sound analysis|sound composition|sound knowledge
The journey along the continuum of understanding how to work with and through sound constantly shifts from traditional, empirical ways of knowing and nontraditional, non-rational ways of knowing. In this first foray into understanding these phenomena I provide three layers within that continuum: analysis, composition, knowledge. Below, I identify how each of these layers can be utilized and presented using tools available through modern digital technologies. Interestingly, I’m finding that the ease of writing (a rational, empirical rhetoric) about these different layers diminishes as I move from analysis (which is also rational) to trying to describe in words what I mean by “sound knowledge” — a non-rational rhetoric based on affect and deep, cultural traditions and belief systems. This will eventually become the larger theoretical problem of my future work.
Pt. 1 : sound|analysis
New medias allow for a variety of ways to present, engage with, and analyze sound. When reading traditional scholarship that includes within its scope the aural, it is frequently disappointing that the reader can’t actually hear the sound, be it music, sound effects, or whatever, that is being discussed.
Sometimes this can result in a misreading and even misunderstanding of the scholarship in question. For example, when I first read Jeff Rice’s “The making of ka-knowledge: Digital aurality” in the Spring 2006 issue of Computers and Composition, I was confused. I read the title as KA-knowledge, thinking that “KA” was something akin to the Egyptian ka that is roughly translated as “life-essence”. This was close, but maybe not quite on point to Rice’s thesis. Instead, “ka-knowledge” was a quote from the Beastie Boys song “The Sounds of Science” but, still, without hearing the song, I couldn’t really understand fully how Rice heard it and therefore have complete access to his argument. The article contains three other direct quotes of various musical artifacts and many other less specific musical references, each of which silently languish on the page.
Of course, our easy access to the internet can solve that problem easily enough, but something organic is lost when a reader has to stop reading, do a google search, hope to find a YouTube video or something with free access to the song and then, finally, listen to the sonic artifact.
Modern web publication such as that found in a simple blogging application have the capability of making reading and listening a much more seamless process more akin to visual studies where a painting or photograph can be easily reprinted in the publication. What follows are three options that Rice could have used had he published his article as a web-document.
First, he could have very easily embedded the song at it’s first mention:
“And the Beastie Boys (1989) highlighted droppin’ science in the song “The Sounds of Silence.”
This is a full-song link out. A similar link might be shared that has only the selection of the song that is quoted. I created this edit in 5 minutes using GarageBand. This seems to me a more concise way of going about the citation (and one that may be exempt from having to pay copyright royalties!).
Finally, for more detailed analysis projects, scholars might consider using software such as that offered at SoundCloud, a site created to encourage a social media-like conversation to happen around a shared song (usually of the users own creation), but also has a secondary use of offering visual comment points.
The Sounds Of Science by jwstone
Pt. 2 – sound|composition
As we move away from analysis into composition, it is immediately clear how very different the two are from one another. Analysis allows for a sense of artistic and rhetorical distance between object and critic, whereas composition requires the critic to become the artist and rhetor. When this transition is made, suddenly the sometimes long-forgotten principles of delivery are useful again. Attention to tone of voice, sonic layering of music and effects, clarity of speech, etc. are important. I offer here two examples of how this kind of work my sound.
The first is a short sound piece that I made for an in-class presentation. In it, my main agenda was to play around with sound and scholarly argument. I intentionally made the piece quirky and semi-musical. I wanted to demonstrate how very different arguments are when we hear them, especially when the speaker (as I was) is less interested in communicating a linear, logical argument and more interested in the sound itself: the tone of the voice, the shifting layers of speech, the meta sounds, and the affect of hearing.
Sound Presentation by Jon Stone.
The second is a link to Cynthia Self’s collection of sound essays she titles “The Movement of Air, The Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.” The essays collected here represent, for the most part, a more traditional approach to bringing aurality back into our disciplinary communication. The essays generally play out like radio programs: There is usually a narrator and then various other voices are used as the “cited” elements of the project. So, rather than quoting an expert, you can hear the words and voice of that expert in the actual essay. One essay, “The Legacy of Music” is able to have as a soundtrack the very instruments and music that the essayist profiles in the piece.
Both of these examples provide insight on reasons for considering the aural when teaching and creating rhetoric, and bring to the surface many rhetorical principles (delivery foremost among them, but surely not the only one) not present when composing with alphabetic texts.
pt.3 sound|knowledge
The impetus behind my interest in studying sound as rhetoric is not, as you might imagine, based solely on my interest in music. It is related but not, in the end, what intrigues me. As I mentioned in my presentation, what fascinates me about sound is that its power towards affect is largely mysterious. And further, within the sonic realm are engrained cultural ways of hearing — these “ways” are tied to deep, embodied, shared cultural value systems that can be enacted unconsciously. My children, for example, know at what pitch to whine to get me to do what they want. And beyond that, my hunch is that there are sonic cues, be they vocal, musical( see also here and here), and even related to our sound effects, that correspond to ways of knowing that go beyond empirical notions of what it means to “know.” That, indeed, the sounds we make are audible evidence of deeply held cultural and ideological beliefs.
The trick, of course, is to find ways to make that argument. Felt experiences are not generally something that are easily reproduced and surely not guaranteed, so while sound analysis and composition might be used approximate the kinds of knowledge that I refer to here, the work on how to properly investigate and document this phenomenon will now become my task.
