Crackles and glitches

Other things get lost through a technical fault. Sound is introduced in this chapter as a linguistic term, which refers to the crackles and glitches in recordings of linguistic data. The sentence turns into a difficult category of description here, as it often remains incomplete, disrupted by the sounds made by humans, machines, animals or weather. But sonic disruption also is a strategy in artful storytelling and is meaningful, by indicating social critique, for example. The manifold meanings and forms of extralinguistic sound radically undermine Western linguistic thought about the ways in which information structure is presented, and instead bring context to the fore – all that information about what engulfs language and interacts with it. Climate, sound and spirits are brought together here in order to offer other ways of looking at and listening to language in recordings and archives.