'Imagined Sound' is a unique cartography of the artistic, historical and
political forces that have informed the post-World War II representation
of Australian landscapes. It is the first book to formulate the unique
methodology of 'imagined sound', a new way to read and listen to
literature and music that moves beyond the dominance of the visual, the
colonial mode of knowing, controlling and imagining Australian space.
Emphasising sound and listening, this approach draws out and re-examines
the key narratives that shape and are shaped by Australian landscapes
and histories, stories of first contact, frontier violence, the explorer
journey, the convict experience, non-Indigenous belonging, Pacific
identity and contemporary Indigenous Dreaming. 'Imagined Sound' offers a
compelling analysis of how these narratives are reharmonised in key
works of literature and music.
To listen to and read imagined sound is to examine how works of
literature and music evoke and critique landscapes and histories using
sound. It is imagined sound because it is created by descriptive
language and imaginative thought, and is as such an extension of the
range of heard sound. The concept is inspired by Benedict Anderson's key
study of nationalism, 'Imagined Communities' (1983). Discussing official
(and unofficial) national anthems, Anderson argues the imagined sound of
these songs connects us all. This conception of sound operates in two
ways: it places the listener within 'the nation' and it bypasses the
problem of both space and time, enabling listeners from across a vast
space to, simultaneously, become one. Following Anderson, imagined sound
emphasises the importance of the imagination in the formation of
landscapes and communities, and in the telling and retelling of
histories.
'Imagined Sound' encounters the different forms and tonalities of
imagined sound - the soundscape, refrain, song, lyric, scream, voice and
noise ¬- in novels, poems, art music, folk, rock, jazz and a film clip.
To listen to these imagined sounds is to encounter the diverse ways that
writers and musicians have reimagined and remapped Australian
colonial/postcolonial histories, landscapes and mythologies. Imagined
sound links the past to the present, enabling colonial landscapes and
traumas to haunt the postcolonial; it carries and expresses highly
personal and interior experiences and emotions; and it links people to
the landscapes they inhabit and to the narratives and myths that give
place meaning. As a reading and listening practice imagined sound
pursues the unresolved conflicts that echo across the haunted
soundscapes connecting the colonial past to the postcolonial present.
The seeds of regeneration also bear fruit as writers and musicians
imagine the future. 'Imagined Sound' fuses the spirit of close reading
common to literary studies and the score analysis familiar to musicology
with ideas from sound studies, philosophy, Island studies and
postcolonial studies.
