RAH! Podcast New Episode: A Short Introduction to Sonic Gothic

Listen to the newest episode of the RAH! Podcast from the Arts and Humanities Faculty at Manchester Metropolitan University and the first episode of our new mini series on A Short Introduction to Sonic Gothic.

This is the first episode in our new RAH! Podcast mini series - A Short Introduction to...

In this episode, Matt Foley will be giving us a short introduction to Sonic Gothic, a literary sound studies focusing on Gothic Literature. In particular, we will explore:

• What sonic gothic is,
• What constitutes gothic,
• And the novel to film adaptation of Psycho, in particular the famous shower scene.

Read along while you listen! Find the full episode transcript available below.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the RAH! Podcast belong solely to the speaker, and are not necessarily reflective of the views of Manchester Metropolitan University, or the speaker's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.

RAH! Podcast – A Short Introduction to: Sonic Gothic Transcript

RAH! Opening Jingle

Lucy Simpson: Hello, and welcome to the RAH! podcast at Manchester Metropolitan University and to our first episode in our new miniseries: A Short Introduction to… In this episode we'll be dipping our toes into the study of Sonic Gothic, which is a kind of literary sound studies focusing specifically on Gothic literature. We will explore:

• How the sounds used in Gothic literature create feelings of ambience, even a reading is a silent activity.
• How disembodied voices in Gothic texts explore who has given voice and what that means.
• How sound from famous literary adaptations such as psycho translate from novel into film,
• And how study of the Gothic more generally can reflect the contemporary political and social moment.

So let's get into it.

RAH Mini Jingle

Lucy: I'm here today with Matt Foley, who listeners of the podcast might recognise as one of our regular presenters. And we're here today to talk about one of Matt's main research interests, which is Sonic Gothic. So Matt, would you like to introduce yourself? 

Matt: My name is Matt Foley. I'm a lecturer and modern contemporary literature at Manchester Met, the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, and the academic lead for our Haunt project. 

Lucy: So Matt, could you start off by telling us a little bit about what Sonic Gothic is and what sort of thing it covers? 

Matt: Well, Sonic Gothic is an incredibly wide and  varied field of interest. The first thing to talk about as I guess what the Gothic means in terms of Sonic Gothic, and the Gothic is basically the literatures, the films of terror and horror. The Gothic itself as an incredibly varied mode, not just film and literature  but also video games, fashion, etc. Where my project on Sonic Gothic comes in really is with Gothic literature, thinking about the extended prehistory of Gothic literature back into the 18th century and all the way up until today. Those tales of Terror and horror that are still being published in our contemporary moment.

Sonic basically means sound. So I'm interested in the sound worlds of these fictions. How can we read the sound world in terms of the significance of it staging, of the Gothic atmosphere, of characters? And in particular, I'm interested in voice and vocality in these fictions. I have worked on ghost stories before, particularly 20th century ghost stories and what I noticed is that they often include disembodied and spooky voices and that trope or that motif goes all the way back to the Gothic romantic novel of the mid to late 18th century beginning with Horace Walpole Castle of Otranto. I'm interested in not just the disembodied voices but how and the sound world of the Gothic the voice is used to generate and create terror and horror all the way from back then, until today. 

Lucy: I guess you've partly already covered my next question, which was about what key books, films or examples you might give to people who are kind of interested in finding out more about the topic?

Matt: Yeah, and I really interesting example to think about actually is Psycho. It moves from being Robert Bloch’s novel 1959, to Hitchcock's adaptation in 1960, which is also famous for its Bernard Herrmann score, the famous kind of violin screech which accompanies one of the murder scenes, the famous shower scene. We can see a kind of movement of the Gothic sound world from novel, to film, to music, and chase and track that and what that tells us is different things about how these mediums handle sound differently.

And one of the questions I often get asked is, how can one think about a sound world in a novel, but there's a lot though that as well as a novel activating kind of our inner eye, our inner ears are also activated as well. We do create these kind of soundscapes within our mind. And that's one of the things that Pyshco Robert Bloch’s novel does from the very outset, is it plays with those kind of assumptions about what we expect and the sound world of the novel.

And obviously, that - that - that attention to detail and importance of sound is carried over into Hitchcock's film. And then of course you have Herrmann's score to Hitchcock’s Psycho which itself screeches at the famous shower scene. That kind of horror is achieved mainly in the way that there’s the kind of difference between the intensity of the violin sound and the scores elsewhere. So the score is muted, until we have that screeching kind of stabbing shower scene and then the violins are kind of unleashed. And we get horror through that, we get horror through the sonic because we don't see, of course, blood and guts on screen, those kind of traditional things that we might expect with horror now, but of course, back in the early 60s, it wasn't possible to show blood in that kind of way. So the horror itself is generated through the Sonic World of the film. 

Lucy: I think a lot of people maybe wouldn't consider Psycho a gothic text. Maybe you could say a couple things just about the breadth of the Gothic and really what it covers for people who are maybe kind of new to it or haven't thought about it within a kind of contemporary context. 

Matt: We could use Psycho perhaps as a - as a tipping point, you know, between Gothic and horror. And in many ways, before we broaden this out, we could think about, okay, well, we associate the big shiny knife with Psycho so that's forshadowing slasher films. But behind the small motel of Hitchcock's Psycho there’s a kind of Gothicy house in the background where Norma seems to reside. That idea of the house being somewhat dilapidated, decayed, there being a secret hidden somewhere in the home. All those things speak to the Gothic aesthetic, as it was then perhaps being received from an 18th century, 19th century heritage.

And there's two lineages that we take from how that is handled on the one hand you've got Radcliffe is interested in terror, and interested in suspense and interested in sort of an unveiling of family secrets. And then we've got the more intense maybe horror tradition. And what the horror Gothic has is a propensity to show perversion much more clearly, and for the supernatural to be part of the world. And then with the Victorian Gothic tradition, you begin to see the Gothic become a mode that fuses perhaps with other genres such as you know, the emergence of the social novels of Dickens, or in crime fictions. And so that the Gothic becomes less of an identifiable genre with identifiable tropes and more of an aesthetic that moves across some of the different genres in the 19th century more broadly. And in the 19th century, too, we have really the birth of monstrosity with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in the late romantic period 1818, and then revised in 1831. And the monsters reawaken somewhat in the fin de siècle at the end of the 19th century, with, for example, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and then slightly later than that Dracula. So the monsters to begin to emerge in the 19th century. The question over what constitutes Gothic and what constitutes horror as one that is much debated in the modern contemporary moment. 

Lucy: And that ties to Psycho again, I guess, in that it explores the hidden monstrous side of Norman Bates. Obviously, then the study of Sonic Gothic kind of lends itself to maybe reading how sounds in the novel are then translated into a kind of filmic format. But where would you start with a kind of piece of literature that doesn't have a filmic equivalent where those sounds have kind of been realised? How would you start to look at that and study it and think about it?

Matt: The Gothic is about ambience, I think, and particularly if we distinguish the Gothic from horror. So terror tends to involve the kind of stormy weather and the outside tapping upon the windows that kind of rattling windows. The sort of ambience too of silence is important to suspense being built up and in fact, and the texts of the Gothic Romantic period, for example, Ann Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance from 1790. It’s often at nights when these sounds in this castle become most kind of uncomfortable, because there's this backdrop of silence. But what’s interesting in Radcliffe’s acoustics, in Ann Radcliffe’s work is these voices are often not attributed eventually to ghosts. So these voices, because they're disembodied, they don't seem to have a source. They seem to be in some kind of pain or agony. They suggest at first ghostliness, but it's not until the face is seen of the speaker or the crier or the body is seen, that we discover that they're not supernatural. It also tells us something about the nature of our voices than themselves, that they carry a kind of weight of identity. 

Lucy: So why do you think then that the study of Sonic Gothic and the Gothic more generally is important and useful? And what do you think it can tell us? 

Matt: That the first thing that we could say about the Gothic is it does an awful lot of cultural work. We can just see the ways in which people are becoming fascinated by the kind of apocalyptic horrors, gothic horror. People turn to these stories to find ways in which they've been imagined before, in some ways in order to find a way forward going into the future. So there's a political dimension, definitely to Gothic.

Though it’s not just about the kind of serious cultural work that the Gothic or horror does, but it's about the ways in which there's a sort of pleasure to terror a strange pleasure even to horror. And that distinction between terror and horror is quite an important. Terror is about suspense. It's about that moment before the horror might be unveiled to you. But it's also suspense is about promise, you know, like it promises something revelatory. And there's something quite nice, I think about being scared or being suspenseful, because there's, there's an intrigue. With horror, it's about a bodily reaction, your heartbeat rises, etc. So there's the - there's both the cultural work that Gothic and horror does and there's also the pleasure that we derive from it.

What's interesting in thinking about the soundscapes of horror and Gothic, it actually changes the way that you - you read or the way that you understand the act of reading, because it draws your attention to the way in which sound can be conjured even in silence. And working on the voice, because the Gothic separates the ghostly voice from a body, you're dealing then with pure voice. And it gives you a chance to analyse the textures of the voice, analyse some of the misrecognitions that can happen with voice and also analyse the ways in which voice is an important carrier of our identity and our subjectivity. 

Lucy: Okay. Well thank you, Matt, for joining us on the RAH! podcast. 

Matt: Thanks so much for your time. 

RAH! Mini Jingle

Lucy: Thank you for listening. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for future podcast updates. You can find us at @MMU_RAH. For more information on all the research and events we discussed in this episode, please go to the RAH! website for full links. Tune back in soon for more episodes. 

RAH! Closing Jingle

Lucy: This episode of the podcast was presented, edited and produced by Lucy Simpson and mixed by Julian Holloway