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Jeff Rice, Wayne State University, The Making of Ka-Knowledge: Digital Aurality
Abstract: This article asks that rhetoric and composition add to its concerns with visuality an interest in the role aurality plays in digital composing. Working initially with observations Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan made in the early 1960s regarding a new physics of sounding out, this article explores how hip-hop updates both theorists’ concerns with the contemporary notion of droppin’ science. Because droppin’ science suggests the displacement of knowledge production with ka-knowledge, new understandings of sounding out are needed in order to understand how ka-knowledge functions. The article works to map out and develop a theory of digital-based aurality called ka-knowledge.
Mickey Hess, Rider University, Was Foucault A Plagiarist? Hip-Hop Sampling and Academic Citation
Abstract: This article argues that comparing academic citation and hip-hop sampling can help students become better users of sourcework. I contend that sampling and academic writing share a goal of building new work in response to existing sources and that this goal is obscured by lawsuits that reduce sampling to theft by applying to sound a copyright regulation system designed for print. Both sampling and citing seek to build new compositions by working from sources, yet academic citation systems preserve textual ownership through attribution while sampling often guards or disguises its sources. These different stances in regard to authorship and ownership belie the values shared by the two systems. composition.
Thomas Rickert and Michael Salvo, Purdue University, The Distributed Gesamptkunstwerk: Sound, Worlding, and New Media Culture
Abstract: This essay argues that musicians have been at the forefront of the multimedia revolution. Rather than limit multimedia's creative locus to individuals working with a small range of tools/instruments, we address the increasing dispersion of productive processes across communities, technologies, and spaces. New media culture has reached a point where one can compose on a laptop, sample, loop, and create mashups and heretofore-unknown musics. These developments indicate that contemporary re/mix/digital music culture offers vocabularies, models, and practices for new media writing and culture generations beyond the tradition of text-based composition or the singular work of art. The article traces a genealogy from Wagner's notion of the “total art work” up to contemporary digital/remix to show how new media extend techniques that have long been developing. Just as the dispersion of production across communities and technologies transforms musical aesthetics, so also the aesthetic experience itself changes. New media culture is less resonant with interpretation than with engagement, and to explain this experiential difference the article develops the concepts of “worlding” and “prosumer.” Additionally, this article considers musical and multimedia attempts to incorporate new input streams, including those too often categorized (and excluded) as noise. Such input streams, in combination with other feedback-driven and distributed forms of production, can be theorized as part of an expansive, immersive, and experiential approach to new media we articulate as worlding.
Bump Halbritter, Michigan State University, Musical Rhetoric in Integrated-Media Composition
Abstract: Rhetorical analyses of popular music in film can guide composition teachers to develop an anticipatory pedagogy for transforming ready-made musical materials into coherent and persuasive psychologically interactive, integrated-media compositions. This essay offers an analysis of The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as the thesis of Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill and an examination of a student-produced digital video homage to David Fincher's Fight Club that employs The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” as a vehicle for its argument. Scholarly attention to visual rhetoric has helped composition teachers and theorists envision new possibilities for composing in new media. Careful consideration of musical rhetoric may enable us to hear new possibilities for integrated-media composition as well.
Heidi McKee, Miami University of Ohio, Sound matters: Notes Toward the Analysis and Design of Sound in Multimodal Webtexts
Abstract: In this essay, I draw from approaches in voice, music, theater, and film studies to examine four elements of sound: vocal delivery, music, special effects, and silence. Within this four-part schema, I discuss a variety of frameworks that I hope may serve as resources for those seeking to engage in both the analysis and production of sound in multimodal webtexts. Throughout the essay, I analyze several poetic Flash texts, and I consider the relationship of part-to-whole and whole-to-part when seeking to analyze and compose with multiple modes.
Jody Shipka, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Sound Engineering: Toward a Theory of Multimodal Soundness
Abstract: The activity-based multimodal theory of composing presented here offers us a way to better understand how, when, and why students might choose to explore the affordances of sound (oral, aural) in their work. Importantly, however, insofar as it resists attempts to bracket off individual senses and the uptake of select semiotic resources, it presents a more robust, integrated approach to theorizing, researching, and teaching multimodal production, one that facilitates the move toward multimodal soundness. An activity-based multimodal approach to composing provides us, but perhaps more importantly still provides students, with strategies for attending to the complex ways that a greater variety of senses, semiotic resources, and rhetorical positionings might be taken up and brought together, if only briefly, and if only in sound-for-now ways, to help them accomplish specific kinds of work in specific contexts. To illustrate how an activity-based multimodal theory of composing achieves these ends, I present two accounts of first-year composition students who explored sound's potential in their work after determining that the uptake of sound could help them, at least in part, accomplish the work they hoped to do.
Tara Rosenberger Shankar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Speaking on the Record: A Theory of Composition
Abstract: This article explores ways in which some of what has been achieved through the use of writing can be achieved in the domain of the oral and ways in which the use of oral forms might be revalued as literate composition. Toward these ends, I introduce a new word and practice to provide a counterpart to writing in a spoken modality: Spriting in its general form is the activity of speaking “on the record” that yields a technologically supported representation of oral speech with essential properties of writing, such as permanence, and offers possibilities of editing, indexing, and scanning but without the difficult transition to a deeply different form of representation such as writing itself. Literacy is defined here as the sophisticated structures and elements that characterize linguistic stories and ideas, largely but not completely independent of the material ways in which these structures are realized. That is, this article distinguishes literacy from letteracy, which refers to textual decoding and encoding abilities, and I introduce another new term, prosodacy, which refers to oral decoding and encoding abilities. Based on outcomes from two years of exploratory empirical work with adult learners and young children using novel spriting software I designed and developed for them, I discuss four areas in which spriting-like activities and technology can have a positive impact on literacy development and education.
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