The Sound of Travelling. Soundscapes of Travelogues and Stereoscopic Photography in the late XIX-early XX century

«To travel is to possess the world», according to the renowned motto of E. Burton Holmes (1870-1958), the leading travel lecturer in America from the late 19th century to the end of his long career, in 1950 (but his company kept doing business in his name until 1970). Holmes’s travelogues, a term he coined himself, were public presentations of commented photographic slides, at first, and then of travel films his camera operators shot during his many journeys around the world; such shows doted on the success that the topic of travel gained in American magic lantern shows after the Civil War (Barber 1993, 68) and in the market of stereoscopic photography. While one could enjoy the marvels of the world at illustrated travel talks, it was possible to have similar vicarious experiences at home or at school, with the stereo views of companies as such the Underwood & Underwood (1882-1921) and the Keystone View Company (1892-1963). In a media archeology perspective, some aspects of the Underwood and Keystone systems might be considered forerunners of the contemporary geolocation technologies, as the use of maps (printed in books sold with the views) intended to give the stereoscope user a more definite sensation of place while looking at 3D images. This feature, though, also points out how the stereoscopic travel experience, as well as that of travelogues, was largely a matter of influencing the imagination: the audience had to be induced to feel more than was pictured in the views. While conferenciers like Holmes or his direct predecessor, John Lawson Stoddard (1850-1931), relied on studied rhetoric strategies, the stereoscope sets invited their owners to practice a sort of mental self-training, by reading the provided texts and looking at maps before looking to a view. One of the earliest stereoscope scholars, Albert E. Osborne, argued in fact that the stereoscopic travel experience was a matter of mental states. He likened it to the experience of talking with someone over the telephone: «even though we know the air waves come from the telephone only, we still, in accordance with our habit, have the old responding state of consciousness, feeling and all, that we are listening to a man» (Osborne 1904, 43). Even though the stereoscopes and the travelogues invited a sensorial focus which was primarily visual, the experiences they elicited also implied an aural engagement. In fact, not only the travelogues were guided by speech, but Stoddard even involved a full orchestra in his 1883-1884 conference season in Chicago (Barber 1993, 73). In the travelogues of Holmes, pictures and films of musicians playing instruments were several times offered, especially in respect to far East and African countries, in order to dote on their exotic flair; the same theme was also exploited in many sets of stereo views, with the same purpose. The proposed talk will comment on how sonic suggestions, imaginary or real, participated in constructing a psychological illusion of travelling in late XIX-early XX century media archeology; the research on sound-themed stereoscopic photographs will be based on the collection of original materials owned by the PRECINEMA Museum in Padova.