‘Read with thine ears:’
Literature as Sonic Archive
This audio paper explores literature as an archive of past soundscapes and a speculative project in auditory archivism, tracing the unique modality of text as a medium for sound through works by Emily Dickinson, John Clare, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and many others. In doing so, it investigates how the format of the audio paper may productively engage with these literary soundscapes through collages of readings from different texts.
Starting from the assumption that literary texts can be seen as sound archives that are unique in their scope, materiality, and interactivity, this paper examines how novels and poems have captured and preserved soundscapes of the past. Moreover, by analyzing the intersection of sound and memory in literary works, the paper considers how literature not only preserves but also transforms and reimagines auditory experiences, thereby reflecting on ideals of fidelity in sound recording and preservation.
Finally, the discussion extends to the potentiality of literature as a speculative auditory archive, where sounds are (re)constructed, magnified, or imagined in ways that transcend the real and actual, showing how poetic language offers a rich field of inquiry for understanding sound and auditory culture. To this end, the audio paper traces the ways in which authors have imagined and reflected on technologies for audio recording and reproduction, as they harness these technologies as generative metaphors and epistemic resources in their sonic speculations.
Through this lens, literature is positioned as a dynamic and interactive archive of the past and future that challenges conventional notions of sound recording and preservation, offering a space where the actual, the imagined, and the speculative converge. This exploration invites a reconsideration of the ways in which literature and sound intertwine, offering new perspectives on the role of the written word in capturing the ephemeral and transitory nature of sound.
Claudia Wolff, www.unsplash.com
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About authors
Katharina Schmidt is a musician and musicologist based in Berlin. She completed undergraduate studies in musicology, theater studies and literature at the Free University Berlin, holds a Master’s degree in Sound Studies from the Berlin University of the Arts and was a scholar of the German National Academic Foundation. Her artistic portfolio includes film music, sound art, and radio pieces alongside releases on various independent labels. She has worked with MaerzMusik, WDR, and ZKM, and has published research on topics such as sound in literature, acoustic ecology, and new interfaces for musical expression. She teaches at Humboldt University in Berlin.
James Castell is a writer, researcher and musician interested in various questions about nature in literature and other art forms with a particular focus on sound. He is currently a Research Fellow in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, working on a project entitled ‘The Sound of Nature: Soundscapes and Environmental Awareness, 1750-1950’. Between 2013 and 2021, he was a Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University, having previously completed a Career Development Fellowship at the University of Oxford and a PhD at the University of Cambridge.
Title: After William Shakespeare, King Lear (IV.6.152).