Stuttering Toward Method: The Challenge of Sound to Everyday Practice

• In Event: 30.065 - Productive Methodological Tensions: Intervening Through Creativity, Collaboration, and Critique

Abstract

It appears as though we are in (another) spike in our ever evolving relationship to the sensuous. While it may seem as though attention to the sensorium is either resurgent or emergent, it is more often the case that academics across the social sciences and humanities are again turning their attention to that which was always already there. The focus of this proposed paper on sound methodologies is a case in point. Where the field of sound studies is still continuing to emerge as an academic site of study—a node of the sensory that focuses on all aspects of the sonic regardless of locus of a given researcher’s scholarly attention or their home field in a (possibly) non-sonic-oriented academic discipline (e.g., Kim-Cohen, 2009; Sterne, 2012)—sound has long been a site of study, not only as music but also as science (Erlmann, 2010), for example. Sound-as-method has a similarly wide-ranging, intertwined mangrove-like roots that range from early recordings to musique concrete to radio and beyond. In other words, this isn’t only a sound intervention, it’s sound attention and what we gain when we utilize the sonic in metaphor and in practice.
 
Rather than return to points raised elsewhere about the possibilities of sound to interrupt textual understandings in either qualitative research or educational practices (e.g., Author, 2011, 2013; Drewal, 2002; Makagon & Neumann, 2009), this proposed soundtexted piece takes such understandings as a given to performatively articulate the possibilities and challenges of sounded methodologies as qualitative research. Pressing at previous iterations of sonic methodologies, this work takes scholarship and produces it as a fully sounded work, where the intention and attention of an academic argument is sonic and firmly rooted in the emergent neither nor. Its production underscores that sound does things that cannot be described well with words while carrying the sound of those words even in your head as you read. Its central interruption and provocation then might be: a) how do current moves in post-qualitative/post-humanist move beyond sonic conceptualizations of ecologies and trajectories and, conversely, b) how might sound methods help to further enunciate a more ethically political means for gathering, considering, and presenting information?

Author

• Walter S. Gershon, Kent State University