Wild Track Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong

About this book

Wild Track is an exploration of birdsong and the ways in which that sound was conveyed, described and responded to through text, prior to the advent of recording and broadcast technologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Street links sound aesthetics, radio, natural history, and literature to explore how the brain and imagination translate sonic codes as well as the nature of the silent sound we "hear" when we read a text. This creates an awareness of sound through the tuned attention of the senses, learning from sound texts of the natural world that sought – and seek – to convey the intensity of the sonic moment and fleeting experience. To absorb these lessons is to enable a more highly interactive relationship with sound and listening, and to interpret the subtleties of audio as a means of expression and translation of the living world.

Contents

Prelude
1. Dawn Chorus: Describing Sound
2. Recording an Essence: Hearing, Reading and the Imagination
3. Ludwig Koch and the Music of Nature
4. Murmurings: Call and Response Between Bird and Human
5. Paths Through the Green Wood
6. Science in Arcadia: The Road to Selborne
7. The Romantic Poetry of Listening
8. Honest John: The Sound World of John Clare
9. North American Sublime
10. Survival and the Sound of Spirit
11. Listening to Ourselves Listening: Voices for Today and Tomorrow
Postlude

Bibliography
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Seán Street is Professor Emeritus at Bournemouth University, UK. He is the author of The Sound of a Room (2020), The Poetry of Radio and The Memory of Sound (2015), and a trilogy consisting of Sound Poetics (2017), Sound at the Edge of Perception (2018), and The Sound Inside the Silence: Travels in the Sonic Imagination (2019). He has worked in radio for much of his life and has made a number of programs for the BBC World Service on the life and work of Thomas Hardy.