The inaugural Sawyer Seminar on Hearing Modernity heralds an exciting year ahead. Veit Erlmann and Jonathan Sterne’s meditations on the disciplinary and institutional pressures confronting Sound Studies reminded me that the field’s attraction derives in part from its promise of novelty. If we begin with listening, Erlmann and Sterne suggest, we might hear new epistemologies, new histories, new … something for which we don’t yet have a name. Such, at least, are Sound Studies’ grand promises (to go along with the evening’s theme of grand narratives).
The conversation also raised for me more pedestrian questions, questions not about Sound Studies in the academy, but about sound in the academy. Specifically, the afternoon was captured—our was meant to be captured—for audio recording (as well as, partially, video). As a result, participants used microphones, both wireless and wired. They did so with varying success. Little wonder! Effective microphone use is a sophisticated technique, one of the seemingly infinite technical relationships between a human body and an instrument that conditions many sonic performances. Neither the featured speakers nor the questioners exhibited particular comfort with microphones. In vain did the evening’s organizers coax follow-up questions to be spoken into the audience mics. And the mixture of audio samples and talk that punctuated Jonathan Sterne’s presentation, while not particularly complex, required constant adjustments that occasionally caught the sound technicians off-guard.
This may sound like a critique of the seminar’s technical production, but I mean just the opposite. Rather, I wish to amplify the ways in which we, in the setting of the seminar and throughout the academy, call upon ourselves to perform sound, and—or perhaps it’s the same thing—on sound itself to perform. This post is a challenge to attend to these sonic performances.
Let me give an example of what such attention might mean. Early in the session, an attendee next to me indicated to the sound board operator that Prof. Erlmann’s microphone level should be turned up, a request with which the board operator complied. Usually, one is called upon to disregard this moment as technical byplay, with no bearing on the substance of what was said. As I hear it, the call of Sound Studies is such that we must listen to this intervention, and to its echoes. What we hear might amplify, interfere with, or otherwise modify the ideas under discussion. For instance, my neighbor’s request, if we attend to it, literalized an institutional demand that our work address a large audience. The imperative to make work accessible to everyone and also reproducible beyond the classroom noises as the request to speak into the microphone, to turn up the volume, to be clearer and louder. In the spirit of Prof. Erlmann’s critique of these imperatives, we might have considered productively how sound itself figures in the libidinal economy of academic labor, had we tuned in to the proper frequencies.
This example is, of course, a simple observation of the banal fact that what we say and how we say it are inextricably intertwined. But, in the spirit of a Sound Studies that promises new knowledge and new ways of knowing, I exhort seminar participants to lend an ear to our acoustic performances this year. I cannot anticipate what we will hear, but I can promise to listen.
Derek Miller
Assistant Professor of English
Harvard University
dmiller@fas.harvard.edu
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