In this conversation, Adrian Curtin, Prarthana Purkayastha, and meLê yamomo highlight how their research on sound and dance engages embodied knowledges and vice versa. They account for how archival work challenges presumptions about the research process as well as what the scholar assumes they are looking for in the archive. The research process demands flexibility because studying performance invites interpretation, adaptation, and cultural understanding as intermediaries in understanding archival materials. Each participant emphasizes how, for them, research processes have incorporated creative endeavours because of the embodied and artistic dimensions of performance and historiographic analysis.

Mary Somerville (1780–1872) is best known for her importance to debates about popular science and education, her contributions to optics, and her philosophical reflections on astronomy and nature. However, less attention has been paid to her writing on sound. Building upon recent scholarly interest in Somerville, as well as in the intersections between nineteenth-century music and science, this chapter initially homes in on her survey of acoustics, which formed part of her best-selling treatise On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834). It goes on to explore how Somerville’s poetically inflected scientific rhetoric portrays sound as at once material and immaterial, a source of objective knowledge and a metaphor for unknowability. Amid the burgeoning print culture of the 1830s, Somerville’s writing belongs to an expanding tradition of female authorship on scientific and musical knowledge. It also anticipates the efforts of later nineteenth-century intellectuals and educators to disseminate and popularize music theory and the science of sound for a wider public.

At the end of Act 4 in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macduff learns that his wife and children have been killed on Macbeth’s orders. Macduff initially experiences grief as involuntary memory. Malcolm urges Macduff to turn immediately to thoughts of revenge, but Macduff is unable to do so. Like Hamlet although more briefly, Macduff is caught in what he calls an intermission of inaction and feeling, analogous to Lauren Berlant’s impasse. In this brief pause, poetic meter, repetition, and enjambment comprise an affective dramaturgy through which grief, disbelief, and anger can be felt and made into the materials for memory. Macduff’s grief is ultimately assimilated into the structure of a revenge plot, but the moment briefly reveals a different way of speaking, thinking, feeling, and remembering, an alternative to both the gendered, racialized chaos of Macbeth and the gendered, racialized control embodied in Malcolm.

“The Song” takes as its subject the material, visual, and sonic circulations of a ballad written about the Kizer and Johnson lynching. The chapter focuses in particular on its first recording, a 1960s single by the folk musician J. E. Mainer. By looking at its circulation first as a performed and then recorded song, the chapter examines the sonic and visual circulations of the ballad as a signifer of southern authenticity. By delving into discourses on authenticity and folk culture, “The Song” points to an evolution in the meaning of racial violence as a constitutive part of a white southern identity. Further, the study examines how this emblem of white southernness came to represent a particular form of personal authenticity for a new generation immersed in the folk revival movement of the 1960s. In this way the chapter serves as a study of both the racist ideology of some countercultural movements as well as the evolution of lynching's meaning in the late twentieth century.

A wall is a sonic medium. It gathers, reflects, amplifies (or sometimes attenuates), and otherwise processes sound; it thereby creates strata of sensory memory and history. Rethinking the notion of teichoscopy (the use of walls to enhance vision), I propose an analogous concept of teichoacoustics in the Greek and Roman worlds –using walls as a technical means of sounding and hearing; that is, transmitting and receiving auditory sensation. I focus on four cities and their walls: Babylon in the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe (via Ovid, Shakespeare, and the Beatles); Troy during the Trojan War, especially Helen’s visit to the city walls in Iliad 3; Thebes, from the creation of its walls through music to its depiction in tragedy; and finally Delphi and the musical inscriptions on the external walls of buildings there. While the particular media functions of sound vary at each of these different sets of walls, these examples demonstrate a number of productive relations between sound and walls, and suggest possibilities for a practice of listening to architecture – both figuratively and literally – as a way of excavating cultural memory in and about antiquity.

This chapter outlines the work of music for Romantic literature. The Romantic era was a pivotal period in the formation of literature as we now tend to understand it, as a category of imaginative and expressive prose and poetry, and writers deployed music in a number of ways to explore the power, limits, and nature of the literary. While lofty claims were made for literature as an ideal art form, one of the strongest uses of music for literature was to suggest its failures – to indicate kinds of freedom, fulfilment, and plenitude only pointed to by verbal language. The paradoxical uses of failure are discussed in this chapter through texts by writers including Blake, Kleist, Hoffmann, Coleridge, and Mérimée.

Prosodic dissonance marks out those most difficult and most stimulating poetic works in rhythm. Poems that do dissonance, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to successive waves of avant-garde poetry over the last century, have confounded commentators and exposed certain analogical faultlines. Recourses to ‘musicality’ in poetry have long assumed that the ‘music’ of a poem must mean, in a word, euphony. Yet a musical poem, as Northrop Frye noted, would withhold rhythmic or rhymic resolve, sporting rugged, crabbed accents and lumbering polysyllables, a sequence of discords only ending with a harmony. Such analogies further do not take into account the centrality of dissonance in twentieth-century music. We therefore need new models and new ways of talking about prosodic dissonance that can take into account a fuller range of poetics. Prosody that attempts such dissonance can be found in the works of Jackson Mac Low, who greatly admired Hopkins. In a reading that follows Frye on Hopkins’s ‘inscape’ I claim that Mac Low seeks ‘outscape’, an emancipation of dissonant potential. Instress becomes outstress, a poetics of clashing exteriors; ‘pure projected detachment’, energy thrown outward and away from the poet, or starting out and finding in.

My essay examines Bob Dylan’s relation to sound recording, still a neglected topic even with the recent explosion of scholarship on the legendary singer-songwriter. Drawing on historical accounts of Dylan and his career, as well as recent histories of studio recording, I trace the artist’s mercurial relation to record making as evidenced in his turbulent encounters with various record producers. My chief focus is on Dylan’s account of his late 1980s creative crisis in his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume 1, which I argue also provides a condensed account of the songwriter’s philosophy of sound recording.