Sound - A Reflection
Can you Hear me Now?
Sound,n
“The sensation produced in the organs of hearing when the surrounding air is set in vibration in such a way as to affect these; also, that which is or may be heard; the external object of audition, or the property of bodies by which this is produced. Hence also, pressure waves that differ from audible sound only in being of a lower or a higher frequency.”
Sound in Digital Humanities
Technology has changed the way that we access various sounds - we are easily able to listen to music, podcasts, and other recordings. Although there have been a number of attempts to visualize the past and gain access to a world long gone, there have been few attempts to listen to it. This is changing. As well, in academia, over the last decade or so there has been an increased use of audio files in digital publishing.This is particularly interesting because the influx of digital tools into the humanities have changed the way that we work as researchers but it has also changed the way that our research is presented. Sound has thus become a part of both our personal and professional lives. Steph Cesaro points to four key approaches of incorporating sound into digital pedagogy:
1.Writing with Sound: This creates direct connections between alphabetic writing and sonic composition. The written works are meant to be read aloud to an audience or recorded for later listening.
2.Curating Sound: The examination and production of digital sound archives.
3.Sound Mapping: Incorporating sounds into more traditional maps in order to layer sonic data.
4.Critical Listening: Asks individuals to reflect on their own listening practices. Despite the fact that we often take listening for granted, practices have actually changed due to different cultural, historical, and technological advancements.
Text Mining:
Text mining as a practise of the digital humanities has long been focused on the analysis of written discourse. Words are elevated on the data hierarchy as having a special sort of value that other information does not carry. Each word has a specific meaning, both on its own and in context. So text mining allows for this to meaning to be collected from large bodies of text, or corpora.
Links:
Clement, Tanya. 2016. The Ground Truth of DH Text Mining Debates in the Digital Humanities
Ceraso, Steph. ‘Sound’ Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities
Ruten, Daniel. 2017 ‘Sonic Word Clouds’ The Programming Historian
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