The Sound inside the Silence: Travels in the Sonic Imagination

237 Pages·2019·1.785 MB·English

by  Seán Street

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN SOUND
The Sound inside
the Silence
Travels in the Sonic Imagination
Seán Street
Palgrave Studies in Sound
Series Editor
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Musik
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Palgrave Studies in Sound is an interdisciplinary series devoted to the
topic of sound with each volume framing and focusing on sound as it is
conceptualized in a specific context or field. In its broad reach, Studies
in Sound aims to illuminate not only the diversity and complexity of
our understanding and experience of sound but also the myriad ways in
which sound is conceptualized and utilized in diverse domains. The series
is edited by Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, The Obel Professor of Music at
Aalborg University, and is curated by members of the university’s Music
and Sound Knowledge Group.
Editorial Board
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (series editor)
Martin Knakkergaard
Mads Walther-Hansen
Kristine Ringsager
Editorial Committee
Michael Bull
Barry Truax
Trevor Cox
Karen Collins
More information about this series at
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Seán Street
The Sound inside
the Silence
Travels in the Sonic Imagination
Seán Street
Faculty of Media and Communication
Bournemouth University
Poole, UK
Palgrave Studies in Sound
ISBN 978-981-13-8448-6 ISBN 978-981-13-8449-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8449-3
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An attentive ear is the desire of a wise man
Ecclesiasticus 3:29 (KJV)
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
W. B. Yeats: ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’
To Jo
Preface
In his work, De Anima, (On the Soul), Aristotle begins his examination
of the sense of hearing thus: ‘…Sound is in two ways, one in actuality,
the other in potentiality’ (Aristotle, 176). There is really no better way
to explain the intent behind this book than that, and of the two sonic
species identified by him, it is the second that in particular identifies
the nature and essence of the journeys undertaken here. It is the third
and last part of a trilogy that began with Sound Poetics and continued
with Sound at the Edge of Perception. When the latter was published in
2018, a friend suggested that my books were growing quieter; if that
has been in fact the case, and I suspect it is, then this writing is where
silence takes over; at least, that is our starting point, but only insofar as
it provides the blank canvas required for imaginative sound to create its
pictures and transport us elsewhere.
Like its predecessors, this is a poetic exploration in at least two senses
of the word; it will invoke the voices of writers and poets as guides to
the sound world, and it will seek to explore its subject in the spirit of
those voices, rather than as a writing of technical exposition. It is also
a highly personal journey, because it is the only way I know of to ask
some of the questions this book poses. In writing this, I have been
ix
x Preface
trying to listen to myself listening, and what I think I have heard is
something that can only be accounted for by the employment of an old
fashioned and some would say overly romantic word: ‘wonder’. To lis-
ten and to hear is one thing, to locate the whispers of response inside
the imagination is another, but it would all be as nothing if it did not
engender wonder at the music of everything, because it is that wonder
that makes us go on listening to the world. Needless to say, as the jour-
ney has progressed, one question has provoked another, and then more;
this is why I have found myself turning to the minds of so many others
who have heard things and then tried to explain what it was that they
heard. This too reflects the personal nature of the quest; on any long
journey, it is reassuring to have friends around you, and I have found
myself turning back to a number of familiar literary voices to provide
moments of sonic illumination: Lucy Boston, Charles Dickens, Emily
Dickinson, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas appear among others at
various parts of the story, and for me, their perceptions help to clar-
ify my own. Out of all these thoughts and ideas, my greatest wish
in making this text is that something in it may speak with its own
voice to those who hear poetry in sound, as well as sound in poetry,
and who consider that listening is fundamental to understanding the
world. Here, beginning with an open space, a field of consciousness as
much as it is a piece of physical terrain, I hope we will people appar-
ent silence (whether or not it actually exists—we shall debate that too)
with sounds, music and imaginative possibilities that enables us to travel
through time and space to the distant past, the infinite future and even
to the afterlife, without stirring from where we are. Such is the wonder
of the sonic imagination, because while sound is made up of events, it
is our perception and psychic invention that gives it meaning and sig-
nificance. Of course, it gets harder, this fishing for sound through active
listening, because all the time, the world shouts louder and louder, and
it is easier to shout over it than to wait and attend to the quiet voices
beneath the cacophony, the whispers that may, in the end, be more
important than anything else.
Sound recording, despite being with us since the nineteenth century,
still only provides an auditory witness in technical terms to a fraction of
history. On the other hand, human beings have been recording sound
Preface xi
ever since they set foot on earth, through marks, paintings and words. It
is in these that may be heard the voices of our ancestors and the world
through which they moved, and there is much to learn from them.
Likewise, the places in which we are rooted, begin and/or grow, are
made of the sounds that fuel our trajectory into the world; the music of
where we are is also the song of who we are, whether it be a pastoral hill-
side in dream England, or in downtown Memphis, Tennessee. Sound
goes direct from heart to heart, which is why radio and its developing
descendents continue to speak across boundaries and classes, opening
imagination and painting colours that belong to everyone, while yet
remaining intensely personal to each individual. We all carry our own
sonic rainbow, and it is ours, because we made it out the raw materials
of listening.
We take all this on the journey, just as we take the sound of the
voices that made us, the dialects and grain drawn from region and
town, and the people who, no longer physically heard, continue to
travel alongside us in memory, speaking to us in the sound beneath the
silence that is always there, always attentive and recording and playing
back. We respond to memory, just as we hear with our eyes, emotion-
ally; walk into an art gallery, and you join a continuing conversation
that immediately includes you, triggering new ideas while at the same
time acting as a mnemonic. Stand in front of a sculptural group, and
listen, tune in; there are voices deep in the stone, striving to be heard by
the sympathetic imagination. It is all simply a question of wavelengths;
everything has a voice, although in the twittering world of media, it
becomes harder to differentiate between truth and fake, between friend-
ship and self-promoting oratory; the world can shout virtually as well as
physically, and the mobile screens we carry in our pockets offer no res-
pite. In this respect, hearing (in auditory terms or virtually) may be one
thing, but listening is quite another; it is all about selection from the
multifarious wavebands that bombard us.
We are in the end what we hear, or rather what we listen to and
absorb; we are receivers as well as transmitters, and coming to the last
full stop of this book, and to the conclusion of the journey that has led
to it, there is still a sense that we have really only returned to the start,
or rather, reached a new starting point, a new season of sonic awareness,