(dis)abling Soundwriting

Sound studies is arguably another remediation in writing studies' evolving relationship with rhetoric, its disciplinary cousin. This relationship has evolved through technological materialities that shift composing affordances: live oration to handwritten texts, later press-produced texts, and now digitally inscribed sound. Each of these shifts brings composing into more public, networked spaces that provide more access to a wide, diverse audience. Now audiophiles, musicians, and podcasters network their sounds in open source platforms aimed at democratizing sonic experiences. It is no surprise then that scholars and teachers enamored with composing, expression, and authenticity would advocate for soundwriting: recording, tuning, inscripting, and orchestrating aural experiences.

In developing our soundwriting pedagogies, our perceptions of sound may limit our approaches in teaching soundwriting. As Cynthia Selfe and Franny Howes remind us, "our programs, curricula, and classes are designed to work for only some bodies, not for all bodies" (Yergeau et. al, 2013, "Over There"). Specifically, in this emerging field of sound scholarship, our phenomenologies and pedagogies describe affordances grounded in "normal" body responses to aurality. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (1997) referred to this perspective as a "normate" view, "the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries" (p. 8). Such an approach in soundwriting pedagogy uses ableistic rhetoric to shape our sonic theories, affirming hearing bodies with a "normal is natural" ideology (Cherney, 2011) and positioning other bodies as unnatural.

Soundwriting is perhaps one of the most democratic of composing modalities, integrating a range of otherwise strange voices and cultural artifacts in academic discourse communities. We welcome popular music, remix, and dialects as unique as fingerprints into tracks of sonic assignments. The more unique the sound composition, the more likely teachers are to recognize student voices present. Yet, our scholarship theorizes about sound in ways that privileges speaking–hearing bodies whose boundaries are "shored" by physiological deviations, such as deafness.

Kirsten describes her experiences with sound.

When you compare my lifestyle now to when I was a child, it is completely different. I was born profoundly deaf, and then, really, it was a world of complete silence for many years for me. I grew up in an environment where everything was silent, no sound. I couldn't hear anything. The world was silent, yes, but it wasn't dark or depressing—it was more like silent. But it was peaceful.

When I was nine years old, I got my first cochlear implant surgery, and it really changed my life. When I… I’ll never forget the first time I heard my first sound. It was strange and foreign, but also at the same time really astounding. But… after that my life truly changed. I really confronted a world full of color and sound and started to hear sound. Every day was a new adventure for me; every single day I was exploring new sounds and rediscovering old ones.

And then I got my second cochlear implant a few years later; it really improved my experience with hearing sound. I'll never forget when I first heard my name and recognized it. That was a special, important moment for me. And I noticed over time that the cochlear implants helped me to recognize and comprehend sound, to understand sounds in my environment. Environmental sounds meaning sounds in the area around me also, like a fire alarm, doorbells, individual's footsteps, all kinds of things. It really helped my life a lot.

While bodies have corporeal boundaries, sound exists in a medium that transcends those boundaries, fluidly and indiscriminately touching, by ear and vibration, bodies within its range. In this way, hearing–deaf binaries do not determine sonic boundaries, and, by extension, are insufficient in describing their soundwriting experiences. As Steph Ceraso (2014) argued, sound is "an embodied event as opposed to something that is heard exclusively through the ears" (p. 103). Multimodal listening, or recognizing the multiple modes that are implicated simply hearing, "retrains our bodies to be more aware, alert, and attuned to sonic events in all of their complexity" (p. 103). Such complexities include experiences with sound that differ greatly from our own, recognizing that boundaries discursively constructed are insufficient to capture a range of sonic perceptions.

Kirsten explores the labels "hearing" and "deaf."

Really, usually when that person first hears of those two different words "hearing" and "deaf," they will instantly group each word with a population, assigning a label to mean that deaf stands for the whole population of people who cannot hear, and hearing stands for the whole population of people who can hear.

But I must say I don't agree with this concept for a variety of reasons. One of them is, there are a lot of different levels in each population. Not everyone has the exact same experience with sound. There are different levels of hearing within both populations. Let me give you three real life examples of what I mean with my two younger brothers and me. The three of us are all deaf, and all three of us have bilateral cochlear implants. My oldest younger brother got his first implant at two and then the second one at five. My youngest baby brother got both of his implants at 12 months.

Now, remember, I mentioned before that I got my first cochlear implant at age nine and the second one at twelve. Anyway, my youngest brother has full hearing ability and comprehension just as much as his peers. My other brother (second oldest younger) has a good level of hearing ability and comprehension, but, really, he is a few years behind his peers, struggling with speech and sound comprehension. As for me, who got my implants at a later age, there is a noticeable difference in hearing comprehension compared to my brothers.

So you can see, three different deaf individuals, but each experiences sound comprehension on a different level. You can't label all three individuals the same way as "deaf" because it's not accurate.

Garland-Thomson's (1997) neologism invites us to unveil dominant ideologies and deviate from phenomenologies based only experiences of normate–hearing bodies. While we recognize that we are not alone in calling our attention to the dangers of not addressing non-normative experiences with sound (Yergeau et. al, 2013; Zdenek, 2009), we offer an honest autoethnography of our personal and professional journeys, as a hearing teacher and a deaf student.

Our individual embodied experiences may affirm boundaries between abled and (dis)abled. But in this journey, sonic events are shared. Between us, sound reverbs in a way that represents a kind of sonic deviance, transcending hearing–deaf boundaries, mediating our experiences. As Kirsten explains, "Hearing and understanding are different." While her cochlear implants provide an ability to hear sounds, she may sometimes struggle to understand them. Similarly, while we may recognize an ableistic hierarchy in sound, we may fail to perceive and understand the significance of underrepresented experiences. Soundlistening, recognizing and seeking to understand the nature of individual sonic experiences, invites sound into a conceptual, dialogic space where our theories become informed by a multiplicity of voices, even those that do not audate.