forum 82.4: close reading
DANIEL GILFILLAN
Arizona State University
What Is Close Reading? A Focus on Sound Objects
Sound objects have short shelf lives. Unlike textual, and to a lesser extent, visual media, the elusiveness of sound-based media makes it difficult to ground a close reading of sound objects in an agreed upon set of conventions. Although sound objects are often accompanied or supported by textual material (scripts, liner notes, scores, DJ scratch notation, artist notes, reviews), the live or recorded nature of the sound, the medial frame in which it either travels (broadcast, streaming audio, digital file) or is housed (CD, album, cassette tape, concert hall), and the materiality of the device through which it is played allow for a more nuanced close reading than can be provided from only considering the sound object’s textual underpinnings. As each new method of sound delivery and playback has fallen into obsolescence, and as sound has traversed the divide from analog to digital capture, sound scholars and “close readers” of sound objects have to account for the range of material or immaterial production methods that comprise any one iteration of a particular piece. In tangibly Geertzian fashion, the numerous intermedial threads at play in any given sound piece help to form the striations of thick description that are interwoven through the conceptual, performative, and reception stages of the piece. Where any one of these distinct stages in the production of a sound object would provide an insightful foundation for a close reading, it is a combined approach which allows for the contours and interpretive possibilities of the reading to take shape.
As an amalgam of textual, aural, compositional, and durational elements a live radio art broadcast, for example, contains any number of unique threads of information, each with its own specific spatiotemporal set of source histories and cultural reverberations. A radio art piece like the Austrian-produced “Other Voices—Echoes from a Warzone” (1999) by Serbian DJ Gordan Paunovi, incorporates twenty distinct vocal and artistic sound elements into the overall broadcast. The intertextual and intermedial play between these individual components prompt both the listener and the creator of the broadcast to think more critically about the connections between each source of information, while also requiring them to delve more deeply into the respective trace histories of each source. This is a potentially exhausting, but also potentially rich, process. It is one that requires mapping the unique contextual histories of each component to understand how one discrete element simultaneously evokes the sociocultural and emotive topographies associated with it, while provoking a new set of relationships when brought together into the mix of elements that comprise the piece. Of course, listeners are ultimately at the core of any close reading of a sound object. Like the readers of a text, they mobilize these discrete elements brought together by the artist and fold them into the specific context of their own unique surroundings, the ambient and physical space they inhabit while listening. And this adds yet another layer to the reading.
While the advent of digital and web-based media has certainly begun to unsettle even the stalwart world of print, the realm of sound-based texts has, from its beginnings, continually posed a distinctive set of peculiarities for questions about close reading. Such questions move beyond the one that forms the basis of this forum. Given that sound is always already underway, that we, as listeners, are always already in the midst of sound, where does such a close reading actually begin, or, for that matter, end? These questions transform when recorded or captured sound is taken into account. The increased archivization of sound files from live broadcasts and performances, as well as the new digital portability of sound works that were traditionally tied to specific formats like CD or cassette, have made sound-based artistic media more readily accessible, and thus more readily legible as texts to be amplified by close readings.
Works Cited
Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. 3-30.
Paunovic, Gordan. Other Voices—Echoes from a War Zone. Live broadcast streaming audio, ORF Kunstradio, «www.kunstradio.at/1999A/RA/99_04_29.ram» (accessed February 14, 2004). The compact disc is also available as Paunovic, Gordan, Other Voices—Echoes from a Warzone. Vienna: Edition Kunstradio, 1999.