UW News

November 15, 2007

Sonic Culture: Becoming producers, not just consumers, of media

Class Title: English 121– Composition: Social Issues, “Service Learning, Sonic Culture and Media Activism,” taught by Jentery Sayers.


Description: This course explores English composition and writing through sound, with a strong emphasis on the development of what the instructor refers to as “sonic literacy.” He argues that because of the current pervasiveness of recorded sound — whether music or narration — sound technologies influence broad social-cultural issues, and indeed, society as a whole. Students create a series of podcasts in an attempt to become producers, and not just consumers, of media. Service learning and the study of media activism are also key elements to the course. Students volunteer at Seattle Boys and Girls Clubs, and create a media campaign for the clubs as one of their assignments.


The instructor says: “One of the premises behind studying sound and sonic culture would be the argument, and we’re kind of taking this argument for granted, that people, especially in American culture since the beginning of the 20th century, understand the world through visual paradigms,” said Sayers, a doctoral student in English. “What we’re doing is we’re mapping service learning onto sonic culture, which we’re briefly describing as the study of how sound technologies influence society.”


His students write and produce their own voice-overs, complete with scripts. Working from a variety of films, students rework the narration to explore a theme, and then defend their approach in academic arguments in the form of papers. For example, one of Sayers’ students examined the shift from black-and-white to color in The Wizard of Oz, creating commentary from the perspective of an older person who may have seen it when it was first released.


Students also create podcasts in response to their service-learning experiences, which are posted to a password-protected class blog. “What we’re focusing on is, generally speaking, the problem of speaking for or about others,” Sayers said.


The final element of Sayers’ course is what he calls “technoliteracy” as it relates to media activism. “What I’m hoping to do… is for them to not just critique media, but to make it, to compose it, to become critically engaged with technology as opposed to just using it,” he said. “If you’re engaging something that’s in a medium that you haven’t composed [in] before, then it helps to become more critically aware of how it’s actually produced,” he said.


Unexpected Experiences: Sayers said that he’s surprised by how intelligently his students think about the world through sound, even if it’s unconscious.


He had his class listen to two different movie trailers without letting them see the corresponding visuals. One was a clever remix of clips from The Shining, making it appear to be a quintessential family comedy. Sayers started the video with no image, and had the class listen to the “happy” music that accompanied it. He then played the actual trailer’s music, with its discordant, cacophonic sound that escalates to an unsettling end. He asked the class what they would expect to see in each case, based upon only the sounds that they had heard.


Sayers said he wasn’t surprised by the identification of the genre, but was taken aback by how the students’ imagined the trailers’ visual elements. “The visuals that they mapped onto these sounds were incredibly accurate,” he said, and are an indication of just how deeply sound affects our perception of reality.


Students say: “I didn’t know what to expect, I just knew it had to do with English,” said freshman Meranda Tuttle. Her advisor insisted that she take a composition class during her first quarter at the UW, and signed her up for Eng 121.


But Tuttle said that the class has turned out well. “I’ve really enjoyed some of the prompts we have been given,” she said. “I liked trying to think up a new script for a trailer and listening to what other people created for their trailers.”


Reading list: Students read from a wide variety of texts, ranging from scholarly works such as Acoustic Cyberspace, by Erik Davis; The Problem of Speaking for Others, by Linda Martín Alcoff; and Democratic Media Activism Through the lens of Social Movement Theory, by William K. Carroll and Robert A. Hacket, to works such as To Hell with Good Intentions by Ivan Illich. They also listen to podcasts, music and view films.


Assignments: as a service-learning course, students devote between 20 and 40 hours during the quarter to volunteering at local Seattle Boys and Girls Clubs. The first half of the course is focused on audio composition, including a series of podcasts focused on their service-learning experiences, creating voiceovers, and completing short reading and writing assignments. The second half of the class revolves around service learning, with a final collaborative paper, written in groups of three or four students, that details a proposed media campaign for their Boys and Girls Clubs, including a public service announcement to be developed for Apple’s iTunes U.


Class Notes is a column devoted to interesting and offbeat classes at the UW. Compiled by UW Week Intern Will Mari.