”Hello there, now I sigh”: On Sound Recording in Swedish Poetry

The research project “Hallå där, nu suckar jag”: Om ljudinspelning i svensk poesi offers an aesthetic and media archaeological investigation of recorded poetry in Sweden – an area, so far, largely under-researched.

The general purpose of the project is to describe and analyze recordings of the analogue era – from the emergence of the phonograph in the late 19th century to the post-World War II-culture of audiotape and gramophone records – in order to illuminate how the relationship between technical media and literary practices has taken shape in a Swedish context.

The ambition is not to make a total inventory, but rather to bring to light certain moments ripe with meaning – to write a history that has resonance in the present, in relation to a digital literature of sound, as it is expressed, not least, through the audiobook.

The aims are to make manifest a partly forgotten literary history, to analyze the voice as an aesthetic and cultural phenomenon in a Swedish setting, to explore methods of listening to recorded literature, and to initiate a genealogy of the audiobook.

Theoretically and methodologically the project seeks inspiration in media archaeology, in research on the close listening of poetry, and in posthumanist thinking.

The project is conceived as a 3-year project on 75 % of full time, and will, apart from a research blog, present its results in an open access article in English that outlines the general framework and a short monograph written in Swedish.