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E-book Soundings : Documentary film and the listening experience
The capacity for sound to be powerfully evocative is unquestionable. An old photograph, or even a silent cine film from one’s childhood, brings back memories and can have strong emotional resonances. Listening to the ‘unseen sound’ of an old audio recording however, can almost without warning, engulf us in the feelings it triggers. The sound of a distant night-time foghorn or of close-by early morning chirruping sparrows can transport me back, as if through some mysterious portal, to my childhood bedroom in East London where I fell asleep and awoke to those sounds. The room itself and the very feeling of being there, and listening, is evoked. Delia Derbyshire has described how the sound of air-raid sirens during Coventry’s wartime Blitz in her childhood engendered her ‘love for abstract sounds’, as did the ‘percussive sound’ of millworkers’ ‘clogs on cobbles’ going to work at six o’clock in the morning in her later childhood home of Preston (Cavanagh, 1998). Listening is an intense, inner experience that can have lifelong resonances since ‘there is nothing to stop’ sound’s ‘penetrating enveloping presence from overpowering’ (Rangan, 2017, p. 284); it has no bounding frame like the image, containing, defining and controlling it, and so is freer to generate deep affects that we have little voluntary control over.
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