The Difference Between the “Sound Document” and “the Sonic”

In her article “Solidarity, Song, and the Sound Document,” Andrea F. Bohlman expands upon notions of musical textuality we have previously encountered by positioning the concept of “sound document” as a crucial and explicit aspect of their methodology, their overarching argument, and their contribution to scholarship. To Bohlman, sound seems to exist both as a) what we normally consider as sonic, and b) as the implied aurality of the written word. In this sense, they explicitly redefine sound as “inscribed materially through an attempt to fix it temporally and spatially,” (Bohlman, 238) thereby expanding ‘the text’ to include both what can be found in actual sonic frequency, and material such as “written registers, song lyrics, recorded soundscapes, elicited interviews, or film soundtracks.” (Bohlman, 238) By defining their ‘text’ as not just musical (and thereby aural), Bohlman’s “sound document” expands the ‘text’ they are considering to include “written, recorded, and filmed accounts of the Polish strikes and negotiations.” (Bohlman, 239) I am curious about how we can negotiate and critically understand the concept of the “sound document” as it applies not only to Bohlman’s topic, but to other scholarship we have read and further, to our own experiences with music, sound and media. Does the “sound document” fundamentally destabilize the order and hierarchy of how we and scholars normally compartmentalize musical knowledges? In other words, does presenting a composite concept of the “sonic” which includes literal written text force one to reconsider how one engages with the unavoidably multifariousness of music as a practice? It seems that in deploying this concept, Bohlman ultimately seeks to destabilize more traditional notions of what sound is and in this sense, encourages their readers to consider the multitude of sounds and their meanings in the context of Gzansk; in other words, Bohlman encourages us to imagine and analyze the soundscape of these events through not just sonic, but written sources. In what sense does this reformulate traditional research methodologies? Or is Bohlman introducing a similar model under a different term and analytical lens?