Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong

(Hardback)

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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.

Reviews

In the rarified world of film and television sound a wildtrack is a non-synchronous recording not connected directly to an image. Sen 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 *
Sen 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 theyd 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 *

Author Bio

Sen Street is Professor Emeritus at Bournemouth 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.