An Island of Sound: A Libretto

The aims of this article are twofold: to present a new browser-based work called An Island of Sound, created by J. R. Carpenter with a soundscape by Jules Rawlinson, and to do so through a discussion of the collaborative process undertaken in creating a live performance of this work. This article is intended to be read in conjunction with the browser-based work, which can be found online at https://luckysoap.com/anislandofsound/.

Artistically, An Island of Sound contributes a feminist, polyvocal, and decolonial approach to thinking about the emergence and propagation of phantom islands in the colonial imaginary. This thinking is undertaken through and with the elemental media of wind. All of the images in the browser-based work come from the British Library’s Flickr Commons. These visual elements extend far beyond the bounds of the browser window. In order to navigate the work, the viewer must scroll vertically and horizontally, and zoom in and out. Even then, the viewing is only ever partial. The textual elements in the browser-based work incorporate references to islands from classical, colonial, and cartographic sources. These texts are variable; one line of text on the screen may be a long poem in a JavaScript array in the source code. Thus, machine time enters into this assemblage, interrupting the timescale of human reading with its own logic of random selection and interruption. The sound-world created for the live performance of this work responds to, supports, and transforms the visual and textual imagery. Field recordings, wind synthesis, generative sample streams, and data-driven sound processing are collaged and combined with live spoken word to create ambiguous and shifting sonic narratives and spectral resonances.

In keeping with the dialogic nature of this interdisciplinary and collaborative compositional process, this coauthored article retains the authors’ distinct voices and disciplinary frames of reference. In dialogue with the code languages underpinning the browser-based element of this work, these voices are differentiated by HTML-style tags: <JRC> for J. R. Carpenter and <JRA> for Jules Rawlinson. In dialogue with the temporal and sequential unfolding of the live performance, this article is written into the libretto devised for the live performance of the work. In taking this formal approach, this article contributes to expanding modes of criticism of literary works written in and with code languages. In doing so, it builds on two earlier examples: In 2013, Digital Humanities Quarterly published Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland’s “cut to fit the toolspun course,” an article written directly into an edition of the main JavaScript component of their browser-based work “Sea and Spar Between.” In 2016, an article written into the main HTML file of J. R. Carpenter’s browser-based work “There he was, gone.” was published in German translation in Code und Konzept: Literatur und das Digital. Poetic text from the libretto and images and source code from the browser-based iteration of An Island of Sound are incorporated within the body of this article in order to aid in the reading of these texts together. [Square brackets at the beginning of each section indicate notation on sound and visuals setting each scene.]