“Remediatizing Visual Media as Sonic Data. Sonification and Cultural History.”

Like Jonathan Sterne before him, American historian Michael J. Kramer considers the digital sound sources from a sociocultural perspective as objects of variable qualities that have been encoded by following a protocol that needs to be documented. In his research project on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival, he observes a digital photograph of 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”. By drawing on the contributions of the “auditory turn” and the possibilities offered by the processes of “sonification” of data, the historian proposes that computational processes of remediation can illuminate new dimensions of digital archives through defamiliarization of visual representation and an expanded range of sensory comprehension. In this interview, the historian explains his experiments, his methodology and the stakes of data sonification for cultural history.