I write often about sound, but rarely about sound alone. I am interested in what sound does: how it gathers people, marks time, creates memory, shapes devotion, irritates the body, organizes attention, and makes communities audible to themselves.
Some of the posts gathered here begin with medieval prayerbooks or with bells, chant, and devotional soundscapes. Others begin with pandemic music, hearing, noise, musical silence, urban sound, forest quiet, or the fantasy of closing one’s ears. Together, they ask how listening works—not only as a sensory act, but as a historical, social, and embodied practice.
I use “listening” broadly here. Sometimes it means literal hearing: bells, sung offices, spoken prayers, ambient noise, musical texture. Sometimes it means the habits and expectations that shape what people notice, ignore, remember, or refuse to hear. Listening is never passive. It is trained, situated, selective, and sometimes deeply uncomfortable.
Want to read more? Start here:
Building for the Ear: From Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg
A good entry point for this theme: sound as spatial, environmental, and historically structured. This post uses the idea of the “soundshed” to think about how churches, bells, elevation, and landscape made sound part of the built environment.
Listening in on the Nuns’ Rebellion at Kloster Goldenstein
A contemporary monastic soundscape: bells, chants, prayers, household noise, resistance, and community life. My medieval/monastic interests link to current women’s religious life, making the concept of the “convent soundscape” relevant to today’s world.
What Does the Medieval Past Sound Like? Alfred Schnittke’s Minnesang (1981)
A post about medievalism, musical fragments, texture, and the strange problem of making the medieval past audible in modern composition. I ask not just “what did the past sound like?” but how later music imagines the sound of the past. I also play with technologies of analysis.
Attention Filtering – the Voluntary Earlid
A post about auditory distraction, attention, noise, and the fantasy—or possibility—of a mental earlid. This is a good bridge between sound studies, everyday life, and the bodily experience of listening.
“We Don’t Talk About COVID”: Cultural Amnesia, Set to Music
A present-day counterpart to the historical material: music, memory, disease, silence, and cultural refusal. Sound and listening are part of a wider cultural method.
Sound as historical evidence
Sound disappears, but not completely. It leaves traces in texts, buildings, rules, memories, metaphors, musical notation, complaints, prayer instructions, and ritual habits. Medieval people did not record sound in the way we do, but their books and archives still preserve evidence of sonic expectation: when to sing, when to speak, when bells should ring, when silence mattered, and when a repeated phrase became recognizable enough to stand for a whole ritual action.
That is why sound matters to me for historical work. It helps us ask what religious life felt like in time: not just what people believed, but what they heard every day, what they repeated, what interrupted them, what called them together, and what made absence perceptible.
Listening as practice
Listening is not just something that happens to us. We learn how to listen. In doing so, we learn what counts as music, what counts as noise, what deserves attention, what can be ignored, and what becomes unbearable.
That is true in medieval convents, modern concert halls, classrooms, hospitals, streets, churches, and homes. Listening is shaped by bodies, habits, technologies, authority, fatigue, desire, and memory. I return to sound repeatedly because it gives access to the lived texture of culture: how people inhabit time, space, and one another.
More paths through the archive
For more posts, try these labels:
- medieval listening — chant, prayer, bells, ritual movement, and the sonic texture of religious life; also bells and Chant posts
- silence — discipline, refusal, pressure, aspiration, and control
- soundscape — sound as environment
- pandemic music — music, memory, public health, and cultural amnesia
- earlids — listening, overload, refusal, attention, and the impossibility of fully shutting sound out
- sound
- listening
- musical silences
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