What Does ABER (Arts-Based Educational Research) Sound Like? Sonic Arts, Sonic Scholarship, and Hip-Hop

• In Event: Sound Arts, Hip-Hop, and Arts-Based Educational Research: A Performatively Corrective Counter-Factual

Abstract

Arts Based Educational Research (ABER) has in many ways moved from an outsider position in the in the late 1990s and early 2000s to the kinds of multi-sensuous, media-rich research practices that have since become central to decolonial (Bejarano, Juarez, Garcia & Goldstein, 2019), youth participatory action research (YPAR) (Dominguez & Cammarota, 2022), and more traditional social sciences, such as what is now called multimodal anthropology (Westmorland, 2022). A burgeoning attention to the sonic has similarly blossomed over the same time period, a movement that has seen the rise of sound studies (e.g., Sterne, 2012) and sonic arts (Kahn, 2001; Labelle, 2015) as well as sonic forms of research (e.g., Author, 2012, 2013). However, as this panel documents, there remains a dearth of attention to the sonic in ABER. Such an absence raises an important question that has been asked previously of other educational subfields: What does ABER sound like?

This proposed soundwork (Author, 2018) is one answer to this question. It is at once an iteration of sonic scholarship (Author, 2018), sonic ethnography (Author, 2012, 2013), sound art, and hip-hop that can also be conceptualized as a soundscape. This is because it is a piece written to be voiced that expresses aspects of a longitudinal sonic ethnography utilizing aspects of hip-hop, including beat production, sampling of young people’s voices and music, and vocal cadence that attends to rhythm and pitch, though this particular instance is closer to what is often understood as spoken word than a cypher. Such a complex combination is an example of what the sonic can bring to ABER, a multiphonic—when an instrument designed for single notes is utilized to produce more than one simultaneous note/pitch/sound—polyphony, a resonance where all voices combine to form an overarching whole yet need not be resolved to be significant in the mix.

The argument presented is itself performative in argument and expression. It is an argument about the possibilities of the sonic in ABER and how those understandings can lead to more significant everyday educational interactions. Education is largely a sonic affair, from the voices we use to convey our possibilities and challenges to the tones that buffet our bodies as we work in never-silent educational ecologies. What might it mean to what counts as educational research and to teaching and learning if rather than watching and assessing we might listen more closely to one another together?

Author

• Walter S. Gershon, Rowan University