DAUGHTRY, J. M. Acoustic palimpsests and the politics of listening.

Music & Politics 7, Number

1, 2013.

“layered nature of sonorous objects and auditory experience” (p. 3)

“toward a politics of listening that is both hermeneutically rich and deeply complementary to
the ethnographic project.” (p. 3)

“the palimpsest as a structured micromethodology for thick description” [of] “the moments of
inscription and erasure that lie beneath acoustic phenomena and auditory practices” (p.3)

[Aims at] “translating the concept of the palimpsest into auditory terms.” (p. 3)

“Porcello deploys print-through as a metaphor [...] to illuminate ‘cumulative listening

experiences engendered in the mediated social spaces of music encounter’.” (p. 8)

“Nina Eidsheim deploys the palimpsest trope in describing the ways in which the embodied
practice of singing inscribes ‘narratives of the body, race, class, vocal genres and practices’ into
‘the musculature of the body’” (p. 8)

“listeners hear voices – and vocal timbre specifically – in relation to all of the voices they have
previously heard” (p. 8)

“to consider the activity of singing as itself a type of inscription, a type of writing, and
therefore, ‘a palimpsest, a constant re-writing over a prior document that may never be
entirely erased… a struggle for power” (p. 8)

“Eidsheim’s corporeal palimpsest provides a model for listening to voices as the result of
complex histories, for hearing history – and therefore politics – within the voice’s grain. It asks
us to imagine the totality of the voice as comprised of multiple fragments, multiple layers” (p.
8)

“Lacasse’s ‘recorded palimpsest’ points to the various relationships between recordings and
other previous or co-present texts […]. From the cover to the sample to the parody to the
pastiche, these implicit or explicit intertextual relationships are so fundamental to popular
music as to constitute one of its enabling conditions”