Historical Soundscapes

What does it mean to compose? Most of us probably think of music, maybe classical music, when we hear the word compose. Of course, a composition is much more. Compositions involve the creative and even artistic rendering of ideas using various modes to express. We might compose in text or with paint or with sound or even with physical objects. Today, compositions are taking on a new meaning with the emergence of the new technologies. In this activity, students use a free audio software program called Audacity to compose an Historical Soundscape. A soundscape is a collection of sounds that emerge from a natural or human-made environment. For this activity, students can compose sounds to interpret an historical event, place, or people. For more on using Audacity to create audio projects see this article from Wikieducator.

Click here to listen to an historical soundscape composition on a topic from Raleigh North Carolina's sports history. This project is an interpretation of a place in Raleigh where a minor league baseball team used to play. The team had many names as it changed major league affiliations over the years, but for a long period it was known as the Raleigh Caps. The Caps played in a stadium, long since demolished, at the corner of Peace St and Capital Blvd. close to downtown Raleigh. Today, the site is home to the city of Raleigh's Solid Waste Services. See the area on this map. The map shows the location of the facility. It is the placemark labeled "A." This soundscape interprets the place with sounds from the Solid Waste Services facility, as well as ambient sound from a baseball game, some history read aloud about Raleigh Caps most famous player, and a 1906 recording of baseball's most famous song.

In the work, I offered an interpretation of the history of minor league baseball in Raleigh. I was attempting to evoke nostalgia, perhaps some irony in this work. The soundscape includes four sound tracks -

• An original recording made at the location of an old minor ballpark. The place is now the location of Raleigh's city waste services.
• A recording of ambient crowd noise at a baseball game
• A 1908 recording of Take me out to the ball game by Edward Meeker. The words were written by Jack Norworth and music composed by Albert Von Tilzer
• Me reading about Carl Yastrzemski from "Baseball in North Carolina'sPiedmont‎" by Chris Holady (2002, p. 62)

Much of my work on this project emerged from my reading of Richard Cullen Rath’s essay on hearing in American history. In the article Rath "encourages historians to consider the senses, in particular hearing, as being historically situated rather than functioning in a state of nature and to broaden their notion of what Americans heard beyond music and speech to include the full spectrum of hearing at particular times and places. A spate of recent books and articles have done just that, and the one thing they all share is the power to open the ears of historians to the importance of hearing and sound in the construction of modernity. Innovations in media, their work suggests, have often had unforeseen consequences that have both reflected and constituted changes in the ways modern people hear" for more see http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/issues/952/#roundtable