![]() 4 At the time, digital humanities – and cultural analysis in general, from scholarship to journalism – was entering into its craze for visualization. It had been the festival director's working archive. In the early 2010s, I began conducting research on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival's history using a large archive of over 30,000 artifacts. ![]() This distinguishes it to some extent from Corbin's groundbreaking scholarship. MK: My approach to sonification arose in a certain moment in the development of digital humanities and out of my archival research. ![]() More than twenty-five years after Alain Corbin published the French version of his milestone book Village Bells 3, how could you explain that discrepancy and could you please define your own approach? In our classical hypothetico-deductive method, vision often seems to take precedent over the other senses, and especially over hearing. For you, sonification constitutes a creative and challenging way to renew historical interpretation. At a time when an increasing number of historians are interested in acoustic archive materials, you outline a different intellectual and sensory relation to sound. The expression is self-explanatory but it highlights a very important concern for cultural history. JSN: In an essay published in Digital Sound Studies, edited by Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller and Whitney Trettien, you wrote something which struck me as being particularly telling of your methodological approach: “I did not see this until I heard it”. Hearing as a mode of historical investigation Thus, by inviting us “to hear an image while listening to its digitized data”, Kramer establishes a new kind of historical hermeneutics of visual sources. Kramer proposes to reverse the current practice of visualizing sound data (as in the case of the sonogram). ![]() Kramer considers the digital sound sources for what they are, namely objects of variable qualities that have been encoded by following a protocol that needs to be documented 2. Like Jonathan Sterne before him, Michael J. Finally, data sonification proceeds from another approach to visual and sound archives by correlating visual data to sound outputs. The practice of data fusion (a concept borrowed from Lev Manovich) has led to the production of a new media object useful for historical inquiry by systematically connecting visual archives and sound archives pertaining to the same event. Kramer conceives his methodology through three types of action: the use of digital sound design has made it possible to “amplify the meaning” of a historical event. By drawing on the contributions of the “auditory turn” and the possibilities offered by the processes of “sonification” of data, the historian does not only plan to change his outlook on the digital archive, but also to change its sensory comprehension in service of generating new interpretations of the past. As part of a research project on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival, the historian observes a digital photograph of the blues singer and guitarist Mance Lipscomb taken during a concert in July 1963 and questions the nature of the gaze directed by the historian on this “digital silhouette”. Kramer has laid the groundwork for a sonic analysis of images 1. Involved in both research in Digital History and in the field of Sound Studies, historian Michael J. Dans cet entretien, il explique ses expériences, sa méthodologie et les enjeux de la sonification des données en histoire culturelle. En s'appuyant sur les apports du « tournant acoustique » ( Acoustic Turn ) et sur les possibilités offertes par les processus de « sonification » des données, l ’ historien n ’ envisage pas seulement de changer son regard sur l ’ archive numérique, mais d’en faire évoluer sa compréhension sensible. Dans le cadre d'un projet de recherche sur le Berkeley Folk Music Festival, il observe une photographie numérique du chanteur et guitariste de blues Mance Lipscomb prise lors d'un concert en juillet 1963 et interroge la nature du regard porté par l'historien sur cette « silhouette numérique ». Kramer analyse les sources sonores numérisées dans leur dimension sociale et culturelle ainsi que dans leur dimension matérielle, les envisageant comme des objets encodés selon un protocole qu’il s’agit de documenter. Dans le sillage des travaux de Jonathan Sterne, l ’ historien américain Michael J.
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