This is a brief summary on Aural Historian Emily Thompson's 2015 article "Making Noise in The Roaring ’Twenties: Sound and Aural History on the Web," which is about her project on the preservation of the soundscapes of 1930s New York, and aural historiology itself.
Having access to archival sounds, while noteworthy in one way, does not mean full comprehension of them. As the anecdote reads, “Context is everything.” Ergo, in the realm of acoustic anthropology and related fields, when an archival, audio-visual recording is taken out of its base “scape” and experienced as an isolated phenomena, much of that recording’s value as a “cultural narrator” of sorts can be lost. Contemporaneously, alongside the benefits of having a breadth of materials available to scholars and historians via the WWW [world-wide-web], the chance of what Jamie Lynne Burgess calls “context collapse,” when the object is extracted from the semiotic fundamental, is strikingly high. Namely, who is the target audience?
In Emily Thompson’s 2015 explanatory article of her somewhat completed, histiographical sound-map project called “The Roaring Twenties,” she calls into question the efficaciousness of contemporary “Aural history” practices, arguing that the abundance of open-access repositories of archival content does little to teach the public the importance of such content. Rather, the soundscape, another name for the surroundings which the original recording was made, must also be studied, preserved, and additional promoted as an equal participant in the learning and experiential process. By engaging this way with archival multi-media, public historians can be better equipped with the tools to ensure that publics are digitally engaging with archival materials more historically-minded.
The article follows her project from idea and monograph, to interactive site. As noted by Thompson, prior to the project’s initial stages in 2007, limited, contextual options existed regarding web-based aural history resources, there being instead ample amounts of digital repositories housing eclectic, archival materials. Hence, the need to imagine novel ways of putting these materials back into their once-booming soundscapes was well-founded. Having secured a partnership with the Vectors journal, a digital journal dedicated to remolding scholastic practice through collagic media practices, she set about forming a free-form, “constructive your own path” type of educative resource which could clearly present the sounds of late-1920s New York City without sacrificing contextual detail along the way.
She goes onto explain the various facets of her project, stressing that the modality used [an interactive website with no clear teleology] was purposefully chosen so to ““empower its users to be their own historians,” a noticeable trend in the contemporary, scholastic marketplace. She also stressed that she wanted to strike a balance between objectivity and personability, in doing so proving that the digital medium could preserve such formal informality. Having constructed the final iteration of her project, she detailed her threefold approach to presenting the sounds and visuals of the forgotten, inner-city pandemonium of 1920s New York City.
The sound-map is broken into Sound [a sound-specific taxonomy, with sub taxonomies available which provide contextual information, along with primary documents and videos], Time [a chronological map of media which fell outside the scope of place or space], and Space [a place-specific, interactive map of 1930s New York boroughs with correlated media]. By displaying the archival material in these three, unique modalities, an sense of “livingness,” better characterized as “organic musicking,” to borrow Small’s vernacular, is created, thus marrying intriguing visuals with historical salience. Thompson’s reluctance to restore primary materials used both eschews any inadvertent tailoring of history and reduces the “nostalgia” factor that comes with using historical materials.
Through what she calls “Immersive, contextual listening,” audiences can better comprehend the reality surrounding archival materials, bringing attention back to the multiplicity of those forgotten -scapes.
Comments