Imagining Sonic Stories

Sonic narratives are the subject of Vincent Meelberg’s chapter, in which he discusses the capacity of sound not only to trigger narratives but also to tell stories that unfold over time. Meelberg uses his own sound collage work as an example of how narratives can be created through a sequence of sounds. He argues that sonic narratives emerge when the sequence of sounds represents a temporal development. Examples are provided that show how this temporal development emerges from either the referential qualities (hearing a succession of concrete events) or the acoustic qualities (e.g., the succession of tension and release) of the sound.