Remediating Sound

In order to move beyond modifications and retrofits, our theories and experiences with sound must transcend boundaries of our hearing-centric rhetoric about soundwriting. Repurposing sound, materially and conceptually, through alternate modalities acts a form of semiotic remediation, recreating sound experiences and interrogating its significance to a range of hearing and deaf bodies. While we can recognize a pragmatism in learning auxiliary methods for representing sound—such as captioning—we also recognize limitations of these "auxiliary" notions of sound which privilege dominant sites of access, namely our ears. Steph Ceraso (2014) characterized listening as "a multimodal event that involves the synaesthetic convergence of sight, sound, and touch" (p. 104). As the teacher, I worked to maximize opportunities for the class to explore sound through multiple modes, shifting our study to "a bodily practice that approaches sound as a holistic experience" (Ceraso, 2014, p. 105).

In our class, we experimented with seeing sound through visualizers to help us recognize movement, dynamics, and tempo. Music visualizers on any simple sound application (e.g., iTunes, Pandora) quickly remediated sound through colors, lines, and movement in ways that amplified features of sounds visually and spatially, capturing otherwise aurally limitless waves in a screen’s frame for observation. We also experimented with a range of live instrumental sounds to explore tactile features of aurality when my husband, a music educator and director, brought his collection of Orff instruments to class. We plugged our ears to mute these instruments as much as possible. Then we inflated balloons, closed our eyes, and wandered around the room, feeling vibrations from a djembe moving through our ovals of trapped air.

In the discussion that followed this activity, it seemed that sound become more transparent, our having been desensitized to its presence otherwise. Shortly thereafter, everyone grabbed an instrument and began a subsequent jam session, creating a percussive and metallophonic presence uncharacteristic to our English department hallways. In that composition, all bodies in the room contributed their melodies to create what felt like a symphony of access. In the recording that follows, Kirsten plays one of the smallest (pitched highest) glockenspiels.

Sounds of Orff Jam in Class

Teachers aiming to design a more inclusive, soundlistening pedagogy may consider the following suggestions:

  • Using captioning software to ensure any audio or video-related sound used in class is accessible (e.g., Camtasia, Amara.org).
  • Providing redundant modalities for sound resources (e.g., transcripts, captions, vibrations, colors, visuals).
  • Inviting students to engage in metacognitive discourse, reflecting on their experiences with a range of sounds. (Imagine a campus-wide scavenger hunt where students record or listen to sounds, then represent those sounds back to the class in a multimodal report: "The coffee shop door sounds like… [student holds up drawing].") Then discuss and compare their descriptions with scholars' whose phenomenologies shape our theories.
  • Inviting students to explore and experiment composing with sound, asking them to reflect on their choices using Jody Shipka's (2011) Statement of Goals and Choices heuristic. In my initial class, I had assignments that isolated modes so that students could target affordances in those compositions. Interestingly, I taught a student who was profoundly hard of hearing in that first class. Though this was long before I started recognizing my own pedagogical bias, she took the opportunity to redefine silence as noise in a soundwriting piece that is now published in The Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects. (Open the original assignment as a PDF.) (Listen to Carol Ashey's 2013 project.) Her experience planted the seed for my own soundlistening.
  • Contacting campus disabilities specialists. These advocates are a valuable resource in helping teachers think through alternatives or explaining what services are available on campus. Invite them to speak to your composers about creating texts for a range of bodies.
  • Raising awareness among burgeoning soundwriting composers about issues of accessibility. Set up a mock inaccessible activity where those accustomed to access are invited to struggle a bit. (See "Accessing Rhetoric.")
  • Reading Melanie Yergeau et al.'s (2013) "Multimodality in Motion", discussing it with the class. Then consider how the class might redesign a common sound composition in order to make it more accessible. In our class, groups adopted inaccessible texts and redesigned them using universal design principles to heighten accessibility.
  • Teaching students how to create transcripts and caption audio and video, adopting its practices such that eventually accessibility will be more than a retrofit, but part of design. (See, for example, the North Carolina State Center for Universal Design's [2008] Universal Design Principles.) Once they know those skills, include an accessibility policy as part of your syllabus and assignment design. (See "Accessing Rhetoric.")
  • Working individually with students. Share your goals for the assignment, your ideas for modifications, and ask them how they would adapt the exercise. On the day we were going to record soundscapes on campus, Kirsten and I agreed that she would still record sounds, numbering and noting each sound. Later, she could import those sounds and see how they "looked" in the audio editing software, manipulating them further and layering them to create an aural–visual soundscape.

Kirsten provides advice for working with students who are deaf.

I'll just make this really simple. Remember: Each deaf student—it doesn't matter really, any student, but specifically deaf students as individual beings—will have their own personal preferences. Always make sure to approach each student individually and ask them what their preference is and would they like to meet. And how would they prefer to work through it. Because we know that everyone has their differences. No one is exactly the same. Remember that everyone will have their own learning style and experiences, so make sure to tap into that.

In Closing

We do not wish to discount the work of many scholars whose phenomenological theories have articulated ideas about sound that have allowed us to conceptualize this all-at-once elusive modality. Instead, we invite scholars to consider how they have shaped our perceptions of sonic affordances that often represent normate responses to sound as natural, hoping that others will take up the challenge of remediating our perceptions of sound through a wider range of embodied perceptions.

Even here, in our efforts to unpack ableistic rhetoric, we find this business sticky, our advocacy for the value of deaf perspectives reliant on its opposition to hearing perspectives.

Our story is an anecdote of our experiences learning from one another. We do not suggest that our narrative should/could/can represent a “how to” guide on teaching and learning soundwriting with hearing and deaf bodies. Such an approach would undermine our unique interaction and its shifting significance. We do offer it as a cautionary tale that teaches us that we should avoid perpetuating rhetoric about soundwriting pedagogies that privileges hearing bodies; that we should deconstruct rhetorics of disability surrounding deaf bodies; that we should make space to study and explore non-normative experiences with sound; and that in our zeal to advocate for soundwriting pedagogies, we should not create a history of rhetoric that excludes deafness. Such a history’s "narrow norms [would] delimit our available means of persuasion, here and now" (Dolmage, 2014, p. 19), a narrative currently challenged by a growing body of deaf/mute voices speaking out about their experiences with sound (Harvey, 2016; Glennie, 2003; Sun Kim, 2015).

Perhaps the most valuable outcome of our experience working together in Multimodal Composition was the dialogue we would have in conferences between classes, discussing forthcoming activities. We would explore how a traditional soundwriting activity might be repurposed so that Kirsten could participate. What if a soundscape became more of a visual landscape, recording sounds in the environment and seeing their textures when tracked against one another in sound editing? So, how would you caption your narrative if you videoed yourself using ASL? How would you represent that "sound"? Often our repurposed activity was one that everyone participated in, not just an "alternative" that would single out Kirsten. In these exchanges, we negotiated the parameters of sound, comparing our embodied responses and tried to come to terms—or senses—of those moments where our perceptions might intersect.

More than anything, we were privileged to immerse ourselves in a semester's discovery of sound through one another's perspectives, seeing, hearing, and touching a sense we'd both learned to silence.