Jessica E. Teague, Sound Recording Technology and American Literature: From the Phonograph to the Remix

Abstract

There is, by now, plenty of firm evidence that sound studies is a thing that scholars of the humanities, in general, can think of themselves as doing. The field has a Handbook, a Reader and a Companion, waiting as the willing greeters to a growing bibliography. There's also a journal under the wing of a major publisher, and last, but not least, a roster of conferences large enough to rack up an environmentally-dubious number of air miles. But lurking at the back of these conferences, or in Zoom rooms, are literary scholars wondering if they're quite where they're supposed to be, or if there has, in fact, been a minor mistake in programming. After all, books don't, by and large, make much noise. I've sat and listened rapt to presentations on underwater microphones, vintage drum machines and the social history of foghorns, only to look down at the poem I plan to start my own paper by reading, and finding it to be, by comparison, very quiet. Certainly, when I read the poem out it will become sounded, but that's me making the sound, not the poem. I worry that I am an impostor, undeserving of this free conference stationery. But then comes the third measure of plastic-cupped coffee, and with it the thought that literary researchers have been doing something like sound studies for a lot longer than it was called that. When we talk about the unsettling effect of Marianne Moore rhyming "of" with "love," we are, surely, studying sound, and the