161–3, 204–6 birdsong (in literature), 14, 89, 176,
artillery, 319–22, 333n, 347n 184, 344, 382–5, 391, 397
artistic research, 353–61 Birmingham, 278
atomic detonation, 319, 327–31 Black, 11–12, 19, 34–8, 61, 63, 91–4,
Auburn prison system, 169–72, 129, 145–52, 155–63, 174, 201–11,
180 284–99, 358, 360
Auden, W. H., 8, 323, 331 Black Arts Movement, 206–7

412 index
black aurality, 211, 358 conversation

Black Quantum Futurism, 358 in coffee houses, 268, 271–4
Blackfriars Theatre, 6, 116–19, 125 and listening, 178
breath, 11, 28, 32, 126, 131–3, 145–6, rules of, 269–70
148, 150–1, 238, 322, 327, 330, sound of, 118, 168, 239, 367, 397
343, 371 and women, 48, 50, 56
Brontë, Charlotte, 276 Corbin, Alain, 51, 354
Bronze, 91–2; see also Douglas Johnson, crowd(s), 69, 121, 220, 269–79, 302–3,
Georgia 323
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 273 cultural poetics, 14, 366–9
buoyancy, 366–81 Cusick, Suzanne, 178
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 12–13, 250–1, cybertext, 218
257–61 cylinder recording, 228, 230–3, 236–8,
Burroughs, William S., 201–2, 206–9 245
Butler, Judith, 35, 37
d’Arezzo, Guido, 89
cadence, 92–3, 107, 109, 117–18, 123, Dada, 324
131, 135, 152 dandy, 273
Cannon, Christopher, 32 Danielewski, Mark, 216–27
Cantos, The, 8, 87, 89–90; see also Davenport, Edgar L., 231–5
Pound, Ezra Davis, Angela Y., 174, 177
Carrà, Carlo, 322–3 Deaf Studies, 356
Carson, Anne, 183, 192 decolonising, decolonisation, 33, 73–7,
Carson, Rachel, 383, 392–3, 400 150, 358
cassette, 228, 238, 242–3 deficiencies, 366–7
catharsis, 106, 107, 112n44, 113n54 Delanda, Manuel, 46
Chion, Michel, 9, 101, 155–6, 167, Deleuze, Gilles, 46, 288
168, 256, 390, 396 Dennis, John, 103–4
chorus, 33, 36, 105–6, 108–9, 113nn, depiction, 368
117, 132–3, 137, 145, 275, 289, Desprez, Frank, 231
396 Dickens, Charles, 3, 168, 230, 277,
cinema, 119, 155–6, 167, 185, 210, 279
217, 256, 344, 390, 396 digital audio, 12, 216–17, 221, 228–9,
circulation, 104, 147, 159, 286, 295–7 244–5
citizenship, 149–50, 182–6, 190–3 documentary poetry, 245
civility see politeness Douglas Johnson, Georgia, 11, 83, 91–4
coffee houses, 13, 267–73 drums, 47, 119–28, 316, 320–1
cohabitation, 177, 396–7 Drum-Taps (poem), 320–1
Cole and Johnson Brothers Trio, Du Bois, W. E. B., 91, 93, 150, 202
146–7
colonialism, 41, 60, 68, 71–3, 93, 294, echo, 12, 53–4, 119, 183, 187, 191–2,
299, 358 293, 330
commensality, 110 ecocriticism, 401
computer games, 13, 251–8, 261 Edison, Thomas, 159, 203, 232–5
consciousness, 49, 55, 64–7, 206–7, ekphrasis, 82–3, 318
219, 297 El-Saadawi, Nawal, 176–8
contextualisation cues, 357 Eliot, T. S., 7, 8, 236–7

index 413
Ellison, Ralph, 12, 33, 154–6, 161–2, Gilbert, W. S., 129–39

202, 204–7, 209–11 Globe Theatre, 6, 116–19
emotion, 21–2, 49, 52, 73, 92, 120, Goldsmith, Oliver, 270
137–8, 152, 160, 235, 251, 256, Goodman, Steve, 115, 126–8
267–78, 305, 383, 389, 391, 392–3 grammar, 19, 63, 74, 103, 107, 217,
environments, 8, 13, 62, 115, 119, 285–97, 367
267–79, 313 Green, Henry, 49
epistemology, 14, 33, 115, 187, 338, Greenfield, Elizabeth Taylor, 154
356–60 Greet, William Cabell, 236–7
Eshun, Kodwo, 358 Guattari, Félix, 46
Examiner, The, 274
extinction, 392, 401 Hamilton (musical), 129–38
extralinguistic sound, 117–26 Handel, Georg Frideric, 90
exuberance, 366 harmony, 35, 45–7, 99, 102, 104–6,
109, 148
factories, 13, 185, 266, 277–9, 303, 341 Harney, Stefano, 35–7, 286, 290, 294,
fame (or rumour), 105, 107 296, 298
Faulkner, William, 32, 56 Hartman, Saidaya, 34–5, 41, 202,
fear, 115–16, 188–92, 258–61 287–8, 293
Feld, Steven, 100, 149, 354 Hayles, N. Katherine, 217, 223
feminism, 162, 183 hearing, 19–29, 48, 53, 55, 59, 61,
film, 13, 23, 37, 119, 160, 184–5, 208, 68–9, 106–7, 131, 155, 178–9,
217, 222, 250–1, 255–6, 261, 334, 203–5, 276–8, 303, 310–11,
338, 342–4, 367, 393 356–7, 383–6
Finnegans Wake, 3, 8, 83–6 heteroglossia, 216
First, Ruth, 173–4 heterotopia, 254, 257
flat disc record, 159–60, 228, 231, hex code, 220–2
233–6, 238, 244 hibakusha, 319, 326–32
forensic (forensic listening), 10, 21, 25, HMS Pinafore (opera), 131, 231
27 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 306, 309–11
format, 221, 224–5, 228–36 Homer, 3, 65–6, 316–17
Forster, E. M., 81–3 Hui, Alexandra, 356
Foucault, Michel, 169, 179, 254, 385 hum, 13, 20–1, 90, 182, 191, 193,
fragments, 13, 53, 62, 290–8, 336–45 302–13
frequency, 7, 19–24, 205, 211, 231, Hunt, Leigh, 274–5
236–7, 256, 285, 372 hyper diction, 129–39
Freud, Sigmund, 56, 202, 217, 338
fugitivity, 290–7 ideophones, 367–75
Futurism, 321–5, 358 Iliad, The, 64–9, 317
imagery, 55, 104, 255–61, 267, 279
Gaskell, Peter, 273, 279 immersion, 251–3, 259
gender, 33–8, 56, 61, 73, 140n, 182–93, Indigenous, 11, 39, 61–3, 70–1, 231,
271, 292, 318, 378 370, 392, 401
generic form, 228–38 industrial (industrialised, industrialisation,
gesture, 26–8, 101–3, 204, 292, 368, industrial noise), 13, 82, 185,
372–5, 399 268–79, 302–13, 319–27, 353–8
Gilbert, Gerry, 240–1 instantaneous disc recording, 235–7

414 index
instrument, 45–51, 101–2, 115–19, Longinus/Pseudo-Longinus, 106, 109

122, 129, 149–52, 229, 239, Luxemburg, Rosa, 172–3
310–11, 325, 353–60 lyric (lyricism, lyrical), 1, 3, 11, 85–6,
interdisciplinarity, 101, 392 90–3, 107–9, 129–39, 145–7, 150,
interface, 116, 218, 222 159, 222, 224, 292, 326, 329, 385,
interpretive community, 218–24 391, 394, 397
intonation, 367–75
Mac Low, Jackson, 240, 247
Jackson, George, 174, 177 machine, 13, 191, 204–5, 207, 221–2,
Jacobs, Harriet, 168 229, 239–40, 279, 281, 283,
James, Henry, 40, 156, 162 303–12, 321, 326, 329, 341–2,
James, William, 306 360, 408
Jaquet-Droz trio, 304–6, 308–9 Marinetti, F. T., 321–5
jazz, 35, 150, 155, 204–5 McCullers, Carson, 12, 202, 204, 212
Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 83, 91–7 McLuhan, Marshall, 16, 74–7
Johnson, James Weldon, 145, 157 media, vi, 1, 4–10, 12, 16, 22, 36–7,
Johnson, John Rosamond, 145–7, 151 61–2, 67, 83, 99–100, 112, 114,
Johnson, Samuel, 270 115, 153–65, 166, 201, 203,
Joyce, James, 3, 8, 83–6, 94–7, 202–3 206, 208–9, 214, 215–24, 226–7,
jurisprudence (acoustic jurisprudence), 228–49, 250, 260–1, 328, 346, 348,
21–7 355, 361, 364–5, 406–9
Meintjes, Louise, 354
Keats, John, 385–93 Metfessel, Milton, 156, 160–2
Kichwa language, 366–77 Methodism, 267, 274–5
Kiyooka, Roy, 239–40 Mikado, The (opera), 131
Kurihara Sadako, 328–31 Mills, Mara, 356
Milton, John, 3, 7, 11, 85, 99, 103–9,
labour (labouring classes), 185, 268–72 177, 318–19, 390
Lamb, Charles, 276 Miranda, Lin-Manuel, 129, 134
language (linguistics), 366–77 Mirrlees, Hope, 83, 90–4
‘Lasca’ (poem), 231–6 modern (modernise; modernity;
law and legal interpretation, 19–29, modernism), 7–8, 32, 53–6,
35–7, 156, 284–95 64–7, 81–94, 100–3, 145–51, 171,
Lerner, Alan Jay, 136–7 174–5, 184, 201–11, 237, 267–79,
‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ (song), 145–53 285–96, 302–13, 319–32, 337–8,
listening, 10–14, 20–8, 32–41, 48–56, 353–62
62–3, 81–94, 149, 155–62, 175–6, Moten, Fred, 29–37, 202, 287–99
182–93, 201–4, 216, 231, 267–79, MP3, 228, 244
284–5, 309–10, 343–4, 351–62, music, 3–5, 14, 21–4, 29, 34, 45–56,
382–9, 396–401 62–3, 71, 81–94, 99–110, 116,
literacy, 2, 4, 59–61, 66–73, 93, 201 118–19, 122–4, 126–39, 145–52,
Loewe, Frederick, 136–7 155–6, 158–66, 178–9, 189, 202–5,
logistics, 285–6, 294–8 208, 211, 221–6, 232–6, 267–8,
logos, 69–71, 102 271–2, 276–9, 289, 291–2, 304,
London, 35–6, 52–6, 81, 116–17, 119, 306, 309–10, 319–21, 324–6, 332,
182–4, 231–2, 267–71, 276–7, 303, 341, 345, 355–6, 360, 382–4, 391,
308, 312–14, 339, 343 395–7

index 415
Music Man, The (opera), 134 252, 254, 256–9, 273, 277, 285,
musical instrument 304, 306, 326, 332, 335, 338–9,
bugle, 320–1 343, 345–6nn, 394, 398–9, 401
guitar, 50, 326, 332
intonarumori, 325 Obadike, Mendi+Keith, 359–60, 364n
My Fair Lady (opera), 130, 136–7 Odyssey, The, 64–5
Oliveros, Pauline, 358, 364n
Nadaff, Ramona, 179 orality (oral cultures, oral histories), 8,
Nancy, Jean-Luc (Listening), 33, 42, 44, 11, 59–78, 82, 94, 106, 210, 232,
76 247n, 278, 316, 332n, 335n, 377
Napolin, Julie Beth (The Fact of ornithology, 385, 400, 402n, 403n
Resonance), 1, 15, 33, 41, 43, 49 Ouzounian, Gascia, 345n, 348n, 356,
National Council of Teachers of 364n
English, 236 Owen, Alex, 56, 58n
nationalism/nationhood, 184, 191–2
nature, 202, 204, 219, 221, 228, 232–5, paralinguistic sound, 118, 120–1, 123
239, 242, 244–6, 262, 268, 274, Paris: A Poem, 90–1; see also Mirrlees,
285, 288, 292, 298, 302, 309–11, Hope
320, 325, 336–8, 342, 344, 345, Parker, James, 21
368, 374, 376–7, 380, 381–2, Pater, Walter, 82, 95n
388–404 patter, 120, 129–141
network (networks, networked), 8, 12, performance, 11–12, 14, 26, 51, 53, 65,
28, 61, 83, 209, 216, 220–1, 223, 84–6, 97, 104, 112n, 114n, 115–16,
225, 246, 249, 277, 353, 401 118, 123, 125–6, 127n, 130–4,
New Negro Renaissance, 91, 94 138, 141n, 148–9, 159–61, 204–6,
nightingale, 154, 341, 382, 384–97, 226n, 228, 231–2, 234–5, 237, 240,
402–3nn 242–3, 247n, 248n, 249n, 267–8,
noise, 4, 7, 8, 15n, 16n, 20, 23, 27, 29, 273, 281n, 282n, 291, 304–6,
47, 49, 51, 55, 81–2, 86, 94–8nn, 308–10, 313, 326, 334, 358–61,
101–2, 104–9, 111n, 114n, 153n, 379n, 396–7
169–71, 209, 212n, 224, 231, 238, Philip, M. NourbeSe, 13, 284, 299n,
240, 258n, 361, 363n, 365n, 388 300n, 301n
noise (fugitive), 32–3, 284–5, 288–90, phonograph (phonography,
293, 296–300n, 355–6 phonographic), 6–7, 83, 93, 155,
modern noise (industrial, war), 12, 159–63, 165n, 202, 204, 206,
13, 183–5, 189–93, 194n, 197n, 212n, 213, 215n, 229, 236, 240,
302–13, 314n, 316, 319–21, 324– 246n, 247n, 249n, 345
6, 333–5nn, 337, 340–2 piano (pianoforte), 45–56, 57n, 89, 92,
prison noise 173–80nn, 181n 149, 159, 185, 311
street noise (urban), 35, 39, 267–83, Pirates of Penzance, The (opera), 129,
397 131–2, 224
theatre noise, 116–26, 127–8nn, 129, Poe (musician), 219–20, 222–7
133, 137–8 poem (poetics, poetry), 99, 104–10,
novel, 3, 9 10, 12, 33, 36, 38–41, 42n, 113, 146–7, 149–50, 207, 231–44,
46, 48–54, 83–6, 95n, 96n, 156–7, 247, 284
161–3, 180n, 183, 202–11, 214n, postmodernism, 209, 214n
216–24, 225n, 226n, 227n, 230–1, Pound, Ezra, 8, 11, 83, 86, 88, 96n, 331

416 index
prosody Reed, Ishmael, 12, 202, 205, 209,

anapestic hexameter, 231, 317 213–14nn
anaphora, 319–20, 333 reel to reel, 228, 238–43
apostrophe, 321 religion, 11, 15n, 146, 152n, 187, 273–5,
dactylic hexameter, 317–18 281–2nn, 355
elegy, 91, 330 remediation, 13, 217, 224n, 227n
epizeuxis, 319–20 resonance, 1n, 10, 15n, 16n, 32–3,
iambic pentameter, 325 40–4nn, 50, 105, 119, 126, 167,
iambic tetrameter, 93, 325 178, 179n, 181n, 183, 186, 187–8,
iambic trimeter, 325 191, 195, 197n, 262n, 290, 358,
tanka, 329 363n, 365n
Pynchon, Thomas, 12, 201–2, 209–11, Reyner, Igor, 42
224 rhyme, 65, 108–9, 113n, 129, 131–5,
138, 172–3, 325, 388, 397
quietness, quiet, 45, 52, 54, 72, 104–5, Richardson, Dorothy, 45, 48, 51–8nn
105, 107–9, 116–17, 125, 137, rioting (crowds, political violence,
169–70, 184, 186–7, 191, 193, 234, London Riots), 35–6nn, 39, 43n
268, 270–9, 320, 361 Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugène, 311–14
Robin, Gwendoline, 359
race, racialisation, racism, 61, 69, Rothenberg, David, 359–60, 393, 402n,
71, 154–63, 201–11, 219, 232, 404n
284–99 Rubery, Matthew, 1, 15n, 32, 41n, 44n
radio, 3, 7, 8, 23, 28, 130–1, 154–5, Russolo, Luigi, 101, 111n, 324–5
182–5, 189–90, 201–11, 223, 236,
243, 332n, 337, 356, 397 Sabine, Wallace, 354
Rancière, Jacques, 35 sacrifice, 11, 99–110, 112, 113–14nn,
rap, 129–41 319
read (reading, reader), 1–6, 8–14, 15n, salpinx (war trumpet), 317–18
20–4, 26–9, 32–5, 41–43nn, 47–50, Salter, Mary Jo, 326, 334n
53, 59, 62, 64–7, 73, 81–90, 94, Sands, Bobby, 174, 176, 180n
99–102, 106–113nn, 131, 135, 138, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 367
146–52, 157–61, 176, 183, 191–3, Satie, Erik, 47
202–12, 214–27, 230–49, 250–63, savage, 68–72, 76n, 77, 258–61, 263n,
268–78, 284–6, 289, 295, 298, 305, 277, 279, 346
325, 330–1, 352–3, 360–1, 375–7, Schuyler, George S., 156–8, 164n, 166n
382–3, 390–5 science (science of sound), 9, 12, 64,
reality (constructed, social, virtual), 67–8, 99, 101–2, 111n, 122, 137,
85–6, 156, 160, 203, 208, 251–6, 139n, 167, 194n, 196n, 209, 212,
261–22nn, 377, 397 294–5, 299, 300–1nn, 313n, 315n,
recording, 2, 9, 12, 19–28, 72, 77, 93, 345, 347, 348n, 353, 356, 363–4nn,
140–1nn, 155, 161, 164–5nn, 190, 367, 384, 393, 398–400
201, 208, 211–12nn, 215n, 216, sensibility, 51, 312, 319
222, 226n, 229–249nn, 256, Serres, Michel, 55–6, 58n, 102n, 111n,
294, 330, 345, 356, 360–31, 361, 363n, 365n
400, 403 Shafer, R. Murray (The Soundscape), 1,
records (flat-disc, long-playing), 155, 2, 15n, 43n, 96n, 111n, 135, 140n,
159–60, 164n, 166n, 201–2, 219, 149, 153n, 183, 187, 194n, 242,
223–4, 227n, 231–8, 243, 247n 279n, 319, 326, 334n

index 417
Shakespeare, William, 2, 6, 115–28nn, sonic methodologies, 100, 102, 115,

384–5, 390, 402n 126, 133–4, 156–8, 365n
silent (silence), 2, 3, 7, 13, 16n, 20, 33, sonic pasts (archives), 7, 32–44,
39–40, 49–57nn, 72, 83, 91, 100–2, 64–78nn, 159–63, 167–81, 201–11,
104, 106, 108, 110, 121, 136, 267–82, 288–90
153n, 165n, 169–73, 175, 177, sonic poetics, 375–7, 290–3
179, 187, 189, 190, 203, 262, 270– sonic witness, 11, 145–53
1, 275, 278, 285, 287–8, 294–9, sonnet, 108–9, 113, 230
312, 319, 326–32, 334, 335n, 337– sound
8, 342, 344, 363n, 365n, 378–9nn, ambient, 26, 101, 182, 185, 313
382, 384, 393, 397, 401, 404 mechanical, 115, 191, 267, 303–6,
singing, 10, 55, 70, 74n, 130, 137, 139, 313–14nn
172, 175–6, 185, 219, 222, 338 musical, 81, 83
birdsong, 5, 53, 341, 382, 386–405nn racialised, 11–12, 24, 33, 38, 149,
race, 154, 159–63, 165, 205 188, 203, 207, 277, 287
religious worship (spirituals), 125, prison, 12, 28, 90, 109, 167–79, 338,
145–52, 267, 274–5 358
urban (street,work, popular), 272, urban, 1, 82, 86, 169, 182, 185, 203,
278–9, 309 267–77, 303–13, 337
Sir George Williams University Poetry war, 12–14, 123, 178, 181–93, 294,
Series, 242, 248n 316–32, 336–45
slavery, 32, 93, 154, 156–7, 164n, 168, sound studies (epistemology, knowledge),
202, 212n, 215n, 284–9, 294–5, 1–14, 21, 25–6, 33, 41, 62–3, 73,
297–300nn 83, 94, 99–110, 115–17, 127,
Sloterdijk, Peter, 10, 48–9, 57–8nn 183, 193, 202, 319, 324, 337–45,
Slovo, Gillian, 36–8, 43n 356
Snaith, Anna (Sound and Literature), soundscape, 1n, 4, 8, 11–12, 19, 40,
1, 7, 15n, 17n, 95n, 97–8nn, 111n, 82–3, 106, 135, 147, 149, 151,
139n, 183, 194n, 196n, 334n, 168, 174, 182–93, 203, 258, 279,
335n 289, 302, 312, 317, 319, 326–7,
song, 2–4, 6, 13–14, 22, 25, 33, 41, 340, 344
56, 65–6, 85, 89, 92–4, 97n, soundways, 10–11, 59, 63
104–9, 112n, 113, 117–20, 123–4, Spectator, The, 268–9, 271, 280n
128, 129–38, 140, 145–52, 154, spirituals, African-American, 93–4,
159–66nn, 172, 175–6, 203–5, 146–52, 160, 204
211, 221–7, 247n, 272, 284, 286, Sterne, Jonathan, 1, 14–15nn, 68, 76,
288–98, 310, 317–18, 326, 329–30, 110n, 230, 246n, 346n, 355–6,
333n, 335n, 341, 345, 363n, 365n, 363n
379, 382–404nn Stewart, Garrett (Reading Voices), 1, 2,
sonic, 1–5, 8, 11, 13, 16n, 24, 26–7, 4, 15n, 41n, 217
60, 63, 83, 86, 104–6, 116, 123, Stoever, Jennifer Lynn (The Sonic Color
129–131, 136, 168–70, 203, 285, Line), 12, 15n, 34, 42n, 44n, 163,
302, 309, 313, 336–82, 390 166n, 202–3, 346
sonic agency, 182–93, 201, 365n sublime, 82, 93, 103–10, 277–8, 306,
sonic epistemology (thinking), 14, 319, 329, 383
181n, 337–8, 351–65 Sullivan, Arthur, 130–1
sonic mediations, 9–10, 12, 106, Sully, James, 277, 282n, 312,
228–48 314n

418 index
Talk Poetry, 242 Victor, Divya, 10, 19–29

‘Taps’ (song), 175, 320, 325–6, 331 video game (computer game), 252
Tarzan of the Apes, 256–61, 263n virtual reality, 251–6
telephone, 155, 157–9, 171, 319, 338 visual imagery, 90, 255–62
TEP (taboo, euphemism, and voice, 23, 25, 32–5, 38–41, 54, 62–5,
perjoration cycle), 60–1, 71–3 69, 72–3, 117–18, 120–3, 125–6,
testimony (testifying), 10, 19–28, 37, 106, 130–1, 136–7, 145–52, 154–63,
117, 125, 172, 174, 327, 330–1, 345 170–5, 177, 179, 189–92, 201–2,
The Beasts of Tarzan, 261 204–7, 234–5, 238, 273, 277–9,
Thompson, Emily (The Soundscape of 288–92, 297, 310–11, 325–6,
Modernity), 313, 333, 356, 363n 336–8
Thoreau, Henry David, 15n, 168, 180n,
396, 405 Walser, Robert, 50
Tkaczyk, Viktoria, 356, 364n ‘Waste Land, The’ (poem), 7, 236–7,
Tocqueville, Alexis De, 279, 282n 246n, 247n
tone (tonality, tonal), 1, 4, 9, 21, 34, 54, WAV, 228
101, 119, 159, 163, 170, 172–3, Wesley, John, 274–5
188, 225, 268–70, 274–5, 292, 306, white aurality, 358
310, 320, 322, 327, 329, 331, 340 Willson, Meredith, 132
transcription disc recording, 237–8 witnessing, witness statements, 11, 20,
transformative justice, 28 23–8, 106–8, 110, 150–5, 179, 274,
translation, 23–4, 28, 46, 69, 71, 112, 330, 336, 340, 345
119, 151, 243, 317, 322, 333–4, Woolf, Virginia, 49, 54, 90, 183,
352, 360, 366, 378n, 384, 395, 403 190
Wright, Alexis (Carpentaria), 10, 33–4,
Van Drie, Melissa, 354, 363n 36, 38–41
vibration, 50, 54, 91, 115–26, 160, 183, Wright, Richard, 156, 158
205, 237–8, 244, 277, 286, 319,
336, 338–9, 344 xenophobia (xenophobic fallacy), 70


The Edinburgh Companion To Literature and Sound Studies - Helen Groth (Editor), Julian Murphet (Editor) - Edinburgh Companions To Literature and The - 9781399502306 - Anna's Archive

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The Edinburgh Companion To Literature and Sound Studies - Helen Groth (Editor), Julian Murphet (Editor) - Edinburgh Companions To Literature and The - 9781399502306 - Anna's Archive

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The Edinburgh Companion to

Literature and Sound Studies

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Edited by Helen Groth and Julian Murphet

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Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by

ISBN 978 1 3995 0230 6 (hardback)

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List of Figures viii

Part I: Literature, Listening, Sounding

Part II: Literature, Music, Performance

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Part III: Literature, Voice, Acousmatics

Part IV: Literature, Media, Coded Sound

Part V: Literature, War, Industry

Part VI: Literature, Sonic Epistemology, Language

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Notes on Contributors 406

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I t is probably no surprise that in a recently published volume entitled Keywords in

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Piping down the valleys wild,

‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’

‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;

‘Piper, sit thee down and write

And I made a rural pen,

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adaptation proved extraordinarily versatile in developing vocabularies of audition

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True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,

Literary ‘voice’, an indispensable category of all serious composition, is situated at

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as a parent, having guided my child across roads enough times; simultaneously as a

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of the epistemological capacities of the acousmatic in the context of the uncomfortable

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supremacism and imperialism of these popular literary works, Grimshaw-Aagaard

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The Sound a Sentence Makes:

W hat sound does a sentence make?

Three years after the death of her husband Divyendu Sinha,

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f The hollow, wind-blown plunge of dry bamboo /or a

f The breathy fret of ten or fewer sheets of heavy duty

f A distant click of a camera shutter /or the snap of thin

f The soft lift of plastic, followed by a sharp click

f A series of stuttering shutter snaps in quick succession /

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List of Figures viii

Notes on Contributors 406