Re-hearing daily sounds: Exploring Sound at Parkdale Collegiate
By: Doug Friesen & Madison Zacharias
In our work in Addressing Injustices, we have used sound inquiry as a way for students and teachers to explore their responses to texts and contexts they navigate (Friesen & Simon, 2021). In this multi-voiced blog post, we describe work we engaged in together related to sound and hearing over two English classes at Parkdale Collegiate, a public secondary school in Toronto. Madison, a student from this school, shared reflections on Doug’s visit to the classroom. During his visit, Doug, a music and sound educator in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), asked students to record two significant sounds from daily life then to use these to create a sound piece with digital audio editing software. Following Madison’s reflection and introduction to the sound project, Doug describes the theories that informed his teaching. Our inquiry is guided by the question: What happens when you ask secondary students to record and describe significant sounds in their lives?
Madison Zacharias, Grade 12 TDSB student
Last year, I participated in a sound-based workshop with a group of my peers. For many of us, it was the first time we had been asked to focus and reflect on the sounds in our lives. Whether or not we are aware of it, we as teenagers are constantly interacting with and being affected by sound. We are too quiet as we learn to find our voices and speak our minds, and too loud with our bluetooth speakers and raucous laughter. We were asked to delve into our memories (“What is the first sound you can remember hearing?”) and to try and identify one another by the different sounds we produced. We engaged with an often overlooked mode of perception, struggling to eschew the limitations of our learned ocularcentrism—a kind of sensory bias I was made aware of for the first time.
The workshop culminated in the production of an audio clip featuring one or two significant sounds from our daily lives. When I arrived home later that day, I found myself walking through my home, looking for things to record. I soon realized that my prioritization of the visual had already seeped into the exercise, and that to fruitfully engage would require a complete mental recalibration. The sound associated with an object is a kind of dormant secret needing to be activated and revealed, for things do not produce sound of their own accord. Rather, sound is the interaction between two or more entities—of air through the vocal cords, of a hand against the skin of a drum. After this realization that the exercise could not be approached passively or visually, I was able to really begin. I moved through my home physically engaging with the objects around me and maintaining an awareness of my effect on the soundscape. This allowed me to consider the potential (in this case the sonic potential) of objects, beyond their assigned functions.
Reflecting on the experience brings to mind a question asked by composer Murray Schafer (2012), as to whether “the soundscape of the world [is] an indeterminate composition over which we have no control or are we its composers and performers, responsible for giving it form and beauty?”(p. 96). Firstly, must the so-called performer be acting with intent, or at least awareness, for her actions to rightly be called performance? In the context of the sound workshop and subsequent exercise, my participation in the soundscape of my life long preceded my awareness of it. Have I been a performer, a composer of this ambient orchestra, only since that workshop? These are lingering and perhaps unanswerable questions, but if we accept our role as composers, we take on a considerable responsibility. Everywhere we go, we become the inhabitants of a sonic space which we are also responsible for constructing and maintaining. How might our world sound if we all acted upon this awareness? *1
*1 A typical commute makes clear that a staggering majority of people choose the latter option—to opt out by donning their headphones, blocking out and replacing the soundscape they inhabit and move through. Who, or what, takes over this responsibility of ours in relation to the soundscape, when we opt out in this way? When we refuse to participate?
The sounds I chose to record for the workshop were of myself typing on my laptop keyboard and turning the pages of a textbook. *2
Listening back, I find a kind of aggression running like a current through the sounds. The recordings are not passive or documentative, but active and performative—I can hear my own awareness of being recorded and subsequent effort to make the sounds interesting, like a tacit apology for their mundanity. I felt the need to justify that these sounds were worthy of documentation, due in part to my visual bias. I have no trouble spontaneously snapping a photograph or shooting a video clip, but when it came time to capture sounds, I struggled to see them as inherently worthy of note. As a result, I less so created an accurate sonic portrait of my life than I did a portrait of my perceptual bias toward the visual. I learned that to accurately and honestly capture sound is not merely a technical exercise, but a mental one that demands a forthright confrontation with one’s own perceptual biases.
*2 (Though I didn’t realize it at the time, both sounds have to do with communication—the typing suggesting output, the turning pages suggesting input. This is another avenue for exploration, of the sounds adjacent to communication but separate from the communicated information itself.)
For the actual construction of the composition, I used a cloud software called Soundtrap. In this software I added a synthesizer track beneath my recorded sounds. At the project’s outset I did not intend to use instruments, but as I explored the capabilities of the software I found my conception of the final piece evolving. This demonstrated to me the extent to which the resources used to manipulate sound can alter a project’s creative parameters. Looking back, I wonder about the expectations built into the software if—what kinds of sound manipulations are encouraged, easy to access? With that said, I think my musical choice goes beyond the software itself. I fill much of my time with music—headphones on as I walk to school, a record spinning while I study. As a result, to create a composition highlighting the most important sounds of my day, it would almost be inaccurate not to include some kind of musical sound.
Re-listening and re-writing
Douglas Friesen, PhD student at OISE/University of Toronto and TDSB Teacher
My visit to Madison’s class was in large part to consider: What happens when you ask secondary students to record and describe significant sounds in their lives?
We worked through some exercises that centred our sense of hearing and then discussed how this sense might not be commonly prioritized. I asked the students to compose audio pieces as a “re-reading” of the sounds of their daily lives. In addition to the opening question I was curious about the following: What would students choose as the most significant sounds of their lives? How would they re-write their world through these descriptions? How might they re-listen to their daily lives through composing with these sounds?
My own interest and background is with sound, soundscape (Schafer, 1967, 1977), listening, and re-creating as critical, individual representations of what is heard, in particular the work in these areas of R. Murray Schafer (1967, 1977) and Pauline Oliveros (2005). I also took inspiration from Paulo Freire’s (1987) insistence that “reading the world always precedes reading the word” (p. 10) and María Ghíso’s (2016) descriptions of multi-modal literacy events in her observations of childrens’ collective and individual empathy and care.
Music educator, Joseph Abramo (2014) cites Martin Jay’s use of the term ocularcentrism to describe a Western prioritizing of vision over hearing; the seeing of an object is equated with the object itself, and the other senses are secondary sources (p. 79). Abramo suggests that seeing an object may be considered fixed and separate whereas hearing involves continually shifting sounds that are both separate as well as connected to our bodies (p. 81). In my practice as a teacher, musician, and researcher I have been struck by how sound might bridge distance senses to those embodied.
Sound studies researcher Brandon LaBelle (2010) states that, “[t]he seemingly innocent trajectory of sound as it moves from its source toward a listener…is a story imparting a great deal of information fully charged with geographic, social, psychological, and emotional energy” (p. xvi).
I am grateful that the students in this class, like Madison, so meaningfully engaged with the exercises, discussions, and creative work. They have given me much more to consider, seek out, and continue to question.
References
Abramo, J. M. (2014). Music education that resonates: An epistemology and pedagogy of
sound. Philosophy of Music Education Review, 22, 78-95.
Freire, P. (1987). The importance of the act of reading. In P. Freire and D. Macedo (Eds.), Literacy: Reading
the word and the world. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey.
Friesen, D., & Simon, R. (2021). Making Fahrenheit 451 “come to life”: Sound inquiries with youth and teachers. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 65(1), pp. 47-54.
Ghíso, M.P. (2016). The Laundromat as the Transnational Local: Young Children’s Literacies of
Interdependence. Teachers College Record, 118(1), 1-46.
Labelle, B. (2010). Acoustic territories: Sound culture and everyday life. New York: Continuum
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Oliveros, P. (2005) Deep listening: A composer’s sound practice. New York, NY: iUniverse, Inc.
Schafer, R. M. (1967). Ear cleaning. London: Universal Edition.
Schafer, R. M. (1977). The tuning of the world. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd.
Schafer, R. M. (2012). The soundscape. In J. Sterne, (Ed.) Sound studies reader. Retrieved from
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