2024 Silences and Sounds (12/31/24)

The 2024 blog word-cloud

As 2024 finishes up, I've been looking back on the year’s journey—its silences, its sounds, and the moments in between. Writing this blog has been a rewarding practice, a space for reflection and connection. As I noted earlier this week, it’s been a way to map the contours of my own thoughts, from the micro to the macro.

Today’s post is a pause, a chance to look at the bigger picture. Above, you’ll find the word cloud of themes from this fall (as derived from post tags). It’s fun to see how words – like echoes – pattern the ways we think about things. Earlids, eh? And cemeteries. And a bit of metacognitive work.

For nerds among us (and who doesn’t have a bit of nerdery?), here are the words that echoed most strongly across my Fall contributions, by frequency: 

• Silence
• soundscape
• Thalbach, eco-acoustical
• sound, nature
• beauty, earlids, hearing loss, writing strategies, monastic, Ovid
• cemeteries, urban, bird song

An interesting list. Ovid's a bit of a surprise. And the obvious omission is "music," which gives me something concrete to do this Spring. Places to go, things to write about ... Not a bad ending to the year!

I hope that your 2024 has been all you had hoped, and wish you a 2025 rich in sounds and in silences. May YOUR acoustical moments bring you to spaces of beauty, joy, and connectedness.

 

Writing is momentum (12/28/24)

Newton's cradle with an arrow for the impulse of "writing"

Why write a blog? In all the busy times, with all the other things to do, why blog at all? In the few months since I’ve started there are a few things that have been motivators.

Ideas: it gives me a place to work out ideas – to take the bits and bobs of reading and remembrance and tie them up into small packages that I can come back to when the need arises.

Accountability: Writing is a kind of progress, even if it isn’t directly adding to word count that “matters” for the CV. Thinking through things on the additive basis is making progress. And to make progress on MY work while also chairing the department, handling hospice at a distance, householding, teaching, and spending time with Tom – that’s a good thing.

Writing Practice: Setting up a writing practice has been helpful modeling for setting up appropriate timeframes. Specifically, I think it’s helped me better plan the idea-generation stages of writing.The sitting and listing things IS an important part of writing, and I give myself more time for gazing absently into space now than I did before I started blogging. I'm thinking less transactionally and more effectively these days. Win!

Momentum: I just have a better sense of ongoing engagement with my own work when I’m putting my ten fingers and some coffee time into the project. I can feel the shifting shapes of the book outline moving in the background even if I’m not actively “writing chapters” yet. The ideas about sound experiences in installations in Chicago, for instance, have shifted the way I’m thinking about civic experiences of sound in the 15^th century since I’m considering how shared sounds provide points of reference – a kind of acoustical person-to-person bonding. Moving forward; that’s a plus.

Perspective: Blogging gets me to the proverbial Forty-Thousand Foot view, and I’ve enjoyed my forays into medieval deafness, earlids (or here or here), and poetry (with its follow-along on poetry and silences). I work more broadly in the blog than I do when I think, “oh, I should work on the book.” The details of medieval documents are one kind of practice; this has been a helpful space for developing a different kind of thinking.

Fun: Okay, who doesn’t enjoy putting words together to make a thing? I love making things. And these short things, these posts, they’ve been interesting to me. I share them in hopes that they’re also of interest to some of you.

So, yep, blogging is something that stays into the New Year. I am going to try to cut back on the book binges and to plus-up the Tom time. But I think I’ll keep blogging. As long as it stays fun!

 

 

“Aged documents” in the Thalbach Monastery Chronicle (12/16/24)

 

1728, 1336, 1338, 1340, 1655, 1532, 1557, 1612, 1597: How old is your evidence?

The Chronicle of Thalbach is a mass of contradictions. (And what monastic chronicle isn’t?) For our chroniclist, history is a bit of a wrestling match, one that needs to reconcile institutional mandates with historical documentation in order to assert the convent’s enduring significance in a period of increasing bureaucratic scrutiny.

I’m starting back through for my fourth journey through the Thalbach Chronicle and its meanings. The chronicle is (largely) an early 18^th century contextual document. In her narrative, the chroniclist tried to do three broad things:

• show the ongoing importance of the convent (with its relatively strong array of incoming novices and postulants and its significant leaders over time),
• trace its history as the oldest women’s monastery in Bregenz, and
• stake its claim as one of the significant Catholic monasteries in the region.

She was writing, in other words, from a position of (justifiable) pride in the convent’s history and its linkage to other convents in the region – a reformer of Wonnenstein, Brunnenstein, and Grimmenstein, for instance. To put it bluntly, she’s writing a history of (women’s) Catholicism triumphant.

As I am studying her narrative this time, however, I’m struck by two areas of tension that the chroniclist faces, though I’ll focus today primarily on the first of these. Notably, our chronicle historian faced a significant Then/Now challenge. She’s writing under command – the chronicle has been commissioned, or at least commanded, by her superiors, she tells us – but she’s also grounded in the documents and legacies of the past. Her audience, in other words, is uncertain. Is it the Catholic leadership? Her future sisters? Some external audience (such as the increasingly involved Imperial audience)? The convent stems from two generations before the Aufhebung, the monastic closures of the end of the century, and already the bureaucracy is closing in. There’s a sense in which that pressure to prove the monastery’s importance shapes the narrative as delivered.

To that end, the author claims that she is writing in “the year 1728” (Gathering 1, p. 3), but she is also writing “as I found it in the old writings of the house of God” (Gathering 1, p. 1). She is laying claim to “found” information; her narrative, she asserts, is document-based. And if document based, it must be authentic, yes? Such grounding in the convent record is important to her, for she repeats those claims several times. She cites the “old documents” of 1655 (Gathering 1, p. 4) and the “old booklet” (p. 7). Oldness is evidently a virtue in documents. Plus, she is clearly concerned about showing her authority and research capacities.

That trend of reference to “older” sources continues:

• There are “old records” which attest to Dorothea Kelhofferin’s role as Mater in 1532 (Gathering 2, p. 1).
• There are other unspecified “old writings” regarding Regula Weisin’s ascension (in 1557) as convent leader (Gathering 3, page 36). Regula was to serve in the role for forty years (1557-1597), so her selection was indeed a matter of significance for the convent
• In Gathering 4, p. 74, we learn about a gift of fish (!) that Amalia Loherin “then wrote this with her own hand in the old good book, which still exists” – one that dates back to 1612.
• Gathering 5a p. 102 suggests that Loherin may have been a kind of genius of accounting practices, since the 100fl, given “30 years ago,” was documented as coming due in 1627, a timely infusion of much-needed cash for the convent!

Oldness and designated leadership – the convent heroes who shaped the successes of the monastery over the centuries -- are thus intertwined. The venerable documentary record – the very stuff of “old records” -- reinforces the idea that significant people and significant documentation are coextensive. Oldness is, by implication, trustworthy. Thus, if an old record says something is so, it has authority.

Such references to Old Records draw us into the realm that Steven Colbert has designated as “Truthiness.” We trust the purported fact or story as much for how it makes us feel and how it explains historical happenings as for any external evidence of its reality. For instance, Amalia Loherin, our beloved financial wizard, is otherwise unattested by that name in the Thalbach record. This is perhaps a slight hiccup in the chroniclist’s pathway of argumentation; we only have her word that the documents (or the person) once existed. On the other hand, names do change; Amalia’s absence may be amended by future findings. And the vividness of the fish story is vivid enough to fit the category of stories that should  have been true; she is telling a story here of how the convent came to be financially self-sufficient. The name may be wrong, but the implications – a fully funded and financially secure convent – are demonstrated through these anecdotes.

Even if she is sometimes telling anecdotes on slender evidence, our chroniclist does get frustrated with the absence of information in what convent documentation does survive. She found, for instance “in an old booklet… that the trustworthy and well-loved Mr. Hiltbrand-Brandenburg of Biberach had traveled to Rome in his post, but it is not written in which year it happened.” (Gathering 1, p. 7). As a researcher trying to tack-and-tie the details of her story, our chroniclist finds that the habits of earlier writers can be frustrating But she’s also sure that his actions were important; she exhorts her fellow monastics to say 3 rosaries on his behalf every year.

The second area of tension is that of convent identity. She’s sure, on the one hand, that the convent was founded by devout sisters, and supported by an unnamed widow. She is also equally convinced (or should that be, she is equally devoted to convincing us as readers) that the convent had always belonged to the Franciscan third order (p. 3), as early as 1338, or perhaps 1340 when the sisters went back to Constance. This is, of course, pish-posh – a historical fabrication generated on political grounds in a moment of intense political need. The convent only became Third Order when commanded to do so after the Council of Trent in the late 16^th century. But that, as they say, is a story for another day.

TAKE-AWAY:

The Thalbach chronicler’s narrative invites us to consider how historical memory is shaped—not only by the documents themselves, but also by the pressures of the moment in which the author writes. The Thalbach chroniclist is concerned that we readers understand her reliance on written records from the convent archives. She did not, in fact, need to tell the reader that documents were old, so her framing of the age of her sources reflects her own intentionality. She is calling to the reader's attention this tension of past and present, historical story and living tradition. And she is doing so by naming her heroes, telling their stories, and even accounting for the convent’s annual gift of fish.

 

CHRONICLE SOURCE:

Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters 1336-1629. References are to pagination where it exists, but to gathering and page number where formal pagination is missing. One gathering is out of order, and another (omitted entirely from the Vienna copy) has been separated in the archival record.

The Vienna copy (ÖNB Cod. 7406: Chronicle and Necrology) largely accords with the VLA copy on the points discussed above.

 

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY: I use the gender-neutral label “chroniclist” rather than the masculine gendered “chronicler” to reflect the reality of women’s agency in the creation of such monastic chronicles. Though un-named, the chroniclist also served as convent archivist for several years; her hand is found frequently in the surviving archive records of the early 18^th century.

Starting from a place of blah (12/11/24)

 

A "no entry" red circle over a parallelogram labeled "The Blah Zone"

When you're caught in the blah zone—the one where starting anything feels impossible, but the work just HAS to get done—it’s time for a reset.

Here are three strategies that I’ve used successfully this past week to get over the not-starting blues…

Actual anonymized excerpt from a 70 item spreadsheet from last Wednesday:

1. Spreadsheet with color, text deleted; each row labeled "Thingy 1, thingy 2" etc.

1. Make a spreadsheet.

Those of you who are spreadsheet people will get where I’m going with this: the spreadsheet itself is an accomplishment. Bonus points for prioritizing with colors. (It was a big project – still is – so the kick-off thinking was facilitated by a little fancy spreadsheet driving.)

Don’t you instantaneously feel better, seeing all that organization? I know I do!

Besides, a spreadsheet can make the next steps straightforward. Ask a question about G3. Then about G4. Then about C5. A spreadsheet can put things into an order that your blah brain just isn’t managing right at the moment. Win!

2. Boots. Put 'em on.

2. Don’t climb the mountains, put on your boots.

Seriously, who has energy for mountain climbing this time of year? (I did last year, but that was last year. This is this year. Be one with the blahs.) If the mountain (or whatever the next task is) seems insurmountable, ignore it. Focus on the next step. If I’m going to go walking, I need to put on my boots. I will now put on my boots. (Or order the interlibrary loan materials, or figure out the grocery list.)

Once the metaphorical boots are on, I’ll often get a couple of hours mileage out of things done “while I’m here.” And if not, at least I have my boots on. Little bits of progress DO add up. 

3. Work-in-progress list

3. Check back on your progress.

So, you’re just going to open the file to see how much you managed to get done this week. You don’t have to work on it. Just report-out on what got done. And while you’re there, maybe write a little summary, or a reminder of things you wanted to do. Maybe bullet point something. Just a little bit of progress.

THE TAKE-AWAY:

            Little by little, and it all gets done.

You don’t always have to have the “big task” in mind. Make progress in increments for a while and you’re still making progress.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

If you’re up against the writers-block-blues version of the blahs, perhaps this writing strategies post will help:

•     The Silence of Not-Writing – and What To Do About It
   

Caveat: this post is about the exhaustion blahs; more serious causes may need more serious attention. If you think you’ve gone beyond exhaustion into depression, please seek support. Here are two resources that can guide you to help.

• https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/depression

• https://www.helpguide.org/mental-health/depression/coping-with-depression

“Bulgy enlargement” and medieval hearing loss: Insights from Flohr and Kierdorf (2022)

 

Bulgy enlargement of ear canal signaled by black arrows (from Flohr and Kierdorf 2022)

This post is a response to (and a brief meditation on) the recent work of Flohr and Kierdorf on two medieval skeletons showing signs of hearing loss:

Flohr, Stefan, & Kierdorf, Uwe. (2022). Abnormal bone loss in the external auditory canal of two adult humans from the medieval period of Germany—An attempt at differential diagnosis. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 32(4), 938–943. https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.3108

Since I’ve just spent a lively month developing a music and madness unit within our music history course for majors, I’ve already been reading and thinking a lot about paleopathology and diagnosis of illnesses of the past and their implications for human experience.

So, when I tripped across the Flohr and Kierdorf article on bone loss in the ear from the middle ages, it was sitting smack dab in the middle of some weird Venn diagram of transient interests.

• Ears and hearing, check.
• Past illnesses, check.
• Medieval, check.
• Soundscapes (and their absence), check.

TBH, I’m in it for the weird facts. I am not a medical person, nor do I play one on TV; I come at this as a humanist, and as someone still –STILL – bothered by ear issues of my own (Today makes it four months of otitis media and associated tinnitus, egad).

TWO DISEASES, TWO DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES

So, in the “learn something new every day” category, there are two separate diseases that can cause external auditory canal problems. External ear canal cholesteatoma (EACC) is the one most commonly diagnosed out of the past, whereas their finding of keratosis obturans in one of the skeletons is new.

Keratosis obturans, I learned from Piepergerdes et al. (1980), is a disease in which keratin (that stuff from hair and nails) accumulates in the ear, causing acute biting pain and hearing loss. It gradually forces the external auditory canal to widen, but doesn’t actually damage bone.

EACC, on the other hand, is (layman translating): skin overgrowth that inflames the area wrapping around the ear bones – periosteitis, in other words. It’s sort of like having shin splints, but in your ear. Symptoms are more an ache than an ow, plus hearing loss. This is the one that causes osteonecrosis – the bone can be damaged and deteriorate if it’s left untreated.

Of the two diseases, Keratosis obturans is more common than EACC, at least in the 21^st century. However, it has been missing in the paleopathology record until now.

WHAT THEY FOUND

Flohr and Kierdorf point out that both Keratosis obturans and EACC lead to enlargement and perforation of the external auditory canal wall. They call that expansion “bulgy enlargement,” and call it out in their images (as shown in the title card for today's blog post, above).

The “why” of that skeletal deformation seems obvious to a layman (me) when you look at the way that “stuff” fills up the ear canal in Keratosis obturans. Chartrand’s Figures 5 and 6 give you an idea of how that works – the left image is several months in, the right hand one is at 5 years. Can you even imagine? Oy! Modern images from Chartrand 2013

Chartrand's images of Keratosis obturans at 4 mo. and 5 yrs

For this study, Flohr and Kierdorf examined two medieval skeletons:

• The first skeleton was of a 6th-8th c woman age >50. Her skeleton comes from a well-studied town graveyard.
  
• The second was a man age >50 from the monastery of St. Lorenz at Schöningen.We don't know if he was a monk or a lay brother; we just know that he was buried in the monastery graveyard some time (unspecified) in the late Middle Ages.
  

While both had “bulgy enlargement” of the ear canal, the second skeleton also had involvement of the mastoid, but the first didn’t. In other words, the woman had Keratosis obturans, and the man had EACC.

WHY IT MATTERS

The “why” provided by Flohr and Kierdorf is all about the ability to distinguish one disease from another, and that’s remarkably cool. Distinguishing between these diseases enriches our understanding of health conditions in the past, and theirs was the first to find Keratosis obturans in the archaeological record. Nifty stuff!

My own “why” is a little bit different, though. I’m thinking about the ways in which these two medieval individuals experienced the world around them.

The woman with Keratosis Obturans would have been hard of hearing, that bugaboo of the aging process. But she’d also likely have had moments of “the twitch,” that head jerking response to stabbing pain in the ear. Such pain may not have intruded very often, but she was living with pain as a regular occurrence. The world around her might still have been beautiful, but she would surely have had moments of wishing she could hear the bird singing, or follow the conversation more closely, and other moments of just wishing it would all stop. Ear pain can be the worst. Keratosis obturans was for her likely a loss, and one that plagued her on a regular basis. On the other hand, as they say, each day above the ground is a day for celebration.

The monastic man with EACC (who had also had several broken ribs, a broken arm, and other signs of hard living) was similarly hard of hearing, but his ear only ached. He too would have missed the birds, and frustrated his companions in his inattention and jumbled responses to conversational gambits. But for him, the ache of old bones and the ache of the ear might have been apiece, similar in their experiential implications. Getting old is not for the faint of heart.

A WORLD MADE MUFFLED

What’s amazing is to think about the fact that we have these clues into the sound-world of these older medieval individuals just by the signs and signals of the bones they left behind.

For both individuals, we can tell that the vibrant soundscapes of youth were now behind them; they lived in a muted world.

• Given its more muffled nature, the world would have had mysterious almost-sounds that they’d be trying to decipher.

• They’d mix up conversational answers because they were only guessing at what the person speaking to them had said. That can be embarrassing and can also strain relationships.

• They might have developed some skill with lipreading (it’s a godsend, truly), but it doesn’t fully make up for what one hears through the ears, and the world goes silent when you turn around to write on the board – oh wait, that’s me. Try, … and the room went silent when when they turned to pick up the water pitcher.

• Knock-to-enter might not have worked as a signal any more; overall acoustical signals would have become increasingly unreliable as time went by.

• In particular, their use of the natural world and its auditory signals was no longer reliable. The sudden hush of the adjacent forest as a predator (or really any big bulky critter) comes through might not have grabbed their attention as it would have in their youth; they might have been unaware of the bleating lamb needing attention; the call of the rooster in the morning might not have served as wake up call now that the sound didn’t penetrate through as once it had.

SKELETON STORIES

In short, these skeletal clues offer something remarkable: a glimpse into the lived realities of medieval individuals as shaped by their embodied experience and its relationship to the world around them. The stories etched (or pressed) into bone invite us to imagine what it meant to listen, to strain to hear, to ache and hurt, and yet to adapt in a time not so very different from our own.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chartrand, Max Stanley. “Beware the Septic Keratosis Obturans: Stealth Public Health Threat” (March 2013): DOI: 10.4172/2161-119X.1000283

Flohr, Stefan, & Kierdorf, Uwe. Abnormal bone loss in the external auditory canal of two adult humans from the medieval period of Germany—An attempt at differential diagnosis. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 32(4) (2022): 938–943. https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.3108

Piepergerdes, M C et al. “Keratosis obturans and external auditory canal cholesteatoma.” The Laryngoscope vol. 90,3 (1980): 383-91. doi:10.1002/lary.5540900303

Smooth or Spiky? November’s Sound Samples (12/2/24)

A cylinder ("smooth") and a spiky call-out box ("spiky")

As I have sought to be more intentional in my listening (and as my ear is gradually coming back online from that oh-so-long otitis media), I spent some time gathering samples of sound that struck me in particular ways. 

I’ll start with the sounds 

Example 1: Rain, in the middle of the night, in a tent:

 

Example 2: NYC, with honking cars and the murmur of the VERY crowded street:

Example 3: NYC, the background "swoosh" of street noise:

Example 4: LIRR (Long Island Rail) and its clackety clackety:

Example 5: Bird babbles on suburban Long Island:

What is interesting to me is the different emotional import of the various sounds. Rain is entirely soothing (except for the fact that it woke me up!); the randomness of it is restful, and quickly lulled me back to sleep. (It helped that the waterproofing worked!)

The NYC background noise of example 3, on the other hand, has much the same pattern of noise, with a relatively steady state of largely indistinguishable noises -- that city mix of traffic, the building being worked on, the walking noisy crowd, and so on. But the volume of that "swoosh" of noise is read by my viscera as a threat; the sheer volume (running at 70-90 decibels) is a pressure on my soul. Given my 'druthers, I'd rather listen to Example 2, the same ambient noise but with the disruptive honking of an aggressive cab. Why? I suppose it is partly because the spike in sound "fits" with my ground-level assessment of the city. It's at that level of "having a reason" for discomfort -- one can complain about the taxi, but it's harder to justify complaining about background sound -- even if it's nearly overwhelming.

The clacking railroad is back toward the comfortable zone of neutral noises; the cyclic nature of its sound is part of storytelling, after all: I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. Repetition is soothing, when it has a shape. Perhaps that puts the "swoosh" of street noise into context; being shapeless, there's nothing to listen for, just the inevitability of having to listen to the noises in an ongoing, unending way.

And then there's the recording of the bird babbles. These are happy birds (and some random squirrel tussling with a bush, click click), and they aren't particularly loud. There's an up and down to their individual calls, but they layer up as a mass of simultaneity. In music, it would be relatively dissonant; read as nature noises it fits into a category of the familiar. It's soothing, even if the assemblage is about as complicated as that of the city noises, with everyone talking at once.

The sounds we encounter at random shape us in ways we often don’t always consciously realize. They thread their way through our emotions and perceptive habits with their textures, patterns, and (especially) volumes. Reflecting on November's sound samples, I've been struck by the tangible interplay of smoothness and spikiness, and especially by how their combinations "read differently" depending on context. Repetition can soothe or grate depending on the narrative we assign it; randomness too can comfort or unsettle. Context lets us transform noise into music (sound organized in time) or cacophony (random unpleasantness), drawing on our emotions to do so. This is why the music sounds in clubs or restaurants can excite some patrons and utterly annoy others; they are placed differently within the internal narrative each listener brings to the moment.

This exercise in intentional listening has reminded me that soundscapes are as much about how we listen as about the sounds themselves. Rain becomes restful because I associate it with shelter and safety; honking cabs feel less intrusive than the city’s unrelenting roar because they narrate a story I can respond to. Even the chaos of bird babbles draws me in, not for its order, but for its vibrant vitality. (That dad’s a birder brings those sounds special meaning, and that’s relevant too!)

Sound, whether smooth or spiky, asks us to tune in—to its rhythms, to the silences (sometimes) interspersed within, and to the ways it resonates within us, both in a physical sense of vibrating WITH the train, and in an emotive sense of what memory/memories it pokes into recollection. Each sound carries its own emotional baggage; in listening carefully, we not only hear the world more clearly but perhaps hear our own inner thoughts as well.