Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

How do you investigate an object while still retaining its mystery? One difficulty is that we are in language. If we want to understand a thing, our words have a tendency to name the thing and thus reduce it to something it’s not. Or, even if we can express it, it may not be communicated, as the meaning conveyed often gets re-inscribed into the lexicon of the listener. The good news is that we are not limited to using words to communicate. The rise of studies of affect in the past twenty years mirrors the rise of sound studies. The emphasis on sound accompanies an ethical modality of listening. As we become better attuned to the sounds in our environments, we become more and more a part of those environments. Ideally, such an attunement helps to erase the distinctions of the all the classic dualities that separate us from ourselves and each other. Perhaps no other character better represents such alienation and separation than Mary Shelley’s monster. This study involves the creation of a soundscape to accompany the two hundredth anniversary of Frankenstein. Rather than trying to interpret or make sense of the psychological state of the monster, this soundscape serves as an affective response to the monster’s emotional state. It is accompanied by a brief talk that will put the affective resonances into some context as they relate to noise, signal, and the affordances of digital media for doing such work.