Crank up the volume: Expanding the reach and circulation of scholarly albums and audio papers

• In Event: "Not Like Us": Using Hip Hop Sensibilities to Broaden Notions of Knowledge, Expertise, and How to Disseminate It

Abstract

This paper focuses on scholarly genres that leverage aurality and sound design for argumentation and scholarly communication. Specifically, the paper addresses genres that lend themselves to hip-hop and Black electronic musical aesthetics, sound design, and experimentation. These genres include hip-hop albums produced alongside social science inquiry (Jay ARE, 2019; Johnson, 2019; Wallace, 2023), multimodal dissertation albums (Mooney, 2022), audio papers (Author & Coauthor, 2023), and embodied performance through hip hop feminist pedagogies (Brown & Kwayke, 2013).

The paper explores design features and affordances that hinder these scholarly objects from maximum utility, reach, circulation, and influence. The paper assumes that such scholarly objects are already legitimate genres but require certain design shifts related to availability (Hart-Davidson, 2017) and addressability (Witmore, 2010) to proliferate and maximize influence.

Conceptually, this paper grounds itself in an understanding of hip-hop as an outgrowth of its aesthetic system: flow, rupture, layering, and sampling (Rose, 1994). Hence, scholarly communication through hip-hop -- whether through language or sound -- happens, at least in part, through these aesthetics. The paper also roots itself in an understanding that scholarly objects -- books, articles, albums, etc. -- are bound by disciplining regimes (Adema, 2021). These forms of binding are around authorship, commodity, and perceived fixity and stability. Thus, unbinding these objects requires attending to their design characteristics.

This paper uses a peer-reviewed audio paper composed by the author as a case to explore unbinding. An audio paper is a scholarly genre addressing a research question through performance, sonic aesthetics, technological mediation, affect, and materiality (Groth & Samson, 2019). Thus, the audio paper lends itself to hip-hop and Black electronic music aesthetics and experimentation. Using this audio paper as an example, the paper explores the following two points:

Design features restricting use and circulation: Important to this point is availability and addressability of scholarly objects. The availability of a scholarly object/text can be understood as how easily another scholar can find, use, share, separate, or combine parts of that object/text (Hart-Davidson, 2017). Addressability is how objects/texts allow for understanding and representing as pieces with communicable locations -- not just as “black boxed” inscrutable wholes. The paper argues that scholarly objects using hip hop sonic aesthetics will reach wider use, circulation, and influence if their designs affords more availability and addressability.

Hip Hop traditions: The paper also explores how some traditions of hip-hop sound practice may limit usefulness and circulation. One example is the practice of secrecy around breaks, samples, and tracks extending back to the foundations of hip-hop DJing (Schloss, 2014). This practice -- extended into scholarly objects composed through hip-hop sound practices -- fortifies their closed, bounded, and inscrutable designs. Hence, the paper proposes a viable path forward is not simply arguing for the legitimacy of albums and songs as they already exist in their artistic contexts. Rather, a viable path entails unbinding some of the ways these objects have unintentionally closed themselves off from being more addressable and indexable in scholarly contexts.

Author

• Emery Marc Petchauer, Teachers College, Columbia University