Cultivating Sonic Literacy in the Humanities Classroom

While sound studies scholarship continues to expand its disciplinary reach, it remains that in the humanities classroom, most of us continue to prioritise the study of images and written language. To remedy the ongoing marginalisation of sound, we can look to the field of composition studies, where scholars such as Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks (2006) are exploring the concept of 'sonic literacy', which they define as 'the ability to identify, define, situate, construct, manipulate, and communicate our personal and cultural soundscapes'. One cultivates sonic literacy by both learning about the historical, technological and ideological foundations of sound media, and also by creating aural compositions - a process that generates sensitivity to everything from microphone quality to vocal performance. I believe that one way to ensure the future of sound studies is to make sonic literacy a priority in post-secondary education. In this essay I will explain how I have used principles of sonic literacy in the film studies classroom, and offer examples of how I integrated sound-based assignments into the curriculum. While my focus is on film studies, we can apply these principles in any discipline, particularly given the relative ease with which students can now access equipment and software for sound manipulation. The pedagogical potential of audio assignments coupled with the growing body of scholarship focused on sound makes sonic literacy an attainable goal in the humanities classroom.

If I may generalise about film studies curricula, sound is usually treated as a discrete topic and is rarely a central or recurring focus except in dedicated sound studies courses. One of the reasons for this is historical, for if we arrange a course chronologically, we often begin in the era before synchronised sound. Of course, silent cinema was rarely silent, but our attempts to convey the intricacies of early sound accompaniment can tend toward abstraction, assuming we don't have ready access to a Benshi or a cinema organist. Thus, we start with the image and proceed, eventually, and briefly, to sound. Furthermore, film history courses tend to focus on sound films of the late 1920s and early 30s, when synchronisation was being established. While these films are extremely important, critical attention to sound tends to fall away as the course proceeds, in spite of the many achievements in audio technology and artistry in the subsequent eighty years.

Further, we may attribute some of the marginalisation of sound to the richness of film's visual qualities, which make the task of teaching visual literacy both complex and time-consuming. In order for students to become truly observant viewers, they must learn about filmmakers' uses of composition, shot scale, camera movement, temporal manipulation, editing, lighting, color, and technological factors such as frame rate, aspect ratio, film stock, projectors and exhibition space. Teaching visual analysis alone is a challenge for the instructor, who often stands in front of a room full of students who assume that the movie 'just happened that way' and accuse us of 'reading too much into things'. It is no surprise, therefore, that sound becomes something of an afterthought.

Given these challenges, how do we bring sound studies to the foreground? While teaching as a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, I taught a course entitled 'Science Fiction: Image, Sound, Text' where I constructed the curriculum around principles of sonic literacy. I drew upon the growing body of literature on film sound, and chose as a primary textbook William Whittington's Sound Design & Science Fiction. The first text we examined was Orson Welles' infamous 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds;¹ thus, from the beginning students were called upon to listen actively, and to contemplate their assumptions about how sounds can be constructed and manipulated.

This contemplation was put into action in the first assignment, entitled 'One Minute of Metropolis', where students were offered a choice of five one-minute clips from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and asked to create their own sound tracks. They could use sounds from any sources, including other films, podcasts, or sound effects downloaded from the internet, but they...