Dead Voices: Phonography, Archaeology and Materiality (original) (raw)
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National Phonography: Field Recording and Sound Archiving in Postwar Britain
Vast numbers of historical field recordings are currently being digitised and disseminated online; but what are these field recordings—and how do they resonate today? This thesis addresses these questions by listening to the digitisation of recordings made for a number of ethnographic projects that took place in Britain in the early 1950s. Each project shared a set of logics and practices I call national phonography. Recording technologies were invested with the ability to sound and salvage the nation, but this first involved deciding what the nation was, and what it was supposed to sound like. National phonography was an institutional and technological network; behind the encounter between recordist and recorded lies a complex and variegated mess of cultural politics, microphones, mediality, sonic aesthetics, energy policies, commercial interests, and music formats. The thesis is structured around a series of historical case studies. The first study traces the emergence of Britain’s field recording moment, connecting it to the waning of empire, and focusing on sonic aspects of the 1951 Festival of Britain and the recording policies of national and international folk music organisations. The second study listens to the founding of a sound archive at the University of Edinburgh, also in 1951, asking how sound was used in constructing Scotland as an object of study, stockpiling the nation through the technologies and ideologies of preservation. The third study tracks how the BBC used fieldwork – particularly through its Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme (1952-57) – as part of an effort to secure the aural border. The fourth study tells the story of The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, produced by Alan Lomax while based in Britain and released in 1955. Here, recordings were presented in fragments as nations were written onto longplaying records, and the project is discussed as a museum of voice. The final chapter shifts perspective to the online circulation of these field recordings. It asks what an online sound archive is, hearing how recordings compress multiple agencies which continue to unfold on playback, and exploring the archival silences built into sonic productions of nations. Finally, online archives are considered as heritage sites, raising questions about whose nation is produced by national phonography. This thesis brings together perspectives from sound studies and ethnomusicology; and contributes to conversations on the history of ethnomusicology in Europe, the politics of technology, ontologies of sound archives, and theories of recorded sound and musical nationalisms.
Sound Recording in the British Folk Revival: Ideology, Discourse and Practice, 1950-1975
PhD Thesis, Newcastle University, 2017
Although recent work in record production studies has advanced scholarly understandings of the contribution of sound recording to musical and social meaning, folk revival scholarship in Britain has yet to benefit from these insights. The revival’s recording practice took in a range of approaches and contexts including radio documentary, commercial studio productions and amateur field recordings. This thesis considers how these practices were mediated by revivalist beliefs and values, how recording was represented in revivalist discourse, and how its semiotic resources were incorporated into multimodal discourses about music, technology and traditional culture.Chapters 1 and 2 consider the role of recording in revivalist constructions of traditional culture and working class communities, contrasting the documentary realism of Topic’s single-mic field recordings with the consciously avant-garde style of the BBC’s Radio Ballads. The remaining three chapters explore how the sound of recorded folk was shaped by a mutually constitutive dialogue with commercial popular music, with recordings constructing traditional performance as an authentic social practice in opposition to an Americanised studio sound equated with commercial/technological mediation. As the discourse of progressive rock elevated recording to an art practice associated with the global counterculture, however, opportunities arose for the incorporation of rock studio techniques in the interpretation of traditional song in the hybrid genre offolk-rock. Changes in studio practice and technical experiments with the semiotics of recorded sound experiments form the subject of the final two chapters. Ethnographic, historical and semiotic approaches are combined with techniques from critical discourse analysis and conceptual metaphor theory to explore sound recording as a means of defining, expressing, and elaborating the revival as a socio-cultural movement. Recording offered a semiotic resource for interpreting traditional texts andrepertoires, and for reimagining social space and the relationship of performance. As such, it constituted a highly significant dimension of the revival’s cultural-political practice.
"Songs of the living dead: The politics of posthumous performance"
'Popular Music Worlds, Popular Music Histories', Proceedings of the 2009 IASPM 15th International Conference, 2013
Published in the online proceedings of the 2009 conference. IASPM 15th International Conference Popular Music Worlds, Popular Music Histories 13-17 July 2009 University of Liverpool, UK. http://www.iaspm.net/proceedings/index.php/iaspm2009/iaspm2009/index
Posthumous Sound and the General Imagination
Cultural Politics, 2024
The 1997 discovery of a fifty-thousand-year-old flute made from the femur of a cave bear, with its intimation of reanimating nonhumans, and the 1977 launch of the Voyager spacecraft carrying an eclectic set of sound recordings intended to be heard in the distant future by nonhuman others: two sonic events that frame the possible meanings of posthumous. Together these examples and others question whether everything audible is already over-the bear's lost life, electronic recording procedures-or indefinitely deferred until an act of listening that may never occur. An ecological address to the problems of making sonic culture at a historical turning point at or beyond terminal risk prompts a politics of the commons grounded in a general imagination (modeled on Marx's general intellect). Against earlier modernist claims for both rationality and its failure, sound cultures enact a drama of melancholy and hope in the ecological continuity of body and world at the moment of their end.
This paper outlines the prodigious field of public history preservation practice prompted by popular music culture as means of exploring the relationship of affect, history and the archive. Framing this exploration with a concept of cultural justice, it considers the still uncertain place of popular music as a subject of heritage and preservation, assessing the parameters of what counts as an archive and issues of democratisation. It offers a discussion of the archival and affective turns in the humanities as a means of framing the politics of practice focussed on popular music culture. The paper offers empirical evidence of the relational qualities of the popular music archive considered in affective terms. Discussion draws first on evidence from the vernacular practices of communities in what Baker and Collins (2015, 3) describe as ‘do-it-yourself’ archives and secondly from ‘authorized’ collections in established archival institutions. The paper explores the motivations of popular music archivists and how they articulate the affective dimensions of their work, and how their work qualifies personal and collective commitments and expressions of value and indeed, relations with users. In conclusion, affect is identified as pertinent to wider issues in the relations of archive, archivist and user and the possibilities of historical practice. Keywords: affect; popular music; public history; DIY archives; authorized archives; cultural justice.
Hearing through Our Eyes: Musical Archives and Authentic Performance
Popular Music and Society, 2008
Archives of written music reveal the ways in which scores and parts create as much forgetting as remembering and how they function as palimpsests that record a great deal of change. Instead of setting sounds in stone, musical notations created by composers and the notations added by performers demonstrate how writing, rather than acting as an obstacle to alteration, functions as a transformative force. Although written scores and parts create an illusion of a revitalized past, of the dead hand revived so to speak, hearing written music—through our eyes as well as in new interpretations—confirms our inability to connect with an original, authentic voice from the past even as it propels us into the future.