Audience:
The students completing the exercise would be second semester freshman composition students in an argumentative writing class. By the time the students work on the exercise, they will have discussed how printed text, visuals and sounds can affect an audience or make certain appeals. Second semester freshman also have some knowledge of metaphors and poetic symbolism, but I would review such topics prior to this exercise. They will also have worked with Audacity to learn to record their voice or sound.
Selecting a Genre:
The multimedia tutorial disks that are available to be packaged with many of my students’ freshman composition textbooks inspired my sound project. For example, the CD disk “iClaim: Visualizing Argument” by Patrick Clauss uses pictures, film, and sound to teach students about argumentative writing. For my media project, again, I wanted to isolate students’ impressions of sounds and the affects of sounds separate from visuals to enable students to focus on the possible intent and effectiveness of sound. For this project, we were only required to create sound files.
Also, the iClaim disk is interactive because it provides on screen questions about the disk’s material and provides on screen space where students can type their answers to the questions. For my sound exercise, I would ask students to respond to my questions with their own sound file to enable interactivity with the exercise.
Composing Process in Ten Steps:
I did the following to create my project.
- I chose a poem as my primary text because poems do not rely on images or music to be effective. However, research indicated that poets do make use of sound when selecting their words.
- I determined that with a poem, I could accomplish three demonstrations: poem without sound, poem with sound effects and poem with music. After listening to the three demonstrations, students could argue why some of the examples were rhetorically more effective.
- I recorded myself speaking the poem several times to make certain that I spoke slowly enough to give the sound effects time to play in the background. However, I didn’t want to speak so slowly that my audience would lose interest.
- I had to choose sound effects to add to the poem. I attempted to choose sounds that would blend without being distracting, but that would also be easily identified. However, some parts of the poem could not be represented literally with sound. For example, near the end of the poem, Auden described a sky that does not show the stars, sun or moon, which most likely occurs during a storm. Therefore, I used a storm sound effect to represent the poem’s ending. In some cases, I decided not to add a sound effect because they would be too close together to be effective. I gathered the sound effects from Soundsnap.com.
- I listened to my recorded voice a few times speaking the poem and made notes about where I said certain things in the time line so that I could use Audacity to layer the sound effects behind my spoken recording in the proper spot.
- I selected music that seemed to reflect the poem’s mood. I used Audacity to layer music behind my voice speaking the poem.
- I converted the version of the poem with the sound effects into an MP3 file.
- I converted the version of the poem with music into an MP3 file.
- I wrote a script and created an MP3 file of my voice speaking the various instructions for the exercise for the beginning, middle, and end of the project.
- I mixed all of my MP3 recordings in Audacity: Voice speaking instructions, voice speaking poem without sound effects, voice speaking poem with sound effects, and voice speaking poem with musical background.
I began building my project based on my needs as a professor. I wanted to create a project that I could later use with students. As I built the project, a variety of sources helped me shape my project.
In his article “An Instrumental Approach to Culture Study in General Music: Use a Musical Instrument from Another Culture to Introduce the Sounds, Stories, and History of that Culture,” Michael Carolin explained that western educators have incorporated audio, such as music, to help children learn about other cultures. He explained how a teacher “used the ukulele to prompt the children to recall [a] South African folk story,” because the instrument had been featured in the story. Carolin explained that the multimodal teaching experience enabled the students to grasp the printed text as well as complex cultural differences. Carolin's article showed me that we can use one medium, sound or music, to help an audience analyze another medium--poetry.
In the article “Sound Symbolism as Drama in the Poetry of Robert Frost,” Marie Borroff discussed sound symbolism. Specifically, I was inspired by her discussion about how poets choose certain words in their poetry because the sound of the word is rhetorical. If the sound of a word can be rhetorical, can a sound effect be rhetorical? Borroff also discussed the rhetorical effect of chanting, which showed me that I had stumbled on to something when I chose a combination of music and chanting as the musical part of my recording.
In addition, I reviewed multimedia tutorial sites such as Atomic Learning to listen to how the information was presented. Atomic Learning provides narrated multimedia tutorials to teach software applications. When I listened to the tone and style of the speaker’s voice in the tutorial, I noticed that it was somewhat monotone and subdued. When I spoke the poem to record myself, I tried to provide a tone that matched the mood of the poem, but would not overly influence my listeners. I also chose to use the exact same reading of the poem in all three demonstrations to make certain that the students focused on the sound effects—or lack of sound effects—along with and separate from my voice.
Also, the PhD course’s exercises in Audacity were helpful because they helped me learn to use the software.
Reflections:
Now that I have completed the project, I realize there were a few things I wish that I could have done differently.
First, I would have made a few more edits. For example, in my recording’s instructions in the sound file, I stated that the name of the poem was “Stop All the Clocks.” But, the complete name of the poem is “Stop All the Clocks, Cut Off the Telephone.” However, I liked my final recording of my instructions. Rather than correcting the title of the poem in my recording, I kept the best version of the recording.
Second, I would like to have added the second part of the exercise. I had recorded myself reading the lyrics to an Audio Slave song. I would like to have created a second exercise that enabled students to assess the meaning of the lyrics alone against the lyrics with the music to determine if they think that the meaning of the song’s lyrics changed.
Third, I would like to test the exercise with students to get their impressions.
Finally, I wish that I could have done more research into the rhetoric of sound as well as sound symbolism, which are new topics for me. I remembered some information about sound symbolism from discussions about poetry in my undergraduate courses, but much of what I read for this project was new to me. I think I only scratched the surface in regards to sound symbolism with my research for this project. Overall, I learned to create a POD cast--a teaching tool that I would like to use with students in the future.
Works Cited:
Auden, W.H. “Stop All the Clocks, Cut Off the Telephones.” Western Michigan University. 10 Mar. 2008.
Borroff, Marie. “Sound Symbolism as Drama in the Poetry of Robert Frost.” PMLA 107.1 (1992): 131-144.
Carolin, Michael. “An Instrumental Approach to Culture Study in General Music: Use a Musical Instrument from Another Culture to Introduce the Sounds, Stories, and History of that Culture.” Music Educators Journal 92.5 (2006): ERIC. 27 April 2007.
Clauss, Patrick. “iClaim: Visualizing Argument.” Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005.
Sound Effect File:
The Benedictine Monds of Santo Domingo De Silos. The Soul Chant.
Other Sound Effects Files:
11100901
12000801
airplane_passing_high_over_2
barred_cuckoo_dove_call,_cambo_250302
Church_Bell
PHONE_RING,_DOMESTIC
Piano_fall_2
storm_drum
street_-_AMB_dog_barking
Ticking_clock
Other Sound Effect Files’ Source: http://www.soundsnap.com/
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