Aural Philology and the Latin Recordings of the Harvard Vocarium

Abstract

Philology is Often Taken to Be a Matter of Eyes and Hands: We Make Sense of Written Text, And Then Write Down Our Findings. This essay is interested in philology as a matter of the ear. Since Walter Ong declared the fundamental opposition of orality and literacy, humanists have located the lost, spoken origins of written text in the realm of orality. By contrast, aurality, the way texts are encountered by the ear, is a condition of consumption, which is to say reading, and so by considering aurality we are also considering the history of reading.Sound recordings, created by phonographic technology, provide a useful critical framework for the history of reading. In addition to what we think of as the legible or intentional content of a recording, sound recordings have what audio engineers call “room tone”—the sonic signature of the space in which the recording was made, the equipment used to make it, and the specific placement of that equipment in relation to a subject. Although we learn to unhear room tone by means of what Jonathan Sterne calls “audile techniques” (137), its presence is always felt. By attuning our ears to the room tone of historical phonography, then, we can practice attuning our historians' ears to the barely perceptible silences, markers of space, and context in textual artifacts of historical reading culture.