‘Fragments of Time and Memory: Matter, Media and the Modern Auditory World,’ in European Journal of English Studies, Vol. 15 (2011), pp. 19-29

This article looks at the emergence and development of the modern auditory world, its relation to time, space and the human body and how these may inform our understanding of material culture today. The first part explores the materialisation of time in phonographic sound as an instance of the fragmentation of modern life, and how this displaced the temporal experience of the premodern world. The second part looks at the impact of magnetic tape recording, which permitted sound artists to produce multitemporal audio collages. The essay concludes with a consideration of how the material culture of sound ends in the human body – its final materialism – just as the old sound objects of analogue technology appear to be dematerialised.