Seán Street Boeken

A study of the wreck, and of the controversy which surrounded it, of a German emigrant ship which sank in the Thames estuary in 1875, claiming 42 lives including those of five nuns.

Exploring the sonic aesthetics of our environments, this book delves into the philosophical and poetic dimensions of sound. It invites readers to reflect on how sound shapes our experiences and perceptions of space, offering a thoughtful investigation into the interplay between acoustics and our lived realities.

This book is about the tiny sounds of the world, and listening to them, the minute signals that are clues to who and where we are. A very small sound, given the context of its history, becomes hugely significant, and even an imagined sound in a picture becomes almost a voice. By speaking a name, we give a person back to the world, and a breath, a sigh, a laugh or a cry need no language. A phoneme is the start of all stories, and were we able to tune ourselves to the subtleties of the natural world, we might share the super-sensitivity of members of the bird and animal kingdom to sense the message in the apparent silence. Mind hears sound when it perceives an image; the book will appeal to sonic and radio practitioners, students of sound, those working in the visual arts, and creative writers.

This book examines sonic signals as something both heard internally and externally, through imagination, memory and direct response. In doing so it explores how the mind 'makes' sound through experience, as it interprets codes on the written page, and creates an internal leitmotif that then interacts with new sounds made through an aural partnership with the external world, chosen and involuntary exposure to music and sound messages, both friendly and antagonistic to the identity of the self. It creates an argument for sound as an underlying force that links us to the world we inhabit, an essential part of being in the same primal sense as the calls of birds and other inhabitants of a shared earth. Street argues that sound as a poetic force is part of who we are, linked to our visualisation and sense of the world, as idea and presence within us. This incredibly interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to scholars of radio, sound, media and literature as well as philosophy and psychology.