Listening to Sound Archives

The compilation of essays on sound archives, published as Social Dynamics, Vol. 41, No. 1, is finally out! The essays are a result of APC’s special focus on sound archives from 2012 - 2014, which included a series of workshops around acoustic collections, practices of listening, on ear-witnessing, on questions related to voice and sonic knowledge production.

The special segment was edited by Anette Hoffmann during her time as a senior researcher at APC. The heterogeneous papers of the compilation presented in this segment do not claim to listen to “the past”, but rather to listen to acoustic archives and historical sound files. These are what a group of scholars, students and artists engaged with in the series of workshops and presentations around sound archives hosted by the APC.

Hoffmann’s introduction seeks to direct attention to the existing depositories that keep recorded words, songs, music, and other acoustic signals from the past: sound archives. Hoffmann speaks of an “underdose” of transdisciplinary scholarly attention to acoustic archives, or rather their audible contents, with the exception of radio archives, which she understands as related to their disciplinary specificity, and to the hermetic form of many of those collections, for instance in the case of historical recordings of language and music from the early days of sound recording. Sound collections, she writes, are often “buried” in specific collections and have rarely been deemed relevant for other areas of research. This has led to a considerable neglect of acoustic archives in research in the humanities.

The essays cover a variety of themes and topics, from Liz Gunner’s reading of archived radio broadcasts of the 1980s in “Violence, the Occult and the Everyday: a Zulu Radio Drama in the 1980s”, to a notion of loss and the politics of archiving noisy place holders in Niklas Zimmer’s essay “Percival Kirby’s Wax Cylinders: Elegy on Archiving a Deaf Spot”. Britta Lange’s essay “Poste Restante, and messages in bottles: Sound recordings of Indian Prisoners of the First World War” and Phindezwa Mnyaka and Anette Hoffmann’s contribution, “Hearing Voices in the Archive”, both engage with recordings of prisoners of World War I produced in German camps. 

The contributions show that listening to archived sound opens up a vast echoic field of acoustic sources that are of interest for a variety of fields of research. In short: the Archive reverberates; there is a lot to sound out.