Sound Studies and Time

The field of sound studies presents significant challenges and opportunities for musicologists and medievalists. Music history and sound studies increasingly share common ground but could benefit from more direct interaction and exchange concerning their methodologies. The emphasis of sound studies on relatively recent history invites an adaptation of its parameters to other contexts with differing arrays of media and data. Studying a period that is remoter in time than the focus of most work in sound studies, medievalists in all disciplines must rely on sources that can be slippery to mine for the cultural history of sound. Growing interest in performance and phenomenology within medieval studies has fostered attention to the role of the senses in history, but the auditory has traditionally been less than satisfactorily developed. Recently, however, the imagining and reconstruction of sound in the Middle Ages have expanded beyond the purview of musicology to engage historians of the visual arts and literature in discussions of sounding images, resounding spaces, and performed texts.