Seth Ellis: Sound as historical material
Channel: NDF - National Digital Forum
Date: 03/12/2019

Tuesday November 19th, 2:00pm-2:25pm @ Rangimarie 2 - Breakout Room

Sound as historical material: Developing a new way of cataloguing, describing, and accessing sound in the archive.

From July 2019 to July 2020, I will be the Mittelhauser scholar-in-residence at the State Library of Queensland. In this residency the development of a methodology for cataloguing sounds within the State Library’s collections—both extant, and newly collected—in a way that makes historical sound more searchable and perceivable by researchers and the public. This presentation will examine the basis for this project, its methodology, and its projected outcomes. Sound is a powerful trigger for individual memory; descriptions, recordings, and reconstructions of sound often form a part of our attempt, not just to describe the past, but to make the past convincing to each other—to make it present. In collections, a single sound recording can provide the same multilayered information as a photograph—a multiplicity of details about past experience, not necessarily linguistic but affective. The examination of sound in this way can provide a rich understanding of past experience.

Seth Ellis, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media