• 1 Joann Élart, Sophie Victorien, « Musique et justice : variations sur un thème donné », Criminocorpu (...)
• 2 Eliana Patrícia Branco, « Justice et Architecture : la relation entre accès au droit et architectur (...)
• 3 Michelle Lecolle, « Audience (lexique) », in Publictionnaire. Dictionnaire encyclopédique et critiq (...)

1In 2013, Sophie Victorien and Joann Élart co-edited for the journal Criminocorpus a special issue dedicated to the connection between music and justice1. While the present issue also focuses on sounds and voices, it has little to do with music, dealing instead with all things acoustic in the judicial arena. The project stemmed from a fortuitous, even anecdotal occurrence: one fine day in 2021, as he attended a trial, an expert in the cultural history of music was struck by how poor an auditory experience the whole thing provided. As the verdict was read, the presiding judge’s low, dull voice got lost in a courtroom whose acoustics left a great deal to be desired. Justice had been served, but in such an unintelligible way that the families of both the victims and the accused had to have it explained to them by their respective counsels… in a corridor. Thus, the concrete technical limitations of the venue itself had partially deprived justice of its democratic function, denying the audience the right to even perceive the verdict, unable as they were to hear properly and therefore fully understand it. Out-of-control, insufficiently thought-out, sound itself had stood as an obstacle between the citizen and their justice2. And yet, in its public dimension as well as in its vocabulary, justice happen to be intrinsically shaped by sound – from the silence required before the Court is ushered in to the hearing, during which magistrates listen to experts, witnesses, plaintiffs, defendants and counsels, through the auditorium—that part of the hall where a silent (and sometimes deaf) public sits. Etymology supports this initial observation: many of the actions and spaces of justice are referred to with a range of terms connected to audition – whose Latin root audire indeed means “to hear”, “to listen” and even, by extension, “to understand”: auditorium, audience – which means a “hearing” in French and “the listening public” in English, the latter being the “auditoire” in French –, auditeur (legal trainee in the French system)…3

• 4 Juliette Volcler, Le son comme arme. Les usages policiers et militaires du son, Paris, La Découvert (...)
• 5 More than 1500 death sentences were pronounced between 1954 and 1962, 222 of which were carried out (...)
• 6 Robert Badinter, L’exécution, Paris, Les Bibliophiles du Palais, 2020, p. 134.

2Still, while hearings are indeed a key moment as far as the sonic dimension of the activity of justice is concerned, it makes sense to explore the entire chain of judicial work, both upstream and downstream of trials. The call for contributions for the present issue encouraged authors to consider all stages of the proceedings, from the arrest to the enforcement of sentences (where applicable), whether in the police van, police custody facilities or in prison cells. The aim was to capture, in these varied contexts and places, the sound environments that may provide potentially restorable traces – such as certain torture practices4 or executions of capital sentences being carried out in prison courtyards as opposed to public places. In the well-documented case of the Algerian war of independence, for example, executions took place out of sight of the inmates, particularly those who were awaiting the death penalty and could only keep an ear out for the warning sounds from the darkness of their cell5. In such a case, what remains from an execution is first and foremost an auditory memory. This is also sometimes how the lawyers who are summoned to accompany their clients perceive it. All Robert Badinter could describe from the only executions he ever actually witnessed – those of Buffet and Bontems, in 1972 – was “the sharp snap of the blade on the bumper”6. He had turned his face away.

• 7 Trevor Pinch & Karin Bijsterveld (ed.), The Oxford handbook of sound studies, New York, Oxford Univ (...)
• 8 Michael Bull et Les Back (éd), The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2003.
• 9 Christian Delage, « L’image comme preuve. L’expérience du procès de Nuremberg », Vingtième Siècle. (...)

3The argument of this heuristic proposition is supported by examples and sensitive perceptions – at least initially, so that everyone may picture the potential delineations and measure the scope of the idea. Scientifically speaking, “listening to justice” involves crossing the history of law and justice with sound studies7 and aural or auditory history8. In order to approach the history of justice through listening, one has to define what the corpora are, determine their specificity, and specify the methods of analysis. Researchers must question the specific characteristics of sound recordings (context and technical conditions of recording, processes of conservation, dissemination, broadcasting, etc.). What is at stake is nothing short of turning sound into an autonomous object of research, in a context where the historiography of justice used to be all about audiovisual sources. Our achievements in this field so far are all the more precious in that they form an epistemology that needs to be reinvested. This introduction therefore proposes to apply the concept of “hermeneutic prerogative9”, designed by Christian Delage to work on images, in the context of sound issues. In this perspective, in addition to reviewing the special issue and its contents, our introduction will elaborate on the methodologies and notions specific to sound studies that seem relevant to explore judicial activities.

• 10 Mark M. Smith (éd.), Hearing history: a reader, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2004.
• 11 Daniel Morat, « Zur Geschichte des Hörens. Ein Forschungsbericht », in Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, (...)
• 12 Michel Chion, Le promeneur écoutant. Essais d’acoulogie, Paris, Éditions Plume, « Collection En bla (...)
• 13 Pascale Goetschel et Christophe Granger, « Saisir la dimension sonore des sociétés », Sociétés & Re (...)
• 14 Martin Kaltenecker (dir.), L’écoute : de l’Antiquité au XIX^e siècle : une anthologie, Paris, Philha (...)

4In 2004, American historian Mark M. Smith10 drew the contours of a history of sound and hearing which had hitherto gone by a number of different names such as “aural history” or “history of hearing” (Geschichte des Hörens in German historiography11). Before him, Michel Chion had borrowed the neologism “acoulogy” from composer and engineer Pierre Schaeffer to designate “the discipline that deals in rigorous words with sounds”. The term involved a degree of critical distancing from both acoustics (which focuses less on hearing than on waves themselves, as a physical phenomenon) and the “misnamed psycho-acoustics (which has less to do with the psyche than with studying certain correlations between physical stimuli and isolated sound sensations, without questioning the validity of what is called ‘sound’ at the auditory level)”. Dismissing the all too obvious causalities between “stimulus and sensation, cause and effect, object and subject12”, Michel Chion invited us to apprehend acoustic phenomena as complex constructs and to denaturalize listening. His position meets the requirements of a historical analysis of acoustic phenomena as well as their social understanding. The historian’s approach amounts to asserting, along with Pascale Goetschel et Christophe Granger, that “sound manifestations and the auditory behaviors that constitute them as such are one and the same13”. Musicology shares this concern for historicization. The recently published collection edited by Martin Kaltenecker provides an impressive diachronic overview from Greco-Latin antiquity to Western 19th century and establishes a “typology of listening frameworks and attitudes” (Vasco Zara)14. Albeit on a much more modest scale, our proposal to “listen to justice” is part and parcel of this indispensable critical methodology.

• 15 James E. K. Parker, Acoustic jurisprudence: listening to the trial of Simon Bikindi, Oxford, Oxford (...)

5However, the proposal did not pop up out of the blue. Ever since the 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of sound studies has been examining acoustic phenomena in legal proceedings, cross-examining the social, cultural, and political dimensions of trials and their technical aspects (sound architecture and design, public address systems), as well as their legal facets (standards, regulations). Thus it is that Australian jurist James Parker, who authored a seminal work in the field, has coined the term “acoustic jurisprudence15”. Analyzing the great complexity of judicial practices and representations linked to acoustic phenomena, Parker postulates that the acoustic study of a judicial fact requires strict contextualization, as abusive generalizations reinforce the effects of essentialization:

• 17 Arlette Farge, Essai pour une histoire des voix au dix-huitième siècle, Paris, Bayard, coll. « Hist (...)
• 18 Romain Telliez, « À cor et à cri. Le paysage sonore de la justice, en France à la fin du Moyen Âge  (...)

6As can be seen, there is indeed a significant body of scientific literature devoted to the relationship between justice and acoustics, but it is mainly anglophone and the work of jurists and anthropologists; and as soon as the historiography of justice appropriates these issues, contemporary history is relegated to the background. The time-frame of the investigation broadened considerably with Arlette Farge17, who examined where the voice stands in the act of justice throughout the modern era, and Romain Telliez, who analyzed the range of acoustic resources (shouts, proclamations, trumpets, murmurs and rumor) of justice in the late Middle Ages in western Europe18. From this point of view, while the present special issue being resolutely anchored in the contemporary could be perceived as a lack of balance – insofar as the call for contributions involved no chronological constraints – it might in fact signal a shift.

• 19 Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity. Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening i (...)
• 20 Francesca Gaiba, The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation. The Nuremberg Trial, Ottawa, Universit (...)
• 21 Fabien Gelinas, Clément Camion, Karine Bates, « Forme et légitimité de la justice – Regard sur le r (...)
• 22 Aurore Juvenelle, « Le microphone dans la balance : espaces et enjeux sonores des procès historique (...)

7Finally, this dossier is based on the history of techniques and the appropriation thereof. For instance, American historian Emily Thomson, in her study of sound modernity in US metropolises in the 1920s, has shown the cross-fertilization that occurred between technical knowledge on the design of sound architecture and new listening cultures linked to the emergence of the radio, the development of industrialized recording, and innovations such as the microphone19. Listening practices have also attracted the attention of Canadian musicologist Jonathan Stern who, focusing on the turn of the 19^th to 20^th century, called for a synergistic analysis of listeners and their acoustic environment. It appears that the evolution of listening cultures and the relationship between society and its acoustic environment are factors that influence the evolution of sound production and distribution techniques. In the judicial context, this attention to techniques has led Francesca Gaiba to take an interest in the development of simultaneous translation systems in the 1920s-1930s (the Hushaphone Filene-Finley patented by IBM in 1926, as well as another, similar system designed by Siemens & Halske in the early 1930s). These systems significantly impacted the Nuremberg trials, held between November 1945 and October 194620. This took place against a backdrop of profound changes in acoustic regimes, with the development of domestic and even individualized listening by way of the gramophone and later the radio receiver. The acoustic space that is the courtroom – a collective one, crucially – must therefore be understood as hosting a public address system broadcasting the words of the various actors via a set of recording devices, but also and more importantly perhaps by means of the headphones, which provided an opportunity for specific listening meeting the language requirements of all the parties involved. The involvement of technology and wires in the courtroom, as translation and recording devices intruded in the courtroom, profoundly redefined oratory practices, as well as the rituals and even the rulings of justice. Should this be seen as a desacralization of the courtroom, a form of bureaucratization, a technicization of justice?21 Whatever the case may be, it certainly induces novel rhetorical practices, news ways of using one’s voice, new ways of listening and focusing. Applying this methodology to the judicial field leads us to exploring the mutual influence of technical innovations and the needs expressed by judicial institutions faced with specific, conjunctural problems. Aurore Juvenelle’s22 article in the present issue is a case in point.

• 23 The article by Gaïd Andro and Fanny Le Bonhomme deals with a radio program devoted to relations bet (...)
• 24 The Rivonia trial, whose recordings have been restored by Henri Chamoux and Quentin Geffroy, Took P (...)

8While the call for papers was meant to cover the entire chain of judicial activity, the dossier has tended – with one exception – to gravitate around the trial phase23. This is easily understandable given the theatricality, publicness, and orality of hearings. Regardless of the type of procedure – adversarial in common law countries such as South Africa, inquisitorial in the French system – trials always share this pattern24. Moreover, these features are more pronounced in criminal cases and even more so in political cases, due to the intrinsic dramaturgy of the debates and judgments, which is why criminal and/or political trials tend to be overrepresented in the present special issue – not an uncommon occurrence in legal history studies. If the trial therefore appears to lend itself better than any other procedural phase to a history of contemporary justice that takes sounds as its object, the rarity of such an approach in historiography appears all the more as an outlier.

• 25 This is how Jacques Commaille sums up this evolution in « L’architecture judiciaire comme analyseur (...)
• 26 La nouvelle architecture judiciaire : des palais de justice modernes pour une nouvelle image de la (...)

9Even though the theatricality of justice lies primarily in its venues, the historiography of judicial architecture does not appear to have been particularly concerned with the acoustic dimension of courtrooms, examining courthouses first and foremost from the perspective of their symbolic representation, both in terms of their monumentality and their integration into the urban fabric. In the French case, the dynamic that has been described went from a “justice of Majesty” –featuring courthouses (Palais de justice, literally “Palaces of justice”) modelled on the columned temple representing a function of authority – to a “justice of proximity” defined by its function of social regulation25, all this without forgoing the solemnity befitting the institution or breaking with the notion of “Palais”, albeit of a new type. The construction and renovation program launched by the government in the 1990s was first assessed in 2002 as having produced functional buildings, especially in terms of accommodating the public (including persons with reduced mobility) and improving working conditions for legal professionals. The emphasis on light, as evidenced by the extensive use of glass, is understood to reflect the concern for transparency. Although included in the list of technical features enumerated by the ministry, acoustics appeared secondary if not marginalized in the review published in 2002, which only mentioned “the remarkable acoustics” of the Aix-en-Provence courthouse26. On the other hand, by the time the review was published, the faulty public address system of the brand-new assize court in Caen had to be redesigned entirely – which could be considered as a sign that this issue has been downplayed.

• 27 Antoine Garapon, Bien juger. Essai sur le rituel judiciaire, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2010, chapitre 6.
• 28 Émeline Seignobos, La parole judiciaire. Mises en scène théoriques et représentations télévisuelles(...)
• 29 See philosopher John Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Paris, Seuil, 2010 (for 1st edition in Fr (...)

10The theatricalization of justice also had to do with the role of eloquence and rhetoric in the discussions. Devoting a chapter to the link between justice and the spoken word in his Essai sur le rituel judiciaire (Essay on the judicial ritual), Antoine Garapon described it as “far-reaching, even consubstantial”, noting in particular the importance of silent pauses and the tonality of voices, the role of the microphone (controlled by the presiding judge), the power of words, and the ritualization provided by consecrated formulas punctuating the course of hearings. The chapter remains quite overarching, with no concrete examples. Instead, it offers a standardized account of the experience of hearing a trial – similar, incidentally, to what the co-author of the present issue experienced in 202127. This is because “the judicial word”, Émeline Seignobos insists in her thesis, is “stillborn”, “condemned to silence, repressed on the threshold of posterity”28. “Verba volant, scripta manent”, she reminds us, to justify her slow, painstaking work of reconstructing the spoken word based on written accounts and audiovisual recordings, as well as mass media sources (television in particular). While this has enabled her to pay particular attention to content (and to conclude that the judicial rhetoric is in decline), such a corpus does not lend itself to a properly acoustic analysis of the judicial word, one that would take into account – for example – its tonalities, rhythms and resonances, and might question the existence of specifically oral strategies on the part of speakers. This limitation is all the more regrettable as the judicial word usually tends to be apprehended in historiography as “performative speech”29. Therefore, all its facets, including those pertaining to formal acoustics, need to be better understood.

• 30 On the figure of the activist lawyer, see the special issue of Le Mouvement Social edited by Liora (...)
• 31 « Maître François Gibault : réflexions sur une expérience des procès politiques depuis 1962 », inte (...)
• 32 Liora Israël, À la gauche du droit. Mobilisations politiques du droit et de la justice en France (1 (...)
• 33 Marie Houllemare, « Un avocat parisien entre art oratoire et promotion de soi (fin XVIe siècle) », (...)
• 34 Among a vast body of literature, see Denis Salas’ clarification in the afterword to the reprint of (...)
• 35 Frédéric Chauvaud & Pierre Prétou (dir.), Clameur publique et émotions judiciaires, Rennes, Presses (...)
• 36 Les Cahiers de la Justice provides a good overview in their two issues dedicated to these trials: L (...)
• 37 Christian Licoppe, Maud Verdier, Clair-Antoine Veyrier, « L’interprète au centre du prétoire ? Voix (...)
• 38 « "Écouter le procès de Rivonia". Entretien sur le travail de restauration des archives » : https:/ (...)

11The prospects opened up by the proposal of a sonic history of justice are just as vast as the fields in which could potentially be implemented. For instance, despite the importance of oratory in the practice of defense, the figure of the militant lawyer does not draw much on this particular dimension30. Jacques Vergès, who has epitomized this figure in France ever since he formalized the “rupture defense” in 1968, was not “an immense orator”31, unlike Jacques Isorni or Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, according to François Gibault, a fellow lawyer who encouraged his right-wing colleagues to do more research on left-wing political defense32. Whether the assertion is true matters less than what it reveals about how unthought the sonic dimension of the various ways of being an activist lawyer is. Beyond the case of these lawyers, the very notion of oratory/public speaking33 could be revisited. In the same spirit, what would a sonic history learn from the emergence of victims’ voices – identified in historiography as a major phenomenon in criminal hearings over the last three decades or so?34 What could be learned from the emotions that, following an initial foray outside the judicial arena, are now finding their rightful place there?35 For instance, the voices and emotions of the victims were an integral part of the most recent work on the trials of the 2015 attacks36. Finally, research on the interventions of interpreters could be revisited as well, given that, in these proceedings, the time of justice is specifically adjusted, as are the devices used for translation, public address and sound systems37. One of the findings of the restoration of the Rivonia trial recordings, described by Henri Chamoux et Quentin Geffroy38, was that the voices of the witnesses were covered by those of the interpreters. As can be seen, the question of sound as applied to courtrooms leads us to focus on the various uses of the voice in the context of legal proceedings. Furthermore, it is the very status of the voice that becomes the object of study, within the space and time frame of the trial.

• 39 Christian Delage, Filmer, juger. De la Seconde Guerre mondiale à l’invasion de l’Ukraine, Paris, Ga (...)
• 40 Nathalie Le Bouëdec, « « On ne devrait exiger de personne de parler dans un micro ». Les débats aut (...)
• 41 Martine Sin Blima-Barru, « Le son dans les procès filmés en France », Criminocorpus, Écouter la jus (...)

13A sonic history of justice can only become a proper project provided one can find recordings that can be exploited specifically from the point of view of sound, which raises the question of capture and how it affects the available content. Again, audiovisual historiography offers a valuable precedent. While filming makes it possible to see and show, choices are necessarily made in that process that simultaneously make whatever is off-camera totally invisible. As Christian Delage explains: “what one can personally see in the courtroom, thanks to the plasticity of the eye and the freedom to allow our gaze to wander, [is] much more open than what the camera’s lens [keeps staring at]”39. As a result, audiovisual historiography has outgrown the primary objective of recording for conservation purposes, striving to understand the act of filming itself – grasping its specific issues, uses, constraints, limitations but also, of course, all its potential for being analyzed in its own right. The same applies to sound. Knowing everything about the devices and systems is not just a necessary prerequisite for analyzing the captured content; the devices are worth being investigated in and of themselves – including from a regulatory perspective, as proposed by Nathalie Le Bouëdec40 and Martine Sin Blima-Barru41.

• 42 Jean Danet mentions this in his interview with the Les Cahiers de la Justice: « Vers une nouvelle o (...)
• 43 Laurence Dumoulin et Christian Licoppe, Justice et visioconférence : les audiences à distance. Genè (...)

14Historiography on the use of digital technology in hearings has also strongly emphasized how much of a total bodily and sensory experience a trial can be – something technology is simply unable to render. Like audiovisual technology, videoconferencing has been regulated by a law passed in 2001 and amended several times since42. As early as 2009 – long before the pandemic made videoconferencing a staple of our lives – a report commissioned by the Ministry of Justice’s Mission de Recherche reviewed how this technique was used and how it impacted hearings43.

• 44 Antoine Garapon et Jean Lassègue, Justice digitale : révolution graphique et rupture anthropologiqu (...)
• 45 Antoine Garapon et Jean Lassègue, Justice digitale, op. cit., p. 176.

15While the practicality of videoconferencing cannot be denied and explains its popularity, research consistently finds that the trial experience had been impoverished. Antoine Garapon and Jean Lassègue, for instance, have analyzed at length the main rupture created by videoconferencing, namely the dissociation of space-time: not only is the space of the videoconference located outside the courtroom, but the screen disrupts the ordering of the judicial scene – the videoconferencing witness is not on the stand, which had been designed expressly to occupy a central position, equidistant from the parties, facing the judges and therefore lending the hearings their specific, structural spatial perspective. Moreover, they write, reinforcing Christian Delage’s remark on the incommensurability of the trial captured by the eye, videoconferencing rules out “shared corporeality”44. “A judge does not react in the same way to the reading of a report or the hearing of a witness as to the viewing of a video”, they explain45.

• 46 R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World. A pioneering exploration into the past history and pres (...)
• 47 Daniel Deshays, « Le paysage sonore, une congélation du vivant ? », in Jean Mottet (dir.), La forêt (...)
• 48 Alain Corbin, Les cloches de la terre. Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIX(...)

16The plurality of audible (or inaudible) realities and the complexity of acoustic phenomena raise questions about how effective the widely accepted notion of “soundscape” actually is. Historians adopted this word in the 1990s – keeping, however, a healthy distance with it. Popularized by Canadian composer and ecologist Raymond Murray Schafer in the late 1970s46, the term was initially coined as part of the World Soundscape Project, led by Shafer at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University in the 1960s. The aim of the project was twofold: introducing individuals to a critical, active listening of their acoustic environment, and collecting so-called “natural”, anthropogenic sounds (the latter, according to Schafer, constituting largely an impoverishment of the quality of the sound signal, if not a nuisance). Although Schafer’s listening methodology proved to be a decisive milestone in the development of sound studies, it has been criticized for its fixist dimension (i.e. its reluctance to analyze complex, evolving social phenomena – Daniel Deshays described it as “deep-freezing the living47”). As a result, following the work of Alain Corbin48, while the phrase has continued to be used, the historical study of “soundscapes” is understood as an inquiry into the social, cultural and political complexity of the production, perceptions and modes of appropriation of acoustic phenomena, seeking to document these on the basis of silent archives (i.e., for the most part, scriptural, iconographic or object archives) prior to the invention and development of sound recording from the 1880s onwards. The term “soundscape” may have a nice ring to it, but it’s a very imperfect description of the scientific approaches that made it their own.

• 49 Bruce Bégout, Le concept d’ambiance, Paris, Seuil, 2020.
• 50 Adrien Pitor, « Une justice froide ? L’ambiance thermique dans le palais de justice de Paris au XVI (...)
• 51 Olivier Balaÿ, « L’ambiance comme objet historique », in Robert Beck, Ulrike Krampl et Emmanuelle R (...)

17In this respect, the notion of “atmosphere” may prove useful. Defined by philosopher Bruce Bégout as an “affective tonality” that translates an “intense and temporary communion” between an individual and their perceived and experienced environment49, the concept has subsequently been used by historians of justice. Still, for purposes of objectivization and historicization, criteria need to be defined to circumscribe and analyze whatever “atmosphere” is. Sound is but one aspect of it. Historian Adrien Pitor has explored temperatures and the sensation of cold, particularly in the Paris courthouse in the 18^th century. Drawing on the history of sensitivities, the history of climate, and the evolution of building architecture (subject to arbitration relative to the hierarchies and functions of the various spaces, heating and comfort issues, as well as fire safety concerns), Pitor set out to re-create “the atmosphere of the place”, evoking “a thermal landscape made up not only of sounds – the crackling of burning wood, the flares – but also of visual and olfactory impressions such as the spectacle of flickering flames or the smell of smoke”50. Architect and urban planner Olivier Balaÿ, studying the sonic spaces of 19^th-century French cities51, noted that how highly relevant the concept of atmosphere is when it comes to analyzing contemporary courthouse spaces. In this case, acoustic clues are used among other parameters:

• 53 Neil Mackenzie, Yong-Keat Lee, Bill Dawson, Magaesh Naidu, “Acoustic design aspects of the Brisbane (...)
• 54 Kirsty Duncanson, Emma Henderson (ed.), Courthouse Architecture, Design and Social Justice, New Yor (...)
• 55 The special issue “Territoires et lieux de justice” published in the journal Histoire de la justice(...)

18As can be seen, multidisciplinary approaches and a variety of analytical focal points are necessary to properly address – through case studies53 or more general approaches54, either in its own right or in relation to other modes of perception – the place of sound in legal architecture55.

• 56 Juliette Volcler, Le son comme arme. Les usages policiers et militaires du son, op.cit. ; Juliette (...)
• 57 Victor A. Stoichita, « Musicopathies », Terrain, 68 | 2017, p. 4-25. [online] URL: http://journals. (...)
• 58 Suzanne G. Cusick, Cusick, Susanne. “‘You are in a Place That is Out of the World…’ Music in the De (...)
• 59 Katie Hemsworth, “ ‘Feeling the range’: Emotional geographies of sound in prisons”, In Emotion, Spa (...)
• 60 Tom Rice, “Sounds inside: Prison, Prisoners and Acoustical Agency”, in Sound Studies, 2 (1), 2016, (...)
• 61 Gaïd Andro et Fanny Le Bonhomme, « “94° à l'ombre” (Rennes - années 1990-2000). Le lien sonore par- (...)

19Finally, the notion of “atmosphere” makes it possible to include the cultural (and therefore evolving) relationship to noise pollution. In this way, research can get out of the courtroom and enter places of detention. Juliette Volcler56 has focused on the use of sound and music for control and repression in prison. Anthropologist Victor A. Stoichita57, for his part, has highlighted the fluctuating impact of music on bodies and health, depending on social and cultural contexts. To document her analysis of the use of music in US detention centers in the context of the George W. Bush administration’s “global war on terror”, music historian Suzanne G. Cusick58 has drawn on a corpus of sources combining declassified military documents and the testimonies of those involved (agents responsible for interrogations as well as former detainees) in the secret prisons of the CIA (also known as black sites or dark prisons), as well as several sites in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba. The work of Canadian geographer Katie Hemsworth59 and British anthropologist Tom Rice60, based on case studies of incarceration combining first-hand accounts and analyses of prison infrastructures, also emphasizes the complexity and polysemy of these acoustic prison environments. Whilst analyzing sound-based control devices and the effects of disorientation, or even desocialization, induced by the buildings’ acoustic biases (Hemsworth focuses in particular on reverberation in communal spaces), they both study the acoustic practices of inmates, such as the use of music as consolation or stimulation, and the development of specific types of listening (seeking protection against ambient noise by taking refuge in quiet areas, communicating with other inmates “ in spite of” surveillance systems). In other words, to borrow Tom Rice’s expression, prisoners deploy an “acoustic agency” (or capacity for acoustic action) that enables them to envisage prison environments in their acoustic dimensions beyond the logic of constraints alone. In this issue, Gaïd Andro and Fanny Le Bonhomme61 examine a local radio program hosted by the Rennes branch of the GENEPI association, documenting the prison experience through the sonic link between inmates and their families.

• 62 Martine Sin Blima-Barru, « Le son dans les procès filmés en France », Criminocorpus, Écouter la jus (...)
• 63 Aurore Juvenelle, « Le microphone dans la balance : espaces et enjeux sonores des procès historique (...)

20Finally, it must be mentioned that this issue very extensively documents archive production as well as the related regulations and the conditions of conservation. This is fundamentally what Heritage curator (conservatrice du Patrimoine) Martine Sin Blima-Barru62 and archivist Aurore Juvenelle63 have been aiming to do with their contributions, both of which question and inform the production of sound archives at the time of the trials of the terrorist attacks in France between 2021 and 2024, nourishing our reflection on the acoustic history of justice by collecting information from the field and analyzing the practices of those actually in charge of producing these documents.

• 64 Martine Sin Blima-Barru, « Le son dans les procès filmés en France », Criminocorpus, Écouter la jus (...)
• 65 Charles Jolibois, Rapport, Sénat, n° 385, session of 19 June 1985, p.15.
• 66 Nadège Ragaru, “Viewing, reading, and listening to the trials in Eastern Europe”, Cahiers du monde (...)
• 67 Nathalie Le Bouëdec, « « On ne devrait exiger de personne de parler dans un micro ». Les débats aut (...)
• 68 Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza, Andrew N. Weintraub, “The Audible Future: Reimagining the Role of Sound (...)

21Upstream, regulations set out a framework one needs to be familiar with. In France, as Martine Sin Blima-Barru64 reminds us, the audiovisual archives of justice occupy a special place in this Code du patrimoine (“Heritage Code”). The period covering the debates that preceded the enactment of the law of 3 January 1979, and those leading up to the law of 11 July 1985 provided an opportunity – in a context where oral sources were being reintegrated into the historians’ corpus – to discuss the issues and problems raised by the creation of audiovisual archives of justice in France. French legislation only provides for sound recordings (or, more broadly, audiovisual recordings) if the historical interest of the trial is established and if said trial is perceived as potentially “making history”, as the Jolibois report puts it65. In other contexts, legislation provides a different framework for the production of legal sound archives. For example, in a recent issue of the Cahiers du monde russe entitled “Viewing, reading, and listening to the trials in Eastern Europe”, historian and political scientist Nadège Ragaru offered a series of studies on the use of images and sound in Communist states from the 1920s through the 1960s66. The present issue – thanks to Nathalie Le Bouëdec’s article67 – further contributes to this comparative and diachronic approach of legislation on the use of sound sources in trials68.

• 69 “Archives of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museu (...)
• 70 « "Écouter le procès de Rivonia". Entretien sur le travail de restauration des archives » : https:/ (...)

22From the perspective of archiving and conservation, the time has come to address the issues raised by the digitization of sound documents from major trials. In 2021, the 775 or so hours of hearings recorded on 1942 gramophones discs from the Nuremberg trials – digitized by Gecko, a private company, as part of a partnership between the USHMM in Washington and the Shoah Memorial in Paris – were made available online69. A few years earlier, in December 2013, as part of a cooperation agreement, the expertise of the French agency for the conservation of audiovisual archives, INA, was put to good use in safeguarding almost 250 hours recorded on “dictabelts” during the Rivonia trial (1963-1964), in which members of the ANC, including Nelson Mandela, were brought before the Transvaal High Court in Pretoria. The long interview Henri Chamoux et Quentin Geffroy70 gave to the editors of the present issue constitutes in itself a document on this process of conservation and archiving, while at the same time providing two experts on sound issues an opportunity to analyze their own practices and the impact of their actions on the source documents made available to historians and history.

• 71 See the list of trials established by Martine Sin Blima-Barru. « Focus : Les archives audiovisuelle (...)

23There are good reasons for the prominence given to these issues in the dossier. Regulating, recording, and archiving are all necessary conditions for the expansion of a field within history as a discipline, either before or during the research process. While a sonic history of justice seems to offer almost boundless prospects – especially if scholars are able to rely on tried-and-tested methodologies and concepts –, as of today, the “listening to justice” project remains a work in progress. Hopefully, the present special issue will prove to be a steppingstone, one that will spark renewed interest in the existing collections maintained by the Archives Nationales71.