Composing for Sound: Sonic Rhetoric as Resonance

This article describes an integrated approach for analyzing sounds and teaching sonic rhetoric that helps students develop strategies for multimodal composition. To analyze sonic practices, we use recordings and installations by sound artists Pierre Schaefer, Michel Chion, Susan Philipsz, and Lesley Flanigan, who all create immersive aesthetic experiences that treat sounds, including the human voice, as material objects, worthy and capable of close observation and manipulation. If sounds are “vibrational surfaces, or oscillators” as Steven Goodman argues, then sonic rhetorical engagement can be characterized as embodied and dynamic experiences with sound, from listening practices into composing practices. Sonic artworks can help us move beyond a static notion of sound and into a listener-centric sonic pedagogy that teaches students to integrate and resonate with other active sound producers and amplifiers in the environment (including rocks, water, air, bridges, buildings, mechanical engines, and non-human animals). We offer readers an extensive and flexible semester-long assignment sequence that provides complex tools for producing sonic rhetoric and sound-based multimodal projects.