Listening for "Found Sound" Samples in the Novels of Virginia Woolf

[T]here is a music in air for which we are always straining our ears --Virginia Woolf, Street Music When we read to ourselves, our ears hear nothing. When we read, however, we listen.--Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and Phonotext The musical undercurrents and aural quality of Woolf's later fiction prompts Garrett Stewart in Reading Voices: Literature and Phonotext to claim that through her poetic resonance and stray reverberations, Woolf performs vocal writing that Roland Barthes valorizes in The Pleasure of Text as necessary though not practiced by most writers (261, Barthes qtd. in Stewart 279). (1) While Stewart's analysis focuses on verbal play and phonic elements of The Waves, I will focus this article on a more overt example of Woolf's performance of vocal writing: her representation of sound. In order to discuss Woolf's inclusion of real-world sound, which progresses with each of her succeeding novels until it culminates in her last work, Between Acts, I will make use of musical term found sampling--the art of recording sounds from real world such as sirens, rain, cars, street conversations, and using those sounds in an original musical composition. (2) The term found sampling allows us to account for not only onomatopoetic sounds of chuff and tick mixed throughout Between Acts, but also street hawkers' cries, which intrude repeatedly in The Years, and song of old woman on street heard in Mrs. Dalloway. This article will demonstrate how Woolf's use of found sampling forces a heightened sense of aural into her narrative, which is sounded out by reading voice of her reader. By examining Woolf's preoccupation with sound representation and aural dimension of her fiction, moreover, we can gather a more complex sense of her modern notions of community and individuality, whereby her characters are momentarily united, as if in a chorus, through their shared aural experiences, though they are simultaneously separate, individual, isolated. Modernism and Beginnings of Found Sound Sampling While it is often assumed that musical sampling is only a digital phenomenon, for purposes of this project, I propose that any recording technology that enables reuse of a sound in a new composition is, in essence, sampling. (3) With growing usage of phonograph and gramophone, invented by Edison in 1877 and improved by Emile Berliner with replacement of records for cylinders in 1887, composers began to experiment with art of sampling in early 1900s. Since first marketed phonographs were not advanced enough to play music, they were advertised as devices that could record and replay an assortment of sounds, heralding a new fascination with noise. For instance, an advertisement for Edison phonograph from The Illustrated London News on February 3, 1900 assured readers that they could hear the HUMAN VOICE, NOISE OF THE CATARACT, BOOM OF THE GUN, VOICES OF BIRDS AND ANIMALS (qtd. in Morton 224). One of first composers to explore use of everyday noises and sounds as musical components was Futurist painter turned composer, Luigi Russolo, who used real-world sounds of whistles, engine motors, and hissing in his 1913 performances of Awakening of a City and Meeting of Automobiles and Airplanes--compositions performed with Russolo's hand-made noise instruments, intonarumori. As early as 1920s, French composer Darius Milhaud changed speeds of phonograph recordings to manipulate sounds for musical compositions, and Italian composer Ottorino Respighi used phonograph to include songs of nightingales in his orchestral composition, Pines of Rome (Ernst 7). George Antheil, an American composer who worked with James Joyce on an adaptation of his Cyclops Episode entitled Opera was notorious for his composition Ballet Mechanique, which included car horns, airplane propellers, saws and anvils. …