Reading text on a page in a quiet room is akin to listening to a vinyl with headphones. Words represent a series of sounds and act like grooves of a record. Our minds are filled with stock audio bites that become triggered once read. As a musician, I take note of the soundscapes that fill my mind when I am reading, and often, the melodic and rhythmic qualities evoke memories that I didn't know I had. For example, if I read, "The piercing squeals of TVs at the museum gave me an instant headache." I know exactly what that feels like. Not only because of my personal experience growing up with a noisy TV, but also my sensory acoustical memories of being in a museum and, this actually happened to me. The word squeal does a lot of work in the sentence — it evokes fear, chaos, witches laughs, and pigs. Someone of a younger generation may not know what an analogue TV sounds like so they would have to use their imagination. Some nuances — like the crackle when you turn it on, or the hiss on a channel your cable plan doesn't offer — will be lost. Someone who has never been to a museum would also have to speculate at what acoustic properties such a space might be like. For me, museums with a lot of analogue TVs are usually contemporary, larger, white-walled spaces, built of concrete. A more traditional museum may have wood floors and grey, adorned walls.
Sounds in literature can vary in their effectiveness in the reader. Prose has the difficult task of describing sounds with little acoustic head-space. Poetry has the advantage of blank space to give room for silence.
Rain.
Drops.
Fall.
Diagonally.
Guillaume Apolinaire Il Pleut (1916). Source
This piece by Guillaume Apolinaire, is a hybrid: both poem and drawing. The visual data we are given — provide the page silent value, that therefor give significance to the location of the letters. Il Pleut could be considered, what is academically called, carmina figurata, or a shaped poem. Another famous example is George Herbert’s The Altar (1633), which depicts via the arrangement of the text, an altar. The tradition surprisingly stems all the way back to 6th century BCE in ancient Greece.
Anglo-Saxon and Old English poetry, such as Beowulf, used caesurae (mid-line breaks), creating physical spaces in the manuscript that mirrored the rhythmic pauses of oral delivery. Medieval carmina figurata, like the works of Rabanus Maurus in the 9th century, not only used blank spaces to form visual shapes that influenced the reading rhythm and interpretation, but also adorned the pages with gold, paintings, and illustrations that framed sacred texts and prayers.
One of the most celebrated examples of an illuminated manuscript is the Book of Kells (c. 800). Made by an order of monks in Scotland.
Book of Kells Folio 5. (Trinity College Library). Source
In modernism, French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, one of the leading revolutionaries, took advantage of not only the shaped poem, but of language itself and the performative quality that is rendered by inventive play-on-words and phonetic invention.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. *Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard*. 1897. *Internet Archive*, archive.org/details/uncoupdesmallarme. Accessed 19 Nov. 2024.
Ways that sounds are used in literature via words:
Onomatopoeia: is a direct way writers evoke specific sounds. Words like "beep," "pow," or "bang," mimic the auditory experience they describe, triggering an immediate sensory response in the reader's imagination.
Alliteration (repetition of initial consonant sounds): "Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm." (Joyce, Ulysses) This is actually a combination of alliteration and consonance — emphasis on the s.
Assonance and Consonance (repetition of vowel or consonant sounds): These create tonal qualities that can evoke auditory scenes, such as the "o" sounds in John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale, mimicking the melancholic tone of the poem.
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
"O" is often used in poetry or plays for the speaker to either call to god, a muse, or to convey a sense of intense feeling, such as dread or joy.
In Thomas Middleton's play The Changeling (1622), the use of "O" in dialogue often conveys intensity, emotional turbulence, or heightened drama. One notable instance occurs in Act V, Scene i, when the character Beatrice-Joanna is consumed by guilt and fear over her role in a murder:
"O my conscience! What is it I have done?"
Silence and Pauses: writers often use blank spaces, enjambment, and punctuation to evoke the experience of silence or interruptions in sound.
Emily Dickinson, famous for her extensive use of the em dash—creates a specific ambience with such typographical structures around her words. They are almost like music notation rest symbols and provide a unique defamiliarization effect in the reader. This is the opening stanza of I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (320).
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—
In theater, Samuel Beckett famously used stage directions to prolong moments of silence and contemplation. One such example is in his directions for Catastrophe,
[Pause. Distant storm of applause. P raises his head, fixes the audience. The applause falters dies. Long pause, Fade out of light on face] (Beckett, 1987, 461).
Source: Beckett, Samuel “Catastrophe”, The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 1986. 457.
Finally, as discussed in the introduction we have a few more modes.
Sonic Associations in Metaphor and Description.
Djuna Barnes’s prose has a certain sonic intensity, her language often mirrors the dissonance of urban life and for me, her work evokes echoes, memories, footsteps of ghosts. In Nightwood (1936), Barnes’s descriptions of settings and characters resonates with me, as when she uses a combination of orchestral music, the natural world, and a modern painter.
Suggestion of Sound through Context and Experience.
We now have film, audiobooks, video games, websites, and animation to combine text and sound, and it is nearly impossible to be a modern reader without the influence of these mediums (especially cinema) and how they have shaped our visualization process, and narrative expectations and tastes.
Film used to be called photoplays — which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Indeed, early cinema is more theatrical, everything from the manner in which the actors played to the sets used. And film is just a series of photographs.
In Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941) modern life has officially crept in to just about every aspect of life in England. Airplanes, motorbikes, cars, telephones, are constantly entering the narrative in surprising, often jarring ways. Many of the characters are reluctant to such new technologies. The gramophone appears 23 times in the text.
The chuff, chuff, chuff of the machine in the bushes had stopped. In obedience to Miss La Trobe's command, another tune had been put on the gramophone. Number Ten. London street cries it was called. "A Pot Pourri."
"Lavender, sweet lavender, who'll buy my sweet lavender" the tune trilled and tinkled, ineffectively shepherding the audience. Some ignored it. Some still wandered. Others stopped, but stood upright. Some, like Colonel and Mrs. Mayhew, who had never left their seats, brooded over the blurred carbon sheet which had been issued for their information.
The words Woolf uses to describe the gramophone are also revealing of its perception at the time culturally. Here are just some instances:
Only the tick tick of the gramophone held them together.
The gramophone warbled Home, Sweet Home
But, the gramophone asserted, let us retain whatever made that harmony.
Dispersed are we, the gramophone repeated.
the gramophone triumphed, yet lamented. . .
The gramophone gurgled Unity—Dispersity. It gurgled Un...dis... And ceased.
Miss La Trobe. . .hoisted the heavy case of gramophone records to her shoulder.
. . .only the tick of the gramophone needle was heard. The tick, tick, tick seemed to hold them together, tranced. Nothing whatsoever appeared on the stage.
It is apparent that the gramophone has a certain malevolent energy to it. Woolf not only personifies the object, with words like asserted, gurgled, and lamented, but she makes the gramophone a nuanced character by inserting it in crucial plot points and by giving it real causality. Woolf portrays the modern soundscapes affects in small moments that add up to something of significance in the lives of her characters.
Multimedia and Digital Texts
I will be writing more on this topic soon. Thanks for reading.
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