TRANSCRIPTION AS CURATION

The production of academic research on sound archives entails a recurring encounter with the limitations of language: making sound present to the readers through writing is an endeavour that seems bound to fail. In this failure, predicated on sound’s excess, I find room for experimentation. I play with various methods for rendering tangible to my readers my practice of close listening to archived radio programmes. In the following essay, based on multiple transcriptions of two audio fragments, I will draw out the implications of the discrimination between sound and noise that transcriptions require in the process of analysis. To approach transcription as a form of curation will expose the care involved in bringing these archived radio signals back into circulation. I understand curation as a process of selection that favors a surface reading and calls attention to the mediation that produces the transcribed object.

The archival corpus I am working with is deeply marked by colonialism, from its inception to the modalities that grant me access to the archived sounds. I research archived recordings from radio programmes broadcasted c. 1945 by France or the Netherlands, to their respective colonies in Southeast Asia. French Indochina’s radio landscape included short-wave broadcasts from Paris by Le Poste Colonial (inaugurated in 1931) as well as radio clubs broadcasting from Indochina such as Radio-Saïgon (inaugurated in 1930 and renamed Radio France-Asie in 1947).¹ In 1956, two years after the First Indochina War ended, Radio-France-Asie was taken over by the new Republic of Viet Nam.² I will analyse the station’s last broadcast in 1956. Meanwhile, the Dutch broadcast to its colonies, including Indonesia (then named Indies), was founded in 1927 as the Philips Omroep Holland Indië (Philips Broadcasting Company Holland Indies, PHOHI). It aired regular programmes from 1933 until the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940.³ In 1946, the Netherlands renamed its colonial radio network the Radio Nederland Wereldomroep (Radio Netherlands World-broadcast, RNW).⁴ Amid Indonesia’s independence war, radio was tasked with keeping up the morale of the Dutch soldiers by broadcasting entertainment shows and airing greetings by their family members. I will examine the latter.

The archived sound files are held in the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV) in Hilversum and at the Institut National Audiovisuel (INA), whose collections I consulted at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) in Paris. The NISV provides remote access to their content for researchers from affiliated institutions through the platform Clariah Media Suite, while the BnF requires researchers’ presence on site for access. As a result, while these sound files speak to an entangled heritage between European empires and their respective colonies, access to them is limited and only granted to researchers able to work in Europe. During my research, the recordings I consulted predominantly consisted of speeches and entertainment programmes by colonisers or European nationals. Their interventions are highly curated and carry the marks of (self-)censorship.⁵

These archived radio recordings by imperial powers contain discourses that normalise colonialism and express a desire for its continuation. I have tried to move away from a textual analysis that perpetuates such discourses. Although I draw from the history of emotions in my analysis, I refrain from approaching these fragments only from a narrow historical or linguistic perspective and instead base my work on sound studies and musicological ways of attending to sound. While other scholars have done similar work based on distant listening and digital mediation, my chosen approach here will be to stay close to the sound and to use my body as a subjective mediating technology.⁶

I will begin by laying out what close listening entails for the purpose of this essay. Annette Hoffmann, who coined the term “close listening” for ethnomusicological recordings, uses it as a form of reparative or restorative listening for voices captured under unethical circumstances — for example, in colonial German South-West African police stations (now Namibia).⁷ Using signals historically discarded as noise, Hoffmann seeks to add layers of meaning to the recorded speech and thus unearth the agency of the speakers. I too will aim to broaden my listening practice. In my analysis, I will move away from the meaning of speech and attend to its formal qualities instead. Indeed, non-verbal sound signals may carry the traces of resistance and counter histories erased from the textual dimension of the recordings. I argue that this act of discrimination between meaningful signal and noise is akin to an act of curation. Before delivering practical examples of transcriptions, I will delve into the implications of this practice. My work borrows tools developed by other scholars to care for colonised subjectivities in the archive and applies these to the voices of colonisers.

In what follows, I will apply different methods of transcription to two fragments selected for their sonic quality and for the type of speech they contain. Both recordings were done in a studio with an audience present. Due to these conditions, there is ambient sound that gives us additional context regarding the setting of the recording. In both recordings, the speakers break out into some form of emotional expression: a Dutch mother greeting her son, and a French radio director announcing the end of the colonial broadcasting services. The first recording is a two minute and three seconds long excerpt from the popular greeting programme for soldiers fighting in the Indonesian war of independence. These biweekly special shows intended to bolster the morale of Dutch soldiers consisted of music, news items, speeches, and voice recorded greetings of their family members and friends wishing them well.⁸ On June 20^th, 1949, five people sent their greetings to three soldiers. I have chosen to reproduce the first greeting of the day, a tearful mother wishing her son well while a baby whines in the background.⁹ The second fragment dates from February 27^th, 1956. It is a farewell message by Jean Varnoux, then director of Radio France-Asie.¹⁰ In this two-minute-long segment, restored and digitised by INA and accessible on Radio France’s website, it is mostly Varnoux speaking, although he states that he is surrounded by his colleagues. Towards the end of the recording, they all sing Ce n’est qu’un au revoir (Until Next Time, also known as Auld Lang Syne). In both examples, the speakers are attempting to control the outburst of their emotions, but, failing to do so, they break down multiple times during the recording. It is this palette of emotions that I attempt to make audible through my transcriptions. I will now return to the question of curation and further detail the implications of bringing into circulation emotions from sonic fragments marked by colonialism.

 

Historical Context

These two recordings must be studied within their historical context. Both are the product of independence wars in which colonial violence reached its paroxysm. The greetings programmes were designed to cheer on Dutch soldiers fighting in the Indonesian war of independence, a war which resulted in about 100,000 Indonesian casualties, compared to 4,751 military deaths on the Dutch side.¹¹ This disparity is a marker of the Dutch army’s systematic use of extreme violence in Indonesia.¹² The greeting I am studying is from 1949, the war’s final and bloodiest year. 1949 alone accounts for 59,083 Indonesian casualties.¹³ This context reframes the otherwise mundane greeting message sent by a worried mother. Such programming was part of a broader state apparatus aimed at enabling, supporting, and erasing this colonial violence.

Considering that the First Indochina War was also qualified as a “dirty war,” it is notable that Radio France-Asie continued to air after its end.¹⁴ After almost ten years of guerilla warfare, the French army was defeated at Dien Bien Phu during a battle and siege lasting from March 13^th to May 7^th, 1954 with close to 20,000 Vietnamese casualties claimed by the French military intelligence and 16,000 military casualties on the French side.¹⁵ The ceasefire accords signed in Geneva on July 21st, 1954 made the partition of Vietnam at the 17th parallel official and placed Saïgon (in the South) under French and allied supervision.¹⁶ Vietnam was to be provided with a unified government by way of general elections in July 1956. Between 1954 and 1956, France slowly removed its troops from South Vietnam.¹⁷ In the closing programme of Radio France-Asie in February 1956, one can hear echoes of the violent end of French colonial rule.

The tools I draw on for dealing with colonial archives have been crafted out of care for colonised voices captured under colonial regimes of knowledge production. Close listening is one such tool, developed by Hoffmann to deal with records of colonial prisoners of war. Similarly, Odumosu and Hartman use refusal as a tool to protect Black subjects trapped in the archive. My work departs in two ways from the intended use of these tools. Firstly, the sound fragments I am working with originated from within the brutal end of colonialism rather than from its mundane (although violent) functioning. Violence that was always latent in the colonial project found its most extreme expression at this time. Thus, the application of these tools – which were shaped by their makers to unearth the mundane violence of colonialism – to a different historical context, namely the brutal demise of the colonial regimes, requires some adaptation, but does not nullify their validity. The second point of departure, however, is trickier. I am working with sound fragments that centre colonisers and their perspectives rather than with records of marginalised people. When dealing with discourses that normalises colonialism, should the care be for the historical actor who pronounced them, or for the contemporary audience listening to their pronouncements? I argue that care in this context may entail withholding empathy and decentring the intended message of the speaker by ignoring the semantic elements of the signal and focusing instead on the material qualities of their speech.

 

Close Listening

Close listening, in my sense, works to challenge which sounds are recognised as meaningful signals, and which are discarded as noise. When working with recordings from the early 20^th century, there is often only fragmentary information available. Hoffmann defines close listening as follows:

What I tentatively call “close listening” describes the attempt to know by ear, that is, to grasp as much as possible of the audible features of a recording. This includes attention to recorded features which do not appear on the label, for instance, the sound of the pitch pipe (which indicates the speed at which the recording should rotate); the noise of a rotating cylinder or scratched record (which can deliver clues on how often the record has been played); etc.¹⁸

Hoffmann gathers sonic information that was deemed unimportant by the recordists and initially dismissed as mere noise. In attending to these noises, she reassembles a fuller picture of the moment of recording, the subjectivity of the person having been recorded, and the lives of the object on which this voice was engraved. While she works with subjects under colonial rule, I attend to people invested in and benefitting from the colonial system. Her work repairs by adding context. Mine disrupts by refusing to listen to colonisers on their own terms. Hoffmann focuses on recordings kept on wax cylinders, a medium with a  materiality that is particularly audible in the recordings. I focus on digitised radio programmes originally recorded using electronic transduction. Electrically cut discs, as opposed to the acoustic discs that Hoffmann works with, produce a subtler sonic noise profile on the recording. I thus not only attend to the noise of the medium itself, but also to the sonic details that I can hear when the sound quality permits such an analysis, for example, voice cracks, stutters and hesitations, sighs and background noises, all of which I attend to as meaningful sounds, not noise, in the signal.

In this regard, I am also engaging in a mode of close listening as Charles Bernstein imagined it: one that considers extralexical elements in poetry readings to be semantically significant. While prosody conventionally attends to “meter, assonance, alliteration, rhyme and the like,” Bernstein suggests enlarging the semantic field to include “gasps, stutters, hiccups, burps, coughs, slurs, microrepetitions, oscillations in volume, ‘incorrect’ pronunciations, and so on.”¹⁹ Bernstein’s approach to close listening differs slightly from Hoffmann’s perspective, as it aims to relate to the materiality of spoken poetry in its estranging quality. Rather than attempting to normalise the sounds into sense-making speech, Bernstein suggests the literary critic attend to the alienating and materialising effects that the poetry reader’s voice has on the poetry that is read and heard. Indeed, poetry’s formal play  with language’s sonorous qualities estranges us from language’s expected “transparency” for communication. By studying this signal from a slanted perspective and attending to its textural quality (rather than only to its textual meaning), we are forced to engage with the material quality of the poem’s sound as meaningful in parallel to its lexical meaning. Neither sonic layer supersedes the other; they co-constitute each other.

The meaningfulness of the speech in the fragments I work with has historically been taken for granted; these were messages broadcast as valuable signals across the world. This has not been the case for utterances made by colonised subjects, as colonial listening has placed and continues to place non-hegemonic speech under the lens of disciplines that do not recognise its textual utterances as meaningful.²⁰

 

Meaning Making

The refusal to recognise recorded speech as meaningful utterance traces a history of colonial recording. In their early endeavours to inscribe and categorise sonic encounters with Indigenous populations’ vocalities, scholars were anxious to determine to whom they would grant a “voice”, and therefore recognise as humans capable of producing meaningful speech.²¹ Such colonial approaches to sound attend to group-wide characteristics instead of individual meaning production. Britta Lange, in her work on prisoners of war recordings from the Second World War, concurs: “the sound recordings of the Phonographic Commission were not made in order to interrogate the prisoners as colonial subjects with individual stories, but to produce supra-individual and exemplary examples of language.”²² These historical modes of engagement with the sonic world only reluctantly recognise meaning in sounds produced by colonised people.

The linguistic lens of the colonial ear continues to operate to this day, as we see with Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s work on Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (LADO), an instrument to which asylum seekers are subjected in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Based on supra-individual linguistic characteristics, asylum seeker’s accents are analysed by the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Office (IND).²³ The formal qualities of their speech are read as a signal carrying more truth value than their outspoken claims of national or ethnic identity. In light of this, Abu Hamdan’s transcriptions of the asylum seekers’ monologues operate as a reparative act, bringing attention to personal narratives deemed irrelevant and meaningless by institutions maintaining Europe’s bordering regime.

Keeping this colonial legacy and its influence on the modes of recording and listening in mind — namely the tendency to disqualify speech by minoritised subjects as a meaningful signal by attending to its formal characteristics rather than its content — my method of transcription, which focuses on the non-verbal qualities of speech, carries an important and productive ambivalence. As Audre Lorde reminds us: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”²⁴ The reversal of colonial violence onto its perpetrators, even symbolically, is not my point here. Still, recognising some dimension of the speech I analyse as empty of meaning and merely formulaic, functions as a refusal to pay attention to the signal on which colonialism inscribes its own narrative.

Since I am working with fragments in Dutch and French, one method to withhold engagement with textual meaning would be to provide my readers access only to direct, untranslated transcriptions. This would imply keeping non-Dutch and non-French speaking readers at an estranged distance from the speech and forcing them to interact with its surface level, rather than its textual, meaning. However, due to my hesitation to withhold the textual meaning altogether, and in a move to grant my readers some agency in their engagement with the transcribed sound fragment, I have decided to disclose a translated version of the fragments. Below is a translated excerpt from the Dutch programme representing a benign and relatable mother whose emotional message is met with disdain by the host.

²⁵

The layering of voices, and the many non-verbal cues that accompany this fragment, is more interesting to me than what is actually said: the baby in the background chattering, the mother’s coughs interrupting the host, her voice breaking as she wishes her son well. These elements, which are difficult to render into written text, are what I want to accentuate. Since my aim is to render the timbre of the speaker’s voices, which is inextricably linked to the stress they put on different syllables in their own words, I have chosen in large part to experiment with transcribing their speech in the original language, in this case Dutch.

 

Transcription as Curation

In my transcriptions, I highlight my embodied interference between the sound I listen to and what you, as my readers, receive of it. I emphasise the partial character of my account as I draw attention to the texture of speech rather than to the content. This responds to a desire to grant opacity to the recording and to put sound on paper without assuming to capture it in its entirety. Inspired by the ethical relation to sound Dylan Robinson advocates for, I think of my transcriptions as an act of care for the historical voices I encounter in the archive. “To care for”’ shares a Latin root with the term curation; incidentally, the notion of curation is applicable to my practice of transcription on two other counts. My transcriptions entail an act of discrimination, which I critically interrogate and make visible, as in Boris Buden’s conception of curation.²⁶ But they are also a form of curation in Carolina Rito’s terms, as they involve a mode of knowledge production that does not seek knowing in depth, and favours surface reading.²⁷

The shared etymological root of curation and care manifests itself in my attempts to transcribe sound ethically, an approach Robinson argues for when he conceptualises sonic encounters as subject-subject relations. In a move rejecting “sound’s perceived lack of subjectivity” in Western sense orientation, Robinson approaches sound – and in particular “Indigenous songs that have life” – as an entity to which we are ethically accountable as writers relaying the intersubjective experience of sound-listener contact.²⁸ Robinson brings in Roland Barthes’ notions of “writing aloud,” which he describes as a “sonorous, sensate form of writing aimed at articulating music’s subjectivity through the materiality of writing itself.”²⁹ With this writing method, Barthes seeks to make the body present to the text, to “make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal’s muzzle).”³⁰

While Barthes seems optimistic about writing’s capacity to capture this fleshy quality of the voice, he remains cynical regarding transcriptions. In The Grain of the Voice, Barthes compares the process of transcribing speech to a form of mummification in which speech becomes stripped of all life.³¹

A certain gendered dimension is noticeable in his reproaching tone:

Nous parlons, on nous enregistre, des secrétaires diligentes écoutent nos propos, les épurent, les transcrivent, les ponctuent, en tirent un premier script que l’on nous soumet pour que nous le nettoyons de nouveau avant de le livrer à la publication, au livre, à l’éternité. N’est-ce pas la ‘toilette du mort’ que nous venons de suivre?

We speak, they record us, diligent secretaries listen to our words, purify them, transcribe them, punctuate them, extract a first script out of them, which they submit to us so that we clean it up again, before delivering it to publication, to the book, to eternity. Have we not just witnessed the cleansing of the deceased?³²

The secretaries, a feminised category of workers, are the anonymous labourers doing the unrewarding job of transcription for the “we” that speaks. Barthes argues that much is damaged in the process of transcription. Even when speech is rehearsed, a certain degree of spontaneity ensures that its theatricality remains audible. When laid down on paper again, a corrective approach erases these markers of ingenuity. Barthes decries a loss of address: where speech is littered with direct interpellations, transcriptions are scrubbed clean of them. The invocation of nameless secretaries, paired with the references to cleaning, colours this paragraph with suspiciously misogynistic undertones: his authorial voice should not be tampered with by these middlewomen’s misdirected obsession with cleanliness and correctness. He rejects actions that could be read as care for his words and portrays them as threats to his authenticity. This anxiety stems from the distance that transcription creates between orality and the written text by removing the text from the direct control of the speaker.

Rather than erasing the labour involved in transcriptions and portraying the transcriber as an invisible mediator, I propose taking advantage of that breach of authorial authority. I suggest thinking of transcription as a collaborative act between the speaker and the transcriber. The cleaning up that Barthes distrusts in the act of transcription becomes an act of co-authoring, of entering into dialogue with the sounding voice. This is where the ethical relation to sound, which Robinson lays out, materialises: my transcriptions, as collaborative engagements with the recorded speeches, enter in a dialogic relation to the sounds I encounter in the archive. I allow the sound to guide my transcription instead of submitting to the authority of their authors. This resonates with Buden’s notion of curation as an act of selection: my transcriptions reveal what I recognise as sound, what I discard as noise.³³ Buden suggests moving away from a perception of the curator as an undervalued mediator, rather recognising the labour of discrimination and definition that this practice entails. Thinking of transcriptions as a form of curation frees one from the stifling control of the authorial voice and from the demand that the written word should only reproduce exact speech. Even if all the stutters, hesitations and markers of candor are transcribed, there is inevitably a loss: the sonorous quality of the voice, its ‘grain’ to use Barthes’ term, cannot entirely be made present in text.

By moving away from the linguistic elements of the recorded speech and into the granular surface of the recorded voice, I focus on the sounding surface of the recording. To make these non-verbal cues more audible and to decentre words from my visual representation of sound fragments, I turn to another mode of inscription: musical script (see fig. 1). Here I work with Rito’s notion of curation as a disruptive activity of surface reading: instead of engaging in an in-depth analysis of the text I transcribe, I curate its visual appearance to reveal its textural quality.³⁴ I match the pitch of the opening tone as closely as possible, but voices modulate in such subtle and rapid ways that not even microtonal music could account for it.

This scoring is imperfect. It is more an impression than an accurate representation. More importantly, this method of transcription does not ensure an ethical relationship to the sound being transcribed. Robinson, who speaks to the violence of transcribing Indigenous music into a script made for the valorisation of Western art music, describes this mode of inscription as oriented by an attempt to capture and categorise sounds. To him, writing about musical performances is not a matter of mimicry — one does not produce a mere copy — but it is rather a matter of relationality, the transcription of a proximity between the listening subject and the sound-as-subject. Additionally, I am making my work less accessible to readers who I cannot assume to be trained in reading scores or able to decode what I intended to capture with this representation. Still, this method brings an awareness of time passing: musical scores are meant to inscribe sounds in time and to give a visual representation of their pitch (the higher the note on the staff, the higher the pitch).

To maintain the visual representation of sound in time and pitch in space while doing away with the narrow language of Western art music scores, I use handwritten transcription in colourful hues to represent the different tones of voice and their malleability through time. In fig. 2, you can see the rendition of the fragment translated and scored earlier. The purple sections are by the mother, while the green ones are the baby whose chatter punctuates the background. The mother’s coughing visibly interrupts and inserts itself into the speech by the host in brown.

In the second recording, from Radio France-Asie, the background sound is not so much the audience, but the static noise and the speaker’s breath. Below you can see my transcription of a section of this speech (fig. 3). In this fragment, I have tried to capture both the rain-like quality of the static on the old recording and its tendency to make a cyclical whirring sound. In what seems to be an attempt to keep his emotions under control, the speaker takes loud breaths. I transcribed them as “hhHHH” to show their intensity and how they emerge out of the whirring background noise and transform into speech. Here the use of colour is meant to represent the change of tone, from a more nasal approach in yellow to a more assertive and commanding tone in dark green or a voice veiled from emotion in blue.

A voice crack occurs on the word orageux, stormy, in the sentence “maintaining France in this stormy Far East.”³⁵ While the speaker’s emotions so far were under control, here his voice breaks entirely. Wayne Koestenbaum, in his book on opera and homosexuality writes:

The tendency of a diva’s voice to break down makes queer people feel at home. […] Vocal crisis is also the moment when the queer meanings of opera begin to speak—because at the moment of vulnerability and breakdown, the diva proves that seamless singing had been masquerade and now her cracked, decayed, raucous, and undistinguished self is coming out.³⁶

In their cracks, the speakers become relatable: they reveal a vulnerability and instability underneath the hard surface of rehearsed radio-transmitted announcements. Unintentionally, they enter into a queer proximity to their listeners.

 

Curating/Caring for Emotions

Attending to the non-verbal cues in the sound fragments, my method of transcription brings to light how emotions are nestled in speech. Returning to the curatorial dimension of my transcriptions, the in/discriminate physical manifestation of emotions in the speakers entails an additional level of care. Care in this context might mean withholding judgment and appreciating these speaker’s emotions as personally meaningful while historically distorted. Care might also mean withholding compassion and refusing to circulate these emotions without framing them appropriately.

Historical distance and a lack of contextual information prevent me from grasping the nuances of these personal emotions, although I can broadly assume that the speakers are expressing a form of psychic pain. Those emotions are not solely private; they are also socially constructed, emotions that are not necessarily held in common, but that are learned – a Bourdieusian habitus, as Scheer argues.³⁷ In focusing on the social dimension of emotions, I am not particularly concerned with defining which emotions are occurring here, but rather with understanding what these emotions do.³⁸ This is the question Sara Ahmed asks as she disentangles hate from love in The Cultural Politics of Emotions. Ahmed studies fascist discourses, which operate with a racially exclusive mode of address and are motivated by apparent love for kin. She reveals that the emotion underlying these discourses is actually hate for an Other.

In both speeches I have analysed and transcribed, the emotions seem self-referential. There is no mention of an enemy causing their pain. Yet the figure of the Other is present in a veiled manner: it is their fault that the radio programme must stop in Vietnam or their war for independence that keeps the Dutch son in Indonesia. This absent figure haunts the recordings as the unspoken cause of the pain that resonates in the speakers’ voices. Historically, what this pain did was to define an injured us (the coloniser), harmed by a them (the colonised). This is a warped perception of colonial violence, as the perpetrator of violence was in fact structurally this us that is now asking for our compassion as they experience pain. The casualty imbalance from the independence wars outlined earlier provides historical backing to this claim, although colonial ideology distorted the perception of the wars from the colonial metropoles such as France or the Netherlands. In my transcriptions, I make the pain present again. I bring it into circulation by echoing it on paper.

Thus, my transcriptions risk fostering an alignment with the “white-injured-us,” a practice which Gloria Wekker describes as all too frequent in Dutch debates about race.³⁹ In her book White Innocence, Wekker describes a white audience member’s reaction to an account of the abuse and murder of a black enslaved girl on a ship. She writes how “it is the predicament of the captain” that speaks most to this audience member and how he seems to seeks information that can salvage the captain “from being labelled a ruthless rapist, how he can be maintained as a decent fellow, who did everything he could to perform his dangerous and thankless job.”⁴⁰ In response to such ubiquitous patterns of identification with the oppressor, I feel an urge to frame my transcriptions in a way that will stall the process of identification with the “white-injured-us”, whose speech I reproduce. My transcription practice requires me to keep this crucial ambivalence in play: an ambivalence of not rescuing the speakers from their endorsement of colonialism and of recognising the historical weaponisation of their pain without delegitimising their individual experience of it.

This is particularly delicate considering the historical and ongoing tendency to centre white people’s feelings at the expense of the feelings of marginalised people. An important distinction is to be made here. The compassion for the “white-injured-us” is not necessarily equivalent to identification with their pain or solidarity with this subject position. Indeed, compassion can occur without solidarity.⁴¹ I seek a way to feel and generate compassion for the pain of these speakers without standing in solidarity with them in my transcriptions. Maybe a more generative gesture of decentring the speakers and their emotions would be to explore which emotions this broadcast might have engendered from an unintended audience, an audience for whom the speech announcing the end of the French colonial broadcasting services would have been heard with joy, relief, or eagerness for changes to come.

Thinking alongside Temi Odumosu and Saidyia Hartman, two scholars working with archival materials pertaining to the history of slavery and colonisation, it is important to remember the  ethical implications of reproducing images that speak to an ongoing history of brutality against black bodies.⁴² Hartman warns against the ease with which violent images are kept in circulation and the consequent normalisation of the pain inflicted upon black bodies. She writes that “by defamiliarising the familiar, I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle.”⁴³ Echoing Hartman’s concern about the circulation of archival materials in a late capitalist society, Odumosu displaces this question to the matter of digitisation. She strives for a digitising practice that takes emotional justice into account, a term which she borrows from Marika Cifor.⁴⁴ This operates through forms of refusal, as she suggests, blocking the settler colonial gaze that wants traumatic stories and fostering forms of reintegration instead, where unnamed people are taken back into networks of familiarity and care.⁴⁵

My work shifts these questions into the realm of sound and applies them to speech by colonisers. My refusal to translate the sound fragments as well as my curatorial choice of handwritten transcriptions both operate as forms of resistance. Indeed, both serve to make the speeches unintelligible — especially the one from France, which is handwritten and cannot be digitally searched. While these forms of refusal may create a protective layer, materially speaking, I remain yet another white researcher withholding information, and my methods risk removing agency from readers whose ethical engagement with these sound documents I have to trust.

In my experimentations with various transcription methods for archived colonial radio programmes, I deploy close listening to reconsider the distinction between sound and noise. Signals which would have been historically discarded as noise, I apprehend as meaningful. To make this approach tangible to my readers, I have played with transcription methods that are akin to a form of curation while reflecting on the ethical implications of bringing sonic fragments marked by colonialism into circulation. Regarding the emotional dimension of this work, I am wary of fostering a sense of identification or solidarity with actors who historically might have stood in support of colonialism. In conclusion, my belief is that I am not entitled to decide who gets access to these fragments and can only, to some degree, control how I contribute to their circulation. Below is my typed-out and translated transcription of the goodbyes of Radio France-Asie and my hand-written method for the same fragment, as a last gesture of relinquishing authority over the circulation of these historical fragments.⁴⁶

---

1. Edwin C. Hill Jr., “Le Poste Colonial,” in Black Soundscapes White Stages (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013). Bernard Lauzanne, “La Radio En Indochine 1929-1956,” Cahiers d’histoire de La Radiodiffusion 63 (January 1, 2000). ↩

2. Lonán Ó Brian, Voices of Vietnam: A Century of Radio, Red Music, and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). ↩

3. Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, “Radio as a Tool of Empire. Intercontinental Broadcasting from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies in the 1920s and 1930s,” Itinerario (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, April 1, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115316000061; Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, “Dutch Speaking to Dutch. Broadcasts from the Netherlands to Indonesia during the Decolonization War (1945–1949),” Journal of Radio and Audio Media 29, no. 1 (2022): 42–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2021.2023538. ↩

4. Kuitenbrouwer, “Dutch Speaking to Dutch.” ↩

5. Kuitenbrouwer (ibid.) notes the political agenda involved in decisions about what would be aired. He reports an instance in which the announcer interrupts a speaker because she starts crying. ↩

6. Here I am thinking of the work done by Tanya Clement in distant listening to sound collections, as well as the tools for listening to text-in-performance developed by Marit MacArthus and Neil Verma: Marit Macarthur and Neil Verma, “White Paper for Tools for Listening to Text-in-Performance,” Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (Northwestern University, 2018). ↩

7. Anette Hoffmann, “Close Listening: Approaches to Research on Colonial Sound Archives,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies, ed. Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen (Bloomsbury, 2021), 529–42. ↩

8. Beeld en Geluid, “Toespraak Prins Bernhard bij opening radiouitzendingen troepen Indonesië,” PROGRAMMA_VOO_AEN5602211M (Programma voor de Nederlandse Strijdkrachten, October 1, 1945). ↩

9. Beeld en Geluid, “Groeten Bestemd Voor de Manschappen van De Huzaren van Boreel, Gelegerd in Nederlands-Indië,” PROGRAMMA_VOO-AEN560400N5 (Programma voor de Nederlandse Strijdkrachten, June 20, 1949). From here on, noted as PNS0649. ↩

10. Patrick Cohen, host, “Les Dernières Minutes de Radio France Asie,” featuring Jean Varnoux, restored broadcast from 1956,  Radio France, February 8, 2016, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/le-7h43/les-dernieres-minutes-de-radio-france-asie-4230151 From here on, noted as RFA0256. ↩

11. Christiaan Harinck, Nico van Horn, and Bart Luttikhuis, “Onze Vergeten Slachtoffers: Wie Telt de Indonesische Doden?,” De Groene Amsterdammer, July 26, 2017, https://www.groene.nl/artikel/wie-telt-de-indonesische-doden. ↩

12. Linda van Putten, “How the Netherlands Systematically Used Extreme Violence in Indonesia and Concealed This Afterwards,” Universiteit Leiden, February 17, 2022, https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2022/02/how-the-netherlands-… ↩

13. Christiaan Harinck, Nico van Horn, and Bart Luttikhuis, “Overzicht Doden,” July 14, 2017, https://www.kitlv.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Overzicht-doden-versie-14-juli-2017.pdf. Accessed October 2, 2024. Cited in Christiaan Harinck, Nico van Horn, and Bart Luttikhuis, “Onze Vergeten Slachtoffers: Wie Telt de Indonesische Doden?” ↩

14. Christopher Goscha, “Indochine : La Guerre de Décolonisation La plus Violente Du XXe Siècle?,” L’Histoire, no. Mensuel 499 (September 2022), https://www.lhistoire.fr/indochine-la-guerre-de-d%C3%A9colonisation-la-plus-violente-du-xxe-si%C3%A8cle%C2%A0. ↩

15. Christopher Goscha, The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 419. Kien Nguyen, Nam Lê, and Khac Vien Nguyen, Le Sud-Vietnam Depuis Dien-Bien-Phu, Cahiers Libres (La Découverte, 1963). ↩

16. Goscha, The Road to Dien Bien Phu, 431. ↩

17. Nguyen, Lê, and Vien Nguyen, Le Sud-Vietnam Depuis Dien-Bien-Phu, 7. ↩

18. Hoffmann, “Close Listening,” 535. ↩

19. Charles Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (Oxford University Press, 1998), 13-14. ↩

20. Hoffmann, “Close Listening.” ↩

21. Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality (Duke University Press, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376262. ↩

22. Britta Lange, Captured Voices : Sound Recordings of Prisoners of War from the Sound Archive 1915-1918, Kaleidogramme, vol. 176 (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2022), 10. ↩

23. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, [Inaudible] Politics of Listening in 4 Acts, ed. Fabian Schöneich (Frankfurt am Main: Kunsthalle St. Gallen, 2016). ↩

24. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984), 110. ↩

25. PNS0649. Translation by the author. ↩

26. Boris Buden, “Towards the Heterosphere: Curator as Translator,” in Performing the Curatorial: Within and Beyond Art, ed. Maria Lind (London: Sternberg Press, 2012), 23–43. ↩

27. Carolina Rito, “Introduction,” in Institution as Praxis: New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research, ed. Carolina Rito and Bill Balaskas (London: Sternberg Press, 2020), 51. ↩

28. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening : Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 15-16. ↩

29. Robinson, Hungry Listening, 77. ↩

30. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 67. ↩

31. Roland Barthes, Le Grain de La Voix, Entretiens 1962-1980 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981). ↩

32. Barthes, 6. Translation by the author. ↩

33. Boris Buden, “Towards the Heterosphere: Curator as Translator,” in Performing the Curatorial: Within and Beyond Art, ed. Maria Lind (London: Sternberg Press, 2012), 23–43. ↩

34. Carolina Rito, “Introduction,” in Institution as Praxis: New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research, ed. Carolina Rito and Bill Balaskas (London: Sternberg Press, 2020), 51. ↩

35. RFA0256. ↩

36. Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (Da Capo Press, 2009), 126–27. ↩

37. Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (May 2012), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2012.00621.x. ↩

38. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). ↩

39. Gloria Wekker, White Innocence – Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Duke University Press, 2016). ↩

40. Wekker, White Innocence, 172. ↩

41. Wekker, White Innocence. ↩

42. Temi Odumosu, “The Crying Child: On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons,” Current Anthropology 61, no. S22 (October 1, 2020): 289–302, https://doi.org/10.1086/710062; Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1–14. ↩

43. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection : Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 2. ↩

44. Marika Cifor, “Affecting Relations: Introducing Affect Theory to Archival Discourse,” Archival Science 16, no. 1 (March 1, 2016): 7–31, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-015-9261-5. ↩

45. Odumosu, “The Crying Child.” ↩

46. Annotations on extralexical sounds are bracketed and capitalised. In blue, I have noted who is speaking. I have indicated voice cracks in red. The grey parts are sections that are less audible, where the speaker’s voice becomes hoarse. ↩

---

Article: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Issue images produced by the media installation All We'd Ever Need Is One Another (2018) by Adam Basanta.