Sound Affairs

How do noise or silence affect the form and texture of interstate relations? Did new sound technologies alter the ways policy makers and field diplomats conducted their business? Can we recreate the silences, hissing, yelling, or whispering of multilateral conferences? How can we hear the voices of all those silenced non-state and semi-official actors that moved in, against, and out of the formal worlds of diplomacy? How, in short, to think about the sounds of foreign relations? It is these questions that animate the research project Sound Affairs: Sonic Histories of Foreign Relations, 1700-1990. The project also sounds out the potential and methods of digital history in conceiving new sonic histories of diplomacy and IR.