revision
After presenting at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), I returned to working on "Singer, Writer" in the fall of 2014, knowing that I wanted to revise, to experiment, and perhaps, to publish. I also wanted to focus much more on the sound. Even though I had subtitled the CCCC version "a remix exploration of sound and writing," and Mary Hocks and Jody Shipka's (2013) Computers and Writing (C&W) panel conversation was all about teaching and composing with sound, I realized as I re-watched the draft that I had spent a lot of effort arranging and layering the visual elements. Compositionists such as Steph Ceraso (2014), Bump Halbritter (2006), Cynthia Selfe (2009), and Kyle Stedman (2011) have been calling us to pay more attention to sound within multimodal composition in our teaching and scholarship for years. Yet even as I tried to heed their call and to pay more attention to sound in particular as I composed, I found my focus wavering.
To be fair, I had done a fair amount of sound work in the first draft: recording and editing the audio of the poem, using and strategically timing the recordings of the UM Choral Union rehearsals (Meria, 2014) and St. Matthews Choir (2009), selecting and ordering various spoken quotations from Hocks and Shipka (2013), and pulling and rearranging several sound effects from Shipka's (2013) "Stealing Sounds." My use of these audio elements, however, did not seem as complex as I wanted. Much of the sound I used worked with the visuals on the screen, as reinforcement (a term Robert Horn [2004] used in the short visual rhetoric article excerpt, "Rhetorical Devices and Tight Integration")—both the visual and the audio mode were working together. This was the case for the C&W presentation footage I used as well: I showed the visual image of Shipka or Hocks and simultaneously played the audio of each speaking, lip and body movements syncing with the audio track. With the revisions, I wanted to explore what the New London Group (2000) called "patterns of interconnection" between and among different modes, to play with various multimodal possibilities for combining sound and images (p. 25).
Some moments of what I was beginning to think of as cross-modal reinforcement were a bit more complex. For example, at the start of "The First Draft," I showed an excerpt from Shipka's (2013) "Stealing Sounds" that included the image of the typewriter typing a quotation from Walker Evans along with the sounds of that particular typewriter typing. I then laid voice-over of the "Singer, Writer" poem on top of both of these elements. I had hoped to create new meanings with the shifted combination: Shipka's typewriter and Walker Evans (her combination) + my poem = something new. I wanted the audio to combine with and illustrate the visual, or, in other places, I wanted the visual to amplify or shift the meaning of the poem.
Many moments of such cross-modal reinforcement made it into the final version of "Singer, Writer" published here. As I initially considered how to revise, though, I set a goal to do more with juxtaposition and layering of sound, to foreground what Erin Anderson (2014) called "new practices of mindful experimentation and play" with digital voice (para. 38). I draw on Jeff Rice (2007) for a definition of juxtaposition, shaped by hip-hop pedagogy, where "patterns motivate readers and writers to find unrealized connections among disparate events and material things" (p. 91). I wanted to find and emphasize such patterns with sound, juxtaposing music and different human and electronic voices. As Anderson (2014) pointed out, the potentials of digital voice invite the creation of new texts through weaving, play, disruption, and experimentation, pushing authors toward "alternative possibilities of invention, through experimental compositional practices that begin from and return to the material itself" (para. 34). Such possibilities and practices propelled me as I cut, re-pitched, juxtaposed, layered, and mixed my own voice with Hocks's and Shipka's.
I wanted to use juxtaposition across modes as well, to play more with cross-modal juxtaposition and cross-modal layering, where visuals might clash with sounds, or several sounds might be placed on top of one another and then combined in different ways with visuals: perhaps for reinforcement, as I had done in the first draft, but perhaps for contrast, for emotional effect, for ethos, or even for calling attention to the sound itself and highlighting the composed, layered nature of the audio. Bump Halbritter (2013) pointed to the importance of seeing audio-visual texts as both "all there at once" and as "precisely determined component pieces," layered atop each other for different effect (p. 76). Such an ability to piece apart while simultaneously keeping in mind the whole is to attend to the multidimensional nature of rhetoric, Halbritter (2013) stated, and it is this multidimensionality that I wanted to play with as I set goals for layering pieces of "Singer, Writer."
As I revised, I was drawn to watch and re-watch (and listen to) the ending of the first draft. I was often using cross-modal reinforcement in this section, but the visual and audio modes were also serving other functions at the same time. More was going on; the sequences and combinations were more complex, multidimensional. In the last seconds of the draft, I brought together audio and image clips from Shipka's (2013) "Stealing Sounds" (audio of her and her student talking and the image of the typewriter) and audio from Hocks and Shipka's (2013) C&W presentation. The string of audio clips in new, unexpected, and rapid juxtaposition was what drew me. The sound bites were recorded at diverse times and in different places, some by me, others not. Together, they all spoke about and enacted composing with media, sound, and music from different places and sources: all was remix and re-assemblage. For me, the ending was emotional, melodic, associational, felt.
The end also enacted the comparisons I was making throughout the draft: Composing and music-making were both emotional, embodied, situated in place and memory, collaborative, and incredibly layered and complex. The ending was all of these, and its current and potential juxtapositions inspired me. The revised version of the entire video, I thought to myself, must be similarly juxtaposed, emotional, experiential, complicated—and, of course, more centered on sound and sound's relationships to other modes.