The Audible Future

Mobilized by the new media formats of the past several decades, publications in music studies have steadily pushed toward the integration of printed text and audible sound. However, this push has not yet delivered the kinds of integrated analytical frameworks—printed text and sound speaking directly to one another—that it seems to render possible, especially in scholarship.¹ Of course, there have been many enriching formats (blogs, podcasts, embedded sound clips in digital publications) in the twenty-first century that did not exist in the twentieth. But the mingling of sound or music with text has remained mostly out of sync with academic publishing, whose proprietary and logistical constraints require compromise. In this essay, I trace some routes through the contemporary technological thicket that might allow printed text and audio media to work together in intellectually productive ways, and which moreover the academic publishing industry can support. I outline one promising format...