Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age

Preface

Preface The genesis of this project lies in Lawrence W. Levine’s single-word response to a question I posed about obscure historical sources. To complete a graduate class in cultural history, I attempted to make sense of thousands of letters written to console Ida McKinley after the assassination of her husband in 1901. As a nascent scholar, I was trying without success to fit these letters into simple categories. When I asked Levine what to do with the letters, he cryptically answered, “Listen.” Of course, the correspondents were dead, and in 1901, few Americans had access to sound-recording devices. Surely, Levine didn’t mean that I should literally listen to scraps of paper. What Levine meant was to listen metaphorically to the sources. He taught his graduate students that as scholars, we are not trained to listen—we are trained to read. After five centuries of the book, scholars have become accustomed to perceiving the world only through the lens of reading. Even when we study speeches or the lyrics to popular songs, we rarely study the sounds of voices and music. Rather, we convert sounds into words on a page. Thelegacyhasleftscholarsinthehumanitieswithahostofvisualmetaphors for thinking. Things “appear” to be, subjects “see” that, history is “unveiled” to us. It is a rare metaphor that compares the other senses to the acquisition of knowledge. And yet, we learn from taste, touch, smell, and sound as well as from sight. Inattention to all five senses, a problem that many scholars are beginning to address, leaves our understanding of both history and the present disabled and leaves us prey to the manipulations of those who understand the persuasive powers of the nonthought senses. Sound is one sense that carries great rhetorical force in and of itself. Yet, scholars have inconsistently thought about it. Perhaps this is why Levine asked his students to listen.1 Levine’s sound advice to me was not the first time he looked to the sonic for guidance. In class, he was fond of anecdotes like the one about immigrants to America who went to the talkies for the first time and knew by the soundtrack that the bad guys (usually Indians) would soon appear on the screen. The post–Civil War blues was a favorite topic. A recording of Levine analyzing an old blues tune has him saying, “You could learn a lot just from listening carefully, reading carefully.”2 His comparison of listening to reading was and remains provocative. Can we read through our ears? Yes, Levine would have argued, and so I, too, take on the visual metaphor of reading sound when in fact I am describing the experience of listening closely. He also left a tantalizing suggestion about the sound of oratory in an essay about Shakespeare in American popular culture: “The generations of people accustomed to hearing and reciting things out loud—the generations for whom oral recitation of the King James version of the Bible could well have formed a bridge to the English of Shakespeare—were being depleted as America entered a new century.” To this, Levine attached an endnote: “The relationships between recitation of the King James Bible and performances of Shakespeare and between the transformation of nineteenth-century religious style and the transformation of Shakespeare need further thought and research.”3 Though Levine was relying on the written record, he had listened to the sounds of American speech correctly: a transformation from what we would perceive as florid recitations of the Bible or Shakespeare to a more simple oratorical style did indeed occur at the turn of the twentieth century. Levine’s sonic examples pervade this project: criticism by listening rather than seeing, the search for sonic evidence, and the willingness to eavesdrop on historical shifts. Sadly, however, few scholars have made prolonged forays into sonic criticism. Unlike the sustained and multifaceted turn toward visual studies in the 1970s, scholarship about sound has just begun to blossom. The vocabulary of its practitioners remains a mishmash of theoretical perspectives and its guiding principles a polyglot of intellectual traditions. To be sure, a few heavyweights have waded into the field. Footnote watchers will find Theodor W. Adorno, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter J. Ong cited in this study. Yet, there are no coherent approaches and no sonic methodologies that bridge the divides among disciplines in the humanities. Words like icon and gaze help constitute a lingua franca among visual scholars, a vocabulary for whom sonic studies has...