Audionarratology

Interfaces of sound and narrative

Editado por Jarmila Mildorf y Till Kinzel

Preface
  • Audionarratology. The term is meant to do nothing less than inaugurate yet another postclassical narratology, one which takes into focus relationships between sound and narrative or more precisely, between oral and aural forms of expression in artistic and non-artistic media and genres and their narrative affordances, structures and functions.
  • The book’s aim is exploratory and it is meant to raise questions as much as it seeks to find answers.
Intro. Audionarratology: Prolegomena to a Research Paradigm Exploring Sound and Narrative
  1. Preliminary thoughts
  • The preponderance of narrative approaches that focus on either verbal/textual in combination with visual or audio-visual media can hardly be ignored.
  • Cultural studies, which have been very influential in literary studies and analogously also in narratology, have in the past four decades largely followed in the wake of, first, the so-called “linguistic turn” (see Bachmann-Medick 2009, 33–36), and then the “visual turn,”
  • Perhaps it is true that “the verbal media represent the domain par excellence of prototypical narratives,” as Werner Wolf (2011, 174) argues. However, the hierarchy of media with reference to narrativity that Wolf then suggests, of which “the top register would certainly be occupied by media that use the verbal in combination with other codes” (Wolf 2011, 174), also creates blind spots. 
  • For linguists investigating narrative in conversational settings, the sound features of rhythm, tone of voice, prosody and intonation are self-evident parameters to be taken into account (see De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012, 36–43), and the materiality of stories as well as speakers’ voice qualities have recently been given renewed attention in the study of multimodal narratives.
  • .jchenbaum Russian formalists such as Boris and Jurij Tynjanov recognized the importance of the sound component in literary language. // significance of intonation and voice within narrative prose and pointed to the fact that the particular narrative form of skaz with its orientation towards oral storytelling “makes the word physiologically perceptible,”
  • aural media and sound artistic genres such as, for example, radio plays or audio dramas, audiobooks, sound installations or different popular music formats are still at the margins of narratological research, or lower down in the media hierarchy, to use Wolf’s image.
  • We could say that, as far as narratology is concerned, sound in many art forms and medial contexts seems to have been relegated to what Leibniz called petites perceptions (sense perceptions which we are not aware of but which influence all areas of our lives. Interestingly, the image Leibniz uses is that of the sound of the sea.)
  • Sound and voice qualities are evanescent, and their narratological analysis requires first, that they are captured or ‘fixed’ in a recording and then made available in transcribed form (this involves important questions of methodology). and that, second, they are discussed as part of and with due attention paid to the medium within which they occur.
  • the study of “soundscapes” is undertaken in academic disciplines as varied as architecture and archaeology, anthropology and sociology, geography, physics, music and museology, to name but a few. The term was originally and famously defined by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (1977, 274–275) as “[t]he sonic environment. // Schafer’s writings still constitute key texts with in sound studies (and unsurprisingly some of the contributions in our volume refer to those writings; see Bernaerts, Festjens, Skoulding). And yet, despite – or perhaps because of – the widespread usage of the concept of “soundscapes” the term is full of creative fuzziness.

  • In analogy to “landscapes,” “soundscapes” cannot easily be demarcated. Where does one soundscape end and another begin? What are constitutive elements (sounds) of a soundscape? How can one capture those sounds and then represent them in symbolic or iconographic form?⁵ And what happens to terms when they are translated into other languages? (This raises the above-mentioned question of methodology again. Schafer interestingly resorts to pictorial representations of soundscapes as means of notation, e. g., isobel maps, charts showing the loudness and temporal occurrence of different sounds and a variety of “sound event maps” that use symbolic or pictorial icons for sound sources and the movement of sounds emanating from these sources (Schafer 1977). In this context, it is interesting to note that scientific representations of sounds (e. g., spectrograms) also visualise them and only thus manage to make them ‘readable.’)

  • Sound seems to permeate the boundaries between the subject and the object of hearing; it seems to relate to the characteristic features of bodies (“property”) as much as to their effects on other bodies. it is extremely difficult to adequately define “sound».
  • The ultimate question for audionarratology is which of these many and diverse terms can be fruitfully connected with questions of narrative and narrativity – in themselves contested concepts – and how this link can be accomplished.

Los términos o conceptos sobre el sonido tienen diversas definiciones según el campo o contexto en el que habiten. Es importante comprender los distintos conceptos y ser lo suficientemente abiertos para ubicarlos en disciplinas e investigaciones que permitan ser lo suficientemente concreto el mundo del sonido.

2. Sound and Narrative in Human Cognition, Society and Culture.

  • Audioception or the faculty to hear sounds is one of the earliest sense perceptions of human beings, well before they are born. // Auditory perception is intricately related to, and often becomes instrumental in, other cognitive faculties such as, for example, memory or spatial orientation.
  • Sound, music and voices are also important because of their affective dimension.
  • Christoph Wulf: the fact that the sound of the voice allows us to perceive that we are addressed by others makes audioception a «social» sense of perception, not least because familiar sounds and voices may foster a sense of belonging to a group and feeling sheltered.  (1997, 459)

  • The voices of our parents reading bed-time stories to us, the favourite song lyrics that form the soundtracks of our lives, the audiobooks we listen to when we need an alternative to reading stories, the radio plays we hear when tuning in to our favourite radio station, the sound effects and music that intensify our emotions when watching a movie: there are boundless examples for the ways in which sound and narrative intersect. And in all these contexts, sound, music and voices trigger in us an emotional response that we may still remember years later.

  • sounds and music are not merely backgrounds to our lives; they can become constitutive in the sense that we may arrange our lives to their rhythms and cadences.
  • the nexus of narrative and sound is shifted from more discrete, per sonal stories to larger cultural or ‘grand’ narratives of whole societies.
  • About Work with Sounds : While the individual sounds archived are not necessarily narrative in the strict sense of the word they are narrativized on account of their placement in a (virtual) museum whose aim it is to capture their historical specificity and development.
  • Audionarratology is in tended to function as an umbrella term for narrative approaches that take into view forms and functions of sound and their relation to narrative structure. // audionarratology focuses more strongly on the relation ship between forms and functions of sound and/as narrative.
  • what is needed is a first attempt at describing the relationship between sound and narrative or narrativity, which in turn requires reflections on what narrative is.

3. Narrative and Sound: Theotetical Considerations

  • cognitive approaches can also be fruitfully adopted for multimodal narratives with a stron ger emphasis on their sound side.

  • Another important factor for narratives is what Herman (2009) calls their “situatedness.”

  • audionarratology attends to sound narratives as a network of oral and/or aural semiotic systems.

  • The very nature of sound makes it potentially narrative since sound moves and is received in time.
  • Fludernik’s (1996) conception of “experientiality” assumes a very different quality in this context because the sound side of storyworlds is no longer textually mediated but can be experienced directly or immediately in aural media.

4. Music and Storytelling

  • The nexus between narrative and music is also interesting when looked at from an evolutionary perspective. Even though it is difficult to say when or why music developed in human evolution, theorists like Denis Dutton, for exam ple, assume that this development must have been founded on natural, evolved interests. Dutton (2009, 217) argues that: The aesthetic effects of music universally depend on listeners being able to anticipate cli maxes, resolutions, suspensions, or cadences – and then hear the music fulfill or foil those anticipations. Completely unpredictable music […] can no longer surprise the mind: if just anything can be expected, nothing can enter experience as unexpected. It follows that nothing can surprise, jar, fulfill, shock, or in other ways please the listener.
  • Dutton’s description of musical pleasure is worth considering from a narratological angle because it is striking how similar this description sounds to a description of the pleasures of reading or hearing a story. Dutton mentions structural elements such as “climaxes” and “resolutions,” which can be found in most structural models of narrative. He also talks about the surprise element, the “unexpected” twist that evokes an emotional re sponse in listeners. // And finally, Dutton uses the term “experience” to refer to listeners’ reception of musical movements, which, in its more abstracted version as the affordance of “experientiality,” is the key criterion for narrativity in Monika Fludernik’s (1996) theory of ‘natural’ narratology. It seems to us that these parallels are no coincidence and are worth exploring further in audionarratology.

  • Audionarratology of course cannot recapitulate, let alone offer conclusive answers, to the debates conducted in musicology. Nor can it say anything meaningful concerning human evolution. However, audionarratology can offer detailed analyses of how music is applied in various narrative forms and what effects it might have on listeners.

5. Sound Art: Audio Drama, Mobile Phone Theatre, Performance Poetry

  • The distinction between aurality/orality and scriptedness in many ways be comes futile in view of the fact that the media through which aural/oral art is transported also contribute towards fixing or ‘congealing’ sound by means of their technological possibilities and make it amenable for editing. Thus, Olsson (2011, 66) discusses how “the tape recorder took part in shaping the genre of sound poetry” (emphasis in original) in the late 1960s and undermined the “immersive effects and physiological intrusiveness of sounds” because it: …manifested the voice as a plastic entity submitted to editorial interventions, as a time based live event hypostasized into an object, which would only later on, in the act of playback, return as the simulation of a living voice present to the body and mind of a listener. (Olsson 2011, 66). This shows that there is not only tension between sound art’s immediacy and the nature of scripts on the one hand but also between sound art and its technological production on the other.

6. Sound, Narrative and Immersion: Aural Ways of World-Making

  • audionarratology also has to pay attention to the transcriptive nature of clearly scripted audio art forms such as audiobooks, exploring what reading a book (script or, more generally, text) and listening to it have in common.
  • Listening to a text is, as Ludwig Jäger (2014, 243) argues, a very different cognitive operation than reading it. // voice does not function as a neutral medium but rather creates a new meaning, which Jäger calls “audioliteral».
  • Audionarratology analyses how sounds and noises contribute to the creation of real and imagined spaces and worlds.
  • An important consequence that follows from this is that audionarratological analysis may also extend to the aural dimensions (including silences) of written texts and their graphic representations on the printed page.
  • “good reading is always aural as well as visual” (Lewis 1992, 90; see also 102) //

    Lewis’s suggestions do not refer to audionarratives as such but rather indicate that already on the purely textual level sound is inscribed in narratives and needs to be brought to our attention.

  • The underlying assumption is that sounds and voices are inscribed in fictional texts and come to life in people’s imaginations.
Conceptos
  • “aural” and “auricular” are considered synonymous and they mean “of or pertaining to the organ of hearing” as well as “received or perceived by the ear.”
  • The meaning of the adjective “sonic” is closely connected to the physical definition, which involves sound waves 
  • “sound,” which is at the core of sound studies, seems to be a ‘mixed bag’ of meanings including music, noise and voice. The sensation produced in the organs of hearing when the surrounding air is set in vibra tion 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 (Oxford E.D.)

Clave dentro del rol editorial: cómo concebimos la tecnología, cuál es el rol que le damos, qué nos está faltando… dónde es realmente nuestro lugar de acción.

Referentes
  • Vera and Ansgar Nünning (2002)
  • Cathy Berberians Stripsody
  • Work with Sounds (EU Project)
  • Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Papa Sangre, Sebastian Domsch. Videojuego en el que cumplen las metas escuchando los sonidos que se crean en el mundo.
  • Mikko Keskinen Audiobook (2008)

  • Alber, Jan, and Monika Fludernik, eds. 2010. Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

  • Bijsterveld, Karin. 2012. “Listening to Machines: Industrial Noise, Hearing Loss and the Cultural Meaning of Sound.” In: The Sound Studies Reader. Ed. Jonathan Sterne. London: Routledge. 152–167.

  • Bordwell, David. 2004. “Neo-Structuralist Narratology and the Functions of Filmic Storytelling.” In: Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 203–219.

  • Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge

  • Hatavara, Mari, Matti Hyvärinen, Maria Mäkälä, and Frans Mäyrä, eds. 2016. Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media: Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds. London: Routledge.

  • McAdams, Stephen, and Emmanuel Bigand, eds. 1993. Thinking in Sound: The Cognitive Psychology of Human Audition. Oxford: Clarendon.

  • Page, Ruth, and Bronwen Thomas, eds. 2011. New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age. Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press.

  • Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed. 2004. Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

  • Wolf, Werner. 2011. “Narratology and Media(lity): The Transmedial Expansion of a Literary Discipline and Possible Consequences.” In: Current Trends in Narratology. Ed. Greta Olson. Berlin: De Gruyter. 145–180.