A current of anxiety about exclusion ran below the surface of our first conversation on sound studies: the exclusion of local voices in a changing rural economy, the exclusion of certain forms of scholarship from academic discourses, the exclusion of unique sonic markers in favor of a unified soundscape. In our effort to consider sound as a tangible object of study, we still fell back on conversations that reify sound as ephemeral, or at least as an object that might be lost, transformed, or resistant as we pursue it. All of the projects presented at the workshop offered different forms our work on sound might take, such as podcasts, film, and experimental writing. A silent consensus seemed to agree that work on sound should be sonified and should battle the challenges of exclusion, loss, and change. The value of sound as an object of study was assumed.

 

The Monday following our workshop, on October 20, 2014, Dr. Ana Maria Ochoa, an ethnomusicologist from Columbia University, presented a talk on her forthcoming book Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Duke University Press, 2014) to a group of graduate students and faculty members from history, anthropology, and musicology. She offered a perspective from which our previous week’s discussion may have benefited—that writing is just another imperfect recording device with its own idiosyncratic challenges and assets. Particular to her book content, she argued that the sound of the human voice was integral to the construction of political classifications as Colombia began to conceptualize a diverse citizenship in its budding nation during the nineteenth century.

 

My own work on sound tends toward Ochoa’s perspective. I concern myself with sound and aurality in eighteenth-century Paris. My sound recordings are textual and visual. I spend a majority of research attempting to understand not so much what sounds were, but how listeners and even passive hearers processed them. I do not presume sound to be a productive object of study and have spent considerable effort to develop arguments for the study of sound subsumed in history: what has come to be known in some academic circles as audible history. Why commit to an understanding of how people constituted and interpreted their late eighteenth-century soundscape? A more theoretical answer offers thinking material for the remainder of our workshops.

 

Two theoretical concepts underpin my work in audible history: acoustemologies and aurality. Steven Feld coined the concept of acoustemologies as ways of knowing through sound. Aurality considers not only histories of the social construction of listening and hearing, but also the physical processes of experiencing sound both consciously and subconsciously. The study of aurality compliments the reconstruction of soundscapes and completes the project of audible history.

 

These two perspectives, acoustemologies and aurality, in conversation within audible history, demonstrate broad social, economic, and political change over time in a particular time and place, while granting agency to individual actors who both constitute and interpret their soundscape. Thus, sound allows me at once into both a general and specific perspective of social life in eighteenth-century Paris. As a musicologist, an understanding of this wider sonic context informs and productively problematizes my study of contemporaneous music—sound organized by humans who lived out and constituted these acoustemologies and aural practices.

 

Generally, scholars of sound no longer have to argue for their object of study. Nonetheless, it can only benefit intellectual conversations to articulate precisely what sound accomplishes in a given inquiry. While sound can indeed be a tricky object of analysis, we must consider how our work holds the potential to re-inscribe discourses of its ephemerality, particularity in comparison to the other senses.

 

I will leave on the table a proposition: that sound studies is not a discipline, per se, but a mode of analysis available to any discipline. For this reason, conversations about sound can be so challenging. Sound demolishes disciplinary comfort zones, especially jargon and assumptions, in favor of big questions that require diverse disciplinary theories and methods. As such, we need to articulate the beliefs that underpin our individual work within the fine arts, history, literature, anthropology, musicology, etc. to productively work together toward a general yet productive perspective on the study of sound.

 

Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden is a PhD Candidate in Musicology at Duke University.

 

On audible history see:

Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and meaning in the 19th-century French countryside (New York Columbia University Press, 1998)

Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003)

Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004)

Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: attending to the O-factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: architectural acoustics and the culture of listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002)

For a succinct discussion in his own words of Feld’s acoustemologies, see his recent Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 49.

 

On aurality see:

Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: a history of modern aurality (New York: Zone Books/Cambridge, MA: Distributed by MIT Press, 2010)

James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: a cultural history (Berkeley: University of Carlifornia Press, 1996)

Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007)

Ana Maria Ochoa, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Columbia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)

Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008)