Brief Introduction and Project Overview

This site, part of my ongoing research project, aims to provide both a research repository for different approximations to an archive of sound that has been effectively lost, and also to serve as a frame of reference for the imagination of sound in a variety of pedagogical settings. While there has been a lot of interest regarding the history of the different technologies that transmit, record, and preserve sound, these archives have tended to document mostly a modern idea of sound, especially from the 19th century onward. Earlier periods have to contend with the absence of a contemporary record of these sounds except for the textual references to them. Among these, literary language is a particularly creative and rich site for the transcription, translation, and instrumentalization of sound. Using medieval Iberian literary texts as pretexts, this site brings together fragments of works that demand a sonic literacy from the audience, supplemented with sound files that are themselves approximations, reimaginings of medieval sound, attempting to bridge the gap between our present loss and a fictional archive.