Sonic Play: On the B-Side of Literacy and Songwriting

• In Event: Amplifying Youth Voices in Hip-Hop Literacies and Sonic Storytelling

Abstract

This article explores sonic play in proximity to a music, literacy, and songwriting for social change community-based initiative for middle-school youth. Through a participatory research design carried out by a team of teaching artists, we leverage ideas about time, space, and narrative under the concept of sonic flux to understand youth's sonic and aural play on digital soundmaking technologies. We break from a fixation on the written and spoken word and address sound, aurality, and technologies that are often present but muted in literacies and songwriting scholarship. Our findings address how the joy, laughter, and play of young musicians/writers move through loops, drones, and durations -- unbound by the narrative structures that often code literacy and songwriting spaces.

Author

• Emery Marc Petchauer, Teachers College, Columbia University