The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing

Headnote

Rhetoric and composition's increasing attention to multimodal composing involves challenges that go beyond issues of access to digital technologies and electronic composing environments. As a specific case study, this article explores the history of aural composing modalities (speech, music, sound) and examines how they have been understood and used within English and composition classrooms and generally subsumed by the written word in such settings. I argue that the relationship between aurality (and visual modalities) and writing has limited our understanding of composing as a multimodal rhetorical activity and has thus, deprived students of valuable semiotic resources for making meaning. Further, in light of scholarship on the importance of aurality to different communities and cultures, I argue that our contemporary adherence to alphabetic-only composition constrains the semiotic efforts of individuals and groups who value multiple modalities of expression. I encourage teachers and scholars of composition, and other disciplines, to adopt an increasingly thoughtful understanding of aurality and the role it-and other modalities-can play in contemporary communication tasks.

Participation means being able to speak in one's own voice, and thereby simultaneously to construct and express one's cultural identity through idiom and style.

-Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere"

. . . perhaps we can hear things we cannot see.

-Krista Ratcliffe, "Rhetorical Listening"

A turn to the auditory dimension is . . . more than a simple changing of variables. It begins as a deliberate decentering of a dominant tradition in order to discover what may be missing as a result of the traditional double reduction of vision as the main variable and metaphor.

-Don Ihde, Listening and Voice

Anyone who has spent time on a college or university campus over the past few decades knows how fundamentally important students consider their sonic environments-the songs, music, and podcasts they produce and listen to; the cell phone conversations in which they immerse themselves; the headphones and Nanos that accompany them wherever they go; the thumper cars they use to turn the streets into concert stages; the audio blogs, video soundtracks, and mixes they compose and exchange with each other and share with anyone else who will listen.

Indeed, students' general penchant for listening to and producing sound can be eloquently ironic for English composition teachers faced with...