Listening to Archaeological Data

on sonification and why you might want to do this

What can we hear, if we extend our senses through digital prostheses?

sonification adds DURATION and implies NARRATIVE

VISUALIZATION is so familiar that we forget that it is weird. Sonification makes the world strange again, so that we may know it anew for the first time

data

are not 'things given'

but 'things captured, transformed':

capta

what is broken and twisted is also beautiful, and a bearer of knowledge. The Deformed Humanities is an origami crane — a piece of paper contorted into an object of startling insight and beauty.

Process

'[T]he relationship to sensation central to sonification ... is most distinctively characterized by the ability to transform data destined for one sense into data destined for another [...] this extreme plasticity lays bare the degree to which the senses themselves are articulated into different cultural, technological, and epistemic formations' Sterne and Akiyama 2012, 545.

https://edsu.github.io/ici/

... shows you wikipedia articles about places near to your physical location, courtesy of your phone's geolocation abilities.

But what if those sites shouted out for your attention? How would that change your experience of the landscape?

Try: historical friction (warning, if it works, it can be intense)

Inspirations: Ici, by Ed Summers

Inspirations: Data Driven Dj - Brian Foo

Ici

The judges were absolutely captivated by the brilliant subversion of what is traditionally a highly visual form of representation into a rhythmic soundscape, commenting that it opened up a totally new way to see and think about the past. The novel, insightful nature of the work, the innovative implementation of audio and visual media forms, combined with the clarity and thoroughness of the paradata led the judges to select this piece as one of three judges’ choice awards for the online jam, stipulating that they would very much like to see the method discussed in the paradata expanded to include further imagery and for more implementations to be produced.

Heritage Jam

2015

Judges' Choice

Listening to

Watling Street

'By actively and critically playing with the representations produced as and through data, using computers to aid in the process of hearing images as well as viewing them, we can seek out fuller, richer interpretations of the materials we study. We can listen more deeply to what we are seeing' (Kramer 2021, 3).

The Values of Remediation

Man standing in doorway of block B2. Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection, z-90; corresponds with Baird 2011, fig. 5

listen

[This figure] does not represent the 'truth' of the matter, but just a truth; it is a visualisation (ironically) of our overall impressionistic listening to the 23 sonifications created for the purposes of communicating in print, at a glance, what it is like to listen to all of these pieces.

but sound moves us

What is the click track of archaeology? What keeps us all in sync? It isn’t ‘time’, however recorded. Dates smear. They’re unsteady, dependent, relative. Extraordinary effort is required to reconcile dates and dating systems ...

No, the click track, the thing that keeps us all in line, is perhaps ‘the context’ or locus. It is a single row in a database.

Reflexivity