ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author details some of the specific challenges that acoustic archaeology presents and outlines some of the strategies. He turns to the discipline of acoustic ecology, in particular to the work of Murray Schafer and Barry Truax. Just as a more conventional archaeologist first unearths the objects to be studied and then ranges them into categories, so an acoustical archaeologist must “un-air” sounds that have faded into the air’s atmosphere and catalogue them. Play scripts provide most obvious instances of sound as implied by written texts, but early modern culture offers plenty of other examples: ballads, sermons, even letters and poems written out by hand. In Acoustic Communication, Truax challenges listeners to free themselves from the narrow confines of speech and to listen to all sounds around them. Adam Fox’s exhaustive examination of the documentary evidence supports that conclusion. “If anything,” Fox observes, “the written word tended to augment the spoken, reinventing it and making it anew.
