Archival Listening

Archival Listening Katherine McLeod (bio) Archival listening, to start with, is the act of listening to archives. That listening can happen in places such as a public archive or outside of archival spaces, such as listening at home to online archival collections or listening to saved audio files on headphones while walking. But archival listening is more than listening to archives. Archival listening is listening to archives while reflecting on how you are listening and how you intend to share what you have heard. That sharing could take the format of a published essay, podcast episode, classroom lecture, playlist, or simply telling a friend about what you have heard, all of which require a degree of editorial curation. Archival listening listens with that future listener in mind. Archival listening listens with the aim of making something new out of archival audio. One such making is ShortCuts. Released monthly on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed, ShortCuts explores what can be made with literary audio archives by cutting, splicing, and reframing their digitized contents. What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through the selection and arrangement of short archival clips? What kinds of scenarios of listening across time arise through such acts of archival listening with the goal of creating audio-based criticism in the present? [End Page 325] As the writer and producer of ShortCuts, now in its fourth season, I have developed a practice of archival listening in the making of over thirty episodes. But when I started to write a version of ShortCuts for this forum, I realized that the sound clips are often what respond to the prompts, arguments, and questions posed in my critical narration. When editing the audio, I can play the same clip again—and again; I can overlap my voice with a recording, as though re-enacting it, which is a technique I started using in an episode based on a recording of Muriel Rukeyser (ShortCuts 2.4 "Connections). Would it work to write about these techniques of archival listening, or do they have to be performed? Playing clips of archival audio can demonstrate affective, sonic entanglements all at once in ways that a linear text cannot; yet, in writing about archival listening, I will try to perform it too. [Tape rewinding] … and I say that while holding out my arms gesturing as though I am attempting to hold the sound …1 [Tape rewinding ends] Archival listening is a practice of attending to the archival apparatus holding the sound. Holding because that action gestures to the physicality of these contexts, both archival and original, and to the embodied agency of the listener selecting audio from the archives. To hold can be an act of care and an act of containment. For instance, to be held is to be supported or carried, implying the body doing this physical and emotional work; likewise, to be held can mean to be held back, to hold one's attention, or to be kept, all implying an assertion of power. An audio archive holds sound. While you were away, I held you like this in my mind.2 [End Page 326] If this were audio, you would have heard those italicized lines spoken by Phyllis Webb. You would hear the sound of her voice. (You might also have heard her voice resonating in the room in which it was recorded and the sonic textures of a recording that was recorded on a reel-to-reel tape in 1966 and converted into a digital audio file.) That sound of her voice is entirely hers and impossible to describe or to recreate through writing. Her written poetry is her voice too, of course. But her voice on the page is not Webb's voice as her voice. Not as her sonorous voice. Not as her voice that says like this as though she is showing you something—with tenderness. Not as her voice that invites an imagining of her reading in 1966. When listening now, we must remember that the sound we are hearing, which we understand as her voice, was constituted and recorded in that moment in time. Archival listening is hearing the body in...

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.