Erin Anderson is an award-winning multimedia storyteller and assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s writing program.

She wants to give away her voice.

Put differently, such rhetoricaldesign organizes an experience, less to persuade in any direct sense, but to attune and inflectour sense of bodily inhabitancy and the cradle of intelligibility within which we comport ourselves.

More precisely, I am going to argue that examining something as small as anoperating system's startup music can open a new window on how we understand our relation tocomputers and computer software.

Why does Microsoft Windows play music upon startup?

My food opera work has its genesis in conversations and sketches dating back to 2006,

The most well-known example is perhaps The Sound of the Sea, developed at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, England; this dish is served with an iPod in a conch shell allowing diners to hear a field recording of ocean surf on headphones while they dine.

Perhaps the most famous milestone in this rapprochement was Spanish chef Ferran Adrià’s “G Pavilion” at the Documenta 12 art exhibition in 2007.

Our goal was to tell the story of sustainable food practices by sonically connecting diners to the sources of their meals.

theatrical narrative structures (including non-linear or generative narratives) that might tell a story, spatial or landscape meditations that might resemble a sound installation, and ritual events such as a Passover Seder or a wedding ceremony.

I identify the main innovations in these food operas as follows:

table in the restaurant is outfitted with speakers, one for each diner, totaling thirty channels of coordinated, real-time, algorithmic, spatially deployed sound in all.

audio-gustatory events that I decided to call “food operas.”

Back in 1997, Heston Blumenthal introduced his iPod-enhanced

Have you knowingly experienced synaesthesia when it comes to taste? Does matching sound to taste seem a massive, unnecessary faff? Does restaurant noise often spoil your meal?

Spence reckons this is because umami may be immune to noise suppression. If he proves his hypothesis, perhaps concentrating on umami-rich ingredients such as tomatoes, parmesan, mushrooms and cured meats in the sky could help obliterate plane-food hell.

devised some abstract live performances that would do the trick with more feeling. "It works with coffee, too," she adds, and she foresees exciting possibilities such as sound replacing sugar in your morning espresso.

The Crossmodal Laboratory at Oxford University

Ben & Jerry's, for example, is considering a sonic range of ice-cream flavours, with QR codes on the tubs that will allow eaters to access complementary sounds via their phones.

Sound is the final frontier in food presentation.

if I listen to a low-pitched sound, my taste awareness somehow shrinks to the back of my tongue and focuses on the chocolate's bitter elements. When I switch to a high frequency, the floodgates to sweetness open up and my entire mouth kicks back in a warm, sugary bath.

I am sitting at my kitchen table eating chocolate in the name of science.

out the big guns when they turned on the deterrent tones. Not to mention their actual guns.

“achieves maximum sound projection and penetration beyond 2,000 meters” and can reach 149 decibels.

devices were originally developed in response to the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.

LRAD sound cannons, or Long Range Acoustic Devices, and they allow for very serious crowd control.

Retrofits are problematic because they tend to be added on only after complaints are lodged and determined to be legitimate.

multimodal texts function as well as the ways that multiple channels of communication occur simultaneously within a multimodal environment.

"knowledge is produced and power is exchanged"

multiple channels and interactional resources that, taken together, convey meaning.

semiotic resources that aim to activate multiple senses (most often those of sight and hearing)

The definition of multimodality used in this essay includes both multimodal texts and multimodal environments.

Such work can cultivate greater inclusivity within our profession and our classrooms.

conceptualizing an ethical infrastructure for rhetoric and composition studies, in this section I highlight the multimodal inhospitality

First, many multimodal texts are not commensurable across modes. Second, inaccessible multimodal spaces are too often remedied by a problematic turn to the retrofit. Third, texts and environments are rarely flexible enough to be manipulated by users.

Stoever’s trailblazing account of sound’s role in racial formation in the U.S.; Fred Moten’s enormously influential remix of radical black aesthetics, largely focused on music but including broader sonic phenomena like the scream of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester; Bryan Wagner’s work on the role of racial violence in the “coon songs” written and recorded by George W. Johnson, widely considered the first black phonographic artist; Dolores Inés Casillas’s explication of Spanish-language radio’s tactical sonic coding at the Mexican border; Derek Vaillant’s work on racial formation and Chicago radio in the 1920s and 30s.

I’m struck, however, by the relative absence of a certain strain of work in these volumes—an approach that is difficult to characterize but that is probably best approximated by the term “American Studies.”

The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012), edited by Karen Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch; The Sound Studies Reader (2013), edited by Jonathan Sterne; and Keywords in Sound (2015),

The New School offered me an opportunity to come back to “Never Heard Such a Thing” at a time when the field of sound studies has grown more prominent and coherent

For those who heard the lynching recordings, this new technology became another site at which they were reminded of the potential price of challenging the racist presumptions that underwrote this modernity

new sound reproduction to Americans on street corners, at country fairs, and in other public venues.

But in fact, white supremacy provided the fuel for many early commercial phonographic recordings, including not only ethnic humor and “coon songs” but a form of “descriptive specialty”—the period name for spoken-word recordings about news events and slices of life—that reenacted the lynchings of black men

what Jennifer Stoever calls the “sonic color line” has become newly audible to many white Americans with the attention the #blacklivesmatter movement has drawn to police violence perpetrated routinely against people of color.

Nonetheless, contemplating them offers one charged example of how race shapes listening

 World Listening Day is a time to think about the impacts we have on our auditory environments and, in turn, their effects on us.

Some of the processes or original information may be different but to hear sound all I do is to listen. I have no more idea of how I hear than you do.

For instance when a phone rings I hear a kind of crackle. However, it is a distinctive type of crackle that I associate with a phone so I know when the phone rings. This is basically the same as how normally hearing people detect a phone, the phone has a distinctive type of ring which we associate with a phone.

Eventually I managed to distinguish the rough pitch of notes by associating where on my body I felt the sound with the sense of perfect pitch I had before losing my hearing. The low sounds I feel mainly in my legs and feet and high sounds might be particular places on my face, neck and chest.

With very low frequency vibration the ear starts becoming inefficient and the rest of the body’s sense of touch starts to take over. For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration, in reality they are the same thing.

Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain.

For instance, there is a common misconception that deaf people live in a world of silence.

his essay is designed to set the record straight and allow people to enjoy the experience of being entertained by an ever evolving musician rather than some freak or miracle of nature.

If the audience is instead only wondering how a deaf musician can play percussion then I have failed as a musician. For this reason my deafness is not mentioned in any of the information supplied by my office to the press or concert promoters.

It is the musician’s job to paint a picture which communicates to the audience the scene the composer is trying to describe.

vocality (voice), as a peculiar category of sound that attends speech but also exceeds it, and as a mediated material that pushes the boundaries of human embodiment and agency.

Under this framework, digital voice becomes not simply a hazard, but rather a resource: a performative material with potential to act and to affect in its own right.

Recently, however, new voice recording practices have begun to blur the boundaries between the living and the dead, giving rise once again to questions about “presence.”

According to Brandon LaBelle, amplification technologies shape the voice to the extent that they “multiply the body,” “displacing it, throwing it beyond the here and now, toward other centers” (Background Noise 135).

argues that “[t]he voice is not personal: it expresses nothing of the cantor, of his soul; it is not original

Certainly, from the perspective of human perception, it seems reasonable to suggest that, when we hear a voice speaking language, it is the language we hear first

ultimately, we always hear in the voice not just anybody but a particular somebody

The idea that voice is sound should stand as common sense.

To this end, my analysis draws together an interdisciplinary body of perspectives on voice from fields such as philosophy, physiology, film and media, and digital aesthetics to take up the questions: What is vocality? Why does it matter? And what can it contribute to digital rhetoric?

Building on this momentum, scholars of sonic rhetoric have worked to carve out a space for sound as a subject of rhetorical analysis, a material for multimodal text production,2 and a methodological model for alphabetic writing practice.

“to give attention to sound or sounds or to perceive with the ear, to hear with thoughtful attention, to consider seriously”.

Deep Listening designers, engineers and city planners could enhance the quality of life

More often than not urban living causes narrow focus and disconnection.

Deep Listening a process that extends the listener to this continuum as well as to focus instantaneously on a single sound (engagement to targeted detail) or sequences of sound/silence

comes from noticing my listening or listening to my listening

perception of sounds to include the whole space/time continuum of sound

commissioner, or member of a jury, or to fully understand something, or to attend Mass or hear confession in a Roman Catholic Church”

to listen attentively, or that information has been received especially by ear, or to hear somebody or some thing, or to consider something officially as a judge,

16hz to 20,000hz

Information, knowledge of events, feelings and experiences can be brought forward from the past to the present

practicing listening with the understanding that the complex wave forms continuously transmitted to the auditory cortex from the outside world by the ear require active engagement with attention.

d references to four sound essays composed by students at Michigan Tech, the University of Louisville, and The Ohio State Universit

e encouraged some teachers of composition to rediscover aurality as a valuable modality of expressio

Michelle has hosted a radio show, voluntarily co-taught multimedia courses and independent studies in the university and the community, as well as taken a digital storytelling workshop, in an effort to keep up with the technologies of multimedia production. All of this occurs outside of her regular workload (or what counts as such).

Mary, as a lifelong musician, has composed and performed music using instruments and voice and has recorded in several studios. She follows sound technologies out of interest and passion--not because they are valued in any way by English departments.

for the past several years the authors have assigned to our composition students multimedia research and documentary projects that feature sound, as well as words and images.

For many of our younger students, life is already rich with sounds--they live in a music video. Because of immersion in popular culture, they are already sensitive to how music and voice set mood, create drama, and fill in emotional gaps of the visual picture.