Soundscapes: Rhetorical Entwinements for Composing Sound in Four Dimensions

Chapter Sections

1. Introduction 2. Soundscape Studies within Rhetoric and Composition 3. Challenges for Soundscape Design Pedagogy 4. Four Dimensions of Soundscape Design 5. Rhetorical Entwinements for Four Dimensions of Soundscape Design 6. A Concluding Entwinement 7. Credits and References

5. Rhetorical Entwinements for Four Dimensions of Soundscape Design

I have chosen the term entwinement as opposed to juxtaposition or connection to demonstrate that I think each dimension of soundscape design calls on and evokes a rhetorical concept in a way that provides less of a sense of a gap between the concept and dimension. In other words, an entwinement may call on both the dimension and rhetorical concept in unexpectedly inextricable ways. For the four dimensions of soundscape design, I propose the following entwinements:

1. selection of sound sources with doxa;
2. ordering of sounds in time with dispositio;
3. construction of simultaneity and layers with copia; and
4. spatialization of sound with saphes.

Sound Sources and Doxa

In her introduction to doxa, Ruth Amossy (2002) wrote, "Broadly speaking … all that is considered true, or at least probable, by a majority of people endowed with reason, or by a specific group, can be called doxic" (p. 369). Amossy went on to discuss how, while traditionally understood as "common knowledge," common belief, or commonly accepted ideas, doxa moves in two possible directions—some link doxa to banality and the idea of accepted truth as stymieing creativity, while others draw on its "constructive functions" in human communication (p. 369). Amossy said, "Endoxa were, and still are, opinions that have authority insofar as they are part of the general consensus" (p. 371), and while that position is not the same as Truth, the capacity and value of doxa is in the way it draws on a "social link" (p. 371). Adam Ellwanger (2017) took this point a step further: "doxa is rarely explicit because it operates not as the subject of our conversation, but below it—doxa as shared belief serves as a precursor to communication" (p. 185). What Amossy, Ellwanger, and the other theorists they cite—like Anne Cauquelin, Jim Kuypers, and Chantal Mouffe—are interested in is the relationship among doxa, Truth, deliberation, and democracy. Considering what is doxic in our sonic relationships draws on the communicative potential in the gap between sound and source.

In the context of soundscape design, doxa offers a productive rhetorical entwinement with the search for and selection, recording, analysis, or archiving of sound and sound sources. The selection or recording of sound sources within soundscape design offers students an opportunity to explore the unspoken assumptions about sound sources and sound types held by their communities of practice or the participants/listeners involved in their soundscape design. However, this is not simply a matter of understanding an audience, but of drawing on the constructive function of an accepted truth about a sound source. Some of this sense of doxa can be demonstratd by examining the way foley sounds work by imitating our sonic commonplaces for particular sources through the use of different materials or "acousmatic" sounds, as Pettman (2017) discussed in terms of "the cybernetic voice." Pettman noted the intimacy possible when listeners "fill in the blanks" for a voice without a body, as in the film Her and the case of "Australian Karen," a popular voice selection on GPS (pp. 17–18). This "filling in" relies on a connection between an actual sound source and doxic notions of what a source should sound like. Much like opinion polls that turn questions into a perceived consensus or the foley sounds that "mimic" a diegetic sound on film, a doxa about sound sources may involve how a certain decibel level, pitch, speed, and even timbre become constructed as a consensus—a perceived, given truth about how a bird sounds or how a dog barks—even when that is far from an ontological truth. For instance, listen to the following sound of footsteps on a surface:

While the original sound may resonate with doxic assumptions about footsteps walking across a number of different surfaces, layering in the sound of wind causes this sound to draw on a doxic notion of walking in the snow.

However, the audio clip is not a field recording of someone walking through snow. In fact, the audio clip notes that the actual sound source is someone walking in the sand. An entwinement between sound and doxa emphasizes the distinction between, on the one hand, accepted belief with communicative potential and, on the other, an ontological Truth.

Also, while listening practices are unique to particular listeners, doxa may also entwine with our notions of listening to sound and sound "symbolism." Although Clay Spinuzzi (2001) reminded us that there are limits to metaphor becoming symbolic of one set of relationships or meanings, Schafer (1977) devoted time in a chapter on classification to discuss the potential for classifying particular sounds as "sound romances" and "sound phobias" based on context (p. 146). In other words, a sound such as wind is not a source of sonic romance or sonic fear in an ontological sense (or a static sense, as Spinuzzi put it), but for those people "where tropical storms may blow in suddenly from the sea, strong winds are disliked" (p. 147). For those at risk from tropical storms, the sound of wind calls on a commonplace of anxiety and danger even when the sound is decoupled from its actual source—that is, when no storm is present. Sound acts to remind us that truth is contingent and doxa need not always be limiting; it can also harness communicative potential.

By way of a final example, doxa and source selection also works on what Don Ihde (2007) calls our "auditory imagination" (pp. 131–136) by drawing on our own internal consensus and unspoken assumptions about sound sources. Imagine the sound of a bird. Was your auditory invocation of a bird related to any of the sounds in the following clip?

Each bird sound featured in the clip allows us to work communicatively in different ways, and each draws on a different auditory imagination and doxa about what birds "sound like." As an entwinement, doxa offers students language for thinking about the slippage between sound and sound source. However, it also offers students tangible experiences with alternately creating sounds that take advantage of that slippage (like assignments or activities with foley sound) and making explicit any implicit notions of what a type of sound "sounds like" by comparing recorded sound files with auditory imaginations of a given type of sound source. These are experiences that not only benefit soundscape design but also become concrete examples for how language draws on slippages between consensus and truth or reveals the distinctions between imagined use and invoked use.

Unfolding in Time and Dispositio

Perhaps the most obvious, the next rhetorical entwinement comes from the concept of dispositio, or arrangement. This relationship between sound and structure is one that Peter Elbow (2006) proposed in his article "The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization in Writing." In the beginning of his article, Elbow lamented that while reading text we are like ants crawling around a painting, unable to read but a small bit at a time (p. 621). So too have many theorists of sound focused on its ephemeral, temporal qualities. Walter Ong (2002) stated, "There is no way to stop sound and have sound.… If I stop the movement of sound, I have nothing—only silence, no sound at all" (p. 32). Ihde (2007) said that "the auditory world is one of 'flux' and that it is primarily temporal" (p. 57, emphasis original). Schafer (1977) noted that there is no equivalent to aerial photography for sound, and thus it is impossible to capture "the instantaneous impression which photography can create" (p. 7). It would seem that time is frequently identified in the structuring and experiencing of sound.

In a classical sense, dispositio also has to do with time in that it draws on ordering of parts. W. Ross Winterowd (1971) reminded us that, according to Cicero, classical oration is divided into "exordium to gain the audience's attention, narratio to state the speaker's case, confirmatio to prove that case, reprehensio to refute the opponent's case and peroratio to sum up" (p. 40). He stated that while the sonnet is a matrix, a form dictated by "the outward, mechanical features of that kind of poem," classical oratory is a construct—"the parts of which become meaningful only in relation to each other and to two other entities which might be called the speaker's case and the opponent's case" (p. 40). Winterowd used this example to not only note the play of form and order, but to argue for a definition of form such that "Form might be defined as the internal set of consistent relationships perceived in any stretch of discourse, whether poem, play, essay, oration, or whatever" (p. 41, emphasis original). It is this "stretch" of discourse or unfolding of an event that seems to unite dispositio with time.

Both Winterowd and Elbow pointed to music in understanding the opportunities and questions involved in structuring language. Elbow (2006) wrote, "The problem of organizing a piece of writing is not so much a problem in 'structure'—building a visual or spatial creation and giving some kind of satisfying visual/spatial relationship among parts. It's more a problem in binding time" (p. 625). Winterowd (1971) began his discussion with a scenario involving a "musically illiterate" listener: "The shadowy and fantasmal form of a Mozart divertimento hovers in the consciousness just below the level at which it can be discussed; it is ineluctably there in the mind of the 'beholder,' but inexpressible, a configuration, a pattern, that constitutes its own content" (p. 39). He also cited Donald Davie, noting that the difference between the seemingly similar syntax of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound in the Cantos is a "musical" one, based on "rhythm" (p. 42). What differs in Winterowd's and Elbow's approaches is that while Winterowd used music to note the possibility of structure and grammar even beyond the notion of "meaning," for Elbow music represents the key to thinking about "organization as energy holding temporal events together" (Elbow, 2006, p. 627).

What does this mean for soundscape design? Certainly sounds unfold in time and the unfolding of sounds along a temporal dimension is part of the way in which a soundscape may be organized or understood as it is designed, listened to, or composed. In his book Speech, Music, Sound, Theo van Leeuwen (1999) treated the concept of "time" and "interacting sounds" in two separate yet adjacent chapters. Within his discussion of time, van Leeuwen offered sustained discussion about measured and unmeasured sound and the experiential meaning potential of meters and phrasing, drawing on what we must do to produce sounds, such as our need to breathe (pp. 46, 53). Within his discussion of "interacting sounds," van Leeuwen explored the meaning potential of sequential sounds and the implications of repetition or response, as well as simultaneous interactions in unison or nonunison. For example, van Leeuwen proposed that even the length of a pause between turn-taking or sequentiality can indicate "real or symbolic distance (for example power difference)" between an initiator and reactor (pp. 76–77). A longer pause could indicate deference to the initiator or that a reactor is understood as located farther away.

For students designing soundscapes, the temporality of arranging sound can be quite challenging. If working within sound-editing software, temporality becomes notated visually as an assembling of sounds along a single track, but also at different time marks along different tracks. A map or a script becomes a reminder to students that not all sounds need to happen simultaneously or that not all tracks or plans should involve a static "looping" of sound where a single sound source is simply repeated without change or a track is "looped" for the duration of the listener's experience. For those first experiencing soundscape design, it may be particularly challenging to think about soundscapes as involving temporal events that are not necessarily verbal or narrative. For example, students are much more likely to think of sounds "strung" together explaining a story in time—like the following where there are footsteps, a door opening, and a scream:

This temporality draws on familiar notions of sounds simply enacting a miniature story. Each sound source neatly follows from the previous and each sound source exists discretely in its own time. We can imagine a visual story in which someone walks up to a door, it opens, and the person screams. It is not the case that this sort of sonic narrative-building doesn't have a place in soundscape design, but it is much trickier to think of temporal unfolding in a soundscape instead like the following:

Here there is still potentially a story at play, but it is one of change, and it involves a rhythm that in some ways may belie translation into the discursive. Rather than a baton-passing sequence of rain, wind, birds, there are overlapping sounds and temporal events unfolding in an arrangement that still involves simultaneity and temporal changes—not just by source, but also by features such as volume. Here, energy comes not from the surprise of each new source, but the suspension and play of tension along changes in sources and dynamics. For students not using sound-editing software, these changes in rhythm or volume can also be notated through typographical choices like spacing or bolding or font size increases on maps.

Finally, in terms of an entwinement between time and the arrangement of sound, Ceraso (2014) reminded us that sound, experience, and learning take place in bodies and time. She states that "multimodal listening practices involve a full-bodied awareness that heightens listeners' experience of the sensory, material, and environmental aspects of sonic interactions" (106). These experiences occur in time, material, and situated locations, and also take time. Similarly, Jonathan Stone (2015) has noted that unlike working with traditional print and visual texts, "listening can be a different and demanding experience insofar as it requires of rhetoric scholars more time and patience" in that audio experiences resist "skimming." I would argue that this is an advantage in having students explore temporal unfolding in soundscape design—students gain experience with working slowly through choices in duration, rhythm, repetition, sequencing, and unfolding that can be returned back to the written word. While students may be quite comfortable with the notion that words come one after another, they may remain "stuck" in those ideas of temporality. Just like temporality in a soundscape does not necessarily imply only a narrative sequence of sounds, working with unfolding sonic events may help students understand notions of rhythm, suspension, repetition, anticipation, and changes in dynamics within print texts. For example, Elbow (2006) reminded us not only that it is common in musical composition for melodies, themes, or phrases to be presented in a simple form and then complicated, but that this is just one example of how thinking about musical composition can translate into writing, where we seek to draw on principles of anticipation, repetition, energy, and binding time (pp. 641–642).

Simultaneous Layering and Copia

Another seemingly obvious alignment exists in the rhetorical entwinement between simultaneity in creating layers of sound and the rhetorical concept of copia. Thomas Sloane (1991), from whom this chapter's epigraph is drawn, noted of De Copia that "Erasmus aimed at a certain copiousness first of words and then of thought," but that his latter focus on "res, or that 'subject matter' which is to be acquired through 'invention,' has been largely ignored" (p. 114). Sloane then referenced Erasmus's own words in his "famous statement of his intentions, to give students the resources to 'turn one idea into more shapes than Proteus himself is supposed to have turned into'" (p. 116). In thinking about imitating Proteus, "the god of versatility," Sloane argued that Erasmus's method has less to do with verba "and everything to do with res, the very product of the multifarious but also heuristic and not infrequently scorned center of classical rhetoric, inventio, or how to think in a certain way about what you're doing when you create discourse" (p. 116).

While Sloane emphasied Erasmus's dual focus, William Weaver (2011) has traced the contribution of Renaissance scholar Philip Melanchton's restructuring of copia along three orders. Apart from the irony of a proliferating number of divisions for abundant discourse, Melanchton's distinction arranges figures not by word and thought, but along three units: word, speech, and amplification (Weaver, 2011, p. 369). Weaver said, "When it comes to the third order, consequently, [Melanchton] identifies as the object of amplification not the argument or thought but the speech (oratio)" (p. 382). This distinction is important because we might consider copia through the study of amplification—sounds that increase the realm of possibilities for other sounds, sonic relationships, and the soundscape itself.

When students make choices about how to layer sound, what they are considering is the outcome of multiplicity, abundance, variety, copiousness. Much like students and scholars of Erasmus, students may assume that this has to do with verba, or as Sloane (1991) said, "saying the same thing in different ways" (p. 116). However, layering sound is more complex than simply adding more layers to "say the same thing" differently. For instance, in the example above layers could create a doxic perception of one sound source as another (walking in sand perceived as walking in snow). Alternatively, layering sound can work on a structural level, creating a sense of space. Layers of sound can connect us to metaphors of sound in a textile sense—multiple layers creating a pleasant thickness or a paucity of layers making a space sound "thin." However, when too many layers or tracks compete in space and time, they can also create an effect more akin to cacophony. Far from simply representing choices in "style," copia in soundscape design can convey information about space, condition a listener's movements through a space (through a perception of the space as "thick" or "thin" with sound), and even cause a listener to avoid moving into spaces that feel already "filled" by sound.

In his discussion of simultaneity, van Leeuwen (1999) talked about meaning-potential differences between "interlock," an unstructured, simultaneous sounding in the same space such as the sound of multiple hammers working independently, and "social unison," a structured, simultaneous sound perceived positively as solidarity, belonging, and social bonding and negatively as conformity and disciplining (pp. 78–79). Next, van Leeuwen (1999) noted the musical development of polyphony, arising from counterpoint, and indicating a time in which Europe "had lost some of its cultural unity, yet managed to incorporate difference in a more complex and multifaceted identity" (p. 81). What van Leeuwen identified is the potential for differences in sonic choices operating within each of six domains to create, allow for, work against, or exemplify meaning-making. In the case of simultaneity (within the domain of interacting "voices"), van Leeuwen reminds us of the difference in attention, relation, purpose, and inventional value between different configurations of sounds that occur at the same time.

Thus, for soundscape design, we can consider layering simultaneous tracks or sounds as working in concert with the idea of invention. While copia is most often connected to the rhetorical canon of style, both Sloane (1991) and Weaver (2011) noted the inventive and analytic possibilities of copia. For instance, take the following scenario in soundscape design. A student wants to intervene in the existing soundscape of a café, creating a space that sounds warmer, fuller, and more densely populated. Such a design may begin with plans for a low ambient sound like shuffling and then layer in an electrical hum as follows:

However, adding additional layers may open the soundscape design up to invention. Although these two layers "fill" the space more, there is a delicate balance in which listeners may object to the sound of the hum and shuffling because there is no obvious source in a mostly empty café. Without additional layers it is too noticeable. As rhetoric must conceal its art, additional layers open up an inventional set of possibilities by masking and concealing sounds as much as adding sounds to a space. Does there then need to be a musical layer behind which the low-pitch clinking of plates is possible? Without that musical layer, the sounds of clinking plates might create a spooky dissonance for a listener in a nearly empty café.

This sort of compositional experience is not limited to sound, but helps to connect the idea of invention with meaning and fit. If the ideas of copia and simultaneous "layering" of sound are instead applied to written or verbal discourse, then students may feel prompted by several related questions: What does the addition of multiple "layers" of writing make possible? When does an additional layer open inventive possibilities or create confusion? When does the space of an argument become "filled" to the threshold of discomfort? In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman (2010) explored sound as it intersects with tonality and two tensions: the politics of noise and the politics of silence (p. xvii). Along the way, he offers theories of shifting affective tonalities as well as examples such as the use of sonic booms as "sound bombs" in the Gaza Strip in 2005 (p. xiii). While it is less likely that students' soundscape designs will take copia to the threshold of pain or invasive vibration, this dimension may afford discussion on the potentiality of simultaneous sounds (and words) enacting violence and violation.

Space, Spatialization, and Saphes

As I said in the beginning, space, the location of sound sources, and the relationships among sounds in space are among the most distinctive practices in soundscape design. While a soundscape involves temporality, it is in some ways unique in the way it uses space as a compositional resource. By spatialization, I here mean the spatial qualities of location and changes in location. While space and spatialization are not concepts traditionally considered in the composition of essays or text-based arguments, Wysocki (2005) has noted that space and spatial design is a not insignificant feature of even the most traditional word-processing conventions and material spaces in which we read and imagine as our worlds. Wysocki (2005) argued, "I wish to question what becomes unavailable when we think of word and image as [Gunther] Kress has suggested we do, as bound logically and respectively with time and with space" (p. 56). I do not mean to suggest that kind of dichotomous thinking either, or to suggest that sound and word are "temporal," but only to note that sound is often perceived as solely temporal, and soundscape design helps to make available other conceptions of the spatial nature of sound through requiring students to attend to space, location, and spatiality.

Within soundscape design, students must consider the consequences of visual, tactile, and sonic embodiment through locating sounds in space. Soundscapes are not ideally disembodied "texts" or objects to be studied from afar. While soundscapes may be dislocated from their spaces through recording, intervention/redesign, or the introduction of acousmatic sounds, listening experience is necessarily embedded in a place, whether that is a video game soundscape in a noisy two-bedroom apartment or an urban sound installation constructed in hybrid space and geolocated. For students designing soundscapes, space and spatialization can indicate the construction of the soundscape, listening or performance, or physical and visual structures for locating sound. For instance, sound may be spatialized within a track, where sound seems to "move" by changing dynamics or being located in the right or left speaker. However, spatialization in a soundscape could also involve fixing sound in particular places: microphones, laptops, Post-it notes with sound types written on them in fonts that indicate volume or timbre or repetitions.

I am suggesting that the rhetorical entwinement for this dimension is saphes. In tracing Aristotle's metaphorical thinking in defining "rhetoric" within his Rhetoric, Sara Newman (2001) presented Aristotle's "illuminary" metaphor in relation to clarity as follows: "clarity applies to expressions that enhance contingent situations and thus articulate individual insights: 'When a speaker throws more words at someone who already understands, he destroys the clarity/saphes by darkness'" (p. 8). Newman went on to show the ways in which that metaphor forms a part of Aristotle's intellectual method and affirms our contemporary understanding that clarity does not in fact rest on eradicating figures and tropes from expression. This is also a point that Scott Consigny (1987) has previously made in suggesting an alternate meaning for saphes, working not from a visual metaphor of clarity as a transparent windowpane, but a sonic metaphor of clarity as distinct, like bell-sound, able to displace the muddiness of other voices. While I have pointed to Consigny's piece often in previous writing as an example of shifting our assumptions from visual-centric epistemologies to those that allow for sonic possibilities (see Ahern, 2013), what I will briefly turn to now is the way that Consigny also drew on location in his thinking about saphes as "distinct," like a bell.

In explaining the difference between clarity like a windowpane and like a bell, Consigny (1987) wrote, "In this second construal, the rhetor is able to achieve 'clarity' when he renders his style clear of other styles; when, that is, he is able to displace them as locations from within which one is able to apprehend and interpret a situation" (p. 416, emphasis mine). He continued:

In this construal, each style is a means of "cutting away" other formulations; of demarcating a place that is clear, a topos or domain of topoi for oneself among competing articulations. Through the establishment of topoi, which are themselves derived from the tropes of his style, the rhetor locates himself in a discourse, among opposing styles and their respective modes of placement. (p. 416, emphasis mine)

Although topoi is often connected to a sense of "place," Consigny went on to use the term with imagery of the rhetor "placing" himself and the "demarcation of a location" from which the rhetor sounds apart from the voices of others—like a bell.

What does this have to do with considerations of space in soundscape design? Not only does the spatial dimension of soundscapes make them a genre of texts distinct from many other sonic forms, but I argue that location also serves as a metaphor for the virtue of clarity in soundscape design. The location of a dog barking within a soundscape creates a distinct space of listening and must also work against, with, and through the copia of the soundscape as a whole. However, the location of the dog barking also enacts metaphorical relationships (broadly speaking, based on foreground/background, up/down, and so forth) that make certain arguments possible amid the other sounds in the soundscape.

In a chapter on perspective, van Leeuwen (1999) wrote about a track of "ambient sounds" mixed such that they locate three distinctive sounds in different perspectives or locations using a Field/Ground/Signal approach (p. 19). Of the track that claims to transparently mix sounds of different habitats, van Leeuwen states, "This is not a recreation of the sounds of the forest. It recreates the three zones of the social world" where the cicadas are mixed low into the background (field); discrete, multiple birds are heard clearly in the ground; and the howler monkeys—closest socially to us and our species—are the signal sound heard as located most closely (19). What van Leeuwen identified in the example above is the ability of locations of sound to act metaphorically. In the following clips, listen for how a sense of space in the form of perceived perspective is achieved through a shifting sense of which sound is signal and which is ground.

In these examples, the ideas of perspective and metaphor act on what we consider closest to us. For instance, in the first clip the bell sounds from a disembodied or "middle" perspective until we have the addition of footsteps that then occupy a closer perspectival space to the listener in both a metaphorical and embodied sense. We are usually closer to feet than bells, both proximally and metaphorically. In the second clip, the Doppler of the siren creates a spatialized sense of movement, but that movement is then superseded by the closer spatial perspective of heavy breathing. Like the example of the birds, monkeys, and cicadas van Leeuwen (1999) recalled, the location of sound has meaning potential. Also, locations of sound in a soundscape are not limited to relative far/close locations or sonic perspectives. In addition to constructing metaphors of social distance through proximity, sound locations can also draw on metaphors noted by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) such as up/down, wide/narrow, and so forth. While it is true that listening alone cannot always yield a fine-tuned sense of the location of all sound sources, what soundscape design brings to saphes is a reemphasis of clarity as distinctive and based on other relationships/locations within a text. Instead of telling the composition student "this sentence is not clear," the soundscape design feedback might be more relational—why is the bark of the dog so loud relative to the whispering? why is the sound of splashing in a pool moving across the installation of the soundscape (and does this mean the participant is moving or the location of the pool is)?

The entwinement between spatialization and saphes is one that can cause students to productively consider a number of ideas for traditional print composition as well. In addition to the idea of clarity as distinct (rather than opening a window to an ontological truth), the act of soundscape design calls on students to make connections between location and argument. The locations of words on a page do not need to follow solely from the linearity of word processing, but it may be possible to instead conceive of words as spatialized in ideas, paragraphs, sentences forming figure/ground relationships or traveling to different locales within a traditional text.