Acoustic Palimpsests and the Politics of Listening

A microphone in a chandelier: How a secret recording sparks mnemonic imagination and affect

“…Past sounds could thus be brought to the present, co-constructing the aural architecture of imagining and understanding the past (see Roy, 2018: 13). In addition to voice and music, technical capture of sound also makes audible the inscription of the physical characteristics of a recording and its surrounding sounds, thus contributing to the immediacy of aural pastness (Daughtry, 2013; Katz, 2004; Sterne, 2003: 327). Such peripheral sounds – the interference of the sliding of the needle on the record or the electrostatic hiss on magnetic tape, print-through, the wear-and-tear on the record or equipment (Daughtry, 2013: 8; Katz, 2004: 25) – become historically and imaginatively relevant indices of the passage of time and its pastness.…”

“…In addition to voice and music, technical capture of sound also makes audible the inscription of the physical characteristics of a recording and its surrounding sounds, thus contributing to the immediacy of aural pastness (Daughtry, 2013; Katz, 2004; Sterne, 2003: 327). Such peripheral sounds – the interference of the sliding of the needle on the record or the electrostatic hiss on magnetic tape, print-through, the wear-and-tear on the record or equipment (Daughtry, 2013: 8; Katz, 2004: 25) – become historically and imaginatively relevant indices of the passage of time and its pastness. What is more, accidental capture of sounds – such as the sound of the train entering the recording (Pickering, 2012: 31), or as I discuss below, the sound of a moving chair or a cough – presents an aural surplus of the past.…”

Towards a Practice of Palimpsestic Listening

“…For Daughtry, the palimpsest can be used to cast light on the hidden layers of a sound text. He says the concept offers listeners opportunity to bring undercurrent auditory phenomena to the surface in the search of new meaning: ‘the palimpsest metaphor urges us to seek out and recover the hidden layers of agency and history and creativity and politics that underwrite and overwrite all sound experiences, and to understand that the acts of making and listening to music always involve both inscription and erasure’ (Daughtry 2013: 24). In this light, a sonic palimpsest connotes a complex of auditory experiences in which both foregrounded and effaced sounds vie to be heard.…”

“…In this light, a sonic palimpsest connotes a complex of auditory experiences in which both foregrounded and effaced sounds vie to be heard. Daughtry’s rendering of the concept highlights the importance of close listening strategies to uncover intra-textual and cross-sensory dynamics, where vast networks of sonic acts and agencies embed in sound objects and environments: ‘the palimpsest has come to figure as a capacious metaphor for all types of intertextuality, intermediality, layered history and embodiment’ (Daughtry 2013: 9).…”

Difference in Contact: Early Music, Colonialism and the Archive

“…People are not books, I appreciate, but J. Martin Daughtry's 'Acoustic Palimpsests and the Politics of Listening' uses this metaphor vividly to discuss material and affective traces in sonic cultures. 33 It can sometimes feel as if the physical trace is all that's left of premodern history; traces in every sense of the word, considering how many manuscripts have been damaged or lost. These objects, many of them incredibly rich in content and meaning, are, as you say, our primary way of accessing history (albeit always mediated by how we read them, the act of which itself is messily affective).…”