Mahindra Humanities Center Medieval Studies Seminar

Judith Peraino (Cornell University), Of Medieval Manuscripts and Mixtapes: Splicing the Body into Recorded Sound. Co-sponsored by the MHC Medieval Studies Seminar and the GSAS Medieval Studies Interdisciplinary Workshop. This lecture is part of the 2019-2020 Medieval Studies Seminar series "Hearing the Middle Ages".

 

In this paper, Prof. Peraino will offer reflections on how certain historical conditions of sound recording technologies also capture an expressivity enacted by formatting and splicing. She will consider examples from a thirteenth-century song collection and cassette mixtapes from the 1970s and ‘80s, and draw on William S. Burroughs’s conceptual spliced-tape experiments to explore the creation of hybrid voices and penetrable bodies through these recording practices.