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Articles Conference Reviews |
W.6 Sound TeachingW.6 Sound Teaching: Bringing Music and Audio into the Composition Classroom Those attending “Sound Teaching: Bringing Music and Audio into the Composition Classroom” heard music to their ears. Broadly construed, this full day, pre-Conference College Composition and Communication workshop explored how sound cultural studies could inform composition theory and pedagogy. In discussing theoretical and applied perspectives on aural rhetorics, Chairs Stephanie Ceraso (University of Pittsburg) and Daniel Anderson (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) conducted a command performance alongside presenters Geoff Sirc (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis), Spencer Shaffner (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Jason Loan (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Zach Laminack (University of North Carolina at Greensboro). Several guiding questions were explored, including: how do we understand the intersections of sound and rhetoric? In what ways can student interests in music become pedagogical tools for writing? Further, how does a relationship to production technologies generate opportune learning moments? In this review, I describe the workshop sessions lead by all presenters (in brief) before turning my attention to a summation of the session. Recognizing a need for prolonged conversation, the workshop began several days in advance when Anderson invited participants to download a shared Dropbox (an online file management system available at https://www.dropbox.com/) folder and install Audacity (a free “cross-platform sound editor” available at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) via email. These steps were intended to reduce the time dedicated to administrative tasks while the workshop sessions were underway (as well as encourage prolonged conversation after the workshop ended). Also, these steps facilitated easy access to conference materials. The workshop at CCCC was then divided into four sessions. During the morning, presenters discussed and shared their research interests in panels derived from genre and heuristics (sessions one and two). Then in the afternoon, participants engaged in “hands-on” experimentation using audio essays and sample voicemail constructions (session three). Finally, to end the day, the entire group brainstormed ways to justify and promote audio projects (session four). The participants were both exposed to emerging thinking and asked to work across the domains of theory, production, and pedagogy. By virtue of an effective organizational scheme, the workshop accomplished a great deal. (All without going into overtime!) The first session, entitled “Annotated Playlists and Music Criticism as Genre” began with Anderson addressing the long shadow in the room: anxiety over irrelevant assignments. Naturally, angst concerning accreditation and assessment were not far behind. Yet, in noting that music serves as a compositional bridge that both invokes student motivation and introduces different genres of writing, Anderson immediately justified the discussion about to occur. For example, asking learners to write soundtracks of their lives may result in a quasi-ethnographic self-study that becomes narrative or argumentative writing. Alternatively, playlist assignments can explore creative processes and identities (while logically moving instruction towards annotated bibliographies). Throughout these examples, a need for students to move from superfluous explanations of taste to rigorous active listening was stressed. Anderson effectively integrated pragmatic concerns with critical and creative ones to forge a pedagogy from and in aurality. The first session continued with a presentation by Sirc, which offered several additional examples of how musical criticism builds writing skills. His primary argument, that musical reflection engagement invents excellent writing, was illuminated through Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique” and Anglefire’s “How to Make the Perfect Mix Tape.” To Sirc, students can become open to taking chances and poetically expressing the world when engaged in musical criticism. Music can also introduce themes, selections, arrangements, and rhetorical vocabulary intuitively. Amongst Sirc’s samples were a playlist annotated with rhetorical lingo (performing a form of conceptual reverse engineering) and an Eminem Haiku by Sasha Frere-Jones. Student testimonials in response to a 2Pac discussion sent via email served as poignant reminders of the tumultuous process good writers must undergo to meet their muse. The process of responding to music and making music personally meaningful is, in Sirc’s session, a way of engaging a student in writing to learn. To produce sound, a performer can rely on object(s) and/or voice(s). The former, a technological apparatus, can be reconfigured and manipulated. And such techno-manipulations facilitate new forms of invention. Thus fittingly, the second session explored “music and remix heuristics.” Shaffner, as the first presenter in the second session, suggested that an ability to adjust the relationship of producer to means of production would result in new ways of thinking about writing. Subsequently, what technology can do is a function of how it is engaged. Offering four paradigms (alterations of existing technology, new uses of existing technology, combining/remixing, and looping/layering), his orientation of the process/object connection fundamentally questions the “what” and “how” of any creative process. And, in closing with a question (what would these four paradigms mean to writing tools and the subsequent composition process?), his inquiry became an invitation for compositionists to further theorize adjusting the apparatus of writing. Noting a need for collaboration in composition, the next presenter (Ceraso) assembled a series of teaching exercises to support a teaching community. Some of her students in response to these assignments constructed an expanded delivery of pharmaceutical side effect warnings and an exploration of copyright/left (an intellectual property commentary). Each displayed conceptual originality and high productive value. Her pedagogical contribution (entitled “The Remix Project”) gestures towards a remix grammar (or, a leveraging of technological into pedagogical capital). In her Remix Project, students are prompted to create a remix across multiple materials that “transforms (radically reverses) the authors’ original ideas…that enables [them – the student] to say something new” and create a polished artist statement that explains their compositional process. Ceraso makes of sound in teaching a space for student creativity. The final presenter of the second session, Loan, found in the trusted genre of feedback a new and novel space for audio culture. Playing with the notion of immersive feedback, he sought to align the learning moments presented in reviewing student work with archival thinking. In his system, a reviewer would produce feedback through noise (in both its creative and disruptive glory). Writers are engaged across the senses: reading, viewing, and listening to the instructor’s concoction of noise and feedback. The resulting a-harmony reframes a genre – teacher comments – such that the instructor becomes symphonic composer and the writer becomes player. Given Loan’s argument, that writing pedagogies often rely on visually impoverished means, the simple process of commenting becomes a lucrative space through which linguistic authority can be further theorized. Sessions three and four marked a turn in presentation style. These sessions, entitled “Audio Media Composing Projects” and “Justifying and Promoting Audio Projects” respectively, required workshop participants to engage in hands-on learning. For example, in the third session, participants engaged in production activities. Through assignments such as a fictitious voicemail or a documentary podcast, the intersection of audio file creation and invention was experienced. Within my work group, we admittedly leaned towards highly political examples, addressing ideological and political contestations concerning educational policy. Yet, given the conference theme of contested knowledge, such an intellectual place made sense. It also yielded a productive dialog concerning how such assignments could generate learning experiences for first year or advanced composition students. This means of instruction, direct engagement, permitted thinking about audio-invention in abstract (or, for example, how a writer manages a composition process) and concrete (aka: how to use Audacity to create media files) terms. In the fourth and final session, participants revisited a familiar theme: how to design and justify audio projects. Using a brief brainstorming session, participants argued for means of including audio assignments in the compositional pedagogical sphere. The fourth session closed with an acknowledgement of thanks to all parties involved, with an invitation to continue the conversation via electronic means. Equal parts theory, pedagogy, production, and contemplation, “Sound Teaching” illustrated why pre-conference workshops are some of the richest session experiences at CCCC. I generally evaluate workshops across two basic criteria; I ask: did I learn and was my attention kept? Such is a reductionist, but usable, taxonomy. In both cases, I offer an affirmative response with compliments to this session’s presenters. The process of expanding composition across modes has frequently invoked heightened awareness of visual culture. Such sensitivity towards the world as experienced through hearing is harder to find. That the scholars present were passionate about answering how composition can learn from music is a step in the right direction. Participants learned to view the theoretical relationship of sound to composition pedagogy as symbiotic – one can inform and inspire the other. Also, the means of production are neither expensive nor difficult to learn. Indeed, a negligible investment as measured by time and money can be enough to learn the “how’s” of including audio culture in composition pedagogy. In hearing the scholarly work of the panelists, it was difficult to leave the workshop without an appreciation of the “why’s,” too. Nevertheless, as a cautionary note, a degree of musical acumen would be helpful in bridging the gap between written and aural discourses. Naturally, if a musician were to teach first year composition, the composition/rhetoric field would rightly ask for rigorous rhetorical investigation as a part of the teaching. Composition likewise, if it follows the wise advice of this workshop, is moving into an already crowded pond of musicologists, acoustic ecologists, and performing artists. Scholars who enter the waters will need to study the existing bodies of research (both rhetorical and musical) to plot their course. To offer one example, consider the idea of echolocation. Theorists of this concept suggest that the sound in a space informs an understanding of the space itself. A bat knows its position and surroundings by the behavior of sound against materials. Ecolocation operates using the same principles. If walking after a fresh snow, the traveler may therefore notice a sense of disorientation derived from the muffled reflection of sound. An idea born of bioacoustics, it can inform the choices made by producers. Dampening the sound projection can have the same affect on the listener as the walker through the snow and distort the sense of spatial reality. In essence, to fully employ sonic rhetorics in support of teaching, becoming informed on these acoustic and cultural signifiers is highly recommended. |