“When we teach voice-over narrations, we focus less on technical details and more on the intimacy and immediacy created by the words, cadence, and tone of the voice(s). All of these qualities create what sound theorists call ‘resonance’–the impact of one vibration on another.” Statements like these from “Voice in the Cultural Soundscape” really inspire me as an instructor to focus on sonic literacy even in a communication course. In fact, I might see where this kind of assignment might fit even better within an argumentation or public speaking course. Though most speeches in the public speaking course are done in front of an audience this might help students focus more specifically on their voices and on writing a speach as an iterative process. As Comstock & Hock’s explain:
“When they record a voice over, for example, students develop a closer attentiveness to how their words and sentence structures resonate with their own voices and their chosen audiences, and as a result, produce better texts with more awareness of the emotional impact of tone and style. They are also more apt to see composing as an iterative process that requires listening, getting feedback, revising, and starting over again.”
In public speaking you give the speech, you receive a critique from peers and the instructor and then you move on to the next speech. There really should be a focus on the revising and performing again.
One point in the article that I’m a little unsure about however was the point that we are actually not living in a culture dominated by images but by sound. I agree that we sometimes don’t embrace enough silence in our culture (immediately turning on the radio in the car, having the television on as background noise). However, I wonder if these “rumblings of our cultural soundscape” are actually decreasing with the rise in internet use and digital media. Though there are audio capabilities in Second Life and other MMOGs, they are not as frequently used as text and often they can overwhelm a system. Furthermore, in internet cafes or places where people gather to work individually on computers the oral interaction is less than if the same group were meeting to speak with one another.
visual images of podcasts
Even the podcasts on iTunes are more becoming more frequently available in combination with visuals (though I personally don’t see the advantage to this). Sound may be the blind spot in visual culture but I wonder if within the digital realm this blind spot has begun to shrink. Again, this could eventually change but I don’t know how at this point you can really work on the internet and not be convinced it is a visually dominated medium.
