By: Catherine Shuler

Mark Pepper
Jeff Bacha
Constructing Soundscapes: An Overview
Creating Audio Essays.
- Introducing audio helps promote accessibility and inclusiveness. .
- Aural/oral rhetoric opens new space beyond privileged discourse.
- Aural/oral rhetoric helps challenge dominant pedagogical
ideologies.

Theoretical Resources.
- Race, Rhetoric, and Technology.
- Labor, Writing Technologies, and the Shaping of Composition in
the Academy .
- “The Changing Nature of Writing: Prose or Code in the
Classroom.”
- “From pencils to pixels: The stages of literacy technologies.”

“In multimedia, students use music, interviews, and voice-over narrations to create a tangible, not just metaphoric,
voice.”

“one reason we address the power of sound, not just images, in our composition courses is to help students become
more than passive recipients and unquestioning consumers of sound.”

“Adding sonic literacy to the composition curriculum does not substitute for textual or visual literacies, however; instead it
relies upon and enriches them.”

“When students begin to hear their own voices and the voices of others in different ways and contexts, they develop a
stronger, more embodied sense of the power of language, of literacy, and of communication in general.”
- Comstock and Hocks
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Constructing Soundscapes: The Narrative

Creating the First Audio Essay.

- Start with something familiar, like a Narrative Argument.
- Then transition to a low-stakes assignment using sound.
- Have the students create an Audio Essay from the narrative.

Activities to Help the Students make the Shift.

- Take field trips to the DLC.
- Use computer lab days to introduce the software (Audacity).
- Show the students how to use layers.

Benefits of this Approach.

- Familiarity helps the students make the shift to tech.
- Using the students own experiences helps generate
ownership.
- Low-stake assignments help reduce student anxiety.
- The audio assignment can help students develop their own
voice.
- Using a program with layers will help with latter
“Given the time period composition came of age (again), a late 20th-century marked by postmodern
thought, the compositions we produce should be hybrids, print of course, but also more forward-
looking digital forms, forms rich in dialogism that recognize the disparate subgenres of writing that
we, as a field, have come to value” (Eldred 36).

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 Constructing Soundscapes: A Mix CD

Expanding the Audio Essay.

- Create a mix CD that tells the story of a classmate.
- The CD should tell the classmate’s story through audio themes.
- Have other students analyze the composers mix CD.

Activities to Help the Students make the Shift.

- Discussion of literal, associative, and enhancement
interpretation
- Listen to concept albums like “The Wall” or “American Idiot.”
- Introduce basic interview techniques.
- Freewriting on Emotional/Pathetic response to music.

Benefits of this Approach.

- Helps add rhetorical awareness to current practice.
- Helps reveal the cultural situatedness of sound
compositions.
- Helps foster classroom community.

“Listening is an art, a conscious process of observing and defining sound. And like the art of writing,
it is affected by one's place in and knowledge of a particular sonic environment as much as one's
previous experiences with sonic forms” (Cheryl Glenn).

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 Constructing Soundscapes: A Mashup
Mashup the Audio Essay.
- Creating what is commonly referred to as a “mash up.”
- Creating an audio recording that combines previous sound
recordings and recorded speech.

Activities to Help the Students make the Shift.

- Research and reading responses on issues of intellectual
property.
- Introduction to Copyright, copyleft, creative commons and
public domains.
- Compare mashup/concept albums to other themed CDs
created by individual artists
- Locate and analyze samples of spoken word mashups

Benefits of this Approach.

- Introduces students to a new and emerging forms.
- Allows students to extend their understanding of writing to
include non-traditional forms.

This assignment "ask[s] students to register more deeply the rhetorical and cultural effects of voice, vernacular, and
vocal performance. ... listening to recordings of oneself inspires a self-conscious perspective (a form of analytical
listening) on what's being said, how it's being said, who is saying it, and to whom. Along with this self-consciousness
comes the impetus to revise and revise again in order to achieve resonance (or dissonance) with an audience. They
learn to write (script) for a particular voice or rather, their sense of their own voice, which requires that they slow down,
be deliberate, articulate, practice, and at the same time, experiment and revise, then re-record“ (Comstock and Hocks).

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 Constructing Soundscapes: Examples
Two Examples of Sonic Compositions.

Gay Marriage: what's the big screaming deal? “John McCain - Yes we can music video response”

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Constructing Soundscapes: Works Cited
Works Cited.

Banks, Adam. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. Mahwah: LEA, 2006.

Baron, Dennis. “From pencils to pixels: Thestages of literacy technologies.” Passions, pedagogies, and
21st century technologies. Eds. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Self Logan: Utah State, 1999. 15- 33.

Comstock, Michelle and Mary E. Hocks. "Voice in the Cultural Soundscape: Sonic Literacy in
Composition Studies." Computers and Composition Online. < http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/
comstock_hocks/voicesinsoundscapes.htm >

Eldred, Janet Carey. “Composition, or a Case for Experimental Critical Writing.” Labor, Writing
Technologies, and the Shaping of Composition in the Academy. Eds. Pamela Takayoshi and
Patricia Sullivan. Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2007. 39-57.

Glenn, Cheryl. Qtd in "Voice in the Cultural Soundscape: Sonic Literacy in Composition Studies." In
Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks. <http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/comstock_hocks/
sonicliteracy.htm>

Rea, ALAN, and Doug White. “The Changing Nature of Writing: Prose or Code in the
Classroom.”Computers and Composition 16 (1999): 421–436.

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