flow

Revising and thinking about revising kept me up at night and early in the morning, and that's saying something: I usually sleep heavy and long. As I brainstormed new ideas for the piece, my ears filled with possibilities. Daniel Anderson (2008) stated that when humans and machines come together, the result is the development of multiliteracies as well as "body and soul realizations, engagement, educational magic" (p. 42). I was feeling the magic. As I revised, I wanted to attempt many of these ideas; I also had a lot of questions:

  • Could I make a chord with speech, like David J. Staley (2010) did with images, an "emergent aural effect that was not present when listening to the notes in isolation"?
  • What would happen if I recorded a quotation at high, medium, and low speaking ranges and played them all together? Would they or could they harmonize with each other?
  • Could I speak with and speak for Hocks and Shipka? As Erin Anderson (2014) stated, could I use digital voice to "speak through others' voices as if they were [my] own"? Could they speak with and for me?
  • Could I create a chorus of voices speaking about a topic, much like a singing chorus?
  • Could I or should I draw on theorizations of chora? (I knew Jeff Rice [2007] discussed the concept in his book, and I knew it was different from choral singing, but I wasn't really sure what it was or if and how it applied to what I was composing.)
  • Should I abandon the visuals and make a sound composition, podcast, or audio essay instead of a video?
  • Should I abandon visuals and sounds I did not create myself?
  • Should I record with my laptop, my office computer, my Yeti Pro mic, or all of these?
  • Did I need or want to write out a script or a storyboard? Or should I jump in and start putting sounds together (my usual method), see what might come out, and go from there?
  • Should I take out my poem?
  • Could I play with the lyrics of Brahms's "German Requiem"? Would anyone understand the words? Would anyone know or recognize the song?
  • Could I explain, mimic, or use some of the musical techniques from the Brahms Requiem, techniques such as repetition, fugue, book-ending, and pattern across movements?
  • Should I play up the themes of death and dying that appeared in the Brahms Requiem and in Shipka's (2013) "Stealing Sounds"?

I pondered these and many other questions, eventually taking the first draft to my writing groups. I asked colleagues if I was crazy and if the draft was a piece of junk. I was insecure, still nervous. They were interested—in cross-modal juxtaposition, in chora and how it might be applied to video composition, in the materialities, images, and sounds of writing, singing, and composing. Spurred on, I began to re-record, make a script, reorganize, delete, and re-watch.

Now, thanks to my tenure-track position, certain functional and technical challenges were lessened. I had my own office with a desktop computer that had Final Cut Pro, a new laptop, two video cameras, two tripods, and lots of storage cards and drives. I could compose, play, and experiment, not limited by time or access, which allowed me to focus instead on the rhetorical aspects of the composition.

While I didn't have to worry about tools or technologies, I did now have to worry about tenure. Could I publish this thing? If so, would it count as a peer-reviewed publication? Should I have been spending my time writing in more traditional formats? But then, as I worked assets around in the software, as I listened to music and looked up lyrics, I forgot (for a moment) about tenure. I forgot, for many moments, about a lot of responsibilities, about grading, about email and Facebook, lost as I was in creating and composing, awash in dozens of audio files. I listened, positioned, re-recorded, deleted, adjusted, listened again. I typed out a script. I followed it, and then I didn't. I put files into Audacity, mashed things up, turned it up and down, re-pitched, distorted. I laughed and cried. My ears hurt from having the headphones on too long. I tried them in various positions, sitting on the fronts and backs of my ears. The sun had set (again), and I was still in my office. Getting home to start dinner could wait thirty minutes, an hour...

I brought the latest draft home with me each night, and I watched it four or five times. I was supposed to be doing other things, but instead, I re-watched and re-listened. It was like checking Facebook—I didn't realize I was doing it sometimes. I made my partner watch the draft too, so I could talk about it even more. I got more feedback from a Computers and Writing colleague across the country, and again from my writing group. I couldn't stop revising, even during finals, even during Christmas. Just a few hours with Final Cut before this or that, I told myself. It was fun and satisfying—but also a time suck. It was what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2002) called flow. And it was beautiful.