Society, Culture and the Auditory Imagination in Modern France

Abstract

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Listening to the archive: Historical geographies of sound

“…Speech and human voice have formed a significant focus of research for historical geographers concerned with the micro-politics of sound, from slaves' speech rights in the British West Indies (Ogborn, 2011) to the asymmetrical power-relationships between early field-recordists and natives and their 'silences' (Cameron and Rogalsky, 2017;Revill & Gold, 2018), the role of salons and operas as sonic spaces shaping political sentiment in eighteenth-century France (Sykes, 2015), or the contested moral geographies of sound and noise in mid twentieth-century England (Matless, 2005;1998). The human voice binds language to the body, but the nature of this connection is paradoxical, for the voice belongs to neither: as soon as it is uttered, it 'detaches itself from the body and leaves it behind' (Revill & Gold, 2018: 1418.…”

“…As many of the authors mentioned in the previous pages have emphasized through their work, in its manifold typologies and manifestations, sound is both immersive and fluid. Unlike the field of vision spread out in front of us, sound is diffused around us (Sykes, 2015). Its experience feels 'less stable than a point of view which can be fixed' (Cole, 2015: 60).…”