Feel the Noise

Hi Steph, thanks for your post! Throughout the development of this forum, I've had one thought on my mind: AUTO-TUNE! The recent explosion of this synth-human-robo-voice-instrument is both fascinating and hilarious (like Autotune the News.) Autotune was apparently developed to correct pitch problems, but of course now the correction has become the 'sound' itself. As Sasha Frere-Jones explains, "pitch correction has also taken on a second life, as an effect." It seems like autotune is just on *this* side of the uncanny valley of the voice: it's recognizable as human with a difference, but isn't too "creepy" yet because we can still hear the difference between the 'fake' and the 'pure human' voice. 

Do you or any of the other folks here have thoughts on the explosion of autotune? 

(by the way, apparently the Cher song "Believe" is recognized as the first widely-recognized auto-tuned song! Poor T-Pain, upstaged by Cher!)

This I Love You video by Cassius is currently making the rounds: the video is totally explicit about the use of auto-tune and vocal synthesizers - the singing is coming out of various iPhone mouths, some of which seem to be vaguely matched to the person, and others which are completely separate or multiplied. You can also see the apparatus - fingers change the mouth on the iPhone when the auto-tune pitch changes. All of which of course leads to... the Cassius iphone mouth app. Commerce and embodiment, together again.

Hey Steph, 

I think the way you are thinking sound as an embodied form of thinking is vitally important, and as you rightly observe, offers us ways of (re)connecting with the sciences to feel a new way into thinking/feeling sound. I'm wondering how recent developments in neuroplasticity help us bridge that connection (Nick Carr's recent book, The Shallows, looks at this topic extensively, if somewhat problematically, as Cathy Davidson notes). This emerging field, which sees the brain as a dynamic, constantly changing and adaptive organ, has given rise to a range of brain-mapping techniques that help us to see neurological activity to bodily responses and effects. I'm wondering how these neurological mapping techniques offer us a means to observing how the brain responds to sound? In an interesting twist, this brings us back into the realm of the visual in order to interpret the audile, but the key difference here, I think, is that it is a form of witnessing, rather than one of critique, which is the mode we are most familiar with in the humanities.

Steph,

I followed the link to your post about listening being a corporeally distributed practice. At one point, you write about manipulating waveforms with our hands via digital technologies:

Interacting with digital audio technologies makes this kind of mind-body collaboration especially apparent.  For example, we physically manipulate the visual representations of sound waves in audio software programs with our fingers.  When we listen to the composition (bit by bit as the various parts are being assembled), the sound waves enter our bodies in the form of vibrations, producing affective responses.  Our bodies respond, and our reactions affect the way we listen-think about these sounds, which also affects how we choose to revise or edit them.  This is a recursive rather than a linear process.  Listening, hearing, thinking, touching, feeling, and seeing overlap and often occur simultaneously.  It's called multimodal composing for a reason, right?

The apparentness of the mind-body collaboration in interacting with digital technologies is most accessible to me through Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Anyone who has spent the last decade in front of a computer--especially doing something like digital audio (or any kind of) editing--is probably familiar with the neck, back, arm, and wrist pain that is an occupational hazard of the digital realm. This always makes me think about the virtual/actual divide. Like, I used to imagine that digital life was somehow only symbolic or dealt only in representations. But there is a materiality to all those pixels. We have to actually, physically push those pixels around. And that work does a job on our bodies. ("Our bodies respond," as you put it, to that work.) The physical manifestations--in the form of pleasure or pain--of that work also change how we listen-think-respond. It is totally recursive. It can be a negative feedback loop: "Ouch! My mouse arm hurts! I don't want to work anymore! Leave me alone!" But sound can enter, and alter, the process in positive ways, too. Of course we can listen to relaxing music or a cheesy biofeedback track; we can get therapeutic sound through the ears. But there is also sound that we can't hear--ultrasound--that can be used to physically manipulate our muscle tissue to manage pain from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Sound, in this instance, can actually penetrate more deeply than touch. So I think it is important to not only think about how we can edit sound with DAWs, but also how we can use sound to edit the bodies that are connected to the DAWs.  

Will, first, I was surprised when all your music links for the tracks above went to YouTube videos ;) I was kinda hoping to just, you know, listen. (But where on the Web could we have gotten hold of all these fab tracks? Uh-huh.)

But I want to respond to something else you said, with an anecdote (that admittedly, I love to tell) that exemplifies this contestation of sound (and, really, multimodality) in the traditional academic classroom, which you mention here:

"Classrooms are expected to be quiet. If you don't believe this, try playing gangsta rap in your classroom (at the volume suggested by the so-called "boombox." Refer to this for boombox nostalgia.) and see how long it takes before someone pokes their head into the room and asks you to turn it down. If we are going to record, produce, and play audio recordings in the humanities, we will almost certainly run into contested spaces where the right to make noise is at odds with the right to read silently or talk quietly."

For several years, I had such a good multimedia project that a grad student had created that I used it (or portions of it) in several talks I gave about teaching or assessing multimodal projects and/or scholarship. I began by using it as an example of the possibilities of multimodal assignments, and when I showed the video (which included three appropriate punk and pop songs as its soundtrack -- in ways that extended the entire text's meaning), audiences loved it and would ask me for a copy of the video. They loved the possibilities of asking students to create open-ended, digital, multimedia texts.

A year or two after I started using it as an example, I began to give workshops that moved away from teaching these texts to evaluating these texts as scholarship. No longer was I talking about the "safe space" of the classroom. Instead, I began to intrude (as the story goes) on the Humanities' so-called scholarly values. I was called out for this intrusion in the following way: Just like always, I began the presentation by telling the audience that I was going to play a 10-minute video and that we'd talk about it afterwards. We were in a small conference room at a large, research-intensive, midwestern university where I presented on a laptop and some crappy laptop speakers. I began the video, which starts with a blank screen and the song "New Noise" by Refused playing. The whole point to the song was to be abrupt -- to "wake up" us academics into listening and watching the argument (about accommodating multimodality in writing classrooms) -- so, yes, it was loud. No more than 12 beats into the song, some guy in (literally) a tweed jacket was banging on the door, interrupted us by coming in, and said "TURN THAT DOWN!!!"

We were startled, and stunned. It was Friday afternoon at 6pm in an otherwise empty building on campus. We turned it down a little, but the sound was important, so I didn't turn it all the way down. The impact, however, had been made, and the audience did not respond to any of the prompts in the video that audiences usually laughed at, got riled up about, or otherwise responded to. They just sat there. Afterwards, when no one was saying much about the video (and audiences usually have *plenty*, both good and bad, to say about it), I pointed out this disparity to them. They agreed that the interruption (of the guy, not the music) had completely distracted them and made them not willing to participate in listening to the video anymore.

For my purposes, it was OK, because it prompted a whole discussion that was still related to the topic at hand: Who is allowed to speak and how in the university - as well as how the Who and What changes depending on whether we're talking about the "safe spaces" of classrooms versus the "public (but gated) spaces" of our discipline's scholarship.

Hmm... ;)

Will's Side-A-Track-Three comment on St. Augustine and St. Ambrose raises the larger question of the times and places for reading aloud.  In 1782, author Hannah More mentioned in a letter to her sister that she read Gibbon's History of the Lower Empire "aloud every day from dinner to tea" (138).  Diaries, letters and memoirs reveal that reading out loud was a common form of education and entertainment in the eighteenth century British Empire.  Readings of poetry were commonly featured at parties, as were live musical performances.  Coffee houses, which today are filled with patrons shielded by earphones from the noises of strangers, were once a notorious place for impromptu speeches and public readings of newspapers, poetry and political pamphlets.           

Short of dragging students to the nearest Starbuck's and forcing them to recite their essays while standing on a table, how can reading out loud enrich the university classroom today?  After all, multimedia gives students multiple sensory inputs, but doesn't necessarily ensure output.  Here are some of the basic techniques that I have been experimenting with in my undergraduate rhetoric courses to help students connect writing and reading.  First, reading aloud can help students understand their assignment prompts.  Have students read the assignment prompt silently.  Then, ask a volunteer to read the same prompt out loud while students follow along highlighting any parts that they missed.  Students are always surprised to realize that they missed words, phrases and entire lines of the prompt.  Second, reading aloud can be an effective tool for peer review and peer editing sessions.  In one exercise, students read their partner's work aloud to mark grammar errors and missing punctuation.  Students are not used to cacophony and will lapse into silence about half way through the first page.  Simply laugh when that happens and say, "out LOUD, everybody," to help them back on track.  When they are done, ask them to return to their partners and discuss areas that need editing for clarity and to explain what their editing marks mean.  In another peer review exercise, students read papers back to the original authors, who take notes.  Hearing one's own words pronounced by another person gives a student feedback on how an audience is understanding and interpreting their essay.  

Finally, consider making reading out loud part of daily classroom activity by selecting "volunteers" to read short passages aloud from the texts presented in class.  Rotating volunteers and calling on students by name helps them get used to hearing and identifying each other's voices.  This can also be a practical way to keep sleepy afternoon students awake, or to encourage shy students to participate in a low stakes way.  Students often learn to pronounce new vocabulary words during this process.  Reading out loud has the added benefit of making sure that all the students get to "read" at the same pace by following the text with both their eyes and ears before beginning discussion and analysis.                                 

so what i think both you and david (below me) point to, at least with reference to appropriation, are two different - but related - concepts.  on the one hand, how does one encounter "cultural music," appreciate it and incorporate what is learned/experienced/felt into their own musical practices?  on the other hand, what does this mean in terms of an economic system where goods - property, intellectual though it may be - is exchanged?  this latter question, i think, is thought about a bit with the other HASTAC forum regarding privacy and HASTAC constantly stages this set of concerns by way of its collaborative nature.  who ever "owns" a song, or a sound?  are not all songs and sounds - as music - organized with relation to (whether as versioning or dissent) other songs and sounds?

for me, it would be nice to put the question of capital(isms) on pause for a while to think about encounter a bit more.  to wax poetic, life is a series of encounters, each one influencing us, revising our paths, our thoughts, our ideas.  to encounter sounds is to both be taken up into them - to be moved by them - while concurrently moving to the rhythms and arhythms.  we tap our foot to "get into it" with the multiple resonances that phrase has.  we try to push our bodies into the space opened up by sound and song but also use our bodies as conduit for that transport.  i'm getting into the music i already inhabit.  

this is an attendant question - or set of ideas, or complications - to the notion of thresholds.  one of the things about black music (and here, i do not mean black as in [merely] people who are called thus) is its attention and commitment to being unregulated.  i think the precision you hear in the jazz of Europe might be a demonstration of the antithesis of this commitment, where style is reproduced as a withdrawal from the sort of abandon (reckless, even?  maybe?) that animates a jazz (as) tradition.  for me, it's the difference between a Swedish choir or even a university gospel choir singing songs that i'd hear in the pentecostal church in which i grew up: the notes would be precise, there would be a loud sound.  but it was just as often - within these contexts - too "clean," too precise, too "right"...there was a commitment to correction (like Auto-tune) that assumed that the grittiness of pentecostalism wasn't too precise - which is to say, wasn't too intentional or thought out - at all.  these sounds and songs evacuated experience, separated style from substance to present things in a "better" more acceptable, respectable format.  

i've rambled far too much.  this was all to say, if we don't give attention to the economics of such sonic exchange, what emerges by these sort of encounters?  and what do thresholds mean when we think differently about encounter?

Hi Sean: Thanks for your question "does a renewed interest in aurality help us expand our horizons of what constitutes literacy in the first place?": my answer would be an emphatic yes!  In fact, I would suggest that what we call literature has *never* been a fully visual category, though it can be easy to forget this since we tend to link the literary so closely to the silent reading of novels.

To imagine literature as visual, we would need to exclude or sideline drama and poetry (which have never lost an emphatically aural dimension) from the start.  But we would also require short memories to separate the aural even from prose reading: mixtape, above, reminds us of Augustine's famous comments about silent reading practices, but it's worth noting that Augustine makes these comments because silent reading is remarkable and out of the ordinary!  Indeed, with some key exceptions including monastic reading, it seems to have been relatively uncommon to read literary texts silently (as opposed to out loud in a group or even while alone) well into the seventeenth century, when silent reading practices began to take hold more firmly.

Digital culture asks us to revaluate what we mean by literacy by showing us that the printed book is only one of a variety of technologies that mediate literature (from the Kindle to the theater to the open mic to iPods playing Bob Dylan and countless other "literary" poets/musicians!)  But discussions of digital literacy would be wrong to assume that a static visual model of literacy precedes it.

I think it's important to point this out not just as a matter of accuracy, but in order to help us understand the paradigm shift to digital culture more fully.  The visual technology of the printed book has never superseded or canceled out aural, performative, scriptive, gestural, and other literary media: in fact it took over two hundred years before the printed book could boast true precedence in literary culture (more than, say, the theater or the manuscript).  Similarly, digital media is not only itself a mixed experience (pixel, sound, touch), as others have discussed above: it also coexists with and codetermines other technologies including the book.  Even terms like "digital literacy" can be misleadingly media-specific, since "literature" has long been a *multi*-media category.