Playing With Sound

For the past year, and more intensely this past month, I’ve been thinking about the role of play in the composing process. For simplicity’s sake (despite the fact I’m seeking to complicate it later when I write in another venue ), I’m thinking about play primarily in the way Henry Jenkins defines it: “the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving.” Experimenting, testing, trying out, finding a fit, making a connection, and ultimately figuring out if something works in a way that helps you achieve your task. Play and reflection are intimately connected: you cannot play without ultimately asking yourself: Does it work? Why does it work? Does it not work? Why does it not work? Perhaps one might even argue that reflection–which has been understood as an active knowledge-making process (Dewey, Schon)–is an instrumental part of play. Perhaps one might even argue that play can’t indeed be play unless there’s a reflective component. Interestingly, reflecting has been identified as a metacognitive activity, and metacognition has been identified as a habit of mind that is needed for success in college (and I could argue life in general). Writing and reflecting on one’s writing is a way to help build metacognition, but the more I think about it, the more I think fostering an environment that encourages, nurtures, and rewards play may indeed be more effective than reflection activities alone.

I’ve seen the value of play at work, specifically in audio projects my graduate students composed last year in a digital writing course. I’m writing a conference paper right now (that is hopefully the seed for a new article), and I’m making an argument that sound uniquely affords the opportunity for play: play with genre, play with technology, play with rhetoric, and play with disciplinary intersections. From my students’ work, I realized that play not only helped students learn more about writing and rhetoric, but it also helped them “problem-solve” or in other words, work to achieve their own goals for the project. In this case, they achieved a wide range of personal and professional goals, which was exactly what I’d hoped for–they used the projects to create and execute their own learning and writing experiences.

But what is it about audio projects that are different than other multimodal and multimedia projects like videos? Undoubtably, composers play when they work with video–they play with layering, juxtaposition, combinations of various modalities; they play with color, with font, with transitions, time, pacing; they play with their assets–clipping, chopping, cutting, splicing, rearranging; and they play with various ways to help them find assets. There’s a lot to play with. So much so that play may feel overwhelming, tedious or maybe even not fun in the least bit if you’re a novice digital composer. While much of the play mentioned above can also be applied to audio play, I do think audio offers more productive and interesting play for a couple of reasons. I’ll talk about one here.

The aural mode can be uniquely isolated from other modes. Unlike a documentary that embodies multiple modes–alphabetic, linguistic, aural, visual, spatial, an audio drama embodies linguistic and aural (or orality, aurality, and vocality), which I tend to lump together anyway.

I hear my critics–all texts are multimodal. Modes don’t work in isolation.

I hear ya, I hear ya.

Audio projects emerge largely from scripts (alphabetic mode) and sounds like crickets or doors slamming harken the visual–the source of where it came from. (Interestingly, Emily’s Oz comes to mind and really challenges the relationship between the “what-is” and the “what-it-sounds-like” and so does Erin Anderson’s work on vocality) Yet ultimately, the audio project is comprised of aurality, orality and vocality, all of which can be categorized under the aural mode. Thus when novice digital composers work with audio, it’s a more manageable task with regard to rhetorical choices. Rather than considering the vast sea of modalities, their affordances,  their constraints, and the infinite number of rhetorical strategies inherent in, between and among these modalities, a composer of audio has less to work with, and thus the task becomes more manageable, especially when a composer works with a limited number of sonic rhetorical strategies (such as silence, music, voice, sound interaction, and sound effects). I am absolutely not saying that composing with audio is easier or less demanding or less intellectual than composing with video. It’s just as rigorous and intellectually challenging and requires just as many thoughtful, informed rhetorical decisions. I am saying, though, that composing with sound can be more manageable and comfortable for novice digital composers because there is a feeling of more control over one’s work. This comfort and manageability fosters a more productive environment for play, and more productive play at that–wherein a composer’s experimentation provides a individualized, robust learning and writing experience.