Resounding the landscape: the sonic impress of and the story of Eyam, plague village

Holloway, J (2017) Resounding the landscape: the sonic impress of and the story of Eyam, plague village. Landscape Research, 42 (6). pp. 601-615. ISSN 0142-6397

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Abstract

This paper addresses how we might access, understand and analyse the sounds of a landscape that are lost to history; unless captured or recorded in some way, the sounds of a landscape disappear as they appear. This paper argues that we can re-enliven such momentary sonics through the practice of resounding. Herein sonic acts are performed, as the landscape is encountered, which attempt to collapse the time between the now and the past in order to conjure imaginative and affective connections to a landscape’s historical freight. The plague village of Eyam in Derbyshire, UK, is practised in this manner and the affective-imaginative rendering of its landscape of loss and heroism is documented. Through a sonic attunement to the village and its environs, the paper argues that resounding offers productive ways of thinking, sensing and listening to a landscape’s past and present.