Sounding Composition, Composing Sound: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Pedagogies, and Everyday Experience

My dissertation re-imagines the teaching of listening in rhetoric and composition to account for sonic experiences in the twenty-first century. Technologies such as audio editing and music software allow users to control sound in ways that were not possible for the average listener before personal computers and digital audio devices became widely available. While digital technologies have presented new opportunities for re-thinking how to teach listening in relation to composing, they have also resulted in a selective and limited understanding of how sound works and affects in the world at large. The aim of my dissertation is to offer a listening pedagogy that helps students capitalize on the compositional affordances of sound in digital contexts and retrains them to become more thoughtful, sensitive listener-composers of sound in any setting. Drawing from the listening and composing practices of deaf musician Evelyn Glennie, acoustic designers, and automotive acoustic engineers, I propose an expansive, explicitly embodied approach to the teaching of listening in rhetoric and composition. The listening pedagogy I introduce is based on my concept of multimodal listening, a practice that involves attending to the sensory, material, and contextual aspects that comprise and shape a sonic event. Unlike ear-centric listening practices in which listeners’ main goal is to hear and interpret audible sound (often language), multimodal listening practices move beyond the exclusively audible by emphasizing the ecological relationship between sound, bodies, and environments. I argue that cultivating multimodal listening practices will enable students to become more savvy consumers and producers of sound in the composition classroom and in their everyday lives