Sonic Histories, Sound Pedagogies: Articulating Educational Sound Studies

• In Event: Educational Sound Studies and Sonic Pedagogies: Tales From the Field

Abstract

This performative presentation seeks to document the polyphonic panoply of possibilities that is educational sound studies through an examination of what might be called sound pedagogies. Split into two overarching parts, this work first details the kinds of events and understandings that might be conceptualized as “sound pedagogies,” an expansion from formal (schools) and informal (i.e., after school programs) schooling to be inclusive of ever-expanding pathways human animals might be taught by things, ecologies, and processes.

The textual portion of this piece attends to important questions at the intersection of what might be called sound pedagogies. On one hand, although not certainly only sonic in ideation and expression, this textual argument performatively makes the case that pedagogies have always been sounded in literal and metaphorical fashion (e.g., Erickson, 2004; DuBois, 1903). On the other hand, this argument traces some of the often overlooked dangers embedded in notions of sound, noise, voice, and volume (e.g., Bobbitt, 1909; Fordham, 1993; M. M. Smith, 2006) that can be understood as forms of sonic warfare (Goodman, 2010) or iterations of audible empire (Radano & Olaniyan, 2016).

This more traditional paper portion of the work is joined by a soundwork interwoven throughout that then stands on its own. The soundwork is at once utterly constructed and emergently meaningful, an intentional combination of disparate sounds, locations, and sources that articulate what sound pedagogies can mean while demonstrating that we have always already been taught by the sonic. Situated somewhere between more recent, open interpretations of soundscapes (e.g., Samuels, et al), sonic arts (Cobussen et. al., 2017), and emerging sonic methodologies (e.g, Bull & Cobussen, 2020), this soundwork, like ethnographic film, speaks for itself without the need of textual explication. A sonic expression of pedagogical understandings and the educational ecologies that engender such possibilities. Echoing sound movements—at once diffuse and targeted, positioned and mobile, emergent and decayed, resonant and reverberating—sounds seep in our pores and bounce off our bodies, teaching all the while.

Author

• Walter S. Gershon, Rowan University
  Presenting Author