Listening in the Gaps: On Creative Practice, Knowledge Making and Archival Sound

Abstract

For more than fifty years the archive has been viewed as a site of power and its critique. Within the drive for archivability, the technological dependence, and consequent vulnerability to loss and decay, of sound archives render them problematic. Yet, the very same fragility has also made sound archives a site of intensive creative production as artists and musicians re-work sonic materials into new shapes and stories that transcend the material constraints of the archive itself. In this contribution, I examine listening to various examples of creative ‘documentary’ musical practice as opening the way to a deeper consideration of the multiple relations between archival sound, artist, and listener. By exploring the contingent, and ultimately ephemeral, relations on which a musical work depends, we can better understand how listening in the archival gaps informs creative processes as well as illuminate emergent meaning in these artistic uses of sonic remnants.