The Archives of Appalachia at ETSU is hosting a presentation by composer and sound artist Dr. Brian Harnetty about a new way to listen to the past. The program is drawn from Harnetty’s recent book, Noisy Memory: Recording Sound, Performing Archives, which explores the remarkable everyday stories of sound recordings from Appalachian archives.

“From murder ballads and oral histories in Appalachian Ohio,” writes the University of North Carolina Press, “to the Afrofuturistic music of Sun Ra in Chicago, to the recorded thoughts of monk and writer Thomas Merton in Kentucky, Harnetty reveals rich historical contexts of the recordings and introduces us to the people and places connected to them. The result is a new, interdisciplinary approach to sound archives, listening, creative practice, and community engagement.