Libraries of Echoes, Archives of Silences

This post is part of a series that examines how colonial knowledge systems in libraries, archives, and museums erase Indigenous, oral, and ecological ways of knowing — and explores how they might be dismantled and reimagined from the perspective of the Global South and the margins. Check all the posts in this section's index.

Resonance, Not Emptiness

Libraries (but also archives and museums) have long been imagined as temples of silence: places where texts could be read, studied, and controlled in quiet.

That silence, however, was never neutral. It was the acoustic correlate of dominant literocentrism — the one designed to privilege reading and writing, and to make the printed page the only valid vehicle of knowledge.

But sounds are documents. And libraries (and associates) can no longer remain mute. They must become polyphonic commons — spaces where resonance is curated, layered, and restituted. Not "listening booths" hidden in a corner, but resonance chambers at the institutional core, where visitors immerse themselves in forest soundscapes, urban noise histories, or ritual chants under community-defined protocols. In such a model, libraries and others cease to be guardians of silent texts and become mediators of auditory memory — places where listening itself is recognized as a way of knowing.

Resonance is always braided with silence. A pause in ritual, the disappearance of a cicada from the dawn chorus, the sudden hush in a marketplace — all of these are documents too, charged with meaning. To recognize the sonic archive is also to recognize that silences are never empty: they are presences, relations, and warnings that must be read —or better, listened to— on their own terms.

But when the door is open to resonances and silences, the next question follows immediately: how does librarianship (and other disciplines of knowledge and memory) handle such sounds once they enter its systems?

Metadata, Violence, and Care

The answer is troubling. Once captured, sound is usually reduced to metrics: frequency, duration, amplitude. Librarianship has inherited and reproduced this "violence". MARC fields, Dublin Core elements, MODS descriptors — all flatten sonic memory into format, carrier, and subject headings. The richness of a chant, a frog call, a grandmother's gossip, or the steps in a procession collapses into a handful of technical parameters.

A critical librarianship must resist this flattening by creating layered sonic metadata: descriptors that register, among others, a sound’s role (omen, treaty, alarm, joke), its cosmological significance if any, the conditions of its activation, or the permissions required for its circulation. Cataloging ceases to be a neutral, technical task and becomes a political act — a declaration of solidarity with the communities that generate sonic knowledge.

Yet description alone is insufficient. Opacity must also be normalized. Open access —one of the most cherished values of LIS— cannot be applied uncritically. Some sounds must remain restricted, inaudible, or ephemeral. This is not censorship but acoustic sovereignty: the right of communities and territories to govern their own soundscapes. A future catalog would therefore embed not only access points but also ethical rationales for non-access. Silence, too, must be indexed.

If metadata can wound, then infrastructures built upon it must be rethought. Catalogs and servers are not neutral containers — they decide how resonances and silences circulates, who hears, and who is silenced.

Decolonial Sonic Infrastructures

The colonial archive extracted sounds and recoded them in northern vaults. A decolonial librarianship must therefore imagine infrastructures that remain with the territory. This means decentralized repositories that are managed locally rather than by remote global servers; participatory cataloging processes that are shaped by the categories of listening defined with knowledge holders; or hybrid systems capable of holding together different epistemic logics —bioacoustic data, ritual protocols, ecological calendars— without collapsing them into a single universal frame.

The outcome is not a bibliographic record but an acoustic map — a relational constellation linking ecological, social, and ethical contexts. Users navigate not by author-title-subject but by echo, timbre, or silence, discovering knowledge as a web of resonances rather than as isolated objects.

But infrastructures are never only technical. They materialize in institutions. To imagine their implications, we must ask: what might a library or a museum look like if it truly listened?

Libraries as Sonic Laboratories

Those knowledge & memory institutions that decide to listen would not restrict themselves to preservation. They would become sonic laboratories: community-controlled spaces where listening is method. These labs might reconstruct disappearing sound textures, design participatory soundwalks, keep alive the noise of a marketplace, or restitute archival fragments that were stolen or silenced.

Parallel to this, museums might evolve into museums of events rather than museums of objects. Instead of vitrines, carefully curated soundscapes would envelop visitors: the murmurs of an ecosystem, the echoes of a protest, the pulse of a festival, the softness of a whispered confession. Authority shifts accordingly: curators cease to explain objects and begin to mediate listening protocols established by the communities of origin.

And yet, even these reimagined institutions risk reproducing the archival obsession with permanence. To go further, librarianship must confront the unthinkable: that some sounds should never be archived at all.

Archives That Refuse Capture

One of the most radical challenges to archival imagination is the recognition that certain sounds are not meant to be stored. A future LIS must embrace opacity and curated impermanence: records that expire after a time, vanish entirely, or reappear only in ritual contexts.

This proposal strikes at the core of archival ideology. It suggests that value may lie not in endless preservation but in responsible disappearance and incompleteness — a refusal to strip sonic memory of its temporal, situated character. Silence here is not the residue of what was lost but the form in which some knowledge insists on being remembered. By institutionalizing impermanence, libraries and archives would accept that listening is not only about capture but also about letting go.

Such a refusal does not weaken librarianship; it transforms it. If memory can include absence, then the profession itself must change its ethics and its identity.

Toward a Librarianship of Echoes

The future library will not only manage "big data" but also big resonance: ecological recordings, citizen audio diaries, machine-listening archives. But unlike raw data lakes, these sonic collections must be structured around vibrational relations, and around care: deciding which sounds circulate, which remain opaque, and which must vanish.

This requires a new professional identity. Librarians cannot remain mere catalogers or technologists. They must become resonance mediators: stewards of sonic ecologies, guardians of opacity, facilitators of echo. Their task is not completeness but responsible incompleteness — ensuring that sonic memory reverberates ethically across generations, without severing its ties to place, protocol, or silence.

In the end, to speak of libraries of echoes and archives of silences is not a metaphor but a design principle. Echoes remind us that knowledge travels, mutates, and resounds beyond its point of origin. Silences remind us that some knowledge survives precisely by withholding itself. Together they sketch the contours of an institution no longer built on the page alone, but on the vibrational, ephemeral, and relational substance of memory itself.

  This entry mirrors the chronicle "Sonic Archives," a narrative reflection on the same theme.