A Way of Listening: Descriptive Review as Sonic Ethnography in a Collaborative Inquiry

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 10:50 am
  In Roundtable Session: Describing the Immeasurable: The Transformative Potential of Descriptive Review for Teaching, Learning, and Research (Table 29)

Abstract

Objectives
Carini (2011) adapted the descriptive review process for student artwork as “a way of looking that honors the complexity and uniqueness of each person” (p. 39). This paper presents findings from a collaborative inquiry into how sound and listening might offer teachers a way to learn more about themselves, their practice, and their students. Teacher participants reflected on, recorded, and created remixes of the sounds of their daily lives. I adapted Carini’s descriptive review of student artwork process as a way of listening deeper to these sonic artifacts, allowing me to pay deeper attention to the embodied and felt aspects of these participants’ sonic lives.
Theoretical framework
Sonic agency (Labelle, 2018), an embodied capacity to listen, not listen, sound, and resound in ways that reframe and transform our daily interactions; critical listening positionality (Robinson, 2020), which illuminates sonic privileges, capital, control, and power; and atmospheric attunement (Stewart, 2011), “an intimate, compositional process of dwelling” on “qualities, rhythms, forces, relations, and movements” (p. 445), frame the design and analysis of this research.
Methods and data sources
Three weekly “podcasts” and an online discussion forum invited music educators to listen deliberately, reflect on, collect, share, discuss, exchange, and remix the disappearing and transforming sounds of their past and current lives. Participants posted recordings of significant daily sounds and composed remixes that mixed these sounds with composed music. This paper shares excerpts from these remixes and outlines how I analyzed them using my adaptation of the descriptive review process.
Results
This project is inspired by Ghiso (2016) who asked kindergarten students from immigrant families to document their lives with disposable cameras. Collaborative analysis of the sonic remixes revealed echoes and reverberations between teachers, illuminating similar themes of empathy and care found in Ghiso’s research. Understandings and connections between daily embodied listening and teaching practices also emerged through my analysis. Teachers made connections between their deep listening and creative work in this project and what they hope students might experience in their classrooms.
Scholarly significance
The guiding principles of the descriptive process alone hold some possibilities for productive disruptions of how music is often taught and researched. A long tradition of music festivals, competitions, and programs emphasizing accurately executed performances is in deep need of evaluation and disruption. Schultz (2003) states that “taking a listening stance implies that teachers place students’ humanity alongside their own at the centre of the classroom and curriculum,” and “when teachers listen for the specificity of who students are, they recognize the multiple and often tightly intertwined identities and cultures students draw from as they enter classrooms” (p. 35). My research gave participants and me a chance to breathe and listen to who we are, to know ourselves more deeply through exploration of the sonic, while also thinking of new, less narrow and exclusive, possibilities for our music classrooms.

Author

• Doug Friesen, Queen's University - Kingston