{"id":724,"date":"2019-02-26T15:59:38","date_gmt":"2019-02-26T20:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/?p=724"},"modified":"2019-02-26T15:59:38","modified_gmt":"2019-02-26T20:59:38","slug":"hearing-the-voices-of-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/2019\/02\/26\/hearing-the-voices-of-the-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Hearing the Voices of the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

When reading “A Resonant Tomb,” with all of the focus on preserving someone’s voice beyond their death, I was reminded of characters in films and television shows such as Cole in M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 film The Sixth Sense\u00a0<\/em>or Klaus in the new Netflix show The Umbrella Academy<\/em>. Both of these characters can “see dead people,” as Cole says in that famous scene, but what seems to be more frightening to them is not only the visual aspect of being able to see ghosts, but more so the fact that they can also hear\u00a0<\/em>these dead people speaking (or weeping or screaming or whatever the case may be).<\/p>\n

In Jonathan Sterne’s article, he writes that sound recording was “aiming for the preservation of the voice in such a form that it may continue to perform a social function” (297). This reminded me of the two examples mentioned above since, <\/span>in the case of\u00a0<\/span>The Sixth Sense<\/em> and\u00a0<\/span>The Umbrella Academy<\/em>,<\/span> the dead characters speaking to Cole and Klaus are doing so <\/span>in order to pass on some sort of message to those who are still living or to gain peace so they can move on to the afterlife. Furthermore, later in the reading, Sterne examines the painting\u00a0His Master’s Voice\u00a0<\/em>(aptly, the cover image for this unit of our class), stating that “When we see a dog listening to a gramophone, we understand that the important issue is the sound<\/em> of the voice, not what was said” (303). The same is true for both Cole and Klaus; what is alarming is not necessarily what the ghosts are saying, but rather the fact that they are hearing the voice of someone that no one else can. This implies that Cole and Klaus<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>won’t stop being haunted by the dead beings until they rectify their situations and allow the ghosts to be at peace with their deaths.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, on a deeper level, sound is obviously a major part of visual and audio media such as films and TV shows, and therefore the actors who play and voice these characters are embodied and stored in time. After all, no matter how many times you watch a movie or video or how many years it has been since it was created, the people within that video exist within a “carefully bounded frame” of “repeatable time,” in the words of Sterne (310). In this way, sound recording, films, and television gives us the opportunity to relive the past in the present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When reading “A Resonant Tomb,” with all of the focus on preserving someone’s voice beyond their death, I was reminded of characters in films and television shows such as Cole in M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 film The Sixth Sense\u00a0or Klaus in the new Netflix show The Umbrella Academy. Both of these characters can “see dead …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":134,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-c"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paB9Ga-bG","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/134"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=724"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":728,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions\/728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}