Sound Journal - The Beauty of Which I Hear

The blind are the most unfortunate. They are condemned to a prison of clay, dark, and helpless, and desolate, in the midst of a world, which is full of light and glory, and beauty; of which they continually hear, and after some conceptions of which their souls must pant in vain, with all the sickening agony of unquenchable desire.

The sounds you will find in my sound journal are part of a project to refute this claim made on the pages of an 1830 issue of American Monthly Magazine. (Thanks to Shelila C. Moeschen’s chapter “Dramatizing Distress: Sentimental Culture, Melodrama, and Nineteenth-Century Reform for the Deaf/Dumb and Blind” for alerting me to this quote.) I will be recording sounds that require no visual component to evoke strong responses in the listener. It is my hope to make this a regular part of the generative process as I reimagine “Rearranging the Furniture” while on sabbatical in 2020.