Beyond Artifacts: Collecting Intentional Traces
Traditional archives house objects: guitars, sheet music, photographs, records. The Tennessee Institute of Blues Phenomenology maintains an ‘Archive of Feeling.’ Our primary collection consists of ‘intentional traces’—documents that provide direct access to the structures of subjective and intersubjective experience surrounding the blues. This includes, first and foremost, our collection of ‘Experience Protocol Transcripts.’ Immediately after a live performance, interview, or listening session, participants (musicians, audience members, engineers) are guided through a structured phenomenological interview. They describe, in their own words, the flow of their consciousness: what they felt in their body at key moments, what memories arose, how their attention shifted, what the space felt like. These transcripts are not reviews or critiques; they are raw data of lived experience, capturing the phenomenon as it unfolded in real time.
The Mediated Memory Project
Recognizing that memory itself is a phenomenon, we also conduct ‘mediated memory sessions.’ We play a historic recording for an elder who was part of that music’s original community or for a musician from a later generation. We record their responses, not as historical corrections, but as accounts of how the music resonates in a present consciousness, carrying layers of personal and cultural memory. We also collect ‘sonic diaries’—audio recordings made by musicians describing their intentional state before, during, and after composing or practicing a piece. Furthermore, we archive non-traditional items: a worn guitar strap annotated with a player’s sweat marks, a set list with cryptic emotional cues scribbled next to song titles, a diagram of a stage setup drawn by a performer to show where they needed to stand to ‘feel the groove’ from the drummer. These are the fossils of intentionality.
The Annotated Listening Station
A core component of our public-facing archive is the Annotated Listening Station. Here, visitors don headphones and listen to key recordings while a synchronized scroll presents layered annotations. These are not liner notes. One layer displays the standard lyrics. Another displays a ‘kinesthetic annotation’ (e.g., ‘[Here, the listener often reports a tightening in the chest]’). A third displays ‘intentional annotations’ drawn from our protocols (e.g., ‘Guitarist’s note: ‘At this bend, I was thinking of the way my grandfather sighed.’). A fourth might show a spectral analysis of the recording, highlighting the overtone series of a bent note. This multi-modal presentation allows the visitor to experience the recording not just as a song, but as a complex event of consciousness, understanding how the acoustic phenomena correlate with reported internal states. It trains the ear to listen phenomenologically.
Ethics of the Emotional Archive
This work raises profound ethical questions. We are collecting and preserving vulnerable, intimate reports. Our guiding principle is consent and co-authorship. Participants review and can redact their protocols. They choose whether their contribution is public, restricted to researchers, or sealed for a period of decades. We acknowledge that the very act of documenting an experience can alter it, introducing self-reflection. We see this not as contamination but as a valuable secondary phenomenon—the experience of *reporting* one’s experience is itself a rich subject for study. Our goal is not to pin down a single, definitive ‘meaning’ of a blues performance. Rather, the Archive of Feeling aims to preserve the multiplicity of meanings that erupt from the intersection of music, body, history, and community. It ensures that future generations will have access not just to what the blues sounded like, but to rich testaments of what it *felt like* to make it and to hear it, in all its subjective glory. In this way, we preserve not a corpse, but a heartbeat.