Our upcoming project: Mapping Whitney

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• Recap Quiz
• Sounds in DH!
  • Had you ever thought about the role of sounds in digital projects?
  • Anything that surprised you about the sound projects you evaluated for your blogs?

Experiencing sound, and the information it carries, involves listening, the conscious processing of auditory stimuli. Gary Ferrington likens listening to “theater of the mind,” where every individual listener is her own dramaturge [Ferrington 1994]. Alan Hall notes listening opens a “portal through which a deeper, often inarticulate, consciousness can be glimpsed”  [Hall 2010, 99]. Such glimpses may promote imagination, interaction, even immersion. Tim Crook says sound very effectively prompts life from little details “seen” in the mind’s eye [Crook 1999, 8].

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Michael Bull and Les Beck suggest by considering sound we open new ways of thinking about and appreciating the social experience, memory, time, and place — the auditory culture — of sound [Bull and Beck 2003, 12]. They advocate “deep listening” or “agile listening,” both of which involve “attuning our ears to listen again to the multiple layers of meaning potentially embedded in the same sound.” Deep listening, they say, also involves “practices of dialogue and procedures for investigation, transposition and interpretation”  [Bull and Beck 2003, 3–4]. They argue several outcomes from deep listening.

• Sound makes us rethink our social experience, its meaning, nature, and significance.
• Sound makes us rethink our relation to community.
• Sound makes us rethink our relation to others, ourselves, and the spaces and places we inhabit.
• Sound makes us rethink our relationship to power [Bull and Beck 2003, 3-4].

there are several reasons for a focus on sound . . .

• Sound is ephemeral, disappearing, its meaning quickly lost.
• Sound is temporal, but capable of returning, here but not here, a feeling, a sense, an experience.
• Sound was the original and remains a fundamental sensory input and communication channel for human culture.
• Sound conveys deep, rich information; is capable of providing immersive, interactive contexts for listeners. Through the act of careful listening, listeners can derive a great deal of information about the world they inhabit.
• Sound transforms space to place.
• Sound is the phoneme for speech (verbalization of abstract thought).
• Sound is the central component of narrative (the recounting of a sequence of events and their meaning) and storytelling (the addition of setting, plot, characters, logical unfolding of events, a climax).
• Sound is the basis for literature (written works considered to possess lasting artistic merit) and the various practices and cultures associated with its production and consumption (reading, writing, and listening)

Barber, John F. “Sound and Digital Humanities: reflecting on a DHSI course” DHQ 10.1 (2016)

Presentations!