Voices from the Past: compositional approaches to using recorded speech

This paper investigates some of the ways in which composers and sound artists have used recordings of speech, especially in works mediated by technology. It will consider this within a wider context of spoken word, text composition and performance-based genres such as sound poetry. It will attempt to categorise some of the compositional techniques that may be used to work with speech, make specific reference to archive and oral history material and attempt to draw some conclusions.

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Sound in the archive: Media materials as archives of narrative

Art Libraries Journal ◽

10.1017/alj.2021.12 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 46 (3) ◽

pp. 78-83

Author(s):

Seth Ellis

Keyword(s):

Oral History ◽

The State ◽

The Public ◽

The Past ◽

And Performance ◽

State Library ◽

Affective Impact

This paper describes and evaluates research undertaken by the author at the State Library of Queensland, in the collection, cataloguing, and presentation of audiovisual materials—specifically, sound materials beyond oral history and performance. It suggests that strategies drawn from transcription can make the sounds of the past more evident in digitised catalogues, and thus can make those sounds themselves more accessible to the public. In doing so it offers a different affordance of the archive to public experience: not just information about the past, but the affective impact of the past.

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From “Observer to Activist”: Documentary Memory, Oral History, and Studs Terkel's “Essence” Narratives

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s002187581000174x ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 46 (1) ◽

pp. 103-119 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

ANDREA GUSTAVSON

Keyword(s):

Oral History ◽

Social Action ◽

Political Movements ◽

Subjective Memory ◽

The Past ◽

Hard Times ◽

History Of ◽

Three Stages ◽

And Performance ◽

The Individual

Over several decades of interviewing people and crafting their words into published works, Studs Terkel defined, expanded, and challenged the field of oral history. Terkel often described his methods as similar to those of a “prospector for gold” sifting through the statements of his subjects to create essays that reveal each person's “essence.” Drawing on his planning documents, interview transcripts, manuscripts and published texts, I trace Terkel's approach to oral history through two of his best-known works – Hard Times and “The Good War” – and through three stages: his planning and performance of interviews, his editing of the individual transcripts, and his construction of the completed text. I conclude by considering the implications of Terkel's unconventional approach to oral history and the ways in which his methodology may reflect his long history of involvement with progressive political movements. Terkel crafted his subject's narratives into texts I term “documentary memory”; he insisted that his works are subjective “memory books” but also employed a documentary rhetoric of objectivity. Terkel believed telling stories of the past to be a form of social action and he used his texts about the past to comment politically on his present – his “memory books” document earlier periods in American history relevant to the cultural moment in which he published.

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Soundscape Composition: Enhancing our understanding of changing soundscapes

Organised Sound ◽

10.1017/s1355771817000243 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

pp. 20-28 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Brona Martin

Keyword(s):

Compositional Techniques ◽

Field Recordings ◽

The Past ◽

Performance Techniques ◽

The World ◽

Cultural Themes ◽

Soundscape Studies ◽

Cultural Science ◽

And Performance ◽

Acoustic Environments

This article discusses the affordances of soundscape composition and how the techniques and approaches of this genre have been embraced as an inter-disciplinary research methodology. Since its emergence from the World Soundscape Project, the concept of soundscape composition has set out to enhance our listening awareness of our soundscapes, inspiring and establishing a discourse that explores a sense of place through sound. Soundscape composition over the past decades has established itself as a popular compositional practice among acousmatic composers utilising compositional techniques that go beyond phonographic representation of acoustic environments. Electroacoustic techniques explore not only the transformation and processing of field recordings but also the spatialisation and performance techniques used to create immersive and realistic soundscapes. These compositional developments since the establishment of the World Soundscape Project have brought this genre of music to a wider audience as it has developed into a cross-disciplinary practice. Soundscape studies methodologies such as soundwalking, listening and recording are being utilised by a broader research cohort outside of soundscape composition. This article provides a survey of recent projects and compositions that incorporate a soundscape and cross-disciplinary approach that reflects a variety of cultural themes and issues within the disciplines of social, political and cultural science.

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Regional history in literature, narratives and performance in Bengal and Santhal Pargana

VEETHIKA-An International Interdisciplinary Research Journal ◽

10.48001/veethika.2021.07.01.005 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

pp. 26-31

Author(s):

Ranjan Kumar

Keyword(s):

Indigenous Knowledge ◽

Oral History ◽

History Writing ◽

The West ◽

Profound Impact ◽

The Past ◽

Local Areas ◽

History Of ◽

Regional History ◽

And Performance

This is an attempt to study the regional history of Bengal with the help of literature and narratives and unheard past of Santhal Pargana through narrative performances. Since, the history was written for the ruling and aristocracy class which gives an understanding of the past from above and it hardly talks about the history of lower strata. There is a massive need of history writing pertaining to local areas. The knowledge of the local people is acquired through qualitative research because the indigenous knowledge is transferred from one generation to another and because of the west centric knowledge, the indigenous knowledge is marginalised which will even vanish after sometime. Similar is the situation of the knowledge of spiritual and religious past. The hagiographical literature of this region is considered as an important source to understand the socio- religious outlook. Beneath these literatures, there were several proto socio- religious outlooks that exercised a profound impact on people at lower level. In process to study these , one has to depend upon the oral history available in its surroundings.

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Progress and Prospects in Translating Nanobiotechnology in Medical Theranostics

Current Nanoscience ◽

10.2174/1573413715666191126093258 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 16 (5) ◽

pp. 685-707 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Amna Batool ◽

Farid Menaa ◽

Bushra Uzair ◽

Barkat Ali Khan ◽

Bouzid Menaa

Keyword(s):

Biological Properties ◽

Chemical Characteristics ◽

Intrinsic Properties ◽

The Past ◽

Profound Influence ◽

Functionalized Nanomaterials ◽

Physico Chemical ◽

Properties Of Materials ◽

Targeted Drug ◽

And Performance

: The pace at which nanotheranostic technology for human disease is evolving has accelerated exponentially over the past five years. Nanotechnology is committed to utilizing the intrinsic properties of materials and structures at submicroscopic-scale measures. Indeed, there is generally a profound influence of reducing physical dimensions of particulates and devices on their physico-chemical characteristics, biological properties, and performance. The exploration of nature’s components to work effectively as nanoscaffolds or nanodevices represents a tremendous and growing interest in medicine for various applications (e.g., biosensing, tunable control and targeted drug release, tissue engineering). Several nanotheranostic approaches (i.e., diagnostic plus therapeutic using nanoscale) conferring unique features are constantly progressing and overcoming all the limitations of conventional medicines including specificity, efficacy, solubility, sensitivity, biodegradability, biocompatibility, stability, interactions at subcellular levels. : This review introduces two major aspects of nanotechnology as an innovative and challenging theranostic strategy or solution: (i) the most intriguing (bare and functionalized) nanomaterials with their respective advantages and drawbacks; (ii) the current and promising multifunctional “smart” nanodevices.

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Pupil with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Lifelong Learning ◽

10.11118/lifele201707027 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 7-25

Author(s):

Karolina Diallo

Keyword(s):

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder ◽

School Performance ◽

School Environment ◽

Detrimental Effect ◽

Obsessive Compulsive ◽

Compulsive Disorder ◽

The Past ◽

And Performance ◽

The Impact

Pupil with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Over the past twenty years childhood OCD has received more attention than any other anxiety disorder that occurs in the childhood. The increasing interest and research in this area have led to increasing number of diagnoses of OCD in children and adolescents, which affects both specialists and teachers. Depending on the severity of symptoms OCD has a detrimental effect upon child's school performance, which can lead almost to the impossibility to concentrate on school and associated duties. This article is devoted to the obsessive-compulsive disorder and its specifics in children, focusing on the impact of this disorder on behaviour, experience and performance of the child in the school environment. It mentions how important is the role of the teacher in whose class the pupil with this diagnosis is and it points out that it is necessary to increase teachers' competence to identify children with OCD symptoms, to take the disease into the account, to adapt the course of teaching and to introduce such measures that could help children reduce the anxiety and maintain (or increase) the school performance within and in accordance with the school regulations and curriculum.

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Line on Fire

10.1093/oso/9780199489893.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Happymon Jacob

Keyword(s):

Oral History ◽

South Asian ◽

Empirical Data ◽

Political Leadership ◽

Jammu And Kashmir ◽

The Past

The India–Pakistan border in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has witnessed repeated ceasefire violations (CFVs) over the past decade. Indeed, with relations between India and Pakistan degrading, CFVs have gone up exponentially. These CFVs have the potential to not only begin a crisis but also escalate an ongoing one. To make things worse, in the event of major violations, political leadership on either side often engage in high-pitched rhetoric some of which even have nuclear undertones. Using fresh empirical data and oral history evidence, this book explains the causes of CFVs on the J&K border and establishes a relationship between CFVs and crisis escalation between India and Pakistan. In doing so, the book further nuances the existing arguments about the escalatory dynamics between the two South Asian nuclear rivals. Furthermore, the book explains ceasefire violations using the concept of ‘autonomous military factors’.

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Characterizing Bilingual Effects on Cognition: The Search for Meaningful Individual Differences

Brain Sciences ◽

10.3390/brainsci11010081 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 81

Author(s):

Kristina C. Backer ◽

Heather Bortfeld

Keyword(s):

Individual Differences ◽

Cognitive Processes ◽

Language Background ◽

Bilingual Advantage ◽

The Past ◽

General Movement ◽

And Performance ◽

Task Irrelevant ◽

Analytical Approaches ◽

The Relationship

A debate over the past decade has focused on the so-called bilingual advantage—the idea that bilingual and multilingual individuals have enhanced domain-general executive functions, relative to monolinguals, due to competition-induced monitoring of both processing and representation from the task-irrelevant language(s). In this commentary, we consider a recent study by Pot, Keijzer, and de Bot (2018), which focused on the relationship between individual differences in language usage and performance on an executive function task among multilingual older adults. We discuss their approach and findings in light of a more general movement towards embracing complexity in this domain of research, including individuals’ sociocultural context and position in the lifespan. The field increasingly considers interactions between bilingualism/multilingualism and cognition, employing measures of language use well beyond the early dichotomous perspectives on language background. Moreover, new measures of bilingualism and analytical approaches are helping researchers interrogate the complexities of specific processing issues. Indeed, our review of the bilingualism/multilingualism literature confirms the increased appreciation researchers have for the range of factors—beyond whether someone speaks one, two, or more languages—that impact specific cognitive processes. Here, we highlight some of the most salient of these, and incorporate suggestions for a way forward that likewise encompasses neural perspectives on the topic.

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The theater of memory: Direct speech in Palestinian oral history

Memory Studies ◽

10.1177/1750698018777023 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 633-648

Author(s):

Kobi Peled

Keyword(s):

Oral History ◽

Striking Feature ◽

Direct Speech ◽

The Past ◽

Theatrical Performance ◽

Main Thing ◽

Significant Figures ◽

Arabic Speaking ◽

Do So

A striking feature of Palestinian oral history projects is the extensive use that interviewees make of direct speech to communicate their memories—especially those born before the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. They do so irrespective of whether or not they participated in or actually heard the dialogues they wish to convey. This article seeks to characterize and explain this phenomenon. In the interviews conducted by the author—an Arabic-speaking Jew—as well as in other projects, this mode of speech is marked by ease of transition from character to character and between different points in time. It clearly gives pleasure to those engaged in the act of remembering, and it grades readily into a theatrical performance in which tone of speech and the quality of the acting become the main thing. This form of discourse sprang up from the soil of a rural oral culture and still flourishes as a prop for supporting memory, a vessel for collecting and disseminating stories, and a technique for expressing identification with significant figures from the past.

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