Tracing the Shape of Sound and Story: Examining Sonorous Systems of Interaction in Learning to Escape

• In Event: Music, Movement, and Media: Tracing (Inter)Active Sounds and Sonic Interaction Across Diverse Learning Ecologies

Abstract

Escape Rooms – cooperative games wherein a team completes a series of timed challenges – are an emerging resource in contemporary teaching and learning. From facilitating motivation in computer science education (Borrego, et. al., 2017), to enhancing learning in the health sciences (Gómez-Urquiza, J. L., et al., 2019; Hermanns, et al., 2017), the simulated constraints and tensions of escape are providing students with real-time opportunities to demonstrate knowledge through interactive skill-building and teamwork. Despite recent research documenting participant’s perspectives on collaboration and communication across a single escape room (see, for example, Pan., et al., 2017), few studies examine how these games foster and transform group (inter)action across time. Similarly, there remains scant scholarship outlining how the media and technology of the room – its design, layout, and sonic backdrop – mediate learning and communication. Taking this gap as impetus for research, this presentation asks the following research questions: How does sound shape interaction? What are the audible contours of (inter)active alliance in learning to escape?
Thinking at the axes of interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Kendon, 1990), affect theory (Anderson, 2014; Massumi, 2002), and sound studies (Bull & Beck, 2010; Gallagher, 2016), this presentation imagines sound as an (inter)active interlocutor and atmospheric partner in game-based learning ecologies. Assuming that it offers a felt dynamism to human and more-than-human activity and movement, sound is both a visceral and vibrational force. Offering us considerations into that which falls outside of representational meaning (e.g., methods for documenting interaction), sound propels us to imagine “how life is composed in the midst of affects” (Lorimer, 2008, p. 552). Hence, when examined as part of an escape room ecology, sound conveys frequency, tempo, and timbral information. Sound, however, also makes “immaterial, invisible, taken-for-granted atmospheres and emotional resonances” (Gallagher and Prior, 2014, p. 269) while mediating activity, seen and unseen.
Stemming from a larger study examining the trajectory of five adults “learning to escape” across a series of multi-linear escape rooms, sources of data include: observational notes, 1:1 participant interviews, GoPro recordings of in-game interactions, and audio recordings of the group talk. Data analysis was an iterative process of both examining participants embodied interaction during the escape process as well as interrogating sound (e.g., tempo of the soundtrack, speech) on its own accord. To understand the relationships among mode, bodies, environments, and materials (interaction-affect-sound) we followed Erickson’s (2006) whole-to-part analytic procedure. We watched the video all the way through, using field notes to mark time and note verbal and nonverbal phenomena. Then, we found significant sonic episodes, what Jordan & Henderson (1995) refer to as shapes of events. We analyzed these events for sonic dissonance and changes in interaction, as mediated through sound.
Findings highlight how sound mobilized directional interaction among participants. Patterns of interaction formed through what Gallagher (2016) conceptualized as “vibrational assemblages.” Sound – both as a heard and felt material – challenged participants to recalibrate how they attuned to the acousmatic patterns of time, space, and the idea of “escape.”

Authors

• Jon Michael Wargo, Boston College

• Melita Morales, Boston College

• Alexander Power Corbitt, Boston College

• Joseph Madres, Boston College