Home Song

Abstract

ABSTRACTInspired by Benjamin’s exuberance for weaving haunting sonic textures into his renowned style of snappy passages and his own sense of writerly intentionality, this paper describes an ongoing research project concerned with the collection of sound bytes using a sound archive and interface (sonification). The archive records my recollections of an earlier life reimagined as ‘Scenes’ from a Childhood, Village Life and Songs of Resistance. The recollections, rendered in Scene I, materialise as a textual street-sketch using a manually-generated word cloud with childlike doodles to disrupt the oneiric rhetoric of national boundaries and régimes of memory. The work blends creative writing (Scene II) with digital art (Scene III) and reflects my fascination with the built and the natural, home and host, the ear as ‘prompt’ for and ‘prop’ in practices of the imagination. The larger cartography of linked digital designs acts as a literary device (ekphrasis), an organising tool that accents the possibilities and impossibilities of listening techniques, while connecting me to the collective voices of what Deleuze and Guattari call a minor literature. The sound archive contains noise that is simultaneously recognisable and alien.