Time Stretching Memory: Haunting, Unforgetting, and Sound Design in the Audio Essay

• In Event: Futuring Scholarly Expression Through Sound, Sound Design, and Music: A Listening Session with Liner Notes

Abstract

This presentation focuses on sound design techniques like time stretching, pitch shifting, and distortion, and how they work in relation to argumentation and communication in a scholarly audio essay. (Time stretching, pitch shifting, and distortion are audio processing/aesthetic techniques from UK jungle and Black electronic music traditions). This focus comes from a qualitative research project that used archival poetry slam recordings, semi-structured interviews, and field recordings to examine the spectral afterlife of a high school poetry slam my high school students and I co-constructed. Through sound design techniques, the audio essay seeks to invoke a future that never came. As my students graduated and I left the secondary classroom to pursue my doctorate, we left behind an archive of sounds. In this audio essay, these sounds are timestretched, pitched, and distorted to reflect the instability of memory and the interrupted futures we often ask youth to navigate. Through this approach to sound and archive, I engage what Simon Reynolds (2024) calls memoradelia as a hauntological method that surfaces emotional residues through sonic distortion and archival interference. The audio essay functions as an invocation of our writing collective, an electronic re-membering (Dillard, 2008) of a space we are still trying to grieve and understand. Overall, the audio essay seeks to unforget a youth poetry slam through sounds that defined its writing community and persist into the future.

Author

• Brian Mooney, Fairleigh Dickinson University