Documenting Ephemeral Sounds in the Premodern World 

Organizers

Morgan Moore, Iona Lister

Session information

How can we as contemporary scholars listen to the past? The pre-modern world saw many attempts to document and memorialize sounds that, prior to the advent of recording technology, were necessarily ephemeral: the sounds of the natural world and cities described in poetry and prose, musical notation representing the sounds of choristers and musicians, and cues for performance found in manuscripts. Existing before modern recording technology, such ephemeral sounds necessarily resist documentation, and this fact is reflected self-consciously in these early sonic records.

This seminar session, which will take the form of a roundtable discussion, will investigate ephemeral sounds in the medieval world in any field, including literature, musicology, theatre studies, art history, philosophy, religious studies, and beyond. Together, we will investigate the significance of sound and its fleeting nature to medieval people, and we will seek to answer such questions as, what are medieval peoples’ relationships to sound and silence? What available strategies best serve our attempts to access these sounds?

For questions, please contact Iona Lister, iona.lister@mail.utoronto.ca.