Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age (review)

The advent of recorded sound technology constitutes a history documented and discussed rather rigorously in recent years via the emerging field of sound studies. Scholars in this field have focused on the technological, cultural, economical, and even political dimensions of recorded audio, often detailing how recording technologies contributed significantly to the methods and practices of a number of academic disciplines (anthropology, folklore, sociology, and oral history among them). They have also addressed broader social phenomena, such as entertainment trends and amateur creative practices. Greg Goodale’s efforts in Sonic Persuasion bring to sound studies an examination of the semiotic and semantic facets of recorded sound. Taking into account the wealth of sonic material within our immediate grasp—whether historic recordings or contemporary sound bites, presidential addresses or cartoon sound effects—Goodale proposes that we pay critical attention to the ways in which we hear these recordings, not just listen to them. That is, he argues that it is worth considering not just what we hear but how we hear, from the active endeavor of “listening” to the tacit aspects of interpreting “meaning” from sonic cues, such as texture of voice, pacing of diction, shape of vowels, or timbre in general. Ultimately, Goodale wraps the analysis in his six chapters around a central question: Can we “read” sound toward the same goals with which we read text? His answer to this question moves beyond a simple “yes” (his firm and well-articulated stance) and points toward a set of considerations to which oral historians might want to pay more than passing attention.

Goodale undertook writing this book in order to chronicle what he terms “the practice of reading sound” (12). This practice takes various forms, and the examples he employs cogently illustrate the wide range of settings within which people do “read” sound—oftentimes, as Goodale argues, without consciously focusing on their efforts. For Goodale, reading sound encompasses an active appreciation of and engagement with the rhetorical power that sounds carry. Spoken word—for example, presidential speeches—can be accessed as printed texts or as audio recordings. Goodale’s overarching point rests in critical attention to the latter, which he maintains “carries more rhetorical force than the words on a page we are accustomed to studying” (49). His argument dwells on the notion that cadence, vocal timbre, pronunciation or accent, and a range of other auditory textures underpin the meaning of recorded speech, thus becoming necessary components of a reading of that recording. For general audiences, such reading comprises the “persuasion” in his subtitle; for scholars (his primary audience for the book), the practices of reading sound constitute critical analytic and interpretive tools in the emerging field of sound studies.

Goodale’s book is a useful and usable volume in many disciplinary settings, as he provides rich examples along with compelling analysis that complements the recent and necessary scholarly attention to the presence of recorded sound in our world. But what does he offer oral historians? His arguments track only tangentially with regards to oral history sources or practices, and many of his examples have nothing to do with the very core of oral history: recorded interviews focused on first-person accounts of the past. However, in reading his ideas from an oral history perspective, I am drawn to several underlying issues his analysis brings to the foreground.

First, Goodale’s focus on “reading” sound and his comments early on about the “rhetorical” power of spoken versus written words brings attention to the role of the recording as “data” in oral history work. Producing transcripts is standard practice, especially in archive settings, but extending Goodale’s argument into such a setting forces us to question what a researcher might pull from the printed text as compared to what he/she might pull from listening to the recording itself. While they both might contain the same words, Goodale’s analysis maintains that they do not necessarily contain...