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'The Spirit Cried' (Mark 9​.​26​)​: sounds of the dead, damned, and demonic in the landscape of eighteenth​-​century Wales

by John Harvey

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'The Spirit Cried' (Mark 9.26): Sounds of the dead, damned, and demonic in the landscape of eighteenth-century Wales 20:42
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Standing by a holy tree 02:12

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The paper addresses the Welsh congregationalist minister Edmund Jones’s (1702–93) collection of spirit narratives, published as 'A Relation of Apparitions of Spirits in the Principality of Wales' (1780), and an earlier now lost volume on the same subject. His books represent the first- and second-hand testimonies of many witnesses to supernatural encounters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Wales. The accounts evoke a spiritually dark landscape in which the malevolent dead, damned, and demonic wandered. They present a fascinating insight into how the eighteenth-century not only visualized but also auditioned the spirit world. It is with this latter aspect of Jones’ narrative that I will be chiefly concerned.

The paper outlines the peculiarities of the spirits’ sonorous manifestations, the auditors’ response to such, and the relationship of the sounds to the landscape in which they were heard. Many of the auditory attributes of spirit noises were adapted from the natural world and everyday experience. The supernatural signification of such was summoned by the fearful context of the phenomena, the often strange and frightening visual accompaniment, and the unnerving modulations, exaggerations, and deformations of the auditory source.

The paper also introduces my sound-artwork, based upon Jones’s books, entitled 'Noisome Spirits' (CD release: Screen and Sound Archive, National Library of Wales, 2021). The suite of seventeen compositions seeks to make the witnesses’ experience sensible, by presencing the sounds and – following Jones’ own determination – provide a ‘vivid account’ of apparitions. The objective is neither reconstruct nor create a simulacrum of the original sounds but, rather, to imaginatively summon the sense of the dread and otherness experienced by the witnesses, abstractly.

credits

released June 8, 2021

Personnel: John Harvey and Rob Daniel (Introduction).

Instrumentation: Adobe Audition CC, Apple MacBookPro and iMac OS 10.16, Apogee Duet audio interface, Eventide ModFactor, PitchFactor, TimeFactor, and Space pedals, custom personal computer and Windows 10, Korg Kaos Pad Effects Processor Quad and Kaos Pad Dynamic Effects Sampler, Moog MF-101 Low Pass Filter, OTO Biscuit 8-bit effects and analogue filter, PreSonus Studioline AR8 Mixer, Revox A77 Stereo Taperecorder, RME Babyface Pro and Fireface UCX audio interface, Sherman Filterbank 2 filter unit, and Sherman/Rodec Restyler filter unit.

Context: Paper presented at the 'Soundscapes in the Early Modern World' conference, Liverpool John Moores University, (June 7, 2021).

Source of sound presentation: John Harvey, 'Noisome Spirits' (Aberystwyth: Screen and Sound Archive, 2021) [GENCD8005].

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John Harvey Aberystwyth, UK

I’m a practitioner and historian of sound art and visual art, and Emeritus Professor of Art at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, UK. My research field is the sonic and visual culture of religion. I explore the sonic articulations of the Christian religion by engaging visual, textual, and audible sources, theological and cultural ideas, and systemic and audiovisualogical processes. ... more

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