Attending to Silence and Quietude: Finding Meaning, Loss, and the Backgroundification of Nature in the Historical Archives

This talk is presented as part of the Munroe Center for Social Inquiry's "Cultivating Attention" lecture series. For more information, visit the Munroe Center's site.

Sound and listening were centrally important to the development of modern conceptions of the environment and environmentalism. Tracing the sounds and silences of the past contribute to individuals’ past — and our own in the present — prompts us to consider the shifting, culturally-bound mechanisms through which we have sensed and perceived and acted upon nature. In this talk I will focus on case studies that help us understand how individuals and communities noticed, attended to, and cared about silence over the course of the twentieth century in the U.S. context: Early twentieth-century efforts to collect the voices of vanishing species and then use these wild-recorded sounds of nature in radio programming, contributing to an association of silence with extinction, a birder’s struggle with age-related hearing loss, and the popular use of “improved sounds of nature” in built environments in the 1970s to muffle and replace the sounds (and silences) of the built environment. I argue that, among several unintended consequences of putting nature sounds to work, perhaps the most consequential for how the public understood and experienced their world in the last decades of the twentieth century was the further backgroundification of the non-built environment. Examining the sensation, perception, and documentation of silence in the archive opens up categorical and ontological questions about how change is determined, challenging the very practice of history.

Alexandra Hui is Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University. Her monograph, co-edited volumes, and articles examine the intersection of music, sound, silence, and science. Her current projects are histories of background music, how scientists listen to the environment, and how historians can intervene in the global climate emergency.