3 - Warp and Weft

Summary

For Stretch, sound worked as a means of keeping abreast of social developments around the prison. ‘Reading’ the soundscape was a means of situating himself and others in the shifting social order, as well as physically locating events and individuals as developments unfolded. Sound lends texture to the spaces we live in and pass through, but also the times we spend within them. Inextricable connections between the way we experience time and space become more discernible when we shift sensory perception. David Toop's (2010) description of sound as the ‘temporal sense’ serves as a reminder of this complex relationship.

What comes together through sound is emergent and passing time – a sense of duration, the field of memory, a fullness of space that lies beyond touch and out of sight, hidden from vision. Sound must be trusted, cannot be trusted, so has power. When sound that should be present seems to be absent, this is frightening. (Toop, 2010: xv)

Auditory experience traverses the boundaries of time just as it permeates walls, evoking memory, eliciting expectation and heralding markers of the daily routine. In Midtown, where movement and access to stimuli were constrained, sound could provide a particularly potent means of reconfiguring spatial experience, reminding prisoners of the world beyond the walls, and their time and place within it. Sound was a means of reconnecting with the outside world, prompting the memory of happier times. The function of sound as a powerful means of eliciting memory was not limited to other times and spaces but also existed within the present. Focusing on sound illuminated the different treatments space received from staff and prisoners, reflecting their relationships with the space within and beyond the prison to the wider community of Midtown.

The soundscape echoed and amplified the power of the constraints of the physical environment, carrying a force distinct from that shared between officers and prisoners, and between these actors and the prison. Time is ‘the essence of sentencing and imprisonment’ (Wright et al, 2017: 232). Understood as the ‘basic structuring dimension of prison life’, time lies at the heart of punishment and the deprivation of agency which it signifies (Sparks et al, 1996; Morin and Moran, 2015; Kotova, 2019).