Voice as Material 62

This final category of approaches to voice-as-sound—that which attends most explicitly to voice’s materiality—is only recently beginning to emerge at the margins of scholarly and pedagogical discourses on multimodal composing. We find a fascinating example of this trend at work in the pedagogical experiments of Tara Rosenberger Shankar, as outlined in her article “Speaking on the Record: A Theory of Composition.” Here, Shankar sets forth a framework for an oral/aural composing practice she calls “spriting”—an amalgam of “speech” and “writing”— which mobilizes our technological capacities to capture and edit the sound of spoken language as digital audio to produce a structured “talkument” (375). Following in the footsteps of scholars like Peter Elbow, Shankar’s approach is motivated by a desire to reclaim the value of speech (and, by extension, voice) in the face of a “graphocentric bias” in the Western intellectual tradition, which privileges practices of reading and writing over speaking and listening (375).

However, unlike Elbow, she does not shy away from the realities of audio technologies, but rather takes them up as a core element of her practice. Because, with sound reproduction, “speech can be made permanent” (379), Shankar suggests that we might submit speech and voice to forms of knowledge-making that have until recently only been accessible to alphabetic text production. With her “spriting” pedagogy, Shankar aims to bring together the “unrecuperable, untranslatable characteristics of speech material” (379) with the structure and permanence of alphabetic composing practices, ultimately aiming to “elevat[e] the status of speech itself to a writerly media” (380).

One of the unique aspects of Shankar’s approach is her work in developing a customized software platform, which she calls the “SpriterWriter,” to enable spriting practice among school- aged children. This software allows students to record their speech, parse it into visually demarcated units, and rearrange those units into a linear, essayistic composition with indented paragraphs and automated line-breaks. By using “Western text conventions as a metaphor for the visual representation of spriting,” the SpriterWriter reimagines the audio editing process as a means to support essayistic, textual literacies (384). In a sense, then, rather than reasserting the value of speech—as sound and voice—on its own terms, Shankar ultimately opts to reshape speech (quite literally) in the image of writing, using the technological affordances of digital media to adapt spoken language to the conventional practices of alphabetic inscription. And because it starts from the familiar forms and conventions of alphabetic composing (i.e. linearity and singular authorship), we might argue that the SpriterWriter ultimately does little to mobilize the particular affordances of vocal material, with its potential for layering and multivocality.

Indeed, Shankar admits that, at the outset, “I had the conservative (and erroneous) idea that spriting would function as a part of a writing process: It would enable composers to focus on

higher-level aims in a mode with fewer mechanical requirements” (383). Under her initial model, she imagined children approaching spriting as a two-part process: “first, shaping ideas in speech and, second, translating those ideas to text” (383). By imagining spriting in this way—as a linear, teleological progression from speech to writing—Shankar proposes a model, which, in many ways, looks like an updated, software-enabled approach to Zoellner’s “Talk-Write Pedagogy”—a classic example of the traditional method-based approach to voice in composition, which, as we have seen, tends to instrumentalize the speech as a practical tool for achieving the ultimate end of alphabetic textual production.

What is interesting, though, at least for our purposes, is not necessarily what Shankar sets out to do with her “spriting” experiment in theory, but rather what she discovers as she puts it into practice. Crucially, and despite her expectations to the contrary, Shankar finds that the students she worked with indeed “perceived and treated spriting itself as the product” (384) and responded to the sounds of their own recorded voices with new, adaptive vocal practices— “words, dialects, language patterns, and voice qualities” (381). Thus, for Shankar, the SpriterWriter emerges as a platform for sonic experimentation and play, opening up a space for students to take up their own voices as “composition material—malleable and plastic” (381) to create embodied, rhythmic, and even musical artifacts60 with value as sound in itself. While she ultimately frames the potential of this outcome in conventionally metaphorical terms, wherein voices become opportunities to reflect on authorial “constructions of self and meaning,” (381) Shankar’s discovery stands as a promising opportunity to reimagine voice’s potential as material

60_{Reflecting on the children’s tendency to “sing” their talkuments in the course of their experimentation,}

Shankar reflects upon the nonrepresentational aspects of voice—as “orchestration,” “tonal and

rhythmic”—and poses the provocative question: “Why are music and linguistic composition in separate boxes?” (387). This potential conversation between what we might call the “two compositions”—musical and textual (though not necessarily only linguistic)—is an area worthy of further exploration.

in both senses of the term: as a fleshy, vibrational substance61 _{and a “malleable” resource for}

compositional invention.

We find a parallel opening to this dual materiality emerging out of Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks’s “Voice in the Cultural Soundscape,” which, to my knowledge, stands as the only full-length article in the field to take up sounding voice as its primary object of inquiry. In this article, Comstock and Hocks take a step back from voice’s long metaphorical history and work to stake a claim for a distinct new terrain of voice as a “tangible” element of multimedia composing (“Voices in Soundscapes”). Laying out their pedagogical approach to activities such as voice-over narration and soundtrack development, these authors call for a model of “sonic literacy,” which they define as “a critical process of listening to and creating embodied knowledge, of understanding our soundscapes as cultural artifacts, of achieving resonance with particular audiences, and of developing the technological literacies involved in recording, amplifying, layering, and mixing sound” (“Introduction”).

This project is particularly noteworthy for its effort to take up the embodied human production of voice alongside—and in paradoxical relationship to—its technologically mediated materiality. While Comstock and Hocks go great lengths to emphasize voice’s “vibration[al]” character as an embodied production of the human vocal chords (“Voices in Soundscapes”), they also work to complicate any neat configuration of voice-speaker-body by expressly interrogating the role of technology in vocal recording and reproduction. Challenging popular assumptions of

61_{Shankar’s discovery here prompts what is, in my opinion, the most viscerally embodied description of}

voice to come out of rhetoric and composition scholarship on the topic to-date: “Our voice apparatus consists of moist, warm air compressed in malleable sacks that are crushed upward and in by the force of muscle and bone. On its way out of the body, the air passes through membranes that vibrate regularly and irregularly and into cavities with different resonant frequencies. What we hear is the product of physical mechanisms: sizes and shapes of fleshy cavities and bone, the protrusion of the lips, position of the tongue, elasticity and tension of the flesh and muscle.” (387).

authenticity, these authors suggest that, “[a]s with any digital media,” recorded voice can only ever be “an illusion of realism.”62 And, most importantly, they draw attention to the ways in which the “new tools” of digital audio technologies open up possibilities for the “framing, editing, and sculpting” of this illusion through alternative compositional practices (“Technological Literacies”).

Despite this promising conceptual framework, from a pedagogical perspective, Comstock and Hocks’s approach falls short of accounting for the many complex compositional possibilities opened up by this shift in the technological landscape. Notably, and similarly to Shankar’s proposal for “spriting,” all of the concrete pedagogical applications offered by these authors engage students in performing, recording, and reflecting on their own voices and primarily as instruments for the delivery of linear narrative compositions—with the documentary voiceover standing as their most highly privileged genre. Laying out their experience teaching with voice- based assignments, Comstock and Hocks write:

As our students have discovered, listening to recordings of oneself inspires a self- conscious perspective (a form of analytical listening) on what's being said, how it's being said, who is saying it, and to whom. Along with this self-consciousness comes the impetus to revise and revise again in order to achieve resonance (or dissonance) with an audience. They learn to write (script) for a particular voice or rather, their sense of their own voice, which requires that they slow down, be deliberate, articulate, practice, and at the same time, experiment and revise, then re-record. (“Voices in Soundscapes”)

62_{In The Audible Past, sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne goes further to suggest that there is no}

authentic “original” in sound reproduction in the first place—that “[b]oth copy and original are products of the process of reproducibility. The original requires as much artifice as the copy” (241). This is a concept on which I will build in the next chapter.

We see in this reflection a familiar set of pedagogical objectives—critical inquiry, self- reflexivity, style, and revision—as well as a familiar model of composition, one which assumes an individual rhetorical agent speaking in her own voice to produce and transmit meaning.

By funneling vocal practice through traditional modes of speech-based narrative performance, Comstock and Hocks are reproducing some of the traditional conventions of live oratory, which once again presume a neat connection between voice, speaker, and body. And by focusing only on the composer’s own voice as the privileged composing material, they are effectively conflating voice with authorship in ways that hearken back to its longstanding metaphorical legacy. In this context, material voice becomes “personal” or “cultural,” evoking familiar debates between expressivist and social constructionist pedagogies, and confining ethical engagement to the question of “what voices are heard and amplified and what voices aren’t” (“Social Conscience”). Indeed, as Comstock and Hocks push to broaden their discussion from the practicalities of “technological literacies” to larger questions of critical and ethical practice, voice, as an embodied vibration and a mediated composing material, quickly slips beneath the shadow of ‘voice,’ as a function of language, style, agency, and identity.

While these representational aims and activities are certainly valuable as cornerstones of our practice in the field, I would like to suggest this: that they by no means represent the only way to engage voice as a compositional material. Indeed, as Comstock and Hocks themselves allow, “modern digital sound tools” enable alternative practices of “splicing, mixing, and layering,” which far exceed the conventions and limitations of linear, monovocal composing (“Technological Literacies”). Furthermore, given that digital distribution networks have the capacity to “[transform] listeners into DJs or soundscape artists” (“Voices in the Soundscape”), there is also no reason that composers need speak only in their own voices—or even seek only to

“create meaning” in the first place. Thus, while Comstock and Hocks, like Shankar, offer vital openings to the question of material voice, I would argue that neither of these approaches goes very far toward making sense of the complex range of emergent compositional possibilities that this material opens up.