Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong

by Se n Street

Overview

Wild Track is an exploration of birdsong and the ways in which that sound was conveyed, described and responded to through text, prior to the advent of recording and broadcast technologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Street links sound aesthetics, radio, natural history, and literature to explore how the brain and imagination translate sonic codes as well as the nature of the silent sound we "hear" when we read a text. This creates an awareness of sound through the tuned attention of the senses, learning from sound texts of the natural world that sought – and seek – to convey the intensity of the sonic moment and fleeting experience. To absorb these lessons is to enable a more highly interactive relationship with sound and listening, and to interpret the subtleties of audio as a means of expression and translation of the living world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501397981
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/20/2025
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Seán Street is Professor Emeritus at Bourbanemouth University, UK. He is the author of The Sound of a Room (2020), The Poetry of Radio and The Memory of Sound (2015), and a trilogy consisting of Sound Poetics (2017), Sound at the Edge of Perception (2018), and The Sound Inside the Silence: Travels in the Sonic Imagination (2019). He has worked in radio for much of his life and has made a number of programs for the BBC World Service on the life and work of Thomas Hardy.

Table of Contents

Prelude
1. Dawn Chorus: Describing Sound
2. Recording an Essence: Hearing, Reading and the Imagination
3. Ludwig Koch and the Music of Nature
4. Murmurings: Call and Response Between Bird and Human
5. Paths Through the Green Wood
6. Science in Arcadia: The Road to Selborne
7. The Romantic Poetry of Listening
8. Honest John: The Sound World of John Clare
9. North American Sublime
10. Survival and the Sound of Spirit
11. Listening to Ourselves Listening: Voices for Today and Tomorrow
Postlude
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

In the rarified world of film and television sound a 'wildtrack' is a non-synchronous recording not connected directly to an image. Seán Street has re-imagined the term in this book and guided the reader/listener from times when sound was 'recorded' solely through experience and then replayed from memory, imagination, poetry and prose. Wild Track engages us with an impressive cast list of artists and their creative works, speaking clearly across time and harnessing text with the developing role of technology to create a narrative flow as affecting as a woodland chorus in spring.” —Chris Watson, wildlife sound recordist

“Seán Street is an extraordinary listener: he listens hard but he also listens softly; he listens, like no one else, to how we all listen. This remarkable book should be translated for the birds. Surely they'd be keen to hear it. The dawn chorus might take notes. Certainly to human ears after Wild Track, birdsong will sound forever different.” —Tim Dee, author of The Running Sky and Greenery (2009), former BBC radio producer and birdwatcher

“An eloquent plea for us to listen to the natural world – to the birdsong that is disappearing. This poetic text illuminates the attempt to capture the sound of the natural world in words and is a celebration of the mystery of birdsong.” —Richard Shannon, Head of Radio, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

“An elegant meditation on the surprising and inventive representation of birdsong in poetry, from the Middle Ages to the present. Ultimately, Wild Track offers a fascinating exploration of the role of sound at the intersection of nature, text and machine.” —Kevin Gardner, Professor of English, Baylor University, USA

From the Publisher