The Song of a Book
The Song of a Book
As a student worker in Williams’ Special Collections during her sophomore year, Darlie Kerns ’24 became enthralled by the tangible crinkling of centuries-old pages and the audible rustling of paper, vellum and parchment of rare books.
“I always made a joke to my bosses that I would start an ASMR channel for the library to get people to come,” she says, referring to autonomous sensory meridian response and the widespread social media trend of posting videos of audio-visual stimuli that can elicit a pleasing or relaxing sensation for viewers.
By her senior year, the “book ASMR project,” as Kerns called it, evolved into an independent study project. Her “Echoes of the Archives: A Sonic Study” culminated in a special exhibition during graduation and reunion weekends in June. Visitors were invited to listen through headphones to “the rustling of pages, the textures of different papers, parchments and inks” and consider “the auditory appeal” of these texts, as Kerns wrote in the exhibition’s interaction guide.
Kerns spent hours with some of the rarest books in Special Collections. She studied how human beings experience sound. She listened to John Cage and other experimental artists who “were trying to understand the bridge between music and sound, and sound and noise.” And she came to understand her own auditory experience on a deeper level.
“I have misophonia,” Kerns says, “so I’m super sensitive to small, little sounds.” Libraries, contrary to popular belief, are not always quiet places. “People are whispering, which is the worst,” she says.
Through her project, Kerns found the hidden merits of her auditory sensitivity. It helps her to pay closer attention, even to discover the music in everyday objects. “It brings more joy to my life,” she says.
Working with a faculty advisor, Brad Wells, emeritus lecturer in music and founder of the Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, Kerns came to see the act of leafing through a book as a musical experience, “a soundful experience.”
“The song of a book is like it telling a story of its life,” Kerns says. “How it was stored, what it was made of, how it was written on. Were there notes taken on it? Was it never opened the whole time? Was it used monastically?”
Once Kerns started thinking of her recordings as songs, she made hundreds of soundscapes of the books in Special Collections. The recordings were accompanied by in-depth research on how the books were created and used in their original contexts, including spaces such as private cloisters and medieval cathedrals.
“In 2024, we’re surrounded by sound all the time,” she says. “We are much more used to everyday noises than people in, say, 1299 were.”
What can a particular book’s sounds tell us? Consider Kerns’ favorite from the project, a first edition of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, published in 1543 in Nuremberg, Germany.
“It’s totally unique of its kind,” Kerns says. “I remember that being brought out in one of my classes when I took astronomy, and I was gobsmacked that it even existed.”
Only 400 copies of this first edition of De Revolutionibus were ever printed, Kerns says, and only 276 have survived. Copernicus’ mathematical text contains many graphs and figures, including the first heliocentric diagram ever printed in any book.
“There’s a particular noise that came with that, because it’s not just text, it’s not handwritten, and it’s not just printed,” Kerns says. “It’s like an amalgamation of all these parts.”
She contrasts the volume’s distinctive crinkling pages with a recording from a 1645 first edition of John Milton’s poems. The Milton text sounds lighter and “younger,” she says, thanks to its thin, luxurious paper, like the pages of a small Bible.
“There’s an unsheathing sort of noise that you get when you turn the page,” Kerns says.
According to Wells, who taught many sound art courses at Williams, Kerns’ project is remarkable because of the “mysterious and beautiful sounds” it unearths. Her audio pieces, which she created by turning pages and running her finger over the books, “are vivid little worlds she fashioned with this material.”
Wells says Kerns’ project also encourages visitors to “physically interact with the works themselves,” including “some immensely revered and important texts” from Williams’ collection.
Chapin Librarian Anne Peale, who also worked closely with Kerns, says the project is an example of the “creative and unexpected uses [students] find for our collections. It was clear that Darlie was making connections that these books’ creators and donors never could have imagined.”
Kerns, who is considering future work in music and historiography, has spent the summer after her graduation working in different artistic production roles, including serving as Wilco’s handler at the Solid Sound Festival at MASS MoCA in North Adams in June. She says she is grateful to the Williams librarians for the vibrant community that fostered her research.
“We have one of the best special collections and rare books libraries in the world,” she says. “It’s a small but very mighty group within the library.”
Rachel Kolb is a writer whose essays have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic and other publications. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir Articulate (Ecco Press).
