PROSE AWARDS ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE FINALIST 2024
Wild Trackis an exploration of birdsong and the ways in which that sound was conveyed, described and responded to through text, prior to the advent of recording and broadcast technologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Street links sound aesthetics, radio, natural history, and literature to explore how the brain and imagination translate sonic codes as well as the nature of the silent sound we hear when we read a text. This creates an awareness of sound through the tuned attention of the senses, learning from sound texts of the natural world that sought and seek to convey the intensity of the sonic moment and fleeting experience. To absorb these lessons is to enable a more highly interactive relationship with sound and listening, and to interpret the subtleties of audio as a means of expression and translation of the living world.
Se?n Street is Professor Emeritus at Bournemouth University, UK. His books include
The Poetry of Radio(2014),
The Memory of Sound(2015) and
The Sound of a Room(2020). He has worked in radio for much of his life and published ten collections of poetry.
In the rarified world of film and television sound a 'wildtrack' is a non-synchronous recording not connected directly to an image. Se?n Street has re-imagined the term in this book and guided the reader/listener from times when sound was 'recorded' solely through experience and then replayed from memory, imagination, poetry and prose.Wild Trackengages us with an impressive cast list of artists and their creative works, speaking clearly across time and harnessing text with the developing role of technology to create a narrative flow as affecting as a woodland chorus in spring. Chris Watson, wildlife sound recordist
Se?n Street is an extraordinary listener: he listens hard but he also listens softly; he listens, like no one else, to how we all listen. This l£*
![Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/1/9/1/2_7203792.jpg "Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong [Paperback]")