In this chapter, I have sought to “recompose” the landscape of voice in composition studies in order to account for the needs and realities of our most recent “paradigm”—that of digital and multimodal composing. Admittedly, in my initial approach to this project, I imagined this “landscape” as a neat, binary division—even a teleological movement—between the silent past of a textual metaphor and the sounding future of a compositional material. However, looking back at this review of the literature, it becomes apparent that, in fact, there exists no such easy split or progressive evolution. Instead, it seems that metaphorical and material approaches to voice in composition have coexisted side-by-side for at least four decades, in both symbiotic and contradictory ways. Indeed, rather than standing in opposition to ‘voice’s’ metaphorical legacy, we have seen how these three approaches to sounding voice have carried it forward into their own vocal imaginations—and, I would argue, in ways that dramatically influence their abilities to engage with this emergent composing material.
As we have seen, the method-based approach to sounding voice is notable for its efforts to reclaim the value of speech in relation to written discourse. By drawing upon the spontaneous and intonational characteristics of audible speech, “talk-write” and “oral composing” pedagogies offer a promising first step toward imagining voice’s role in rhetorical invention. However, by
foregrounding voice’s practical function as a carrier of spoken language, and by presuming alphabetic text as the exclusive end product of the composing process, these methodologies serve to instrumentalize sounding voice as a mere means to an end of written discourse, ultimately imagining language—as opposed to voice—as the core material of their practice.
In contrast, the modal approach to voice moves this conversation explicitly to the auditory realm, exploring the role of voice-as-sound in multimedia texts. As part of a larger disciplinary move to recover delivery for digital rhetoric, this trend highlights voice’s performative capacities in relation to the sensory experience of a listening audience. However, by approaching digital voice through a somewhat nostalgic return to classical orality/aurality, this strand of practice has tended to tie the voice to the live, speaking body of the rational speaking subject and thus to reinforce the conventions of representational, rational, discursive transmission. Voice, here is reduced to a mere medium or mode through which external meanings are delivered; it matters not as a material in its own right, but rather for that which lies behind it, in its performance of representational discourse.
In the final category of work on sounding voice in the field, though, we find promising efforts to approach voice as a material in its own right. Here, voice appears both as an audible vibration, which is produced by the body but which also “matters” beyond the body, and as a “malleable” material with the potential to participate in the construction of new compositional forms. As an explicit response to the rise of digital audio technologies—technologies that make accessible not only the recording and reproduction of voice, but also its editing and recomposition—this approach is significant in offering first steps toward grappling with the complexities of digital voice’s mediated materiality. However, at the level of concrete practice, it might ultimately fall short of accounting for the full range of new compositional possibilities
available in the present technological context. Falling prey to many of the same assumptions as its methodological and modal counterparts, in the end, the existing material approaches to sounding voice continue to confine their engagement with this material to familiar textual conventions of linearity, singular authorship, and representational ethics.
Of course, there is no question that all of these approaches—to the method, the mode, and the material—represent welcome contributions to the disciplinary discourse, working to recover voice from its long silence as textual metaphor and beginning to imagine how we, as a field, might take up voice, as a peculiar category of sound, in the context of digital composing. However, I would also argue that the existing scholarship in the field seems to be concerned largely with identifying the new opportunities sounding voice offers to carry out the work of a composition-already-defined as opposed to a composition-in-the-making. In other words, by taking as our starting point the linguistic, metaphorical, and oratorical attachments of voice in our disciplinary history, in the end, we appear unable to move beyond the present structuring logics of composition as we know it.
Taking this dilemma as a point of departure, I would like to pose the question: What would happen if we were to reverse our process here and start not from the disciplinary conventions of composition, but rather from the materiality of voice itself? How might a more robust exploration of voice as a sounding material help us to expand our notion of what it means, how it sounds, and why it matters to compose? In other words, how might voice—if taken seriously on its own terms and in its complex relations—enable us to recompose composition itself? If we believe, as Jack Selzer suggests, that “language is not the only medium or material that speaks” (8), then, perhaps we need to do more to understand the complex materiality of voice beyond language. Thus, in order to transcend the limitations of the existing literature in the
field, perhaps it is time that we look beyond our own disciplinary boundaries for ways in which we might productively reimagine our relationship to voice—and, more specifically digital voice—as a core material of compositional practice. As we have seen in the work of composition scholars like Heidi McKee, Tara Rosenberger Shankar, Michelle Comstock, and Mary Hocks,63 we are already beginning to move in this direction, but we still have a long way to go.
Stepping back for a moment, we might ask ourselves: What is at stake in this project? After all of these years, why continue to attend to the question of voice in composition? At a basic level, I believe that it is precisely because of our field’s longstanding disciplinary attachments to voice—or, more aptly ‘voice’—that we are coming up against these questions and provocations in the first place. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the extent to which our long traditions of textual metaphor and classical oratory continue to inform our approach to sounding voice in contemporary composition practice is truly remarkable. And while these frameworks certainly go a long way toward helping us to account for the performative, stylistic, and expressive possibilities of vocal sound, they do not exhaust the compositional possibilities for voice in digital composing environments—neither the kinds of voices that we can take up, nor the ways in which we might use and reuse those voices for rhetorical, aesthetic, and even political ends. As Collin Brooke has argued in his aptly titled Lingua Fracta, “[T]here are many new media ‘texts’ that do not ‘mean’ in the same way that we might argue that a particular poem or essay means something” (18). If we take this reality seriously, then perhaps we need to consider not only how voice might be mobilized to transmit semantic content or perform the tone or emotion of a pre-given text, but also how it might be edited, manipulated, re-composed, and
63Other notable scholars working in this area—those working more broadly on the question of sound but
attending to the question of voice in the process—include Jeff Rice (“Making of Ka-Knowledge: Digital Aurality”) and Jody Shipka (“Sound Engineering: Toward a Theory of Multimodal Soundness”).
recombined in ways that push beyond the intentionality and agency of the original speaker and even disrupt the possibility of meaning as we know it.
It is here that the question of voice becomes a question of ethics. Whether we like it or not, with the rise of digital audio, it seems that our technological capacities for composing with voice—and, more specifically, for composing with the voices of others—have begun to radically outstrip our ability to make sense of their ethical implications. In this context, we are left with a difficult decision: either to banish particular forms of engagement with digital voice from our repertoire altogether or to interrogate some of our most deeply held assumptions about voice— rooted in fundamentally rational, representational, and proprietary value systems—and consider how we might imagine them otherwise. If it is true, as Anne Wysocki has argued, that we can no longer take “persuasion” as a purely rational concern, then we must also attend to the many “means of shaping behavior and identity that are non-linguistic and that appeal, usually quietly and without direct address, to bodies and feelings rather than articulated logics” (“Unfitting Beauties” 94). As I imagine it, digital voice is one among many of these affective means of “persuasion,” broadly conceived, with great potential, in Wysocki’s words, to “impel us toward particular sensuous engagements with the world and each other” (94). This ethical “prospect”64
serves as the primary catalyst for my engagement with digital voice in the chapters that follow.
64In his “An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto,” Bruno Latour proposes the notion of “prospects”—
or “the shape of things to come”—as a generative alternative to our cultural obsession with “the future,” which, he argues, is ultimately only an act of “fleeing [our] past in terror” while looking backward (486).