thanks for not being a zombie

This certainly is a fascinating and growing area of historical research. One of the students I share a supervisor with, James Mansell, has just embarked on a PhD thesis on 'Auditory culture in fin-de-siècle Paris' and has, I think, done quite a lot of work on sound and cultural theory etc. If you are interested in talking to him, let me know and I'll pass his e-mail address on to you privately.

That would be great, Cath. Thanks!

This is a huge issue for me as I'm now preparing for a spring class on the design of "virtual world" simulations of historical contexts, where the students are mostly going to consider the theoretical and methodological problems involved.

So, for example, not just "how did the past sound?" but also, "How do we know what spoken speech sounded like in a past society, given that speech represented in written texts is often not at all reliably mimetic to spoken speech?" Even for time periods after the invention of photography, you can't say with confidence what many moments of everyday life looked like, given the nature of photography that aimed to represent everyday spaces or scenes. And so on.

But the sound question is one of the most methodologically profound.

That sounds like a fascinating class, Timothy. I've found that people in eighteenth-century England were also concerned with the nature of speech and the relationship between speaking and writing. They also wondered about the question of how best to represent on the page the diversity of speech that existed even within the borders of their own country.

So one approach is to look for what contemporaries had to say about the questions that vex us now.

But even beyond the question of how language sounded at different times and at different places is the question of how people listened and what their world (their "soundscapes") sounded like: what did they ignore? what did they consider important?

This sounds flakey, perhaps, but I've been sitting on my back porch trying to engage in the "deep listening" that the Bull and Back advocate in the introduction quoted above. What do I hear? Tree frogs, cicadas, wind in the trees, dogs barking, birds of various kinds, but also the air conditioning unit, the jets overhead, and the distant sounds of traffic. All of these sounds carry important information if one is attuned to them. What does it mean when the tree frogs start or stop singing? ...if a dog is usually quiet but starts yapping its head off? ...if the jets are no longer flying overhead?

I think it's fair to say that, aside from the dog example, most contemporary Americans don't pay any attention to these sounds and what they mean. We get our information from other sources, and so these sounds recede from our consciousness, not because they cease to exist, but because we cease to register their existence. I don't believe this has always been so.

I heartily recommend The Auditory Culture Reader as both a useful resource in itself and as a good starting point that will lead readers to further sources. Furthermore, the book is part of a series on sensory experience, and the others look pretty interesting.

While we've seen many scholarly works addressing "visual culture" in the last decade or two, the other senses have, for the most part, been neglected.

Two thoughts that I had while reading this entry:

First, my husband grew up on a rural Christmas tree farm in Oregon. Now we live in an apartment in Portland, Oregon, and although it is not a large city, it is still the city. I find that he has a much more intimate relationship to sound than I do. For me, most noises register as just filler and noise. For him, he wants to be able to identify every sound that he hears. At first it drove him nuts trying, but now he has learned the language of city sounds in a way that I, who have lived in the city for a long time, never have.

Case in point: we were sitting at home last weekend and he jumped up suddenly off the couch and said, "I just heard a steam engine! I heard one of those when I was a little boy." He puts his jacket on, jumped into the car and then chased after the noise that I only heard after puzzling over it for a while. He came back satisfied because he had reached the tracks and saw the train pass and it was in fact a steam engine.

My second comment is more of a reccomendation. Although you said that the human voice does not change much, there is still something about poets reading their own works. I love the book with CDs "Poets Speak."

Lots and lots to think about here, G. A lot of the threads and ideas here make me think of my Chaucer course, where sound is vitally important. Chaucer presented his works aloud to his first audiences. And it's poetry, after all -- a medium related to song and music. I make students learn how to pronounce and read Chaucer aloud, so they can "hear" it in their heads even when they're silently reading (which helps with comprehension, as well, so that, for example, they hear "ers" as "arse," and don't mistake it for "ears"). But what we "know" about how Middle English sounded is a constantly evolving thing, and, of course, necessarily based on study of written text. Though Middle English is about as close to 'phonetic' in its orthography as English gets, it's still writing and not speech.

And then there's the importance of sound to the content, as well. There's a funny couplet in the Miller's Tale in which Nicholas and Alison make love (and, I think, reach orgasm) just as the bells for one of the canonical hours of prayer for the monks ring. I point it out to students because it's funny and naughty, but also because it's so meaningful in so many ways (for example, it points to the messy overlapping of the secular and the sacred in medieval life, among other things). But also, it makes students realize that even though the medieval world was free of traffic and electronic noise, medieval towns had their own kind of constant soundscape -- church bells galore, thin walls through which voices escaped (including the most "private" kinds of sound), animals, hucksters selling wares, and so and so on. And those church bells also parcelled out their time. They may not have lived by the watch like we do, but their time was marked in other ways, including sound.

And on that note -- coincidentally -- my university's tower bells just rang! Back to work!

TF, you might be interesting in Alain Corbin's Village Bells.

I think about these questions often in my research on music, but hadn't really considered it in relation to literature. Thanks for the pointer to The Auditory Culture Reader. Here's a reference on musical soundscapes that you may find useful: Strohm, Reinhard. 1990[1985] Music in Late Medieval Bruges. Oxford: Clarendon Press.