Aurality and Multimodality

Websites are changeable, which means that when I wrote down the instructions for this assignment on Thursday, it was a 1-pg. response. Now, it's supposed to be short. So, I'll leave it as is, but here's a summary:

• The Selfe article helped me understand what we mean by "multimodality" a little better than the other readings we've done. You?


• Still digesting Tagg. Not sure I buy the whole music-as-conquest thing, though it does make some sense. There are loud people in Milton that have earned some aural conquest, which I deliver with headphones.


• The Mississauga sound map was pretty cool because it made ambient sound the focus, which makes it stop being "ambient"; it's kind of like the effect of listening to rain.


• Interspecies made me happy in entirely geeky ways. I think that paragraph's worth reading, so scroll on down.

As I read the Selfe article, the term multimodality suddenly started to make a lot more sense to me. Granted, it was reading the endnotes with the text that helped this along, but I’m starting to gain a better understanding of how to explain it and treat it in my writings. It also made me decide to modify my definition of New Media so I could make a distinction between it and multimedia. (I caved in and decided it has to be digital.)

I also appreciated Selfe’s historical approach. I think we often forget just how recently writing has become important to us and how quickly our field (meaning composition, communication, whatever) has developed. Why do we resist using video and audio in freshman composition when aurality is what Aristotle was talking about when he came up with ethos, logos, and pathos? However, we probably wouldn’t know what Aristotle said in the first place had no one privileged writing enough to commit it to print. Selfe seems to be somewhat critical of the fact that it requires writing to discuss aurality as a topic in composition, but the lack of hyperlinks to the audio content to which she refers in the text doesn’t really help any arguments for the alternative. Access!

I’m still digesting the Tagg piece; in terms of my experience, I guess his notion that we use music as a conquest of ambient noises makes sense. I know I wear my headphones in Milton a lot so I can drown out the distractions of other people talking. The terms he uses are pretty strong, though, and I’m not sure I entirely jive with this article.

For the listening exercise, I first chose the Mississauga Sound Map. What immediately struck me about the samples in this piece was that, for the first few samples, everything sounded like rain to me. Even when the sounds were those of a lot of people talking and shuffling around, the fact that I couldn’t make out what any one voice was saying made it easier for me to hear it as something else. Without a visual context for the sounds—which I tried to create by closing my eyes—it was harder to associate the sounds with what might have actually been happening when the sound was recorded.

I was also surprised by my tendency to get startled by sudden loud noises in the Missauga recording. Often, not knowing the origin of sounds I recognize as potentially dangerous made me nervous, such as the repeated knocking noise from the Lakeview Generating Station recording. The recordings with audible words had a much different feel to them; I paid far less attention to the background noise than to the person talking.

My second choice was the site Interspecies, which was incredibly cool (in a “Holy crap, talking whales!” way). The audio on the site was created by humans and whales interacting through sound, which sounds bogus, but is pretty fascinating. For example, in one recording, an orca responds to the sounds of a reggae guitarist, while keeping the beat of the music. Very strange. It’s especially interesting if you think about its relationship with the Tagg piece; is getting an orca to respond to an electric guitar a gesture of conquest?