Vox Media: Sound, "under language," and "narrative archaeology" in/as Literature

Authors

  • John F. Barber Washington State University Vancouver

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_5-1_1

Keywords:

sound, sound based, remix, under language, sound narratives, sound files, computer code, narrative archaeology, hearing, listening, aural/oral storytelling

Abstract

This essay describes (re)combining and/or (re)conceptualizing sound artifacts from two pioneering works of electronic literature no longer readily available to create a new, sound-based narrative for each work. The techne proposed promotes broader opportunities for conceptualizing and creating literary artifacts characterized by audibility of text, sound as text and meaning, and heightened awareness of the author’s and/or speaker’s voice(s) in the text. This approach may help challenge the past invisibility of voice in literature and promote practices more rewarding than simulacra, description, or transcription. Vox Media. Sound in and/or as literature.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

John F. Barber, Washington State University Vancouver

John F. Barber, Ph.D. teaches in The Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. His scholarship, teaching, and creative endeavors focus on intersections among Digital Humanities, computer technology, and media art. Of particular interest are digital archiving / curation and sound+radio art. He developed and maintains Radio Nouspace (www.radionouspace.net), a curated listening gallery/virtual museum for sound featuring historical and experimental radio+audio drama, radio+sound art, sound poetry, and experimental music. His radio+sound art work has been broadcast internationally, and featured in juried exhibitions in America, Canada, Germany, Macedonia, Northern Ireland, and Portugal. Barber also developed and curates Brautigan Bibliography and Archive (www.brautigan.net), an online, interactive information structure known as the preeminent resource on the life and writings of American author Richard Brautigan. Richard Brautigan: An Annotated Bibliography (McFarland, 1990) and Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life (McFarland, 2007) are offshoots of this work. Barber has contributed essays regarding Brautigan to Postwar Literature 1945-1970: Research Guide to American Literature, Encyclopedia of Beat Literature, and international literary journals.

References

AARSETH, Espen (2015). “Electronic Literature. What Is It?” Keynote ad-dress presented at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference, Ber-gen, Norway, August 5.

ANDERSON, Laurie (2008). “Interviewed by Cathy Lane.” Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice. Ed. Cathy Lane. London: CRiSAP (Cre-ative Research into Sound Arts Practice). 180-185.

BALL, Hugo (1974). Dei Flucht aus der Zeit [Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary]. Translated by Ann Raimes. New York: Viking Press. 70-71.

BARBER, John (2014). “Internet Radio and Electronic Literature: Locating the Text in Aural Narratives.” ebr (electronic book review) 3 May. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/internetradio

BARBER, John (2016). “Sound and Electronic Literature: ‘Under Language’ and ‘Narrative Archaeology’.” International Conference on Digital Media and Textuality. Universität Bremen, Germany, 3-5 November 2016. https://shapeshiftingtexts.wordpress.com

BERNSTEIN, Charles (1994). “Frame Lock.” College Literature 21.2 (June). 25 Aug. 2017. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/essays/frame-lock.html. [See also 1992 Modern Language Association conference as part of a panel entitled “Framing the Frame: Theory and Practice”]

BERNSTEIN, Charles, ed. (1998). Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Oxford University Press.

BLONK, Jaap (2008). “Sound.” Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice. Ed. Cathy Lane. London: CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice). 31-33.

BULL, Michael and Les Back (2003). “Introduction.” The Auditory Culture Read-er. Ed. Michael Bull and Les Back. Oxford: Berg Publishers. 1-18.

COWEN, Amy (2002). “Talking Photos: Interview with David Frohlich.” Mpulse, A Cooltown Magazine, June.

Originally at www.cooltown.com/mpulse/0602-thinker.asp but no longer available.

CROOK, Tim (1999). Radio Drama. Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.

ELECTRONIC LITERATURE ORGANIZATION (2015). 25 Aug. 2017. http://eliterature.org/what-is-e-lit/

FELD, Stephen (2003). “A Rainforest Acoustemology.” The Auditory Culture Reader. Ed. Michael Bull and Les Back. Oxford: Berg Publishers. 223-239.

FERRINGTON, Gary (1994). “Audio Design: Creating Multi-Sensory Images For The Mind,” Journal of Visual Literacy 14.1: 61-67.

GRIGAR, Dene (2006). “The Role of Sound in Electronic Literature.” No longer online but formerly available at trAce Online Writing Center. http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/Opinion/index.cfm?article=140

HALL, Alan (2010). “Cigarettes and Dance Steps.” Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound. Ed. John Biewen and Alexa Dilworth. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 99. http://realityradiobook.org/

HIGHT, Jeremy (2005). “Narrative Archealogy: Reading the Landscape.” Paper presented at Media in Transition Conference: The Work of Stories, Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology, May 6-8. 25 Aug. 2017. http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit4/papers/hight.pdf

HIGHT, Jeremy (2006). “Views from Above: Locative Narrative and the Land-scape.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol 14, 7.8 (30 November). [Special is-sue, “Wild Nature and the Digital Life”] 25 Aug. 2017. http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n07-08/jhight.asp.

HIGHT, Jeremy (2015). “Narrative Archaeology.” academia.edu. 25 Aug. 2017. http://www.academia.edu/203311/narrative_archaeology.

HIGHT, Jeremy, Jeff Knowlton, Naomi Spellman (2002-2003). 34 North 118 West. http://34n118w.net/

IHDE, Don (2003). “Auditory Imagination.” The Auditory Culture Reader, Ed. Michael Bull and Les Back. Oxford: Berg Publishers. 61-66. [First pub-lished in Ihde, Don (1976). Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Ohio University Press, Athens. 133-139.]

LANE, Cathy (2008). “Forward.” Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice. Ed. Cathy Lane. London: CRISAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice). 7-11

MCLUHAN, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill.

MIGONE, Christof (2001). “Headhole: Malfunctions and Dysfunctions of an FM Exciter.” Experimental Sound & Radio. Ed. Allen S. Weiss. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 42-52.

MILLER, Paul D. (2008). “In through the Out Door.” Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Ed. Paul Miller. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 6-8.

MOULTHROP, Stuart (2012). “Sc4nda1 in New Media.” Dichtung Digital: A Journal of Art and Culture in Digital Media, 41.9 (November). 25 Aug. 2017. http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2012/41/moulthrop/snm/.

MOULTHROP, Stuart (2007). Radio Salience. Center for Digital Discourse and Culture. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. 25 Aug. 2017. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/07Spring/moulthrop/radioSalience/index.htm.

MOULTHROP, Stuart (2007). Under Language. 25 Aug. 2017. http://www.smoulthrop.com/lit/ul/

MURCH, Walter (2005). “Womb Tone,” Transom Review 5.1. 25 Aug. 2017. http://transom.org/2005/walter-murch-part-1/

SCHAFER, R. Murray (1977). The Tuning of the World: A Pioneering Exploration Into the Past History and Present State of the Most Neglected Aspect Of Our Envi-ronment: The Soundscape, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto. [See also Schaf-er, R. Murray (1993). The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Destiny Books, Rochester, Vermont adapted from The New Soundscape (1966) and The Tuning of the World (1977)]

SHERWOOD, Kenneth (2008). “From Audio Black to Artful Noises: Looking at Sound in Electronic Literature.” Paper presented at the Electronic Litera-ture Organization Conference, Vancouver, WA, May 2008. 25 Aug. 2017. http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/audio-black-artful-noises-looking-sound-electronic-literature

SMITH, Bruce R. (2003). “Tuning into London c. 1600.” The Auditory Culture Reader. Ed. Michael Bull and Les Back. Oxford: Berg Publishers. 127-135.

SUROWIECKI, James (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. New York: Doubleday.

WISHART, Trevor (2008). Interviewed by Cathy Lane. In Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice. Ed. Cathy Lane. London: CRISAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice). 70-72.

Downloads

Additional Files

Published

2017-12-27

How to Cite

Barber, John F. 2017. “Vox Media: Sound, "under language," and "narrative archaeology" in/As Literature”. MATLIT: Materialities of Literature 5 (1):11-26. https://doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_5-1_1.

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2017): Vox Media: Sound in Literature

Section

Secção Temática | Thematic Section

License

Copyright (c) 2018 John F. Barber

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

MATLIT embraces full open access to all issues. Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
  4. A CC licensing information in a machine-readable format is embedded in all articles published by MATLIT.
  1. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
  2. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Notices:

  1. You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.
  2. No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.