>Image>Memory>Sound>Text>

The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art presents an overview of the issues, methods, and approaches crucial for the study of sound in artistic practice. Thirty-six essays cover a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to studying sounding art from the fields of musicology, cultural studies, sound design, auditory culture, art history, and philosophy. The companion website hosts sound examples and links to further resources.

In my chapter is entitled '> image > memory > sound > text'. I decided to approach this text about sound by starting with images and writing through the memories they trigger. Anspyaxw is a sound and photography installation which grew from my work with speakers of Gitxsanimaax, an endangered indigenous language in British Columbia, Canada. When I looked back through the photographs taken by Denise Hawrysio and myself during our fieldwork in and around the reserve of Kispiox, the first thing that struck me was the untold – the people, stories, sounds and relationships that got left behind in the process of turning fieldwork into artwork. Of course, fieldwork is itself a selective process from which much experience is, of necessity, either actively or passively filtered out, but perhaps the process of revisiting these images can help to unravel some of the apparently neatly tied threads of this project by working back through its heretofore undocumented history to the sounds that did – and didn’t – find their way into the final work.