Reverberations and Reverb: Sound Possibilities for Narrative,Creativity,and Critique

Intention, Attention, Expression: Sonic Arts, Sound Research, Researching Sound

Of the many ways to conceptualize research or soundarts, attending to them as layers of intention, attention, and expression (Gershon, 2017) provides a means for considering visual and performing arts (VAPA) and research utilizing similar language and understandings. These terms are meant to be both specific in articulating commonalities across iterations of kinds of experiences yet general enough to be useful from a variety of disciplinary or personal perspectives, whether one wishes to consider them as phenomena, experiences, or events, for example.

Statements of intention, the first aspect of these three interrelated considerations of artistic and/or scholarly production, are also often the most difficult to examine or assess. It is for this and other associated reasons that contemporary artists and scholars, in artists’ statements, biographical statements, or sections in publications, for example, work to be transparent about their processes, ideas, and ideals. At its core, the reason that intentionality matters is because it is a means for those who are not the individual or group involved in a given process to better follow what the producer(s) meant to do. Such information is valuable to arts and scholarship in different yet interrelated ways, another advantage for using these terms and one to which I will return momentarily.

Questions of intention can be understood to lead to notions of attention across multiple layers between and within producers, the artists and/or scholars in this case, and the audience, those who actively receive and react to the works produced. This too is a false distinction in that producers are necessarily audience members not only for others’ works but also in relation to the group most often conceptualized as the audience: producers are an audience’s audience. In addition, it is often the case that there is another layer of relations between producers, works, and audiences, in that works tend to take on a life of their own once expressed in the world. Attention also pertains to both sides of this false divide between producer and audience, a divide that is helpful to maintain here in that it allows for a kind of focus on the foregrounded aspect of the split, provided that one does not lose the interconnectedness of their everyday experiences or the falseness of the foregrounding.

From this perspective, attention pertains to what and how producers went about their intentions (to what did they pay attention when they did what they set out to do) and the ways in which audiences pay attention to producers’ intentions and expressions (what did the producer intend to do and what informed those choices). Knowing a producer’s intentions does not necessarily translate into a desire to attend to them in the fashion that a producer prefers nor does it insist on a particular perspective. It does, however, provide another important layer of transparency in the process of translation from intent to expression.

It follows, then, that expression is the outward release of something that is a result of producers’ processes of intention and attention. Expressions are meant to be an open category that is not bounded by such factors as form, function, content, or media. A podcast, an artwork, a publication, a webpage, a newspaper article, and a street performance are but a few of the possible avenues of and for expressions. Both producers and audience members express their ideas and ideals in ways that are iterative, recursive, and interrelated. Following recent trends in social sciences, the arts, and humanities, such expressions can also be understood as forms of media and mediation, regardless of how either media or mediation are conceptualized and/or how the media is mediated (e.g., Gitelman, 2006; Peters, 2015; Roquet, 2016).

These layers of intention, attention, and expression at once place artists and scholars in a shared category as public intellectuals and, as noted above, also underscore some significant differences between these two groups. On one hand is an assertion that all scholars and artists are public intellectuals, those who release ideas into the public sphere. Regardless of the depth or mendacity of their intentions or to what they attend, both groups nonetheless interact with publics and pass on their intended and unintended messages. It is by taking these ideas, ideals, and processes seriously that we can critique those with which we disagree and promote those that more closely resonate (Gershon, 2010a, 2017). This is case regardless of expression or apparent lack of depth. A song that affects you to the point that you shake your ass despite the lyrics is a fine case in point, an expression that points to the positive nature of affect and how it can inculcate our beings to constantly be exposed to ideas or ideals with which we disagree. From this position, one can at once praise the hook and condemn the content, a move that takes taking that expression seriously, both as a whole and as its distinct parts. The same is true for a scholarly argument where one agrees with the content but not the tone or tenor of its delivery.

On the other hand are central differences between artists’ and scholars’ processes, products, and roles. Where artists’ intentions and attentions are central to their processes and to the expression of those foci, an audience member does not need to either know or agree with either to have an experience that is meaningful to that person or group. For example, one not need know that John Coltrane’s Alabama was written in response to the bombing of the 16th Street Church on September 15, 1963, in which four young Black girls were killed by the Klu Klux Klan to hear that it is a haunting and probing melody. One could even be moved by the beauty and passion of Mr. Coltrane and his fellow musician’s playing (McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; and Elvin Jones, drums) and believe it to be a song about spirituality. In other words, regardless of intention, attention, and expression, audience members’ reception of those intertwined aspects of production and release does not need to be aligned to the producers’ for it to be a deeply meaningful experience.

Qualitative researchers, however, regardless of their particular kind of scholarship, must have a good degree of transparency in conveying all three aspects. In addition, audiences’ experiences should be aligned to a scholar’s productions of intention, attention, and the expression of those attentions and intentionalities. There are two central reasons for this need for alignment between producer(s) and audience member(s). Unlike VAPA where producer and audience need not be congruent to have a meaningful experience, what scholars do and how they go about enacting those things are central to audience members’ understandings of the kinds of attention and veracity they should grant to a given scholarly expression. Did a scholar do what she said she was going to do? Can she make the claims she makes based on the information she has shared? Does her consideration of that information jive with both what she said she would do and how she enacted those steps? Second, there is an ethical obligation to participants and information in which falsely reporting and/or a lack of consideration of ecologies and that which populate those ecologies, from chemical compounds to fragments of spacetime to human beings, is detrimental if not antithetical to all three aspects of scholarly production.

By this I do not mean to imply either that, for example, audiences somehow can’t disagree with scholarly intentions, attentions, or expressions, or that similar feelings and experiences aren’t part of how audience members react to artistic processes of production. Rather, the point is that there is a degree of transparency necessary in scholarship, one that includes clear presentation of parameters, questions, and results that is qualitatively different from artistic endeavors.

This also leads to a central point about those who wish to engage anything that might be called arts-based research (ABR), a process that must address components central to both artistic and scholarly processes of production. Although ABR can function artistically, its claims to research require the kinds of transparency and alignment between intention, attention, and expression that are part and parcel of scholarly processes. Research-for-research’s sake runs the risk of a lack of ethical engagement to one side and poorly constructed research on the other. Regardless of whether one works in a more traditional scholarly tradition or an emergent possibility imbued with the messiness of flattened, entangled relations, a lack of clarity and transparency about one’s intention, attention, and expression dodges an integral part of qualitative research: meaning what you say and saying what you mean regardless of its expression.

The same tends to be the case for narratives. Because all research can be conceptualized as a form of a story about a given process, understanding, event, or the like, the same holds true for all qualitative research. Producers, then, can also be understood as storytellers, regardless of either media or mediation. Such a move puts questions about the nature of the narratives, from their content to their contexts and beyond, at the center of this comparison. Whose story is being told? Is the storyteller in an ethical position to convey that story, especially if was garnered from or about others? If the story one is telling is in some fashion a translation or interpretation of another’s story, as all retold stories nearly always are, then knowing the steps one took to gain the stories one tells, the right to tell those stories, and the contexts that informed these narratives are also central to this process. Again, regardless of their intent, attention, and/or mode of expression.

This is also the case when describing one’s own processes. Far too often, I find myself drawn into ABR or narratives (regardless of form) only to find that the authors have either overstated their case in terms of their artistic expertise or findings based on their processes. If you are brand new to a process, trying it for one of the first times, speaking about that work as if it is either a masterwork or of the depth of your skills not only weakens the argument you are trying to make but it also lessens the potential impact for others who might engage in similar processes. Similarly, assumptions about the newness to a particular art form are also often made possible by a lack of attention to scholarship in other fields or an ahistorical attention to work. Standing firmly in what one does and speaking of it as it unfolded helps provide both greater transparency of process and gives processes greater weight. It is also here that considerations of intention, attention, and expression can be helpful in the consideration and critique of ABR and narratives: Were these aspects made clear by the producer(s), did the producer(s) do what they said they would do, do the arguments and conclusions align with their intentions and attentions?

Finally, although the term storyteller does indeed work to further make parallel the interactions and roles in the false split between VAPA and scholars I have inserted here, one would then likely need to consider the similarities and differences between VAPA and scholars, a move that would, in the case of this argument, reinscribe the VAPA/scholar roles. Although it is likely clear that I am more than a little sympathetic to the collapsing of VAPA and scholar roles/performances, the kinds and qualities of the narratives artists and scholars tell have significant differences that putting them together would often hide rather than render audible. For example, the labor, effort, and time that practice in VAPA is often missed and scholars taking on the mantle of artist can at once denigrate the VAPA the scholar seeks to venerate while obfuscating the very kinds of technical expertise that a scholar might insist upon in their roles as scholars. ³

Reverberation: Lasting Liminalities and Affective Vibrations

Sounds are at once fleeting and resounding, affective vibrations that are characterized as much by their mobility as their liminality. This combination of characteristics creates an ongoing experiential oxymoron that queers our ocular understandings, as ecologies and the things that populate them encounter wave upon wave of sonic information. Unlike most metaphors and conceptualizations of relationships, sonic relations are always already in a state of omnidirectional expression and reception. This means that sonic inquiries are always multiple—many sounds impacting things, the sounds of things moving out to impact other things, and that sound waves colliding into one another are but some of the things that affect and are affected in this never-ending mess of interrelations. ⁴

As briefly noted in the introduction, metaphorically, ideas and ideals resonate. Conceptualizing them as resonances rather than iterations of relevance speaks to the multiplicity of feelings and thoughts and their potential to affect and be affected by any other thing, be it an ideal, an idea, an ecology, or the infinite number of things, from the microscopic to the enormously complex, that populate ecologies, whether they are people or forests or nation-states. Such a move is possible because, unlike relevance through which an agreement between any two entities can determine a third lies outside their preferences and can be disregarded as irrelevant, resonance holds the potential for disparate-seeming ideas, ideals, feelings, things, or processes to resonate with one another.

Practically, this means that anything can be given the dignity of resonating with any-other-thing. There is a difference between the dignity of resonance and respecting or agreeing with that resonance. What resonates with some will not resonate with others. Questions of consonance and dissonance then become categories according to one’s filters and philosophies. Rather than a universal set of equally or always applicable frameworks, sonic understandings are as much about increasingly less local norms and values as they address any individual’s senses of what is normal or should be valued. This also means that resonances, while value-laden, are also to some degree value-independent. Resonances are the result of particular understandings and processes that carry sensibilities they are not necessarily ethical in and of themselves as their moral value is more about relations between that which is resonating and the person/group with which they resonate. For example, current moves of the self-proclaimed alt-right carry strong echoes of fascism, particular strains of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism, often a kind of Third Reich hatred expressed as naturally occurring scientisms. From my perspective, and those of the overwhelming majority, this is inexcusable hate and violence; to others, this resonates.

Giving people the space to have ideas resonate with their sensibilities does not mean that one shouldn’t oppose particular resonances tooth and nail on every possible front. Treating others’ resonances seriously and granting people the dignity of their particular understandings provides a strong, ethical footing for critique, disruption, resistance, and rejection. This is because treating someone’s resonances with dignity leads to at least the following two understandings. First, treating their sensibilities with dignity means you’re taking them seriously regardless of how they either couch or play off their resonances, as sarcasm or a joke, for example. Second, treating others with dignity means that you, in turn, should be granted, and can argue for, being treated that way yourself.

Making matters all the more messy, resonances are never still, bouncing this way and that, moving through media, solids and liquids better than air. To this never ending omnidirectional travel, there are then the ways that particular resonances are boosted or dampened, the ways that contributions of Black peoples in the United States is all but absent in U.S. history textbooks except for two often-under-covered historical moments, enslavement and civil rights, with perhaps a sprinkling of Jim Crow and a hint of Plessy v. Ferguson versus Brown v. Board. The mobile resonances we hear are reverberations.

Reverberations are always already misheard (Gershon, 2017). They are mediated, bouncing, fleeting informatics, sensory input that was mediated, through media and by ideas and ideals, before it was received. Our reception is as much a uniquely individual experience, only you have that exact otology and physical construction of hearing, as it is socioculturally mediated by the ideas and ideals you use to interpret the sounds you hear. And the act of hearing, of attending to the sonic information that hits your body, is an act of filtering, at once an intentional attention to specific vibrational affects that at the same time actively tunes out other sounds. Unlike the passivity of selection through the ocular, your perception is framed by the limits of your sight; listening involves actively attending to some sounds at the expense of others.

In sum, where resonances are alignments between the vibrational affects of at least two things, be they ideas, sounds, or feelings, what one is in fact resonating with are reverberations, the mediated, messy, information that are resonances in motion. Just how resonances are dampened, amplified, and attuned, as well as implications and results of such manipulations, is the focus of the following section.

Reverberations Versus Reverb: Manipulating Vibrational Affect

In addition to being mediated and misheard (as but two examples), reverberations are always to some degree manipulated. With an understanding that this is a false split with fuzzy, blurred edges, reverberations can be conceptualized as being manipulated in two overarching ways. The first of these is what might be called “inherent” manipulation. By this I mean the wide variety of things that produce vibrational affects that also serve as reflectors off, of, and through which reverberations are redirected. Inherent here does not refer to another false split that is often present in conversations about acoustic ecology or soundscape, that between person-made and nonperson-constructed things, the difference between a tree and a lawnmower, for example. Instead, the category of inherent reverberations is those that were not intentionally manipulated. For example, sounds of children playing outside that bounce off the walls of a house so that they are louder where you are standing than other sounds that occur in the immediate surroundings, a bird singing, or a car whizzing past.

The second overarching category is intentionally manipulated sounds. These include the various walls and siding beside highways designed to reflect the constant stream of traffic from adjacent neighborhoods, the addition of reverb to sound recordings to convey a sense of space that was purposefully deadened to achieve a more “pristine” sound recording environment, and the many pathways through which the sonic is directed to create particular sonic environments, smooth jazz in an upscale shopping mall, for example. In keeping with differentiations between inherent reverberations and intentionally manipulated reverberations, I utilize a nomenclature common to musicians and recording processes. Where sounds that are inherently manipulated are reverberations, those that are intentionally manipulated are iterations of reverb. Reverb is the slight delay and echo on nearly every recording done in recording studios that gives a sound a bit more sense of roominess, a difference our bodies interpret as depth in space, similar to the differences between singing or speaking in a restaurant and a cathedral.

Although there is much overlap between inherent and intentional manipulation—bird calls during mating season, a cat enjoying the echo of her voice when directed into a stairway corner—these distinctions are particularly useful for metaphorical discussions of reverberation. Reverb are the ways in which individuals and groups manipulate ideas, ideals, processes, and ecologies according to particular sets of norms and values to attune them in a given direction. Not unlike the hidden curriculum (e.g., Apple, 1990; Jackson, 1968), regardless of whether reverb is implied or explicitly applied, it is nonetheless intentional.

What is striking is that in musical and other circles, reverb is the status quo. It has become normal that sound-proofed rooms, those that deaden natural reverberations as much as possible, are “the best” spaces for recording, an understanding that necessitated increasingly better functioning and sounding tools (analog and digital) that allow sound engineers to put reverberations back into recordings. This tool is called reverb.

It is my contention that the rhyzomatic blooming of information that is the Internet has done the same for our understandings, turned reverberations into reverb. For the Internet in its current incarnation is print media on steroids, amplified by the highest bidder, and carved into appropriate echo chambers where they are tweaked and retweaked through iterative layers of reverb. Stories that beget stories that beget stories. All social media tends to work in a similar fashion. Facebook, not all your friends, just those who you most agree about as decided by an algorithm, reverb. Twitter, open to all, no list of those with whom you might agree, limited in mode of expression that nonetheless falls into the same categories, followers, retweets, responses, reverb. Digital Audio Workstations (DAW), the programs that mimic analog soundboards, all have multiple kinds of reverb that, along with all of the other sound-shaping tools such as equalizers, are all digitized and the result of algorithms. There is nothing wrong with either algorithms or reverb. They are both useful and I want to expressly note my appreciation, especially in light of the following critique.

We can no longer tell the difference between sound producers and their analogs, either literally or metaphorically. A great example is the following Public Radio International (PRI) story (Haddad, 2014) that surfaced around the popularity of the HBO program Game of Thrones and regard the opening and central motif of the show’s theme music, played on a cello. The article portion of the story about violinist Lara St. John’s describes her displeasure and ability to attend to such differences:

According to St. John, the theme song doesn’t sound genuine. Although a real cellist may be involved in the early stage, an engineer modifies and re-creates the original scale in another key. The result resembles a computer generated, digitally-synthesized track, as opposed to a real musician.

During the interview segment on which this article is based, here’s how Lara St. John describes the difference between the sound of a real cello and the digitized, keyboard-triggered version in the Game of Thrones theme song:

There’s no sense of melody, or flow. For a string player, it’s what’s between the notes, and this was just every note was the same, no dynamics, it’s just not at all musical. The way I could probably describe it best is if you heard your favorite song as sung by your GPS machine.

A literal difference between reverberations and reverb.

Then there are the metaphorical differences. Current debates over fake news and the inability for many to discern between the two. Fake news, that which was a staple of tabloids before the rise of electronic medias and notably different from the Los Angeles Times or Washington Post in both content and “believability,” suddenly looked and acted like “real news,” a change that was as much a result of traditional print news moving to look like tabloids as it was tabloids working to look like traditional news structures and forms. Made up stories went through the same literal reverb tweaks in our current incarnations of echo chambers that funnel those literal fake stories through the electronic algorithms, a metaphorical reverb that allows the further spread of literal reverb, all without stoppage to consider if it was reverb or reverberations.

It is important to note, however, that every rise in a newly introduced media has gone through a moment where audiences, even those who are either trained in the production of that new media or those with the training to discern between event and its reflection, again have a great deal of difficulty telling the difference. In much the same way that Harryhausen special effects (which, to my mind, remain wonderful) are boldly obvious, as are special effects from just a decade ago. It takes time, though increasingly less and less time, for what was once innovative to become commonplace and what at first seemed magical to be readily discerned. From a social science perspective, it is no accident that the rise of such technologies throughout history has been readily adopted and manipulated by those who wish to gain and maintain power (Bernays, 1928; Tye, 2002), often at a time when such technologies are new and their impact is the highest.

Practically, this raises two important and seemingly contradictory points. First, although reverberations and reverb are deeply intertwined in ways that it is next to impossible to discern between the two, trying to hear the differences is nonetheless of utmost importance. For, while such differences are often questions of degrees rather than kind, both a feel and an attention to how sensory information has been manipulated to specific ends (intention) is central to understanding what is expressed and to whom such conceptualizations are beneficial.

Second, in spite of differences in their intentionality, that reverberation and reverb function in a rather similar fashion provides both a potentially strong means for conceptualizing and also critiquing relations. This is because, on one hand, resonating with any feeling, idea, process, ecology, or thing is in actuality what might be called a sympathy of reverberations. For resonances are always in motion and what we receive are reverberations with which we resonate. The ability to consider how much that with which you resonate is reverb as well as the harmonics to which that reverb is attuned, not only the over- and undertones but also subtones and frequencies beyond our perception are as often intuited as they pass through us without notice.

All of which brings us back to questions about sound, art, and social justice.

Deep Listening, Power, and Possibility: Sound Art as Social Justice

If anything can resonate with anything else and reverb can spin possibilities toward specific ends that engender particular resonances, then the sonic expression of socially just possibilities can affect audiences at once literally and metaphorically. All ideas, resonances, and indeed all education are forms of manipulation. With this in mind, the concern is less whether or not something is manipulated than the specifics about the intention, attention, and expression of that manipulation.

Remixed, conceptualizing relationships as reverberations opens the door for an understanding of the multiplicity of possible connections while providing a means for critical attention to those connections. You can dignify the reverberations and critique the reverb. To do so requires something much like what Pauline Oliveros (2005) calls deep listening, a fully embodied attention to another’s expression so deep that you can hear the alignment between her intentions, attentions, and expressions. Sound, through resonances and reverberations, is not only always already misheard but is also necessarily affecting and affected, as much by the sonic as by other modes of expression.

Affect is sticky (Ahmed, 2010) and, as Boni Wozolek, Ross Varndell, and Taylor Speer (2015) argue, lingers and blooms (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010) like a melody that plays on long after the last note decayed past perception. In short, affect seems to move like sound: ephemeral, liminal, haptic, lingering, deeply moving waves that operate within and outside perception. Although this is not necessarily surprising as the sonic is one mode in and through which affect operates, in light of continuing conversations about affect and how language falls short in its explanation, such comparisons may yet be theoretically and practically helpful. For, if we can conceptualize affect as being sound-like—provided we do not make another level of error in saying that sound is the only or best way to imagine sound, and that we also do not make claims to the inverse that sound is not affect—such a simile can deepen our talk and thoughts about the affect and, in turn, about the sonic.

The decentralizing of humans and giving agency to objects is certainly helpful in making the familiar strange and the strange familiar (Spindler & Spindler, 1982) as well as to negotiate lingering biases and patriarchies in social science in general and qualitative methodologies in specific. However, removing the human from relations, or decentering her, runs the risk of either unethical relations with participants on one hand or a devaluing of human struggles on the other.

Along similar lines, because of the ways that people relate to ecologies and ecologies acquire but do not necessarily center people, it can be hard to square the decentering of humans in ecologies with a very human and rather subjective thing called social justice. This is also because social justice requires intentionality, meaning to do something that further engenders someone else’s, and by extension your own, ability to negotiate for liberation in the face of multiple intersecting injustices. Instead, as Alexander Weheliye (2014) argues in his Sylvia Wynter–inspired work, “There can never be an absolute biopolitical substance and racializing assemblages cannot escape the flesh” (p. 52). Just as postmodernists reminded us that it is not beyond modernism but is instead inclusive of it, anything that is called new materialisms cannot overlook the agency of a material human body, regardless of whether it is doing the action or acted upon.

It is here that we come back to the possibility of doing something called soundart toward an end called social justice. While there were moments scattered throughout this work that made sonic gestures to such concepts, the claim I am making is not as much that this is soundart as social justice but instead to argue for the centrality of reverberation and reverb toward such a project through this argument couched in a performative example.

More practically, as but two possible incarnations of soundart as social justice, consider the following two examples, a piece about students’ coming out processes used for a fundraiser for a discretionary fund that provides immediate assistance for queer university students who have fallen on financial hardships with family after coming out (being cut off from tuition and housing funds after coming out, for example) and an installation that focused on K-12 students having conversations and writing songs about science (Gershon, 2010b; Gershon & The Listening to the Sounds of Science Project, 2012). Although not intended this way, in no small part because of the purpose of this piece, what students wished to discuss most were their own coming out stories so that possible donors could understand the difficulties queer and questioning young adults face. The latter soundart/installation provided a means for audiences to consider whether children were failing science tests or science tests were failing children.

This was also, most certainly, a narrative. A story about particular places, spaces, processes, and products. It was also a story that was as traditional as it was contemporary in its expression, told through sound, expressed through recent technological innovations that rendered its construction possible. Finally, it was a set of reverberations and reverb, a critically creative reflexive presentation in which all participants were also producer, and were named as such. A process in which the construction of the narrative, with its uncovered cuts between sounds and its clear manipulation of the sonic (lowering all sounds when students’ songs played, for example). At once sonic, soundart, and story.

To conclude with an opening, as the second piece was a 2 1/2 hour installation on a loop played through eight speakers and my intent here is to give a sense of how affecting and affected each piece is, here are two excerpts, one from each piece. As is so often the case with nontextual and nonocularly oriented scholarship, the question is often not whether or not such scholarship is possible or powerful but instead whether or not it will be deemed accessible by groups of scholars regardless of their locality or size. Yet, regardless of their recognition, resonances and reverberations continue unabated. Furthermore, there is a long-standing history of sonic arts as tools for interrupting dominant norms and values in the Arts and society, simultaneously calling into question aspects of the arts as well as the sociocultural norms and values that the VAPA often interrupt (check, for example, Kahn, 2001; Kim-Cohen, 2009; LaBelle, 2015; Weibel, 2017).

In our current contemporary moment where those in power have, if not actually eugenic, explicitly declared intentions, attentions, and expressions with strong eugenics tendencies (the very same worldviews that served as the foundation for many fascists in the 20th century), there is little room to equivocate. From this perspective, resonance and reverb provide not only a means to trace ever-evolving layers of intention, attention, and expression but are also critically creative possibilities for disrupting and rejecting the momentum of oppressive ways of beingknowingdoing. It is high time to employ reverb to amplify the reverberations we require to underscore human dignity and rights while pushing back at the ignominies and oppression of continually marginalized peoples, a move that simultaneously better secures the rights for all.

Coda: A Lingering Note on the Sonic ⁵

This piece intentionally flips the relationship between nontextual media and text in scholarship. A move to create distinct, interwoven soundworks for each section written here creates a context in which this entire article functions as libretto, lyrics, or liner notes depending on one’s perspectives and predilections. As sounds convey information in ways that texts do not (Gershon, 2011, 2013b, 2017), the sonic version of this work is what I had in mind and produces various layers and pathways that are absent from the written version of this article. In short, the sounded version of this work is the work and this is its supporting document.

All sounds for this work were composed, arranged, performed, recorded, engineered, edited, and produced by the author. What is often missed, in no small part because of the value placed on text by scholars, is how very time intensive media work almost always turns out to be. Imagine the time each step takes, the act of recording, for example.

For work like this, there is no engineer to select and place microphones until they are just the right distance and angle for a given instrument. No one to press record and stop, to level meters so a musician can hear the mix played back during recording, or to review each take as it occurs, as well as a good many other factors. Then there is the amount of time needed to warm up on each instrument so that there is a greater chance that it will result in fewer takes. Each round of recording an instrument also requires the creation of spaces on the recording so that each instrument has its own track as well as the attributes that generally are beneficial for a particular instrument. There is also the selection of microphones and that each instrument has at least two different mics for each instrument, including voice, to capture its subtleties and nuances both in close proximity and with the air of the room. All this without getting to the actual recording of each instrument individually rather than played by multiple musicians at once.

Each stage of recording is at least this painstakingly time intensive. The number of times one has to listen to playback to get the sounds the way they are in one’s head or the volume balanced well, including further work necessary after one converts the file into a playable format. In this case, Mp3s, though in many ways a dying media, are still helpful in that they are readily uploaded and downloaded due to their compressed format, a format that requires further adjustment after the sound is already mixed the way one wants before it is converted to Mp3.

In sum, doing work of this nature in sound is incredibly time intensive, requires multiple forms of expertise, and deeply impacts the person doing the soundwork (for more on this point, Gershon, 2017). It is not only the audience who is viscerally affected by sound but also those who produce it, altering our understandings with each layer of recording, each pass at mixing, every listen and adjustment. That this information must be addressed is further evidence of sociocultural tendencies in the West to deeply privilege text and of its settler colonialist orientation. As but one other example, I have often been critiqued or questioned about the programs I utilize for creating soundworks, something that has never happened to me when presenting textual scholarship. Perhaps it is time that our moves to postmethodologies and theories also performed those maneuvers in ways that accept medias the same way that texts are conceptualized, as matters of course or fact that, while they should be transparently conveyed, no longer require justification for their use. If nothing else, it would be a pleasure not to have to note such things in yet another piece.