Telling Sounds

A digital research platform for the documentation and processing of audio-visual documents, including oral history materials, relevant for Austrian music history.

“Telling Sounds” refers to what is told with and within sounds and what is explained and understood about the sociocultural significance of music. Concretely, the project explores audio-visual documents and sound recordings with a view to all narratives about different musical forms that can be related using words, sounds and images and, in so doing, sparks interdisciplinary, pedagogical and scientific-artistic discussions. Of particular interest are audio-visual sources from the collection of the Austrian Mediathek and the Phonogram Archive of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The particular challenge of the project is posed by the theoretical analysis of the significance of audio-visual sources (and the scientific evaluation of them) pertaining to discourse on music history. In particular, the intrinsic characteristics of audio-visual documents permit new questions to be asked regarding the importance of music in a socio-cultural and socio-historical context and foster a broader understanding of the history of music.