As a work of audiography, Pond’s three sonic collages show how field recording can serve as the scaffolding for making critical arguments in sound. Consider the way different mixing strategies create emphases between the three pieces. In the trucker chapel recording, we move from a trucker talking about working more and earning less, to the cab of a truck from which the voice of Donald Trump promises an America that will “boom again,” to the quiet intimacy of the mobile chapel, with songs and spiritual healing. This pattern powerfully inflects our listening by movement from one place to the next in a concatenated but obviously assembled sequence of fragments that has the effect of essayistic montage. The second piece emphasizes layering rather than sequencing, with sounds overlain atop one another rather than spatialized; this tends to de-emphasize what is left out in between the gaps of the recording, offering a set of painterly washes at the Orthodox supper. Finally, the protest piece emphasizes continuity of time, like a long take. It has a multiplying quality, using repetition and echoic effects to make slogans into bold placards of sound that break across the stereo image like waves. Sequencing, layering and continuity are three distinct strategies, and to get a sense of their structuring force, we need only imagine what one of the three elements might have sounded like in using the mixing strategy of another.

We can also think across the three pieces as an assemblage with an overall aesthetic. As a whole they make an implicit comparison of the relationships that are possible between voices and spaces. As Silverstein points out in her essay, we notice a contrast in the “dryness” and “wetness” of the various reverberance of these scenes. Pond thus shows us how audiography could advance studies of the acoustic spaces of religious practice (see Charles Hirschkind’s The Ethical Soundscape, Patrick Eisenlohr’s Sounding Islam, and Richard Cullen Rath’s chapter on Quaker meeting halls in How Early America Sounded), through concrete choices of recording, composition and curation.

Works Cited

Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2018. Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World. Oakland: University of California Press.

Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and Islamic counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rath, Richard Cullen. 2005. How Early America Sounded. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.