Smith 1999

Smith, Bruce. The Acoustic World of early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999.

"from the listener's standpoint, there are two quite distinct ways of attending to sound: one that focuses on the thereness of the sound, on the sound-producer; and one that focuses on the hereness of the sound, on the physiological and psychological effects of sound on the listener. Both dimensions aer present all the time, and we can readily shift focus from one to the other." (7)

"Since knowledge and intentions are shaped by culture, we need to attend also to cultural differences in the construction of aural experience. The multiple cultures of early modern England may have shared with us the biological materiality of hearing, but their protocols of listening could be remarkably different from our.s We need a cultural poetics of listening. We must take into account, finally, the subjective experience of sound. We need a phenomenology of listening, which we can expect to be an amalgam of biological constants and cultural variables." (8)

silence (or lack thereof) (9)

orality vs. literacy -- Renaissance rhetoric gave primacy to orality (12)

"By and large, the artifacts that survive from early modern England ask to be heard, not seen: compared, say, to Renaissance Italy, the number of buildings, paintings, tapestries, pieces of furniture, and utilitarian objects are few. What we have, in great abundance, are verbal artifacts. Our knowledge of early modern England is based largely on words, and all evidence suggests that those words had a connection to spoken language that was stronger and more pervasive than we assume about our own culture. Can we be so sure -- especially in a culture where 'orality' and 'literacy' were reciprocally defined in ways quite different from today -- that speaking and listening were experienced as uncomplicated acts of self-presence?" (13)

Luhmann: body, psyche, media and society -- communication as "a process, not of transferring meaning, but of negotiating meaning" between these autonomous systems (16)

"If language, media, and society are configured as environments, each one functioning as such for the others, then we can identify three consensual zones, three sites of resonance, that together constitute an ecology of communication: (1) the zone between language and society, (20 the zone between language and media, and (3) the zone between media and society." (17)

"Rather than imagining a rigid distinction between oral culture and literate culture, between aural media and visual media, we should imagine a continuum between speech and vision. At one pole of the continuum are communications that have little or no direct contact with litters: ballads from oral tradition, St. George plays, morris dances. At the other pole are communications that have little or nothing to do with voice: texts in legal French, treatises on mathematics, books on geometry. In between are ranged broadside ballads, scripts for the stage, sermons and orations, familiar letters, manuscript commonplace books, accounts of the New World." (19)

"Different speech communities stand in different relationships to different media, according to how open or closed those media are to the polyphony of dialects and argots, songs and sonnets, whoops and hollers that filled the ambient air of early modern England." (25-26)

women and ballads (26)

"O as asks us to listen for multiple voices, for competing voices, even for noise." (26)

"O is not about ontology, but phenomenology. It is concerned not with 'voice,' but voice. O is not about metaphysics, but materialism -- the materialism of the human body, of sound waes, of plaster, lath, and thatch, of quill pens ,ink, and paper, of lead type." (29)

Mapping the Field

movement within speech fields -- different registers, dialects (43); middling group had largest speech field and the most extended speech networks

soundspaces: speech --> music --> ambient sound; dreasing specificity of meaning along this axis (45)

acoustic communities (47)

acoustemology (Steven Feld); "cultures establish their identities not only through things seen but through things heard and said" (48)

The Soundscapes of Early Modern England: City, Country, Court

London soundscape; less broadband sounds than today, more clattering, clacking; heard conversations (58-9)

• St. Paul's; quid novi? (what's the news; gathering before midday meal; 60); likened to a Tower of Babel
• Exchange; polyglot gathering spot before midday meal
• Westminster Hall
• Tower Wharf, guns/cannons discharged on ceremonial occasions (63)

street cries /hawkers turned into music (64-7)

pageants displaying the sights and sounds of the city in aggregate; "in these emblems-brought-to-life, the city was made to speak" (71)