"Yankee Doodle" as Affective Catchment: Following Sonic Rhythms in an After-School Documentary Filmmaking Program

• In Event: Music, Movement, and Media: Tracing (Inter)Active Sounds and Sonic Interaction Across Diverse Learning Ecologies

Abstract

Educational ethnographers often treat sound as an aspect of human interaction, paying analytic attention to talk and other sounds deemed relevant to learning events (e.g., Bautista & Roth, 2012). In this presentation we resist what Leander and Rowe (2011, following Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) called a “representational approach” to social life, which “freeze[s] continuous streams of action as moments in time and space” (p. 431). Instead we follow the trajectory of an episode of work in an afterschool documentary filmmaking program called Digital Studio (DS) to understand how rhythmic entanglements of actions and materials shape and are shaped by sound, with particular attention to the affective nature of these flows. We take up affect as simultaneously public and intimate, trans-personal and personal (Stewart, 2007). We extend Erickson’s (2004) study of sonic rhythms during family dinner table conversations, looking to understand how these rhythms emerge and transform dynamically while shaping affective engagements in learning activity.

Micro-analysis (Streeck & Mehus, 2005) used 3 video angles and 4 audio channels to follow the 10-minute trajectory of a group of three students and an adult facilitator (Jessie) at DS. Eight days before DS’s public screening, the class was working to adjust the film, adding new elements, editing existing footage, and planning additional shots. Two of the students were working with Jessie to add a voiceover track to the film and choose appropriate b-roll footage, which seemed to be corrupted, for visuals to accompany the track. The third sat at a computer to the side, typing up questions for an interview planned for the next day.

Sounds in the room included the steady hum of air; irregular clicks and thumps as computer mice were used, chairs were shifted, and objects were dropped; and talk amongst the three students and Jessie (the other students in the room worked quietly during this time). We traced the development of the periodic singing of the song Yankee Doodle, initiated by the tapping of a beat by one student, then taken up by various members of the group over time as they worked. In moments of quiet working one individual would begin tapping, humming, or singing a fragment, and others would join in or complete the next phrase. Yankee Doodle became what we describe as an “affective catchment”, following the concept of a gestural catchment (McNeill, 2000), a recurrent gesture that retains recognizable features to participants over a stretch of interaction. Like gestural catchments, these repeated recallings of Yankee Doodle retained meaning for participants even as the fragments transformed over time, produced with different rhythmic patterns (syncopated or legato), remixed (a version from once-popular television show Barney), played from a phone, and finally associated with the swimming pool game Marco Polo. We argue that the meaning that emerged and developed for the Yankee Doodle singing was affective, transforming the anxieties of the ongoing activity into playful—at times joyful—and sustainable work engagements. The affective catchment of Yankee Doodle was distributed across individuals and groups, a binder for collaborative work over time.

Authors

• Jasmine Y. Ma, New York University

• Molly Louise Kelton, WA