Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- In Memory of Lise Garde-Hansen
- Introduction: Mediating the Past
- Part 1 Theoretical Background
- Part 2 Case Studies
- 5 Voicing the Past: BBC Radio 4 and the Aberfan Disaster of 1963
- 6 (Re)Media Events: Remixing War on You Tube
- 7 The Madonna Archive: Celebrity, Ageing and Fan Nostalgia
- 8 Towards a Concept of connected Memory: The Photo Album Goes Mobile
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Voicing the Past: BBC Radio 4 and the Aberfan Disaster of 1963
from Part 2 - Case Studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- In Memory of Lise Garde-Hansen
- Introduction: Mediating the Past
- Part 1 Theoretical Background
- Part 2 Case Studies
- 5 Voicing the Past: BBC Radio 4 and the Aberfan Disaster of 1963
- 6 (Re)Media Events: Remixing War on You Tube
- 7 The Madonna Archive: Celebrity, Ageing and Fan Nostalgia
- 8 Towards a Concept of connected Memory: The Photo Album Goes Mobile
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Voice does not simply persist at a different level with regard to what we see, it rather points to a gap in the field of the visible, toward the dimension of what eludes our gaze. In other words, their relationship is mediated by an impossibility: ultimately, we hear things because we cannot see everything.
(Žižek 1996: 93)There is a tendency within media studies to ignore sound. The visual image has dominated: art, photography, advertising, film, television, video games, online media, mobile phones. Just compare the amount of scholarly texts on television to radio, on cinema and gaming rather than soundtracks and soundscapes. Even the mobile phone, which is essentially a listening device, has only become interesting to media studies since it has a screen interface of applications, games, graphics, e-mail, photos and videos. When it comes to memory we assume that the visual dominates and structures our understanding of the world. We do not assume that sound is memorable and yet musicology tells us otherwise. Music anthropologists, researchers and practitioners of folk music know all too well the importance of sound for memory in terms of individuals, communities, geography (space, place and landscape), heritage and nostalgia. However, these are areas of studying sound and memory in terms of music and art rather than media and popular culture (see Snyder 2000).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Media and Memory , pp. 91 - 104Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011