Listening for Learning: Performing a Pedagogy of Sound and Listening [1 ed.]

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Listening to Bodies: Many Kinds of Sounds
1. Listening for Learning Bodies
2. Listening for Teaching Bodies
3. Listening and Sounding Bodies
Part 2: Listening from Learning Spaces
4. Listening to and from the Performance Lab
5. Listening for Reverberations
6. Listening and Sounding Spaces
Part 3: Listening to Pedagogy
7. Listening as Pedagogy
8. A Pedagogy of Sound
9. A Pedagogy of Listening
Index

Citation preview

Listening for Learning Performing a Pedagogy of Sound and Listening

Chris McRae

Whoosh, crunch, buzz, inhale, exhale . . . Listening for Learning: Performing a Pedagogy of Sound and Listening presents sound, listening, and pedagogical interactions as performances that create relationships, ways of being and knowing, and that provide an opportunity for transformations of existing and taken-for-granted practices in the classroom. By using performative listening and performative writing this book presents fragments of sound and listening as sites of learning and knowledge production. The written fragments throughout this book are offered as performances that listen for and hear sound as a central feature to educational practices in terms of bodies, classrooms, and pedagogy. The goal in sharing this performance of listening is to create opportunities for recognition, to invite further listening in educational contexts, and to employ listening as an opportunity for transforming and re-imagining educational spaces and interactions.

Chris McRae (Ph.D., Southern Illinois University Carbondale) is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. He is author of Performative Listening (Peter Lang, 2015) and co-author of Creating Performances for Teaching and Learning (2017).

www.peterlang.com

Advance Praise for

Listening for Learning: Performing a Pedagogy of Sound and Listening “I have listened to this book—​an extraordinary claim to make, an extraordinary way to feel, yet I have listened to this book because Chris McRae offers here the extraordinary opportunity to listen to his book. He accomplishes this through interlacing sensorily rich poetry and academically resonant prose, and most importantly through engaging readers with openness and curiosity and a striving to attune to us. What we need right now, when learning, when teaching, when performing, and above all when listening is practice in slowing way, way down; practice in taking more in; practice in allowing our world to move through us so that we might move through it with more care and compassion. McRae models in this outstanding book how we might learn together to listen slowly and inquisitively, with the care that sound and pedagogy need, and above all with the compassion that one another deserve.” —​Keith Nainby, Professor of Communication Studies, California State University, Stanislaus “Spending over two decades listening to and learning from scholars who approach the world of human communication in distinct ways is one of the many blessings of my academic life. Among the most instructive have been performance scholars who merge the interpretive turn and a critical reflexivity with uncommon flair and grace. With Listening for Learning, I am reminded of the ways of teaching, of learning, and of listening that I  struggled to understand as a newly minted Assistant Professor. My performance colleagues engaged in scholarly and pedagogical practices that took seriously the embodied nature of experience, something that I knew at an intellectual level but had never fully grasped phenomenologically. McRae eloquently weaves together research and his own classroom practices with sustained attention to the role of sound and soundscapes, the situatedness of listening, and the possibilities enabled when we attune to others. The book is an excellent deep dive into how we might approach learning (either as teachers or students) in a manner that takes listening seriously. It puts the generative nature of listening, communication, and performance front-​and-​center, providing a truly novel contribution to the field.” —​Graham Bodie, Professor of Integrated Marketing Communication, The University of Mississippi

Listening for Learning 

This book is part of the Peter Lang Media and Communication list. Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production.

PETER LANG New York • Bern • Berlin Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Chris McRae

Listening for Learning Performing a Pedagogy of Sound and Listening

PETER LANG New York • Bern • Berlin Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Control Number: 2020044743       Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://​dnb.d-​nb.de/​.                       ISBN 978-​1-​4331-​7954-​9 (hardcover) ISBN 978-​1-​4331-​8084-​2 (ebook  pdf) ISBN 978-​1-​4331-​8085-​9  (epub) ISBN 978-​1-​4331-​8086-​6  (mobi) DOI 10.3726/​b17037          

                    © 2021 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 80 Broad Street, 5th floor, New York, NY 10004 www.peterlang.com   All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.  

For Graham and Oliver. Thank you for transforming my world with your wonderful sounds and lessons on listening.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

Part 1.  Listening to Bodies: Many Kinds of Sounds

19



Chapter 1.  Listening for Learning Bodies

29



Chapter 2.  Listening for Teaching Bodies

49



Chapter 3.  Listening and Sounding Bodies

69

Part 2.  Listening from Learning Spaces

99



Chapter 4.  Listening to and from the Performance Lab

111



Chapter 5.  Listening for Reverberations

127



Chapter 6.  Listening and Sounding Spaces

145

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Part 3.  Listening to Pedagogy

163



Chapter 7.  Listening as Pedagogy

169



Chapter 8.  A Pedagogy of Sound

189



Chapter 9.  A Pedagogy of Listening

215

Index241

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Listen. This project emerges from a specific space, a room, a performance lab. It is a site of experimentation, learning, and vibration. Housed in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida, the performance lab, CIS 3020, is where I first met performance studies as a field of inquiry. And it is where undergraduate and graduate classes with Stacy Holman Jones first encouraged my interests in music performance, performative writing, and listening. It is a room that I returned to in my first academic position, and it is the room where I teach all my classes. Towards the end of the completion of this book, the COVID-​19 global pandemic has led to a shift in my instructional mode and I am currently not holding classes in the performance lab. However, the lab still features prominently in this book, and in my thinking about and experience of listening as a pedagogical and performative act. For these reasons, it does not feel all that strange for me to begin with an acknowledgment of the role the performance lab plays in the creation of this book. Because it is a classroom, the performance lab is also a space where I am privileged to encounter and learn from dozens of students every semester. Each of these students and encounters impact and shape my listening and thinking throughout this project. I am especially privileged to know and work

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for extended periods of time with some of these students including Alyse Keller, Adolfo Lagomasino, Christina Magalona, Mike McDowell, Marquese McFerguson, Brooks Oglesby, Sasha Sanders, Lihanna Stanley, and Leanna Smithberger. Their presence in my classes expands my listening. The performance lab is a space that is located within an institution and department that has enabled and maintains the use of this space for the study and practice of performance. I am grateful for this as a space created and supported by the past and present faculty in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. The performance lab also locates me in conversation with scholars in the field of performance studies through both invited performances, conversations about performance-​making, and performance pedagogy. I  am particularly grateful for the performances and mentorship of Elizabeth Bell, Marcy Chvasta, Craig Gingrich-​Philbrook, Jonathan Gray, Stacy Holman Jones, Amy Kilgard, Michael LeVan, Keith Nainby, Ron Pelias, Elyse Pineau, Heidi Rose, and Nathan Stucky. Their teaching shapes my thinking about performance and listening. I also continue to be impacted in my listening by and am grateful for my experience working with, learning from, and knowing John T. Warren and Suzanne Daughton. Their lessons and compassion continue to resonate. The performance lab is an important and generative site that informs this project; and though it is a space that I turn to and return to as a performer and teacher I  always come to this space from other locations. The relationships that precede and exceed the limits of the lab reverberate and resonate in ways that persist throughout the writing and listening of this project. I am especially appreciative for the support of my first teachers, my parents Laurie and Randy. I am also thankful for the care of all of my family members including Danny, Michelle, Riley, Leo, Mandy, Zach, Bob, Lyn, Katy, and Chris. I am infinitely thankful for the listening and compassion of Aubrey Huber. She is always my first reader, editor, and sounding board. She is my collaborator in performance and teaching. She listens with me. And it is my privilege to count her as my partner in life. This project echoes with her impact, her thoughtfulness, her care, and her creativity. Finally, Graham and Oliver are my newest and most vibrant teachers. Thank you for your sounds and lessons in listening.

INTRODUCTION

Listen. Learning sounds. Learning resonates and reverberates. Learning happens in, next to, and with sound. Learning exceeds sound. And listening to the sounding of learning, of teaching, and of classrooms is always an act of pedagogy. It is a performance of engaging, creating, and changing the textures and dynamics of learning and teaching. Listening to and for learning is an opportunity to create new pedagogical interactions, to re-​configure classrooms, and to reimagine the relationships between and among students and teachers. Throughout this book, and this introduction, I approach sound, listening, and pedagogical interactions as performances that create relationships, ways of being and knowing, and that provide and present an opportunity for transformations of existing and taken-​for-​granted practices in the classroom. Sound effects bodies and affects the scenes and sites of interaction. Sound is vibration. Sound is immersive.1 Sound is a way of knowing and being in the world.2 Sound is performance.3 And in this book I approach performances of sound as always emerging in relationship to and with performances of listening.4 Importantly, I do not consider listening to be a performance that is exclusively a physiological act. Instead, listening in this book is an ethical and performative stance of openness that precedes or accompanies dialogic modes of engagement in the service of creating new and better worlds.5 Listening for Learning: Performing a Pedagogy of Sound and Listening is a reflection, a meditation, an attunement to

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learning, and it is an invitation for a proliferation of performances of listening for learning and other pedagogical performances.

Teaching Performance I currently teach courses in the area of performance studies within a communication department. Some of the courses that I teach include Introduction to Communication as Performance, Performing Identity & Culture, Group Performance of Literature, Performing Relationships, and Writing for Performance. These classes, and the other courses in the performance curriculum, all begin with the course prefix “ORI” which is an abbreviation for oral interpretation and an indicator of the institutional and disciplinary histories of the curriculum. In the discipline of communication, the label of “oral interpretation” precedes performance studies as a label for courses of study that privilege performance as a site of knowledge production. Oral interpretation is at once an act that can be aesthetic, communicative, and analytical.6 As the name suggests, oral interpretation is invested, at least in part, in the learning and knowledge that is made possible through the spoken word. By speaking written words aloud, new interpretations, critiques, and discoveries about texts, others, and the self are made possible. The shift from oral interpretation to performance studies allows for an expanded understanding of performance; however, the epistemological value and possibilities of speaking and performing remains a central concern of the area of study.7 One implication of teaching courses in performance studies is that the use of the classroom is heavily characterized by presentations and performances. In my case, I am fortunate to work in a department with a dedicated performance lab.8 This space has moveable seating, stage lighting, theater curtains, and even a dedicated storage area for props, rehearsal cubes, and risers. The room enables students to create and present staged readings, solo and group performances, and performance installations.9 In the ongoing effort to maintain and update this space, the department recently secured funds and went through the process of renovating the floor in the performance lab. After over 25 years the carpeted floor was replaced with a cork-​backed, hard-​surface, vinyl flooring material. After the installation, I entered the lab and for the first time since I first walked into the space 17 years ago, the floor was new to me. The shift from worn carpet to a vinyl surface allowed for an expanded understanding of my body in the space, and of the space. Visually the room appeared changed: bigger and brighter. The floor felt different: smoother and



Introduction 3

with more bounce. Though I couldn’t discern a different smell in the space, I know that given the usually full canister on the vacuum cleaner, the carpet trapped and contained dust, hair, and dirt. And now, the new floor excluded the opportunity for this collection of dirt and dust, perhaps providing a reprieve for my sinuses and allergies. And as I walked deeper into the lab, what I anticipated most became overwhelmingly certain:  this floor made my experience of sound in the space different.10 The sound of my shoes clicking on the floor, the sounds of my voice, the sounds of students taking their seats were all just a little different: brighter, sharper, just a little bit more than they were when the floor was carpeted. This new floor disrupted my otherwise taken-​for-​granted ways of being in the room.11 I am tempted to make a clever link between the shift from oral interpretation to performance studies and the shift from carpet to vinyl flooring, but what is more important to me is the fact that oral interpretation, performance studies, and the effects of new floor all point to ways of knowing in and from the body.12 My goal in teaching courses in performance studies is often to draw attention to and privilege the ways bodies come to know the world and are shaped by larger cultural and institutional structures. The installation of new flooring in the performance lab provides a mundane and material example of the ways individual performances and ways of knowing and learning are entangled with cultural and institutional forms and structures. The occasion of the installation of the new floor in the performance lab is a notable disruption to and transformation of this classroom. This new floor presents a reminder about the ways learning and knowing are always entangled with the felt experience of classrooms, pedagogical interactions, and broader social, cultural, historical, political, and material structures and configurations (including vinyl flooring material).13 This new floor also presents an invitation to engage with, contemplate, and listen to the ways bodies engage with, create, and transform pedagogical interactions. Listening for Learning engages this invitation and works to enact a mode of listening that exceeds the physiological apprehension of sound to consider the ways learning, teaching, and pedagogy are felt, embodied, and might be reimagined through listening.

Performative Listening and Critical Performative Pedagogy This book begins where my last efforts at defining and describing listening as a performative act end (McRae 2). Or perhaps it is better to say that this project

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takes up the invitation that I  offer with performative listening as a way of attending to and attuning to the infinitely instructive possibilities of the world and others by turning my attention and listening to the sounds of learning in educational contexts and pedagogical interactions. The goal of this book is to attend to learning sounds, not only as pedagogically relevant details of classroom experience, but as evidence of the critical and embodied significance of pedagogical interactions and as an opportunity for disrupting and transforming the formation of these interactions. In other words, the goal of this book is to employ listening as a critical mode of engaging and transforming pedagogical interactions, contexts, and practices. As David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny state, “Sound, then, is a substance of the world as well as a basic part of how people frame their knowledge about the world” (2). In terms of pedagogy and classroom interaction, sound is a substance of the classroom as well as a basic part of how people enter, learn, and perform in the classroom. Performative listening is an understanding of listening as an embodied practice of critically and reflexively engaging others across difference. In Performative Listening I focus the possibilities of this definition of listening as a performative act in terms of qualitative research. I suggest questions and commitments that might guide a qualitative research practice that is informed by a listening stance. Performative listening offers a method for engaging others across difference that is attentive to the ways encountering others is always a pedagogical opportunity. As a method, performative listening is also attuned to a critical reflexivity that attends to the ways the subject position of the listener is always situated within larger structures of power that are historical, institutional, and always located in the specificity of the here and now. The critical reflexivity of performative listening is also guided by an awareness of the generative and potentially transformative possibilities of listening as a way of learning from others. By specifying performative listening as an applicable method for engaging in qualitative research practices I work to broaden the reach of what might otherwise be understood as a narrow project of theorizing listening in terms of my own research interests in performance studies and music performance. But this broadening of performative listening in terms of method also has a narrowing function. Specifying performative listening as a qualitative method positions performative listening within a specialized project of scholarly inquiry via qualitative research. I now return to the invitation of performative listening to engage more fully with the ethical, aesthetic, and transformative possibilities of performative listening as a pedagogy of performance.



Introduction 5

This project moves beyond a concern with applicability and method and moves towards a discussion of performative listening as a generative performance of imagination and invitation. This is not a project of how to listen, or how to apply a mode of listening to an interactional context. Instead this book works to perform listening, and to take seriously the heuristic potential of listening in pedagogical contexts. This book listens to and for the ways learning sounds, might sound, and might sound differently. This work is committed to the aims of critical performative pedagogy which focuses on how bodies create, maintain, and transform social and cultural structures through performance (Pineau 42). Critical performative pedagogy considers the role of power and privilege in shaping the ways bodies perform in classroom contexts. Moreover, critical performative pedagogy emphasizes the possibilities of performance as a method for identifying and disrupting the social and cultural constraints that impact teaching and learning (McRae & Huber 5). In this way, performative listening engages sound as an embodied performance of learning, and this engagement via listening is an act of critical performative pedagogy. Performative listening is a way of being in and coming to know the world, and in this way, Listening for Learning is an enactment of performative listening that works to demonstrate the ontological and epistemological functions of performative listening. The goal of this project is not to ask how performative listening might shape the ways we approach others in research, but instead to ask how performative listening might understand and transform pedagogical interactions. Performative listening offers a way of configuring the world, of self and other, and of the ways we move and intervene within these configurations. This book activates performative listening as a performance, as a worldmaking, and as a critical pedagogy.

Performance, Performativity, and Listening Performative listening enters a stage set by the field of performance studies as practiced and presented primarily within the discipline of communication.14 This area of research emerges from and engages performance as metaphor, as object of study, and as embodied method of inquiry. In terms of performative listening, these approaches aid in the definition of performance as an embodied practice, as a generative and constitutive act, and as a way of engaging others across difference. What guides my definition of performative listening is a conceptualization of performance as an “essentially contested concept” (Strine, Long, and Hopkins 183). The acknowledgment of performance as

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contested is a characteristic of performance studies scholarship that recognizes performance as an idea in motion (Conquergood 138) and that is productively and continually shifting and reforming in relationship to new contexts (LeVan “The Digital” 218). What performance is, what performance can be, and how performance is studied is always emergent, contested, and in the process of making and re-​making the world. In many ways, performative listening is a conceptualization of listening that tries on and tries out the contested concept of performance as a way of making sense of the similarly contested concept of listening. For example, within the communication discipline, listening is at once a skill to be mastered and taught, a behavior to be studied and measured, the function of individuals and groups of audiences, and a question of environmental and cultural configurations (Beard & Bodie 209–​210). The idea that listening is a performance that is embodied, culturally located, and generative is an idea that makes a claim about listening and about performance. The claim about performance that is forwarded by performative listening is that performance is a making that is activated by individual practices that are always linked to and enabled by larger cultural, historical, and social structures. The claim that is made about listening is that performance is a way of understanding and enacting listening as a cultural practice. Performative listening understands performance as a site of performative enactment and intervention. Performativity, as it is employed by scholars in performance studies, offers a theory of how specific and individual performances emerge within an ongoing historical and cultural scene and of ways performance engenders disruption, transformation, and new possibilities (Warren “Doing” 96). For instance, Judith Butler engages performativity to demonstrate the ways identity, and specifically gender identity, is always an act that is “tenuously constituted in time—​an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (519). In this way performativity links individual practices and accomplishments to larger structures. Performative listening plays with this theory of performativity to consider the ways individual listening practices function as acts that are also stylized repetitions that constitute material and cultural realities. Performativity also provides a framework for understanding the function of performance to disrupt and transform understandings of the status quo. Della Pollock explains that performative writing activates the open and unruly logic of “what if” instead of the closed logic of “if, then” to disrupt and imagine new possible configurations of the world. She says, “This is an ethical space: a space of mobilizing the difference between imagined and entrenched realities; and



Introduction 7

it is a performance space: a space of mobilizing the difference in repetition for ethical ends” (247). Jill Dolan identifies the possibility of performance to create moments that realize these imagined possible different ways of being as utopian performatives. She explains: Utopian performatives describe small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense. (5)

Performative listening attempts to enact the disruptive potential of performative writing, and the transformative possibilities of utopian performatives in the performance of listening. In this way performative listening is both an individual accomplishment that is constituted contextually, historically, and culturally; and it is an act that works to intervene and transform our ways of being in and knowing the world. Performative listening is a listening that follows the imaginative logic of “what if.” Throughout this book performative listening offers a way of engaging with sounds as constitutive of learning experiences to understand the historical and cultural contexts that shape the relationship between sound and learning especially in educational contexts such as classrooms and schools. This project also practices performative listening as a way of asking and enacting the logic of what if to hear and make sounds that might otherwise be unacknowledged, ignored, or not yet imagined as sites of learning and knowledge production. Like Diana Taylor’s argument for performance studies, performative listening “allows us to expand what we understand by ‘knowledge’ ” (16). For Taylor performance studies allows for the recognition of embodiment as a critical site of knowledge and knowledge production. Taylor offers the distinction between the archive and the repertoire as a way of marking the tension between different formations of knowledge. The artifacts of the archive are “supposedly enduring materials (i.e. texts, documents, buildings, bones)” (p. 19). She goes on to explain, “The repertoire, on the other hand, enacts embodied memory: performance gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—​in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (20). For Taylor performance studies offers a way of engaging the embodied knowledge of the repertoire. In this book, I use performative listening as way of engaging and considering sound as part of the repertoire of embodied knowledges that shape educational contexts and pedagogical interactions.

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Goals of the Book Listening for Learning is a performance that brings questions about sound and listening in conversation with performance studies as a method of inquiry, and questions about sound as a site of knowledge production in conversation with critical performative pedagogies. The goal of this book is to hear and perform sounds of learning in educational contexts and pedagogical interactions to emphasize the significance of both listening and sound for critical performative pedagogy.15 By using performative listening and performative writing this book presents instances of sounds as sites of learning and knowledge production. The writing is offered as a performance that both listens for and hears sound as a central feature to educational practices in terms of bodies, classrooms, and pedagogy. The goal in sharing this performance of listening is to create opportunities for recognition, to invite further listening in educational contexts, and to employ listening as an opportunity for transforming and reimaging educational spaces and interactions. The book considers learning sounds within the specific context of the performance studies classroom. This emphasis on the performance classroom is first and importantly a matter of what I  know from my cultural, academic, phenomenological position as a teacher, researcher, artist, and scholar.16 My work as a teacher is located exclusively in a performance classroom, the courses I teach all heavily feature performance in terms of content and form, and my pedagogy is characterized by a commitment to the creation of embodied performance as a way of knowing and learning. The emphasis on the performance classroom in this book is also offered as an opening to hear sounds as always already a feature of all educational practices, institutions, and experiences. The performance classroom is the site of my inquiry and study of the ways sounds texture learning in the classroom. So, while my focus in this book is exclusively on how learning sounds in relationship to an experience of the performance classroom, this book is not exclusively about courses in performance studies. Instead, this book is about listening as mode of recognition and transformation of educational spaces, practices, and experiences.17 In the written performances of listening offered throughout this book the phenomena of sound are approached as an important feature of learning in two distinct ways.18 First, this book acknowledges and attends to the ways sound is made in and by learning practices, contexts, and arrangements. Learning bodies make sounds, classrooms make sounds, and pedagogical commitments and interactions make sound.19 Sound is approached by performative listening



Introduction 9

as prepositionally a phenomenon that is of and from bodies, classrooms, and pedagogy. In other words, performative listening attends to how sounds emerge as they are generated by phenomena in order to understand and make sense of those sounding phenomena. The second way sound is configured via performative listening is as a phenomenon that produces or makes other phenomena recognizable. Specifically, sounds produce bodies, classrooms, and pedagogy. Prepositionally this is an understanding of sound as, for, and with educational practices, institutions, and experiences. In other words, sound is the shifting ground for the dynamic figures of schooling. By taking sound as a mode of performance, this book also considers the disruptive and transformative pedagogical possibilities of sound by engaging, presenting, and analyzing these various sounds and ways of sounding as ways of knowing. In order to perform and imagine the sounding of learning in writing, I engage in performative writing as a method of enacting and imagining these sounds.20 In this book this writing is accomplished by using fragments, a blending of fictional and nonfictional, and a synthetic and synthesized approach to making sound in writing.21 The sounds that are performed are offered in terms of these three characteristics of learning:  learning bodies, classrooms, and pedagogy. This book is an attempt, a performance, and an incomplete consideration of sound and listening as these phenomena emerge and are activated as performances at the site of a specific educational context. The goal of this admittedly partial effort is to open a space for continued and further engagement with listening and sounding as critical sites of inquiry and transformation regarding the formation of educational interactions and practices. Sound and listening present an opportunity for rethinking the ways bodies enter and move through classroom spaces, the ways classrooms are configured, and the ways pedagogy is conceptualized and practiced. In this way, Listening for Learning is a performance that both listens for sounds of learning and that invites you to join in the performance of sounding and listening.

Organization of the Book This book is divided into three parts. Each part of the book takes up and considers one of three distinct features of educational experience: bodies, spaces, and pedagogy. The first part of the book, “Listening to Bodies,” features three chapters that apply performative listening as a mode of engaging the bodies of students, teachers, and more-​than-​human entities in performance studies

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courses. The second part of the book, “Listening to Learning Spaces,” presents three chapters that listen performatively to the educational spaces that house performance studies courses. The third part of the book, “Listening to Pedagogy,” engages with and listens for the sounds and sounding of pedagogical practices, theories, and values in the context of performance studies education. Each of these three parts begins with an introductory section that overviews the forms, questions, and theories at play in the chapters. The chapters that comprise each part of the book are then presented as performances of listening to bodies, spaces, and pedagogy. Each of the introductory sections are organized as a kind of liner notes for the chapters in each of the three parts of the book. These notes are inspired, in part, by the text that might adorn the paper covers on vinyl records, or the folded pamphlets that might be tucked into plastic cassette tape or CD cases. These liner notes sometimes included acknowledgments by the artists, notes to fans, or even critical interpretations of the content of the album by other musicians, journalists, or critics. I reference this form here for two main reasons. The first reason is that liner notes are evocative of a kind of interpretive text common to formats that present performances of sound. I’m less interested in upholding the exclusive mode of sound that these formats privilege, but I do find the structure and use of liner notes to be a particularly useful way of framing the performances of sound that I present in each part. The second reason the logic of liner notes is a helpful way for me to frame this introductory section is that the chapters in each part are presented as performances of listening. Liner notes, as a form, provide a way for interpreting and discussing the design, questions, and implications at play in each of these chapters. In addition to the liner notes that work to tell a story about each part of the book I also begin each chapter with brief preludes in order to further contextualize the guiding questions, theories, and goals of the performances presented in each chapter. I again am borrowing from the aesthetic form of music in order to specify an organizing structure for composing and presenting the work and performances of this book. The prelude, as a form, helps provide continuity across the chapters, provides space for transitions, and it invites the use of an authorial voice that might otherwise be heard as disconnected from the voice that is enacted in each chapter. Each of the three chapters in Part  1, “Listening to Bodies,” provide instances of performative listening to sounds of learning as they emerge in and from bodies. In Chapter 1, “Listening for Learning Bodies,” I listen to and for the ways the sounds of student bodies activate the performance classroom. In



Introduction 11

this chapter I provide fragments that work to present the ways bodies make and produce sound while learning in the performance classroom. This chapter also plays with the idea of how bodies are positioned as learning bodies (as students) in performance classes and therefore considers the sounds and sounding of students, teachers, and nonhuman bodies as bodies that sound while learning. In Chapter 2, “Listening for Teaching Bodies,” I listen to and for the sounds made by bodies that teach in the performance classroom. As in chapter one, this chapter focuses on the sounds that are made by bodies and it also considers the ways the bodies that teach fluctuate and are dynamic. In Chapter 3, “Listening and Sounding Bodies,” I shift the focus and understanding of the function of sound. Instead of emphasizing sound as a phenomenon that is produced by bodies, I consider the ways the bodies in the classroom are always produced by and constituted in sound. Part  2, “Listening to Learning Spaces,” presents three chapters that use performative listening as a way of engaging and reconceptualizing the space of performance studies courses. Chapter 4, “Listening to and from the Performance Lab,” considers the sounds that are made by the educational space of the performance studies classroom as meaningful features of the space and the curriculum. Chapter 5, “Listening for Reverberations,” listens to and for the sounds and sounding of the performance classroom space as reverberations of other cultural and social spaces. Chapter 6, “Listening and Sounding Spaces,” emphasizes the ways the performance studies classroom is made by and constituted in sound. Part 3, “Listening to Pedagogy,” also contains three chapters. Chapter 7, “Listening as Pedagogy,” listens to and for the ways listening is a practice that is always shaped pedagogically. This chapter also considers the ways listening might be used to configure pedagogical interactions and relationships. Chapter 8, “A Pedagogy of Sound” listens for the ways sound as metaphor, sensory experience, and embodied practice shapes and is shaped by pedagogical choices, interactions, and contexts. In Chapter  9, “A Pedagogy of Listening,” offers a discussion and description of a pedagogy that is characterized by commitments to sound and listening as generative, aesthetic, and transformative modes of engaging in educational practices and experiences. This chapter also serves as the conclusion for the book and sounds this pedagogy as an opening for future work in performance studies, sound studies, and critical pedagogy that works to hear sound and listening as critical and performative features of teaching and learning in a wide range of educational contexts and practices.

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Listening is Electricity Essayist Rebecca Solnit (2017) describes the importance of what is colloquially referred to as “preaching to the choir.” She explains: The choir is made up of the deeply committed: those who show up every Sunday, listen to every sermon, and tithe like crazy. The time the choristers spend with one another, the sum of their sympathy and shared experience, is part of what helps them sing in unison and in tune. To win politically, you don’t need to win over people who differ from you, you need to motivate your own. There are a thousand things beyond the fact of blunt agreement that you might need or want to discuss with your friends and allies. There are strategy and practical management, the finer points of a theory, values and goals both incremental and ultimate, reassessment as things change for better or worse. Effective speech in this model isn’t alchemy; it doesn’t transform what people believe. It’s electricity: it galvanizes them to act.

Though this passage is primarily about the value of speaking in the context of shared political values, goals, and experience, Solnit’s framing of speech provides a provocative opening for thinking about listening as a making. The musical imagery of a choir calls to mind a group of people who sing together, but when “preached to” this group of people is called to listen (not to mention the listening that choral singing also requires). And Solnit argues that this is a model for effective speech that doesn’t “transform” the beliefs of individuals, but instead it functions as electricity: galvanizing, shocking, stimulating this listening choir to action. If Solnit’s descriptive account of effective speech as galvanizing is extended to listening, then listening, as always part of speech, is also electric. Listening is electricity. Listening doesn’t necessarily yield a change in beliefs but listening can send an electric current into the ways we live in the world, interact with others, and learn. Listening is a galvanizing force. Throughout this book I engage with a commitment to the idea that listening is electricity. When we listen something electric happens, something is charged, something jolted. In different contexts this has different implications. Listening in the context of music is electricity in the ways that it is an act that jolts songs, concerts, and music into being. Listening in the context of relationships is electricity in the ways that it charges the words of the other with significance. Listening in the context of this project, to learning sounds, electrifies learning, classroom spaces, and pedagogical choices. This listening hears learning sounds as important and generates power by engaging these sounds.



Introduction 13

As I listen to the ways the new flooring surface effects the sound of the performance classroom, I notice a shift in my attention to and thoughts about the room. I think it’s fair to say that my feelings and beliefs about the room haven’t really changed. I still consider the room to be an invaluable part of the performance curriculum and a unique feature of this department where I teach. But as I listen to the new sound of the room there is an electricity that charges the room. And it’s not just that the renovation has electrified the room, it’s also that listening to the room sends a shock into the space. There is a current that hears the importance of the ways learning sounds, and this book invites you to bring the electricity of your listening to a wide range of learning sounds.

Notes 1 Justin Eckstein attends to sound not only as immersive, but as designed in the service of reasoned argumentation (“Designing” 269–​270). 2 Deborah Kapchan presents the concept of “sound knowledge” in order to suggest sound as a way of knowing. She defines sound knowledge as “a nondiscursive form of affective transmission resulting from acts of listening” (2). 3 And as Michael LeVan notes, “Performance is of sound, in sound, in spite of sound, for sound, by sound, through sound, around sound, after sound, and until sound” (“Sounding” p. 1). 4 Following Deborah Kapchan’s descriptions of sound writing as an approach to sound and listening that moves beyond the treatment of sound as an object and towards an expanded way of coming to knowledge, this book approaches listening as a performance that attends to and engages the pedagogical logics and possibilities of sound (11). 5 This understanding of listening is informed by and resonates with Lisbeth Lipari’s theory of listening otherwise that generates an ethics that is “committed to receiving otherness” (45). Lipari explains: The ethics that emerges from this kind of listening arises from intentionally engaging with what is unfamiliar, strange, and not already understood. In its reception of otherness, the listening otherwise that gives rise to ethics is a profoundly difficult way of being in the world because it by necessity disrupts the sameness and familiarity of the always already known (45). Importantly, this listening presents a stance of engaging others that is not predicated or dependent on a degree of physiological ability. 6 Ronald J. Pelias and Tracy Stephenson Shaffer explain oral interpretation as an artistic practice, a communicative act, and a method of literary study (38). 7 For an extended discussion on the shift from oral interpretation to performance studies see Ronald J. Pelias and James VanOosting’s essay, “A Paradigm for Performance Studies.” 8 Not all departments with courses in performance studies courses have dedicated performance classroom spaces. For instance, Amy Kilgard details the challenges of teaching performance courses in classrooms that are not explicitly designed for performance, and the important role space plays in performative pedagogy (221).

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9 Tracy Stephenson Shaffer similarly draws attention to the significance of the performance space, The Hopkins Black Box theatre, used as the performance classroom by the Department of Communication at the Louisiana State University. As she describes the space functions ideally as one “where we come to understand literature better by using our empathy, voices, and bodies as sites of inquiry” (240). 10 In his introduction to The Sound Studies Reader, Jonathan Sterne explains the importance of attending to sound, the context of sound, and the history of sound as a central feature of sound studies scholarship. He offers the following prompt as an example of the way this work might unfold: If you can, take a good long listen around you—​for a few days. Whether or not you can listen yourself, consider what others are hearing. How many of the sounds in everyday life existed ten years ago? Twenty? Thirty? Fifty? That’s just the sounds—​but what of the contexts in which they happen, the ways of hearing or not-​hearing attached to them, the practices, people and institutions associated with them? Now think of what the previous generation of sounds must have replaced, and what those sounds and their worlds replaced in turn. In this small exercise, you will join generations of intellectuals, who have lifted their ears toward the sonic airspace around them, taken stock of it, and reacted to the changes they heard (1). For Sterne, and sound studies, the theoretical and critical value of sound lies in the ways sound resonates with a range of cultural, social, political, and historical choices, values, and practices. Listening and attending to sound offers a way of making sense and interpreting these choices, values, and practices and their effects. 11 Drew Leder speaks of the phenomenological disappearance of the body from everyday attention. He explains, “I live in bodies beyond bodies, clothes, furniture, room, house, city, recapitulating in ever expanding circles aspects of my corporeality. As such, it is not simply my surface organs that disappear but entire regions of the world with which I dwell in intimacy” (35). Over time, the seeming disappearance of the body becomes possible through our habituated ways of moving through the world. 12 Michael LeVan offers a clever link between Oral Interpretation and Performance Studies using the metaphors of surfaces in terms of the affordances digital modes of performance have for the discipline of performance. Building on Wallace Bacon’s (1960; 1996) metaphor of the “Dangerous Shores” to explain the tension between performing bodies and texts, Levan introduces the metaphor of the shoal to articulate and characterize the shifts that digital modes of performance offer Performance Studies. He explains: Rather than forming a boundary between land and water, shoals are spaces of contact, friction, and interaction among land and water (framed above, of course, by another space of contact:  air or atmosphere). The phenomenon of ‘‘shoaling’’ is a sign of this contact:  when surface waves approach a shoal, they slow down, their height increases, the distance between them decreases, and sometimes they are diffracted. Though not an absolute obstacle, a shoal transforms the qualities of the movement of water. (“The Digital” 211) The shift from carpet to vinyl flooring does not present as rich and nuanced a metaphor as shoals for explaining the shifting figures and expanding grounds of Performance Studies, but it is worth noting that the grounds and grounding of performance are site of



Introduction 15

performance theory both in terms of the kinds of performances that are possible and in terms of the ways these performances function. And in this way the shift from carpet to vinyl flooring aligns nicely with Levan’s contention and call for an expanded understanding of performance. He says, “It may be that ‘the center’ has held as the territory expanded, undergoing transformations along the way—​as I will later suggest—​from a sense of being to a matter of sensation and becoming” (211). These different flooring surfaces emphasize the work of performance studies as always already a matter of “sensation and becoming.” 13 Anne M.  Harris and Stacy Holman Jones extend and expand this consideration of felt experience and embodied knowledge to include “more-​than-​human actors” (2). 14 Shauna MacDonald and Vassiliki Riga offer a mapping of performance studies in US universities that helps to articulate the ways performance studies functions as an interdisciplinary field of study that encompasses and exceeds the disciplinary focus of communication studies (2–​5). 15 The significance of sound in this project aligns with the review of sound studies offered by Gunn et al. in which they note that sound is often treated in sound studies as both a cultural and material object (477). 16 John T. Warren contends, “It is an important thing, I think, to trace how one arrives to the classroom” (“Reflexive” 140). 17 Importantly, scholarship in sound and composition studies also address and listen for the classroom and the function of sound in terms of the experience and transformation of pedagogical spaces. For example, Steph Ceraso considers the ways acoustic design shapes learning and may shape pedagogical practices in terms of multimodal composition pedagogy (68–​80). Kati Fargo Ahern and Jordan Frith present “social soundscaping” as a mode of rhetorical engagement with and resistance to space and sound. Kati Ahern and Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher consider the entanglements of genres of pedagogical spaces, or different types of classes, pedagogical modes, and classroom soundscapes. These discussions present calls for additional scholarship in and around the relationship amongst sound, classrooms, and pedagogical practices that I attend to in this project from a performance studies and communication perspective. 18 In her discussion of physicist Niels Bohr’s quantum theories, Karen Barad explains that theoretical concepts are not only a matter of ideas, but that they are “specific physical arrangements” (814). In this instance sound and performative listening may be understood as theoretical concepts; however, these are not merely ideas, they are also physical arrangements. Barad goes on to explain the implications of this understanding of theoretical concepts in terms of the relations ideas create. She says, “In other words, relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata-​within-​phenomena emerge through specific intra-​actions. Crucially then, intra-​actions enact agential separability—​the local condition of exteriority-​within-​ phenomena” (815). In terms of performative listening in order and sounds of learning, both of these concepts emerge through their intra-​action. There is no performative listening without sound, and no sound without performative listening. Barad uses the example of a light wave and light particle to show the ways an apparatus of measurement works to engender an understanding of light as a wave or light as particle. She says: “The notions of ‘wave’ and ‘particle’ do not refer to inherent characteristics of an object that precedes its intra-​action. There are no such independently existing objects with inherent characteristics”

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(816). In terms of sound and performative listening this is a useful reminder:  there are no inherent characteristics of sound, rather sound emerges as characterized, or having characteristics, in and through the intra-​action of sound with an apparatus, or theoretical concept, like performative listening. 19 This way of listening is self-​consciously aware of what Michel Chion refers to as causal listening, or a listening that identifies sound as a resulting cause of a particular source (25–​ 26). Justin Eckstein explains this constitution of sound as “causism” and cautions against the reductive functions of this configuration of sound. He offers the following reminder: Sound emerges not from a single source, but an acoustic ecology. Any attempt to elevate a cause to the cause dis-​places other potential actors. The reduction of sound to a cause (as opposed to a complex multiplicity) comes from a desire to manage sound’s ambiguity. If sound can be circumscribed to something external and verifiable, then it can become amenable to objective inquiry (“Response” 343). In other words, listening for sound as an effect of some external source runs the risk of a limited understanding of the ways sound emerges from a dynamic range of sources and actors. However, it is important to note that though performative listening might engage in causal listening, the objective of this listening is neither the identification of a singular source, nor is it to creative a singular theory of sound. Instead the aim of performative listening is to engage with learning as a dynamic, emergent, and deeply contextual performance. 20 Within composition studies several emphasize a multimodal approach to composition that incorporates writing with sound and the creation of audio compositions that is related both to my interest in the pedagogical implications of sound and in my own compositional practice of performatively writing sound and about sound. For example, Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks detail an approach to teaching and creating sonic multimodal projects that is grounded in an embodied approach to listening (137). In their web text, Tanya K. Rodrigue et al., present an exploration and example of the pedagogical possibilities of teaching, reflection on, and enacting sonic rhetoric through audio compositions. Finally, Crystal VanKooten analyzes and considers the embodied as well as rhetorical implications of sonic invention in student projects. While my project does not directly work to develop or present a multimodal pedagogy, it does make a turn toward sound and listening that is aligned with the multimodal composition pedagogy that works to understand and engage the embodied implications of writing (with) sound. 21 This writing is inspired in part by Ronald J.  Pelias’s use of poetic writing as a mode of inquiry. In Leaning: A Poetics of Personal Relationships he explains: The turn to the poetic reflects my faith in language’s evocative power, in its ability to capture more fully than any other representational mode the heart of human relationships. I rely upon its sensuous, figurative and expressive muscle. I want the poetic to shape random experience into form, to open what is closed, and to carry despite the unbearable weight. I want the poetic to discover how meaning feels and how feeling means. I want the poetic to show how ideas only matter when they attach to bodies, how bodies only thrive when both the heart and the head language and live in concert (12). In a similar way the blending of fictional and nonfictional accounts in this book is an attempt to engage language as an evocative and presentational mode of expression and inquiry.



Introduction 17

Works Cited Ahern, Kati, and Ashley R. Mehlenbacher. “Listening for Genre Multiplicity in Classroom Soundscapes.” Enculturation:  A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, vol.  26, 2018, http://​enculturation.net/​listening-​for-​genre-​multiplicity. Ahern, Kati, and Jordan Frith. “Speaking Back to our Spaces:  The Rhetoric of Social Soundscaping.” Harlot:  A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion, vol.  9, 2013, http://​ harlotofthearts.org/​index.php/​harlot/​article/​view/​150. Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 28, 2003, pp. 801–​831. Beard, David, and Graham Bodie. “Listening Research in the Communication Discipline.” A Century of Communication Studies: The Unfinished Conversation, edited by Pat J. Gehrke and William M. Keith, Routledge, 2015. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, 1988, pp. 519–​531. Ceraso, Steph. Sounding Composition:  Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening. Duke University Press, 2018. Chion, Michel. Audio-​Vision: Sound on Screen. Columbia University Press, 1994. Conquergood, Dwight. “Of Caravans and Carnivals:  Performance Studies in Motion.” The Drama Review, vol. 39, no. 4, 1995, pp. 137–​141. Dolan, Jill. “Producing Knowledges that Matter:  Practicing Performance Studies through Theatre Studies.” The Drama Review, vol. 40, 1996, pp. 9–​19. Eckstein, Justin. “Designing Soundscapes for Argumentation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 51, no. 3, 2018, pp. 269–​292. —​— ​—​. “Response to Groarke: Figuring Sound.” Informal Logic, vol. 38, no. 3, 2018, pp. 341–​345. Gunn, Joshua, et  al. “Auscultating Again:  Rhetoric and Sound Studies.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 5, 2013, pp. 475–​489. Harris, Anne M., and Stacy Holman Jones. The Queer Life of Things: Performance, Affect, and the More-​Than-​Human. Lexington Books, 2019. Hocks, Mary E., and Michelle Comstock. “Composing for Sound: Sonic Rhetoric as Resonance.” Computers and Composition, vol. 43, 2017, pp. 135–​146. Kapchan, Deborah. “The Splash of Icarus: Theorizing Sound Writing/​Writing Sound Theory.” Theorizing Sound Writing, edited by Deborah Kapchan, Wesleyan University Press, 2017, pp. 1–​24. Kilgard, Amy K. “Chaos as Praxis: Or, Troubling Performance Pedagogy: Or, You Are Now.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3, 2011, pp. 217–​228. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. The University of Chicago Press, 1990. LeVan, Michael. “Sounding Off on Sound.” Liminalities:  A Journal of Performance  Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, 2007, http://​liminalities.net/​3-​3/​soundintro.htm. —​ —​ —​ . “The Digital Shoals:  On Becoming and Sensation in Performance.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 3, 2012, pp. 209–​219. Lipari, Lisbeth. “Listening Otherwise:  The Voice of Ethics.” The International Journal of Listening, vol. 23, 2009, pp. 44–​59.

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MacDonald, Shauna M., and Vassiliki Riga. “Mapping Performance Studies in US Universities.” Text and Performance Quarterly, https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​10462937.2019.1655165. Accessed 30 August 2019. McRae, Chris. Performative Listening: Hearing Others in Qualitative Research. Peter Lang, 2015. McRae, Chris, and Aubrey Huber. Creating Performances for Teaching and Learning: A Practice Session for Pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeny. “Introduction.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 1–​11. Pelias, Ronald J. Leaning: A Poetics of Personal Relations. Routledge, 2011. Pelias, Ronald J., and James VanOosting. “A Paradigm for Performance Studies.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 1987, pp. 219–​231. Pelias, Ronald J., and Tracy S. Shaffer. Performance Studies: The Interpretation of Aesthetic Texts. 2nd ed., Kendall Hunt, 2007. Pineau, Elyse L. “Critical Performative Pedagogy:  Fleshing Out the Politics of Liberatory Education.” Teaching Performance Studies, edited by Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002, pp. 41–​54. Pollock, Della. “The performative ‘I.’ ” Critical Studies Cultural Methodologies, vol. 5, 2007, pp. 239–​255. Rodrigue, Tanya, et al. “Navigating the Soundscape, Composing with Audio.” Kairos, vol. 21, no. 1, 2016, http://​kairos.technorhetoric.net/​21.1/​praxis/​rodrigue/​authors.html. Solnit, Rebecca. “Preaching to the Choir.” Harper’s Magazine, Nov. 2017, https://​harpers.org/​ archive/​2017/​11/​preaching-​to-​the-​choir/​. Accessed 30 August 2019. Stephenson Shaffer, Tracy. “The Value of Literature in Introducing Performance Studies.” Review of Communication, vol. 16, no. 2–​3, 2016, pp. 236–​245. Sterne, Jonathan. “Sonic Imaginations.” Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne, Taylor and Francis, 2012, pp. 1–​17. Strine, Mary S., Beverly Whitaker Long and Mary Frances Hopkins. “Research in Interpretation and Performance Studies:  Trends, Issues, Priorities.” Speech Communication, edited by Gerald Phillips, Southern Illinois University Press, 1990, pp. 181–​204. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire:  Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003. VanKooten, Crystal. “The Music, the Movement, the Mix: Listening for Sonic and Multimodal Invention.” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, vol. 25, 2017, http://​ enculturation.net/​the_​music_​the_​movement_​the_​mix. Warren, John T. “Doing Whiteness:  On the Performative Dimensions of Race in the Classroom.” Communication Education, vol. 50, no. 2, 2001, pp. 91–​1084. —​— ​—​. “Reflexive Teaching: Toward Critical Autoethnographic Practices of/​in/​on Pedagogy.” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, vol. 11, 2011, pp. 139–​144.

Part 1

L istening

to  B odies: M any

K inds

of  S ounds

Deborah Underwood’s children’s book The Quiet Book illustrated by Renata Liwska presents a descriptive series of some of “the many kinds of quiet” that might exist over the course of a day in the life of a child (1). The illustrations present anthropomorphized animals moving through a day at home, in school, and with friends as they encounter and produce these different scenes and sites of quiet. The short sentences offer instances for reflection and for hearing personal connections: “Coloring in the lines quiet,” and “Last one to get picked up from school quiet.” Throughout this short children’s book, school is presented in multiple moments and illustrations as a place that is full of moments of meaningful quiet. In The Loud Book by Underwood and with illustrations again by Liwska, school is again offered as a scene where the characters and the descriptions of the “lots of louds” are made meaningful including:  “Burp during quiet time loud,” and “Fire truck day at school loud.” In both The Quiet Book and The Loud Book sounds are evocative of a range of experiences and emotions that might occur in relationship to schools. Likewise, schools are presented as sites that are characterized and experienced through the production of sounds ranging from quiet to loud. And as these sounds are made, they are also heard, felt, and experienced as fully embodied performances.

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For example, one of the many quiets includes:  “Others telling secrets quiet.” The illustration shows one of the animals separated and distanced from the other two animals who are walking a short distance away and engaging in a conversation. The quiet of exclusion is presented as relatable both as an experience of being excluded and of excluding others. And this quiet is presented as an experience that is sounded in a way that is not exclusively heard through the ear, but it is importantly a quiet that is felt and embodied (in this instance by distance and separation, absence and presence, connection and isolation). Underwood and Liwska present quiet and loud sounds as ways of making sense of experience with a recognition that sometimes we encounter these sounds in the world, sometimes these sounds change the ways we experience the world, sometimes we make these sounds, and sometimes we are made by these sounds. The Quiet Book and The Loud Book function as openings for a recognition of sound as a pivotal and dynamic feature of an embodied experience of the world. In his introduction to Ear Cleaning:  Notes for an Experimental Music Course R. Murray Schafer also attends to the ways sounds shape experience. Schafer presents a series of questions and notes on how sounds are experienced that work to uncover and explore how sound matters. He explains his pedagogical goal: I felt my primary task in this course was to open ears. I have tried always to induce students to notice sounds they have never really listened to before, listen like mad to the sounds of their environment and the sounds they themselves inject into their environment. (p. 1)

Like Underwood’s children’s books, Schafer treats sound as entangled with our experience and movement in and through the world. These texts ask: How do we experience sound? How do we make sound? What sounds do we encounter? How are these sounds made meaningful by our listening? And how do these sounds shape and constitute our way of being and knowing in the world? Underwood and Schafer also both situate their consideration of sound in the context of schools. Underwood and Liwska explicitly draw and reference schools throughout their books, and Schafer’s project is based on lecture notes for an undergraduate level experimental music class. Sound is an important feature of the how bodies move through schools. Bodies sound within schools, and sounds shape the ways schooling is felt and experienced. Steven Feld’s conception of acoustemology offers another way of thinking about the relationship between bodies and sounds. He explains, “Acoustemology joins acoustics to



Introduction 21

epistemology to investigate sounding and listening as a knowing-​in-​action: a knowing-​with and knowing through the audible” (12). For Feld, sounding and listening are always embodied practices of knowledge production and learning. Bodies sound, but bodies are also constituted in and by sound. Deborah Kapchan offers a theory of the body as always of sound. She explains, “This is the sound body:  a resonant body that is porous, that transforms according to the vibrations of its environment, and correspondingly transforms that environment” (38). The sound body is a body that is always entangled with its environment. The sound body makes and is made by sound. The sound body offers a theory for encountering what the student and teacher as audience member might be doing in sound. For example, as witness to a performance, the sound body resonates, is transformed by, and transforms the staged performance event. Kapchan further specifies the sound body in contrast to the legal body. She explains, “Against the legal body—​the body defined by jurisprudence—​the sound body is marked as unusual or extraordinary” (39). The sound body is not defined in legal terms, it exceeds these institutional definitions and boundaries. In the classroom, the legal body is marked by institutionally sanctioned roles and practices. The legal body is afforded rights, carries specific expectations, is bound by policies and procedures to act in particular ways. For example, the legal body in the classroom is often expected to follow the guidelines and rules set forth in institutional handbooks created for students and handbooks created for faculty. In contrast, the sound body exists and exceeds despite these institutional and legal configurations of bodies. The sound body offers a way of approaching the body as a site of resonance and reverberation that is always entangled with the world and others (both human and nonhuman). Pedagogically, the sound body, presents an opportunity for considering the ways teaching and learning emerge as sites of feeling and knowing in and through feeling. Kapchan explains, “The fleshy sound body unfolds as a chiasm, a barzakh from self to world, an intertwining of world with self” (40). The sound body is a pedagogical site of learning in and with the world. Bodies in schools make sound and are made in sound as they work to teach, to learn, and to aid in learning and teaching practices. Performative listening and performative writing together offer a framework for engaging these sounds, re-​presenting these sounds, and considering the implications of these sounds. In the following three chapters I turn to Underwood and Liwska’s texts as a guiding framework for organizing my account and performance of listening

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to bodies in the performance classroom. The Quiet Book presents 29 distinctive moments of quiet. The Loud Book shares 29 kinds of loud. Each sentence describing a quiet or loud moment is accompanied by illustrations that provide visual clues regarding context, characters, and conflict that accompanies and resonates with these moments of sound. Taken together the descriptions and illustrations work to tell a story of one possible way of experiencing any given day as a chronicle of quiet or loud moments Throughout Part 1, I listen for the sounds of bodies in the specific educational context of the performance studies classroom. In each chapter, I follow Underwood and Liwska’s format in order to account for the many kinds of sounds that bodies might make in a performance classroom on any given day, and I offer 29 kinds of sounds bodies make in the performance classroom as section headings.1 Each chapter presents 29 kinds of sounds that work to demonstrate the ways bodies perform sound, how sound configures and creates an expanded notion of learning and teaching bodies, and how the sounding body always carries ideological and material implications. Within each section I present a series of descriptive fragments or figures of sounding bodies in the performance classroom that reflect on, extend, and perform these 29 sounds.2 These fragments or figures follow the spirit of Roland Barthes’s fragments of a lover’s discourse which he describes as figures in the sense that they are “the body’s gesture caught in action and not contemplated in repose” (4). The performance classroom privileges and emphasizes the body as a site of learning. Bodies carry knowledge, bodies create knowledge, and learning is always an embodied act. Activities are developed in the service of reflexively engaging and critically interrogating the knowledges of bodies. Assignments are designed in the service of generating new modes of understanding and knowing about the self and others. As Elyse Lamm Pineau explains, “Since performance is a methodology of enactment, a learning by doing, it must proceed through direct kinesthetic engagement with the issues to be explored” (48). The learning that happens in the performance class, therefore, often involves the direct movement and use of the body. Students in performance classes move, they perform, they develop and stage interpretations, critiques, and analysis that emerge from their embodied positions and experiences. The chapters in Part 1 take seriously the idea that this movement and performance is worth listening to and for. An embodied approach to learning, or the fact that learning happens in and through the body, is not exclusively the purview of courses in performance



Introduction 23

studies. As John T. Warren explains, “In the classroom, the body serves not only as a performing ideologically-​saturated cultural being, but also as an enfleshed being situated in education—​as a body that is capable of learning viscerally” (258). In other words, all bodies, and all classroom encounters, present opportunities for learning that is visceral, enfleshed, and embodied. Learning is always an embodied act, even if the lessons or the pedagogy of the educational interaction are not directly linked to how bodies come to know. For example, it is through embodied learning that students learn to sit, raise hands, listen, ask questions, complete tasks, collaborate, follow rules and instructions, and otherwise accomplish successful or acceptable performances as students. In the next three chapters, I present my performance of listening to and for the embodied learning practices that emerge in a performance classroom.3 If performance presents an opportunity for learning in and through the body, then this process of kinesthetic and visceral learning surely generates vibrations and reverberations, or sounds. In listening for these sounds of learning bodies I  am interested in creating and performing (in writing) descriptive accounts of the possible sounds that might emerge when bodies work to learn. If learning happens in and through embodied engagement, then my guiding question is: what does it sound like when bodies engage in learning practices in a performance classroom? I am not interested in attributing specific sounds to particular bodies, though this listening does flirt with what Michel Chion refers to as a causal mode of listening in which sounds are attributed to particular sources (25). In describing and imagining the sounds that might accompany pedagogical moments and interactions I am linking sounds to actions, but my goal here is not to create a direct link between sounds and actions. The moments described in this chapter are not always going to sound the same, and the sounds are not necessarily of these moments. Instead these descriptive accounts are an attempt at generating a sense of the effects and affects of learning bodies. So, while I  do mark some of these sounds as being “of learning bodies” and “of teaching bodies” my interest is not in the causal relationship between sound and body, but instead it is in the ways sound might be engaged to generate an account of pedagogical interactions. By performatively listening to the sounds of learning bodies, I am actively engaging in a listening practice that creates a sense of (and is reflexively aware of and accountable for this creative act) these sounds, these bodies, and these events. In this way, listening is a pedagogical and performative act that works to learn from performances and acts of learning.

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Performative listening presents four commitments that guide my approach to describing the sounds of learning bodies. First, performative listening is committed to curiosity, or a stance of openness to the other, to the unknown, to the unexpected (McRae 38). This stance positions me as a listener in the classroom open and willing to engage with sound as a starting place for thinking about and reflecting on what constitutes learning and learning bodies. This commitment might be characterized in this chapter as a question of, what can be learned by listening to how bodies learn and work to learn in a performance classroom? The second commitment of performative listening is a commitment to listening to and with the body (McRae 39). This commitment positions the act of listening as always from and with the body. So, not only am I interested in listening to and for learning bodies, I am also listening from my embodied position as teacher, researcher, and student of performance. I listen from an embodied position that embraces an expanded notion of listening that strives to move away from what Steph Ceraso describes as an “ear-​centric” approach to listening (6). Instead I strive to listen in ways that resonate with Ceraso’s descriptions of a multimodal listening. She explains: Multimodal listening allows for dispersed attention—​a general openness to the sonic world and its complexities. Put differently, multimodal listening enables listeners to understand how their bodily experiences in specific contexts shape and are shaped by sound. (6)

Listening to and with the body is similarly a multimodal way of engaging learning bodies and the emergence of sounds in pedagogical contexts and interactions as felt experiences that include and often exceed the sensory experience of sound. The third commitment that characterizes performative listening is a commitment to context and location as always entangled with the act of listening (McRae 41–​43). In later chapters I  take this commitment as an opening to listen specifically to and for context and location as pedagogical sites. However, in this chapter context and location provide a way for focusing on the sounds of learning bodies as they are situated in relationship to and with the specific context and location of the classroom. My act of performatively listening to and for these learning bodies is also always contextually located. The descriptive fragments that I offer in this chapter emerge from my context and location as a listener. I listen to and describe these learning bodies from my position within this performance classroom. This is a context and location that I enter



Introduction 25

with great familiarity. My body has inhabited this space as student and teacher for over a decade, and my listening and accounts of listening are informed by this position. The final commitment of performative listening that informs my listening for learning bodies in this chapter is a commitment to accountability (McRae 43–​45). This is a commitment that emphasizes the importance of accounting for and reflexively attending to the ways individual and embodied listening acts and contextual positions enable and constrain the ways listening is and can be practiced. Each of the descriptive accounts that I share in this chapter are reflective of my position and limits as a listener and instructor. These are partial, incomplete, fleeting moments that reflect just as much (if not more) about me as a listener, then they do about the learning bodies they attempt to describe. Performative listening is the mode that enables me to generate the following methods and fragments, and my hope is that some of these moments resonate beyond the performance classroom. My hope is that these examples and descriptions serve as a starting place for others to listen for learning bodies in other contexts of learning as a way of engaging in the generative work of attending to the affective, the critical, and the mundane textures and dynamics of pedagogical interactions and practices. Chapter  1, “Listening for Learning Bodies,” listens for and presents the sounds bodies make while learning in a performance studies class. The fragments of listening for learning bodies are presented in the perspective of third person narration in order to convey a sense of one way these sounds might be encountered and overheard. The instances of learning bodies making sounds in Chapter 1 are designed to emphasize the sounds and feelings generated by learning bodies in a specific classroom context; however, the hope is that these moments also generate other examples and ways of approaching pedagogical interactions in a range of classroom and educational contexts. Chapter 2, “Listening for Teaching Bodies,” listens for and presents some of the sounds bodies might make while teaching in a performance class. These moments emerge from my own experience and practice as a teacher and are offered not as a comprehensive account of the sounds of teaching bodies, but as an opening for consideration and conversation about the various ways teaching bodies make sound in pedagogical contexts. In this chapter the sounds of teaching bodies are presented from the perspective of a second person narrator as an invitation for you, the reader, to listen with me to some of the ways teaching bodies might sound.

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Finally, Chapter 3, “Listening and Sounding Bodies,” focuses on the ways sound makes bodies in a performance class. Working from Kapchan’s conceptualization of the sound body, this chapter works to present and juxtapose the ways bodies are made to sound through institutional or legal practices and policies, with the ways bodies might be understood as always made in and by sound (in spite of institutional constraint). The 29 fragments in Chapter  3 play with form in a variety of ways to mirror the various ways institutional practices and regulations constrain sound. For example, I suggest the function of the regulation of sound through institutional policy and practice by using syllabic poetry, or poetry that uses a specific number of syllables for each line. These forms of poetry similarly constrain the ways bodies make and are made in sound. I contrast these descriptions and forms with forms that are less regulated in fragments that are suggestive of how the sound body emerges in and exceeds institutional controls. In each of the next three chapters I offer these fragments and descriptions in the spirit of moving beyond an aural understanding of sound and toward an approximation of feelings as they might emerge in and through sound. As Kapchan reminds, “Sound affects: we feel it and it creates feelings” (40). My hope is that you, the reader, might recognize some of these moments from your own educational experiences. I hope that you might sense the feelings of these described moments. And I hope that these fragments signal and invite a consideration of the infinite ways bodies emerge in and through sound in educational contexts and pedagogical interactions.

Notes 1 This formal choice is in part inspired by Peter Turchi’s description of compositional constraints of form used by the Oulipo or the Workshop of Potential Literature (including “the Heterogram, a text in which no letter is repeated; the Lipogram, a text in which a given letter(s) does not appear; and various replacement formulae” (170). Turchi emphasizes the value of constraint. Turchi also points to the Road Runner cartoons created by Chuck Jones in which each cartoon adhered to nine specific rules or constraints (179–​181). Constraint, as Turchi explains, provides a productive and generative space for creating surprising connections and insights about the world. 2 The use of fragments is also aligned with Amy Kilgard’s call for collage as a paradigm for performance studies. Kilgard explains, “As a paradigm for performance studies, collage begins with the idea that all performance is intertextual” (11). These fragments first begin with the intertextual connection to Underwood and Liwska’s children’s books, but they are also intertextual in terms of the ways they bring together various cultural forms, pedagogical



Introduction 27 experiences, and ideas and experiences about sound. Kilgard goes on to broaden the ways collage might shape performance studies saying:

Beyond intertextuality, however, collage offers additional insights into performance studies practices. I  posit four facets of collage as paradigmatic for performance studies: 1) Collage involves examining the (at least) double life of constitutive components; 2) Collage is a sensual/​sensory/​embodied practice; 3) Collage involves juxtapositions and relationships of elements in time and space; 4) Collage is unsettled. These elements of collage are not mutually exclusive. Nor are they exhaustive. (11) The use of fragments in the following chapters engages this paradigm for performance by working these four facets of collage. 3 This is a performance of listening that is informed by D. Soyini Madison’s description of the function of performance. She explains, “Performance helps me see. It illumines like good theory. It orders the world and it lets the world loose. It is a top spun out of control that spins its way back to its beginning. Like good theory, performance is a blur of meaning, language, and a bit of pain” (108). In a related way, and in these chapters, I argue that performance helps me hear. It resonates like good theory.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse:  Fragments. Translated by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1977. Ceraso, Steph. Sounding Composition:  Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening. Duke University Press, 2018. Chion, Michel. Audio-​vision: Sound on Screen. Columbia University Press, 1994. Feld, Steven. “Acoustemology.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 12–​21. Kapchan, Deborah. “Body.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 33–​44. Kilgard, Amy. “Collage:  A Paradigm for Performance Studies.” Liminalities:  A Journal of Performance Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, 2009, pp. 1–​19. http://​liminalities.net/​5-​3/​collage.pdf. Madison, D. Soyini. “Performing Theory/​Embodied Writing.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 2, 1999, pp. 107–​124. McRae, Chris. Performative Listening: Hearing Others in Qualitative Research. Peter Lang, 2015. Pineau, Elyse Lamm Pineau. “Re-​Casting Rehearsal: Making a Case for Production as Research.” Journal of the Illinois Speech and Theatre Association, vol. 46, 1995, pp. 43–​52. Schafer, R. Murray. Ear Cleaning:  Notes for an Experimental Music Course. Clark & Cruickshank, 1967. Turchi, Peter. Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. Trinity University Press, 2004. Underwood, Deborah. The Quiet Book. Illustrated by Renata Liwska, Houghton Mifflin, 2010. —​—​—​. The Loud Book. Illustrated by Renata Liwska, Houghton Mifflin, 2012. Warren, John T. “The Body Politic: Performance, Pedagogy, and the Power of Enfleshment.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 19, 1999, pp. 257–​266.

1 LISTENING FOR LEARNING BODIES

Prelude 1: Fanfare for Learners Sounds of learning bodies abound in the classroom. Students fill the space and their presence is made known in and by their sounds. Learning bodies activate the space with movements and vibrations. Learning bodies create continuity and connection through their actions, interactions, and intra-​actions. And when the students leave, when the learning bodies are not in the classroom learning, there is a stillness, a silence, a disconnection. This chapter listens to and for the sounds of learning bodies (McRae 20–​ 23). What do they sound like? How do they sound? Where and when can the evidence of learning be found in sound? And how might sound and listening, as heuristics, create an expanded understanding of what it means to learn? For example, how might learning occur and be evidenced in the mundane and taken-​for-​granted sounds of learning bodies as they enter, move through, and inhabit the classroom? And how might sound and listening, as heuristics, also create expanded understandings of what it means to sound as learning bodies (beyond auditory dimensions and techniques)? For example, how might listening to learning bodies provide a way of sensing and making sense of the embodied presence, experience, and expertise of bodies working to learn?

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This listening is not a neutral practice. Instead, this chapter presents my performance of listening that is actively working to locate and name sound as a site of bodies learning in a particular classroom context. This performance is always based on and in my experience, perspective, and privilege as someone who teaches courses in performance studies. My hope is not to model a singular way of listening to bodies learning in the classroom, but to suggest one way listening might begin to approach learning bodies. In this chapter, sound and listening present an opportunity for hearing (both literally and figuratively) learning bodies in the classroom as they participate in processes of learning.1 Privileging sound and the logics of sound and listening as ways of approaching and engaging learning bodies in the classroom creates an opportunity for considering some of the constraints and possibilities that texture and characterize learning.2 This chapter presents and performs moments when learning bodies might sound. These fragments are performed in writing from the third person perspective in order to convey instances as a generic composite of interactions both real and imagined. These are in no way comprehensive of all the possible configurations of learning bodies in the classroom, rather they are an offering that reach out toward the generative moments of recognition and creation for anyone who interacts with or enacts the stance of a listening body.3 These are openings and suggestions inviting you to listen for the multiple ways learning bodies might sound in a wide range of classroom spaces and educational contexts. There are many kinds of sounds made by learning bodies in the performance classroom including:

Before Class Starts Sounds Materials are gathered for class. Bags are zipped, bottles are filled with water, phone calls are ended. Car trouble, a disagreement with a roommate, a hastily eaten breakfast, a quick call to a friend about weekend plans, an outfit change, a negotiation with a manager about a work schedule that accounts for a full schedule of classes, a goodbye to a child on their first day with a new caretaker, a second glance at a computer screen verifying the time and location of the upcoming class. The commute to campus is taking longer than usual (ninety minutes instead of thirty) this morning. The traffic on the interstate is at a standstill 20 miles from campus. A student in a 2-​door sedan pulls out their smartphone



Listening for Learning Bodies 31

and opens the university e-​mail application, keeps their foot on the brake, and writes a quick note to the instructor about the traffic. A student enters the classroom twenty minutes before the start of class and engages with the instructor in a conversation about events and experiences unrelated to class. They discuss the weather, traffic, parking, the weekend, a viral tweet. A hush falls over the class in the moments that precede the start of class. The students sitting, watching, waiting for the instructor to speak. The instructor sitting, watching, waiting for the last students to arrive and for the institutionally sanctioned start time of class before speaking to the group.

First Day of Class Sounds The first student arrives to an empty space and looks around the room taking inventory of the things that are there that usually aren’t in a classroom: black curtains draped around all four sides of the room, chairs with no desks arranged in a large circle, a small grid of theatre lights, three projectors. They take inventory of the things that aren’t there but that usually are in a classroom: desks in rows, some sort of podium or lectern, a computer, a whiteboard or smartboard, and a discernable front of the classroom. The student leaves the room to re-​ read the room number sign next to the door. The number on the sign next to the door matches the number listed on the online schedule of classes. The student shrugs, walks back into the classroom, and waits for somebody … anybody else to arrive. The first students arrive and immediately readjust the chairs, dragging them across the floor. Some students move their seats closer to one another. Some students move their chairs farther away from each other. Bags are unzipped. Greetings are whispered. Somebody laughs. A  text message alert prompts someone else to change the settings on their phone. A group of three students immediately recognize each other upon entering the classroom. They walk toward three empty chairs and begin sharing information that they have discerned about this new class and instructor. An apprehensive student feigns interest in reading through the syllabus, all the while, avoiding making eye contact with anyone else in the class, especially the instructor. An apprehensive student loudly tries to make jokes with everyone in the room including the instructor.

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Some students ask the instructor questions about the expectations for the class, about the necessity of purchasing the required books, and for more detail about the kinds of assignments. Some students whisper to each other questions asking for clarification of something the instructor said. Some students exchange contact information. Some students take notes. Some students listen, but do not participate in ways that the instructor (or other students) recognize as “active.” Some students decide to drop the class.

Name Sounds The instructor enters the classroom on the first day of class. A few students are early. Some students are already talking to each other. The instructor extends their hand to greet each student and to ask their name. Students speak their first names to the teacher. Some names are repeated because they are shared by other students in the class. These students are asked about the spelling of these names and about last names so that the teacher can make some sort of differentiation amongst the students with shared names. Some names are offered and immediately modified or qualified. My name is x, but I go by y. Or my name is y, but officially it is still x. Some names are repeated several times as the teacher clearly struggles to hear the phonemes and to discern the pronunciation. The teacher repeats these names and is sometimes corrected, sometimes offered approval of an accurate articulation, and sometimes acknowledged as adequate for the time being, but still wrong. Some students listen in order to learn the names of the other students in the class, and in order to learn how to say the other students’ names. Some students decide that they aren’t good with learning names, and so they don’t try to learn any names. Some students learn how to say their name for others. They learn to repeat their name several times. They speak their name with an exaggerated slowness. They share clever rhymes to help people remember the sounds of their names. They quickly learn who will and who will not be able to easily pronounce their name. Some students, upon being asked to repeat their name, immediately dismiss their name as being difficult to pronounce.4 They concede to mispronunciations, the use of abbreviations, nicknames, or, “whatever you want to call me.”



Listening for Learning Bodies 33

Some students don’t think twice about how their name sounds.5 Their name is common. They are the third person in this very class with this name.

Warming-​Up  Sounds At the beginning of each performance class, the students are invited to participate in some variation of a warm-​up that involves movement, vocalization, and the participation of the entire class. One warm-​up exercise is a game called, Whoosh! This game is characterized by the requirement that everyone stand in a circle and take turns saying and passing the “whoosh” to the next person.6 The warm-​up includes vocalization of words that accompany a variety of gestures and rules: Whoosh! Ramp! Zap!

Whoa! Zip!

Block! Zop!

Tunnel!

Boing! Orange!

The sound of unison voices repeating and reciting nearly memorized tongue twisters fills the air. Volume is often high, tones and pitches are varied, and the words coming from the individual voices overlap and fail to fall into perfect rhythmic alignment. The texture of the sound is rich and full of unexpected moments of harmony and dissonance. The sound of bodies moving, stretching, reaching, and flexing fills the space. The instructor invites students to walk around the room, to fill the space, to take an inventory of their movements, their breathing, and their posture. The sound of feet shuffling, stepping, stomping fills the room. Some students make eye contact and chuckle to themselves. Some students remain focused on the exercise and attentively concentrate on the way they move and breath as they walk around the room.

Embarrassment Sounds Warming-​up creates a sense of community, but it also often creates a sense of discomfort. This is an atypical beginning to most upper level university classes. Discomfort with the warm-​up is often sounded: a giggle, a sigh, a groan. For some students the discomfort with the warm-​up exercise is sounded by a refusal to fully engage.7

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Boundary Sounds During the first five minutes of class somebody from a nearby office walks by the room and tries to close the door to the performance classroom. During the first five minutes of class somebody in a nearby office loudly closes the door to their office. During the first five minutes of class somebody from the class closes the door to the classroom. During the first five minutes of class somebody from the class tries to open the door in order to enter the class, finds that it is locked, and has to knock in order to enter. Halfway through the class a student (who is not in the class) walks into the classroom, identifies the instructor, and interrupts with a question: Did you find any keys in here? Did find a blue notebook? Did you find a laptop? Do you know where I can find the Statistics Lab?

Breathing Sounds As an extension of the warm-​up, students are asked to focus on their breathing. Inhalations and exhalations are deliberately made audible by everyone in the class. Inhale: the sound of sizzling air rushing across teeth in a partially open mouth. Exhale: a short burst of air is pushed out of the mouth. Inhale: a faint whistling of air entering the body through the nostrils Exhale: an unexpected cough

Inhale: the sound of air drawn

inward

Exhale: the release of air deliberately

slowly

filling

lungs



Listening for Learning Bodies 35 and gradually pushed out

Class Discussion Sounds A question is posed by the instructor. The students sit quietly, thinking, waiting, deciding what to say. A hand raises into the air signaling a desire to speak, and a request for permission to speak. Another student does not see the raised hand and starts speaking. The student with the raised hand keeps their hand in the air. The instructor nods. The student lowers their hand and starts speaking. A question is posed by the instructor. Nobody responds. The question is reworded and posed again. One student tentatively raises their hand and tries to restate the question. A question is posed by the instructor about a concept found in the assigned reading. Before the instructor finishes speaking a student raises their hand and asks a question about an unrelated, but previously explained assignment. Another student mutters, “unbelievable.” The students take up the instructor’s question and the answers, examples, points, and counterpoints come from multiple voices and perspectives.

Workshop Sounds The class period is dedicated to a theme or idea that aligns with an upcoming performance assignment. Today’s theme is the use of voice. Students are given prompts and asked to work in small groups taking turns playing with vocal variation and quality to convey a range of emotions and points of view.8 Varying levels of volume are played with, attempted, and voiced: A faint whisper A whisper meant to be heard across a table A conversational tone meant to be used in a casual setting An excited greeting from across a lobby

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listening for learning An effort to get someone’s attention from across in a crowd Or a wide-​open space

Imagined feelings are played with, attempted, and voiced: Anger guilt Surprise! sadness disapproval HUNGER J O Y

Rehearsal Sounds Students are asked to create embodied performances:  to present, to stage, to create embodied responses, interpretations, and critiques of fictional and nonfictional texts, personal experiences, and a range of cultural and social phenomena. Students make choices about their use of voice, movement, and space.9 Students are invited to use the class period before the performance assignment is due to practice and rehearse in the space. Some students leave. Some students sit silently in their chairs and look over their chosen texts. The teacher invites and encourages the students to use the space to practice. One student cautiously moves to the center of the room and begins to take inventory of the size of the space he will need. He moves a chair into the middle of the room. Then he counts off steps from the chair to a point on the stage where he stops and looks over his shoulder at the chair. He repeats this same set of steps at least five more times. She walks around the hallway outside the classroom with notecards in hand, speaking her lines under her breath. As she walks, she looks ahead, and occasionally glances at a notecard to verify and validate her memorization of the text. A group of three students sitting in a corner are discussing their performance choices. Their voices of the group get louder and louder as they debate and discuss one of the suggested ideas: “You can’t do that!” “You have to try that.” “I don’t know if I can do that.”



Listening for Learning Bodies 37

Setting Up Sounds A student performer drags two chairs center stage and turns them towards each other. A student performer disappears behind the curtains and a faint sound of rummaging comes from the adjacent prop room. And then, without warning, there is a small crash accompanied by the shattering of glass. The student returns to the stage area carrying a medium sized black rehearsal block. No mention of the crash, or sound of glass is made. The next student performer disappears behind the curtains making way for the prop room and the previous performer shouts, “Watch out for the glass. It’s everywhere!” A student pushes three of the 3-​foot by 3-​foot black rehearsal cubes into the center of the room. The blocks are heavy and need to be pushed. They scrape across the vinyl flooring surface. A student tries to pick up and carry one of the 3-​foot by 1-​foot black rehearsal cubes across the room. They lose their grip on the block and it falls to the ground with a loud thud/​smack. A student starts setting the stage, bringing out rehearsal blocks, a table, chairs, props, another student stands up, “Do you need some help with that?” The performer raises the water bottle to their lips and takes a small sip before setting it down and turning to face the audience.

Disclaimer Sounds A student performer stands before the assembled audience and offers a disclaimer to frame the coming performance: I’m so nervous. I’m so sorry, I didn’t have time to fully prepare. I’m sorry about my voice, I’ve been sick. I’m sorry about my cough. I’m no good in front of people. Oh, I’m sorry I forgot my prop. I’m so sorry, I can’t do this now. I’m sorry. A student sends an e-​mail before class and offers a disclaimer: I’m not prepared to perform today

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Recognition Sounds Audience members perform in ways that provide expected and desired sounded feedback: applause, laughter, sighs, groans, agreement, disagreement. An audience member starts laughing at the enactment of a gesture, turn of phrase, way of emphasizing a line, use of vocal variation. An audience member finds the performance to be true to their experience. They relate to and with the performer’s presentation of the experience that is written in the script. The audience member is surprised by their emotional response but cannot stay to see how the performance will end. An audience member identifies with the performer who is struggling to remember the lines of their script. The audience member begins to sweat as they imagine standing in the same place as the performer. An audible hmm, or mmm, or huh is offered from an audience member to the performance of a poignant observation.

Disruptive Audience Member Sounds Audience members perform in ways that provide expected and unwanted sounded feedback throughout almost every performance. A whispered conversation between two audience members begins at the end of a performance and continues despite the fact of the next performer standing on stage, waiting. An alarm on a cell phone abruptly begins to sound in the middle of a performance. The owner of the phone fumbles through a bag (that is out of easy reach and zipped shut) to find and turn off the phone. Then turning to nobody in particular (not even the performer on stage) whispers in a slow and exaggerated fashion, “I’m sorry.” An audience member reaches into a bag [CRINKLE] pulls out a cracker or chip and begins to [CRUNCH] eat. Upon realizing [CRUNCH] the volume of their crunching, they proceed to eat at a slower pace, as if [CRUNCH] to obscure the sound. Instead [CRUNCH] the now intermittent [CRUNCH] crunching draws [CRUNCH] more attention to [CRUNCH] itself. An audience member who is scheduled to perform later in the class sits nervously, script in hand, and runs their lines under their breath while the other performers present their work for the class. A student sneezes. [CRUNCH]



Listening for Learning Bodies 39

Silent Sounds A silence full of possibilities fills the air in the moment before a performer begins their creative act. It is a silent full of anticipation, hope, curiosity, support, and perhaps indifference. An uncomfortable silence fills the air when the performer drops their line, struggles to remember the next word, searches hopelessly for the right phoneme. Time passes slowly in this silence One second feels like

twenty. Two seconds

feel like forever A gripping silence fills the air at the end of a powerful, incisive, and well-​ prepared performance. The body of the performer holds the room, the audience, and time in wonder and awe.

Performer Sounds A performer stands before the audience, inhales, moves, and begins to speak.10 Their voice enters the room and sounds a constellation of histories, meanings, and critiques. Their voice performs and signals difference. Their voice is a creative force. The performer walks in front of the audience. As their legs move the fabric of their pant legs rubs together making a barely perceptible swishing sound. Their sneakers softly tap against the floor. The performer turns and faces the audience and tries to hold their body still and quiet. The performer sits on stage with a bag of objects. As the performance begins the performer pulls out a wooden block from the bag. As the monologue

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continues the performer pulls block after block after the bag and slowly begins building a precariously tall tower. The inevitable crash of the falling tower is met with “oohs” and “ahhs.” The timing of the crash with the climactic and unresolved moment in the monologue is impeccable. The performer takes the stage, pauses, and takes a breath. They begin speaking. The audience watches, listens, and leans into the performance. The performer ushers the carefully rehearsed lines of their performance into the room. And as the end of the performance draws near, the performer tries to slow down, to linger in the act, but with nothing more to say or do the performer stops. In the brief moment of silence that follows the last word of the performance and precedes the applause from the audience, the performer notices themself on stage. They notice the audience. They notice the performance has ended.

Dropped Lines Sounds The performance is not quite ready for an audience. The performer calls for a line, and a student in the audience turns pages of the script searching for the line. The audience watches, and eventually (finally?) the student in the audience finds and says the next three words in the script that prompts the performers’ memory. The performer hears their voice in the classroom for the first time, speaking the words that they have practiced in their bedroom all week. The performer is surprised and caught off guard by the sound of their voice. They forget the next word in their performance. The performer sighs. “Line?” The performer successfully remembers and says the lines of the first full page of the script. They then arrive to the part of the text that they barely-​if-​ at-​all worked on learning. They call for line, but they know it won’t help. They call for line again, and again, and again. Finally, they reach the final paragraph of the script. They rush through the ending lines and hurry to their seat. The performer confidently presents their performance and is surprised when suddenly, and for the first time all week, they can’t think of the next line. They call for line and, with their memory restored, they finish the performance without dropping any more lines. A student in the audience sits and watches intently and nervously as the performer drops another line. The student turns to sneak a glance at the instructor, and then pulls out a copy of their script and tries to silently go over the lines of text.



Listening for Learning Bodies 41

Reassurance Sounds The performer expresses their apprehension and reluctance to perform. The other student-​performers in the class offer their encouragement and enthusiastic support: It’s okay! You can do it! You’re going to be great! The performer takes a deep breath, and before beginning the presentation they whisper: I’m okay. I can do this. This will all be over soon.

Asides Sounds Two audience members whisper to each other about something during a performance. Nobody, not even the instructor, is sure what the conversation is about. Was it something the performer did or said? Is it something about one of their performances? Is it something about something external to the class? Two audience members whisper to each other about something before a performance begins. Something funny is observed. One of the interlocutors laughs out load. Halfway through a well-​prepared performance one audience member turns to the person sitting on their left and says, “I do not want to go after this.” One audience member mutters a barely audible, “yeah right” in response to a performed line of text.

Hallway Sounds A group of people stop outside of the classroom and begin laughing. A repair person walks by the classroom carrying a ladder. A student answers their ringing phone and steps from the classroom into the hall, bits of the conversation make their way back into the classroom: “Tomorrow? That’d be … yes … no I’m not … absolutely … nervous

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… next to … fine … bye.” When the student returns to the classroom, the other student feigns disinterest in the subject of the call. Somebody throws something heavy into the trashcan outside the classroom door. A conversation from a nearby office spills into the classroom.

Leaving the Classroom Sounds Throughout the round of performances, a student gets up and leaves the classroom. As they make their way to the door, they: Repeat a whispered pardon as they move through the chairs, outstretched legs of the other students, and bags of various shape and size that fill the aisles: “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me.” Accidentally kick over a plastic cup filled with a brownish liquid. Accidentally knock over an open bag. Accidentally bump into an opaque stainless-​steel bottle. Accidentally nudge a skateboard across the floor. Deftly maneuver through the bags and outstretched legs that impede their exit without making a single conspicuous sound.

Returning to the Classroom Sounds Throughout the round of performances, a student returns to the classroom. As they make their way to the door, they: Peak through the four-​inch wide vertical window on the locked and closed door to see if anyone is currently performing. Stop short of knocking on the locked door when they realize that somebody is performing. Start knocking on the door when they see the audience members clapping. Push open the slightly ajar door and find that someone is in the middle of their performance. Offer an apology to the performer with a furrowed brow, widened eyes, a wince, and a withdrawn posture.



Listening for Learning Bodies 43 Tip toe to an open seat. Knock on the door as soon as they hear the applause at the end of the most recent performance.

Clapping Hands Sounds The performer pauses and somebody starts clapping. Several others join in and start clapping. The performer blushes and says, “I wasn’t finished yet.” The performer utters the last lines of the performance and slowly looks up to acknowledge and focus on the audience members for the first time as they happily applaud the performance. An audience member is particularly impressed by the performance and begins to clap loudly and quickly in admiration. An audience member is neither impressed nor offended by the performance and nonchalantly claps at a moderate volume level and rate of speed. The performance ends, and before the applause begins the performer dashes to their seat. The performance ends, and the next performer on the schedule forgets to clap.

Digital Machine Sounds Without warning, the fan in the ceiling mounted projector, which appears to be powered down, starts whirring. The performer inhales and begins reciting their memorized text and the sound of an alarm bell begins ringing loudly. Audience members turn and look at one another. The instructor scans the room with a disapproving eye. The performer reaches into their pocket and turns off their phone. A student removes the pair of over-​the-​ear headphones and lets them hang around their neck. The faint sound of a snare drum persists. An incoming text message causes a phone in a backpack to vibrate and hum in a series of three short bursts: Vrmmmm, Vrmmmm, Vrmmmm. The pre-​recorded sound of a camera shutter emanates from several smartphones as students line up in front of the whiteboard to take pictures of the notes and reminders scrawled across the surface of the board.

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Feedback Sounds After all the performers present the instructor walks in front of the room and asks for the audience to share their thoughts about the performance. The instructor asks for reflections on and descriptions of moments from each of the performances that were haunting, that linger, that were intriguing. Some reflections include: You did a really good job! I really like the sound of your voice. It’s so hard to present when you forget your lines, but you didn’t give up. That was great. You were so prepared. You really used the space well.

One student waits until the formal feedback session ends and stops another student/​performer as they are packing to leave: “That was a really great performance. I don’t know how you did that, but thank you.”

Packing Up Sounds There are three minutes left in class. Somebody closes their notebook and opens their backpack. The whizzing of the zipper loudly signals the beginning of the end of the class. There are two minutes left in class. A student tries to quietly pack their book and the handout from the instructor so that nobody will notice that they are trying to be the first person to leave. They slowly open the zipper on their bag. They softly slide the book into the bag, and ever so quietly put the bag over their shoulder. There is less than one-​minute left in class. Students begin shifting in their seats. Zippers open. Belongings are shuffled and stashed. The final reminders are rattled off by the instructor fighting for the final seconds of attention. There is no more time left in the class periods. Chairs scrape across the floor, students talk loudly to one another about a range of topics. The classroom door is open. Headphones are put over ears. Text messages are sent. Plans are made and shared. The classroom is emptied.



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Cleaning Sounds As the students leave there are props and rehearsal blocks left around the room that the instructor begins taking to the prop storage room in the back of the classroom. Two students put their bags down and return to help. As the instructor begins to wipe the black and blue markings on the white board away, a student finds a second eraser and helps clean the board. “Can I help you rearrange the seats?” a student asks the instructor.

Last Conversation Sounds A few students form an ad hoc line by the instructor eager to ask questions, make requests, and offer excuses in the passing time between classes: I just wanted to remind you that I have (a doctor’s appointment, jury duty, a court appearance, a business trip, a family vacation, to pick up my brother/​sister/​mother/​ best friend from the airport/​train station, surgery, to watch my child, to pick up my child, to visit my parent/​grandparent/​sibling/​friend-​who-​is-​just-​like-​family in the hospital, a funeral, a wedding, a training, an interview, a tournament, an away game, practice, a team meal, to pick up my car from the shop) during our next scheduled class and I won’t be here. Do you need to see proof from my (doctor, jury summons, boss, parent) for my absence last class? Is there any way I can still (turn in my paper, present my performance, make-​up the group work) that I missed? I’m not sure that I understand the assignment, can you give me an example, look over my paper, read my script? I have this idea for my performance, and I want to check with you first. Can I (bring my dog, use a candle, light a match, bring in a bag of salt, use my vape pen, bring a guitar, invite a friend, turn off the lights, ask the audience to participate, wear a costume, bring in glitter, show a video clip, use a video camera)? I want to make sure that I have (the right idea, a good idea, the best idea, an idea that will work, an idea that you will like, a good understanding, your permission).

After Class Sounds The lights are turned off, the door to the room is closed, and only a few students remain in the nearby vicinity.

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A student from class nods at the instructor as they wait outside the office door of the academic advisor, who can be heard giving advice about electives, online courses, and internships. Further down the hall another student from the class has taken a seat on the floor by the elevator and is eagerly unpacking a sandwich. Just outside the building, a student from the class unlocks the doors to their car with the remote-​control key fob as they pull from their backpack a lanyard emblazoned with an easily identifiable logo for a global coffeehouse chain and a photo identification card. Further away from the building another student from the class has a pair of white headphones in their ears and is whirring down the sidewalk weaving through the clumps of slower moving pedestrians on their 40inch longboard skateboard. Back at home a student tries to explain to their roommate, sibling, or parent what a performance is, and what they are trying to create. At work a student receives puzzled glances from co-​workers as, in between customers, they try to memorize lines of text for their upcoming staged performance.

Notes 1 In a related way, Stacy Holman Jones explains her own performance of listening as working to develop connections. She says: “This listening—​my listening—​isn’t a how-​to manual. It is not an explanation. It is, instead, a meditation; an inkling and linking of institution and individual, social structure and subject, history and biography, the living and the dead” (45). 2 Dwight Conquergood emphasizes the importance of the body and the function of listening in ethnographic practice. He states, “Listening is an interiorizing experience, a gathering together, a drawing in, whereas observation sizes up exteriors” (183). 3 These are moments that reach toward what Bryant Keith Alexander refers to as “generative autobiographical performances” (98). 4 Rita Kohli and Daniel G.  Solórzano note the function of mispronounced names in the context of K-​12 schools as instances of racial microagressions. They explain: The majority of racial microaggressions in regards to names likely occurs because of unawareness to the issue, or even a phonetic limitation in a teacher’s ability to say a particular sound. Even so, the consequences of these subtle racial experiences are real and can have a lasting impact on the wellbeing and self-​perceptions of youth. For this reason, to prevent internalized racism, teachers must own this issue regardless of the cause of a mispronunciation and be transparent about their limitation. (458) 5 Nina Sun Eidsheim explains that voice and timbre are qualities that are always also linked to and with racializing practices including listening (24–​27).



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6 Chris McRae and Aubrey Huber, Creating Performances for Teaching and Learning. 7 Ronald J. Pelias, “Confessions of an Apprehensive Performer” (79–​87). 8 Ronald Pelias and Tracy Stephenson Shaffer offer prompts for working with and workshopping various dimensions of voice in performance (81–​85). 9 Elyse Lamm Pineau, “Re-​Casting Rehearsal.” 10 These descriptions of performer sounds are based on experiences of witnessing and teaching what Tracy Stephenson Shaffer refers to as the “conspicuous aesthetic performance” of performance studies scholarship (51).

Works Cited Alexander, Bryant K. “Skin Flint (or, The Garbage Man’s Kid): A Generative Autobiographical Performance Based on Tami Spry’s Tattoo Stories.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1, 2000, pp. 97–​114. Conquergood, Dwight. “Rethinking Ethnography:  Towards a Critical Cultural Politics.” Communication Monographs, vol. 58, 1990, pp. 179–​194. Eidsheim, Nina S. The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre & Vocality in African American Music. Duke University Press, 2019. Holman Jones, Stacy. Torch Singing: Performing Resistance and Desire from Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf. AltaMira, 2007. Kohli, Rita, and Daniel G. Solórzano. “Teachers, Please Learn Our Names!:  Racial Microagressions and the K-​12 Classroom.” Race Ethnicity and Education, vol. 15, no.  4, 2012, pp. 441–​462. McRae, Chris. Performative Listening: Hearing Others in Qualitative Research. Peter Lang, 2015. McRae, Chris, and Aubrey Huber. Creating Performances for Teaching and Learning: A Practice Session for Pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pelias, Ronald J. Writing Performance:  Poeticizing the Researcher’s Body. Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Pelias, Ronald J., and Tracy S. Shaffer. Performance Studies: The Interpretation of Aesthetic Texts. 2nd ed., Kendall Hunt, 2007. Pineau, Elyse L. “Re-​Casting Rehearsal: Making a Case for Production as Research.” Journal of the Illinois Speech and Theatre Association, vol. 46, 1995, pp. 43–​52. Stephenson Shaffer, Tracy. “The Place of Performance in Performance Studies.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1, 2020, pp. 49–​71.

2 LISTENING FOR TEACHING BODIES

Prelude 2: Tones of Teachers This chapter listens to and for the different ways that teachers sound in the performance classroom. The listening fragments in this chapter are performed in writing from a second person point of view as an invitation to you, the reader, to engage with and consider the embodied positioning, perspective, and experience of the teaching body. The performance of listening to and for sounds of teachers in the performance classroom presented in Chapter 2 emerge from my experience as a teacher, as well as from my conversations with and observations of other teachers. These fragments are imaginative accounts of the sounds and are deliberately composed and curated to create a sense of some of the considerations and experiences of teaching bodies. These moments are, as with the other fragments throughout this book, also offered as an invitation and call for you to listen for teaching bodies. Sound, as a starting place, for engaging with the experiences and efforts of teaching bodies creates possibilities and opportunities for rethinking and reimaging what teaching bodies do, how they move, and how they interact with and are shaped by others in classroom spaces. Here I listen to the sounds

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of teaching bodies as always in process, as emergent, and relational. Or as Erin Manning explains, “What a body does is ecological:  it becomes in relation to a changing environment, and what it does in that relation is what it is. A body is a tending, an inflection, an incipient directionality” (190). Bodies are always and made and re-​made in relation to environment, and teaching bodies become in relation to students in time and space. Sound, and listening that attends to the sounding and sounds of teaching bodies is an attempt at attending to what Manning refers to as the relations of bodies and worlds (191). Teaching bodies become in and through relations, and I am interested in how those relations might emerge in ways that can be attended to as sounds and soundings. Just as the teaching body is a body that becomes in and through relationships, the sounds and sounding of teaching that I listen for throughout this chapter approach sound as a process and a becoming, rather than as a fixed object or thing. Nina Sun Eidsheim explains sound in terms of vibration in order to consider music and singing as emergent and relational processes. In terms of the implications this shift has for music Eidsheim explains, “Music as vibration is something that crosses, is affected by, and takes its character from any materiality, and because it shows us interconnectedness in material terms, it also shows us that we cannot exist merely as singular individuals” (20). Theorizing music as vibration is not an approach to music that hears music as a fixed object. Instead, music is configured and emerges relationally. In terms of listening sounds of teaching bodies, I similarly understand these sounds not as fixed objects that teachers make, but as vibrations that emerge relationally in contexts that are socially, culturally, and ideologically saturated.1 Listening for teaching bodies is a listening for the emerging relationships that constitute acts of teaching in a particular space and time in order to better consider teaching bodies, how teaching bodies become, and how they might become differently. There are many kinds of sounds made by teaching bodies in the performance classroom including:

Preparation Sounds Twenty minutes before class starts you unlock the classroom door, turn on the lights and enter the space. You begin rearranging the chairs in the room, making a circle of seats to fit 24 students. The chairs slide across the vinyl



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flooring. You pick up leftover trash and take it to the garbage and recycle bins in the hall.2 You return to the room and count, under your breath, the chairs in the room. Fifteen minutes before class starts you return to your office and turn on the coffee maker. The dripping water falls into the ceramic cup. Steam rises. The smell of rich coffee fills the air. Ten minutes before class starts you walk down the hall and enter the copy room in the front office. You turn on the lights, walk to the copy machine, open the lid, and place your handout on the glass of the machine. You close the lid and stare at the screen trying to find the right buttons to enter the number of desired copies. The machine hums and whirs as it exists “sleep mode” and becomes “ready” to copy. Five minutes before class starts you hurriedly return to the classroom and scrawl your agenda for the day on the whiteboard. Students enter the room. Some of them greet you. Some of them greet each other. Two minutes before class starts you realize you left your coffee mug in your office. You glance at your watch and decide to try and race the clock. One minute before class starts you return to the classroom, inhale, make eye contact with as many students as possible, muster a smile, and …

Before Class Sounds You are stopped in the hallway three feet from the door to the classroom by a student who is in the class you are getting ready to teach. They have something important to let you know: I’m expecting a call from my doctor, so I might need to step out during our class. I need to pick up my little sister from school, and I need to leave class early. I’m expecting a call back for a job interview. Is it okay if I take the call? I have an appointment with my advisor halfway through our class. It was the only appointment I could get. I’m feeling really sick, is it okay if I don’t come to class today?

You enter the classroom a few minutes early and some of the students are talking about

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another class a recent assignment, test, paper in another class a new streaming show politics the weather fashion parking

another teacher in the department a new movie a viral video clip on the internet sports music work relationships

You enter the classroom early and you greet the students in the room. They ask you about your weekend. You ask them about their weekend. They ask you about an event that just happened downtown. You ask them for movie recommendations.

Starting Class Sounds You begin the class period with a speech act:  “Welcome,” “Good morning,” “Good afternoon,” “Good evening,” “Hello, my name is.” With the sounds of these words the class begins. You enter the classroom and before saying a word to the students, you proceed to write a list of key words, questions, and points of discussion on the board.

Rapport Sounds As you ease into the class period you begin with a series of open-​ended questions for the students to consider and engage. How’s everyone enjoying the weather? How are your classes going? Did you have a nice weekend? What did you do over the weekend? Did anyone see the (new movie, new show, game) last night? Does anybody understand this new (app, trend, fad)? Can anybody make any recommendations for (food, music, entertainment) this week?



Listening for Teaching Bodies 53

Personal Properties Sounds Your keys are attached to a carabiner that is clipped to your belt loop. You slide the keys into your back pocket to limit the jingling of the keys. Occasionally the keys slip out of your pocket and punctuate your walk across the classroom with a syncopated jingle jangle. You pop the top on your travel mug and take a sip of your lukewarm coffee. You set your bag down at the front of the room. You carefully lean it against the chair you plan on sitting in during the upcoming discussion. The bag slowly slides out of position and the contents spill out onto the floor. You set your phone on the podium. An incoming call at the beginning of class causes the phone to vibrate and rattle the podium.

Returning Papers Sounds With a stack of papers, rubrics, evaluation forms in hand, you awkwardly move through the classroom handing students their papers with comments and grades. You make a concerted effort to keep the exchange discreet: you fold the graded papers or turn them over before handing them back so that the grades and your evaluative comments are hidden from wandering eyes. You stand at a table in front of the class with a stack of papers. You call out student names and hand out the papers one at a time. You prepare to hand back the evaluation forms from the last round of performances, and as you reach into the folder to grab the stack of papers you drop your pen, lose your grip, miscalculate the stack, and the papers fall to the floor like oversized pieces of confetti.

Warming-​Up  Sounds You invite the students to join you in a warm-​up. You take a deep breath before offering instructions. You look around at the students. You take another deep breath. You ask the students to try out the gestures, the sounds, the rules. You tell the class that this is a good way to build community and to develop confidence. You ask the students to inhale. You ask the students to exhale. You ask the students to repeat a tongue twister that you hope you have mastered.

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Lecture Sounds You start to introduce a new concept/​set of ideas/​theory. You explain that this will be a brief lecture followed by an activity/​discussion/​application. You follow the notes on your outline. You begin your lecture with every intention of leaving time for a small group activity. You start talking about the issue or theme of the day, and before you know it there are only five minutes left in class. You decide to create a slideshow to accompany your lecture. You want to provide visual examples and illustrations of the ideas you are discussing. The computer and projector system seem to be especially slow this morning. The first slide finally appears on the screen. You point to different places on the image as you talk. You try to deliver your lecture with energy and with variation in your use of volume and tempo. You try to pause between points. You try to leave room for questions throughout your talk. You try to adjust and adapt when you notice the students show signs of boredom, confusion, or disagreement. You try to adjust and adapt when you notice your own signs of boredom, confusion, or disagreement with the things you are saying. You decide to work from a detailed outline in delivering your lecture. Your notes are helpful. You hit the main points that you have in bolded text on the outline. Your examples seem relevant. You surprise yourself. You decide to work from a detailed outline in delivering your lecture. You look down at the outline and realize that instead of your class notes you brought an old agenda from a faculty meeting.

Discussion Sounds You offer an argument and ask the students to respond. You wait for a few seconds, and just before you are about to rephrase the argument, a student in the back raises their hand. You present a concept or theory, and you ask the students to define the terms using examples from their lived experience. You wait for a re … two students start speaking at almost the same time. You ask the students to think about why. You wait for a response, and nobody says anything. You rephrase your question: Why does any of this matter? One student raises their hand. As the student is speaking, another student raises their hand, and another, and another.



Listening for Teaching Bodies 55

You ask the students to share their questions about the discussion topic. You wait for a response. As the discussion unfolds you try to stage manage, or curate, or direct the way conversation goes. You rephrase comments, you redirect questions, you try to invite and include more voices. Throughout the discussion, you notice one student never speaks. Throughout the discussion you notice that the same two students always speak first, last, and the most.

Classroom Technology Sounds You log in to the computer at the podium and a chiming sound plays as the screen brightens. You turn on the projector and the cooling fan whirs. You press a button and the electric motor hums as the projection screen descends behind you. Your type a few words on the keyboard and the keys click as you type. You drag the mouse across the smooth surface of the podium and click a hyperlink. An advertisement for life insurance begins playing over the speakers. After waiting five seconds you choose to “skip the ad” and the video clip you want to share with the class begins playing. You erase the blue and black markings from the white board leaving a streaky haze across the surface of the board. You uncap a dry-​erase marker and begin writing on the board. The felt tip of the marker leaves your daily agenda in ink on the board. You enter the space and discover one of the fluorescent lights is flickering in the back of the room. A faint clicking and buzzing sound accompanies the light show. You turn the lights on and off to try and correct the glitch.

Group Work Sounds After explaining the handout, you instruct the students that they are to complete the task in ten minutes while working with no more than two other students. You let the students pick their group members. You count, in a barely audible whisper to yourself, the number of students in the class. Twenty, twenty-​one, twenty-​two, twenty-​four … no … twenty-​three. Twenty-​three. You try to determine how many groups of three you could form. You try to figure out how many groups of four you could form. You are distracted. You ask a student sitting in the front row who seems to be

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attentively watching your attempts how many groups there could be. They offer an answer. Before class starts you arrange the chairs in the room in groupings of four in different places around the room. As students enter the room, they fill the chairs, and groups. You try to watch and listen to all the groups as they begin working on the assignment. You overhear a range of comments and discussions that may or may not be on task: it’s a four page essay every two weeks! I think he wants us to … but did you see this one? I work at the … across town I’m supposed to … tonight that’s just the starting pay, then there are also … you don’t even have the books for the class yet?

The groups disperse and take on the assignment. One group leaves the classroom to work, you guess, out in the hall. Another group sets up in the middle of the room. Another group moves their chairs and bags and huddles together in a corner and begins working quietly. You circulate and check in with each group: we’re done we need, like, two more minutes we’re nowhere near being ready

Activity Sounds You describe your objectives for an activity that follows the lecture or discussion. You invite the students to perform a set of tasks, to accomplish a particular goal, or to complete some specific actions in a set amount of time. You finish explaining the activity and wait in anticipation for the students to begin working. Students find new places to work around the classroom. Chairs are dragged, bags are moved. Somebody leaves the room.



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The sound of voices swells—​peaks and valleys of volume—​as students engage, talk through a problem, devise a plan of action, make choices. Somebody raises their hand. You move closer and try to answer their question. You try to interrupt, to get everyone’s attention. Your voice is not loud enough. You try to call attention to yourself again, but you are still not loud enough. You move to the center of the room. You want to find the right volume: just loud enough to get everyone’s attention. You inhale and cringe as the sound of your voice comes out just a little too loud.

Shoe Sounds You shuffle into the room and the flat rubber soles of your sneakers pad softly across the vinyl surface of the floor. You walk heal to toe through the classroom, challenging yourself to walk as quietly as you can. You revert to an old performance practice of rehearsing in your bare feet and slide out of your shoes and socks to teach. The skin on the bottom of your feet sticks, ever so slightly, to the floor. The leather soles of your shoes make a sharp staccato click as you move quickly and purposefully across the classroom. Your less than two-​inch heels make a rhythmic, but quiet, drumming as you move around the room. You pivot abruptly as you remember to pick something up that you forgot on the table, and the pressure and speed of your movement creates a squeaking sound, like a basketball player on a wooden court.

Assignment Sounds You introduce a major assignment to the class. You begin by explaining the overall goal of the assignment, and you offer a reminder that there is a description of the assignment in the syllabus. You write several important guidelines and due dates for the upcoming assignment on the board. Several students stop you from erasing the board at the end of class and they use their smartphones to take pictures of your instructions.

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You bring a detailed handout with instructions for the assignment. You pass out copies and wait for everyone to receive a copy before you begin talking. Later you realize that you did not wait for anyone to read the document. You ask the students to share their questions about the assignment.

Answering Questions Sounds Before you finish describing the assignment an eager student raises their hand with a question. You decide to answer the questions as you explain the instructions. You decide to ask everyone to hold their questions until you finish explaining the instructions. You ask students to share their questions. You ask students if there are any other questions. You ask again if there are any other questions. You tell the students to let you know if any other questions arise. You try to answer each question with clarity. Sometimes you stumble over your words. You restate questions. You ask if your answer helps. Sometimes the question seems easy to answer. Sometimes the questions are repeated questions that you try to answer without sounding annoyed. Sometimes the questions are impossible to answer.

Student as Teacher Sounds You explain to your classmates what you did in a previous performance class for a similar set of assignments. You offer a way of explaining the current assignment in terms that make sense to you, and that seem to make sense to the other students in the class. You reassure the students who seem particularly anxious. You offer your previous performance as an example. You speak from experience. You ask a series of questions about the assignment. Each answer you receive leads you to more questions. You keep asking your questions. Your questions point to both your understanding and your curiosity. Your questions reveal gaps in the assignment and the instruction. Your questions help your understanding, but they also help teach the instructor. This is not your first class with this instructor, and you recognize certain patterns in the way the class is structured. You explain to your classmates your understanding of the class and the instructor.



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Workshop Sounds You set aside class time for the students to work on and develop their performance assignments. This includes:  making time for students to receive feedback from one another and you, making plans for the ways they will use the stage space, use props, use movement and gesture, practicing how they will speak, memorizing lines. You offer prompts, create checklists, and create rules and guidelines to structure and constrain their use of the workshop time. Students work alone, in pairs, and in small groups over the class period. Sometimes these workshops are graded, sometimes they are not. A student confidently blocks out a rehearsal space center stage—​in the middle of the classroom—​and begins repeatedly rehearsing their opening line in full volume (IT WAS FIVE YEARS AGO ON A SUNDAY IN JUNE). A pair of students retreats to the prop room that is adjacent to the classroom, and quietly begin discussing something. (IT WAS FIVE YEARS AGO ON A SUNDAY IN JUNE) A group of three students slide their chairs into a corner. Nobody in the group remembered to bring their book, their script, or any materials (IT WAS FIVE YEARS AGO ON A SUNDAY IN JUNE) for the class. One student in the group raises their hand, “So, what are we supposed to do?” A pair of students (IT WAS FIVE YEARS AGO ON A  SUNDAY IN JUNE) stand upstage left and begin pointing and gesturing to different parts of the stage. One of the students sits down and watches as the other student begins delivering (IT WAS FIVE YEARS AGO ON A SUNDAY IN JUNE) their lines. One student arrives twenty minutes after the start of class, looks around the room, finally makes eye contact with you and begins to apologize for being late (IT WAS FIVE YEARS AGO ON A SUNDAY IN JUNE) due to parking, work, traffic, childcare, illness, appointments, etc. They ask (IT WAS FIVE YEARS AGO ON A SUNDAY IN JUNE) what they missed and what they should be doing.

Unexpected Interruption Sounds A colleague walks by the open classroom door and waves at you. You offer a nodded acknowledgment, but then you stumble over your next words. You pause.

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try and remember what you were saying You are listening to a student share an idea with the class and a loud and repetitive siren reverberates throughout the building. The students look at you. You look around. You aren’t sure if this is a fire drill, a real emergency, or if you are “in charge.” You shrug and say, “I guess we are supposed to leave the building.” The students grab their belongings and head out the door. You stay in the room to make sure everyone gets out, and as an afterthought you grab your bag too. In an instant fifteen cell phones, including yours, all start ringing a multi-​ toned rhythmic alert: bnnnrnnnrn, bnnnrnnnrn, bnnrnrn. You jump and as the students reach into their bags and pockets to check the screen of the phone there is, what seems like, a collective sigh of relief at the recognition that the emergency alert is an automated test, or a weather alert for a nearby county, but not an on-​campus threat.

Personal Wellness Sounds You feel a tickle starting to build in your nose. You sneeze. You sneeze again. You sneeze again. You sneeze again. Your stomach gurgles. Your sleepless night has turned into a full-​blown migraine headache. The lights are too bright in the classroom. The sounds of the softest whisper are too loud. Several students e-​mail you before class informing you that they are not well and will not be in class. When you enter the classroom almost half of the students are absent. You begin previewing the goals for the day, and you start coughing.

Scheduling Sounds There are three days on the schedule set aside for the round of performances. You ask the students if anybody would like to volunteer to perform on the first day:



Listening for Teaching Bodies 61 one student immediately raises their hand and volunteers (you write their name on the board) one student averts their eyes from your gaze a second student volunteers (you write their name on the board, and ask if you’ve spelled their name correctly) one student says they are happy to perform on the last day several students say nothing another student volunteers (you write their name on the board, but don’t ask if you’ve spelled their name correctly, and then the student informs you that you have in fact, misspelled their name). several students remain quiet eventually everyone agrees to sign up for a time to perform

Setting Expectations Sounds You try to clarify expectations and rules before the round of performances begins: Please don’t enter the room while somebody is in the middle of a presentation. Please silence your phones during the round of performances. Please don’t try to rehearse your script while somebody else is performing Please keep track of the performances and choices that you find compelling Please wait to offer feedback until the round of performances has ended Please make sure somebody in the audience has a copy of your script in the event that you forget a line If you have a copy of a performer’s script and they ask for a line, please be sure to clearly and loudly say the next line in the script Please help each other in setting up and breaking down each performance Please support the performers through your attentiveness as an audience

Starting Performances Sounds You arrange the chairs so that they face a designated “stage” area in the classroom. You set your evaluation forms on a chair in the front row. As students

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enter the room the energy feels different. There is a buzz … of nervousness, of anticipation, of excitement. The first performer takes the stage. The other students in the class are still talking, whispering, distracted. You turn to the class and ask for a round of applause for the first performer. The students applaud, turning their attention to the performer, and as the clapping

fades feels

the space

ready. The performer looks at you.

You smile and nod. The performer inhales, and begins.

Witness Sounds You sit in the front row of the class as each student takes their turn on stage presenting and performing. You nod, you smile, you listen. Occasionally you vocalize your reactions: sympathetic sighs thoughtful hmms supportive ooohs sincere chuckles

Occasionally you physicalize your reactions: covering your mouth in disbelief shaking your foot in nervousness wiping an unexpected tear from the corner of your eye

Evaluation Sounds You witness each assigned performance as audience member, but your witnessing is always also anchored to, and textured by, your roll as teacher. You glance at the evaluation form and write a few comments as the student/​performer



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begins. You make check marks next to different criteria as the student/​performer demonstrates the execution of meaningful choices. You are busy jotting down a comment for the student/​performer and several of the student/​audience members around you laugh at something the student/​performer said or did. You realize that you’ve missed this moment. You glance down at your evaluation form, and then you look up to find that the performer is (Anxiously? Patiently? Annoyingly?) looking at you, waiting for your signal that it is okay to begin. Your pen scratches across the surface of the paper as you make a comment for the performer to read later. The performer pauses purposefully in between lines. The break in speech is amplified by the sound of your scribbles.

Feedback Sounds After the round of student performances, you take the stage and offer some generalized comments that attempt to account for all of the performances: Thank you all for sharing your performances today. These performances were a wonderful example of … I appreciate all of the careful choices I had the opportunity to witness in your work. These performances taught me so many different things.

After the round of student performances, you take the stage and offer some specific feedback to emphasize and praise particular performance choices that you consider exemplary: The preparation that went into creating this performance is incredible. This was a clever use of space on stage. The dynamic use of voice to create and show emotion was powerful. This performance created a new way of understanding the perspective and experience of the text and the performer.

After the round of student performances, you invite the audience members to share their thoughts with each of the performers. You place several constraints on the kind of feedback you invite by asking for specific kinds of responses:

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listening for learning Share and describe moments from each performance that you found particularly meaningful. Share and describe specific performance choices that stood out to you, that were curious. Share and describe moments from each performance that linger or that you find haunting.

Adjourning Class Sounds You pull your phone from your pocket and notice that there are only two minutes before the class period ends. You quickly find a way to conclude the class discussion. You try not to cut anyone off, you try to make the concluding remark one that is generative and not too abrupt. You make a few hasty reminders about upcoming due dates, required readings, and the importance of rehearsal. The two minutes end. You wish everyone well. When you realize that the class period ended two minutes ago you abruptly stop mid-​thought and apologize to the class for going long. As the students pack their bags and begin filing out the door your raise your voice and wish everyone well. There are still ten minutes before the class period ends; however, the discussion has faded, there are no other forthcoming questions from the students, and you have already issued all your reminders. You share your hope for the members of the class to enjoy a safe and good weekend. At first the students are caught off guard by the early dismissal, but then, without protest, they pack their bags and leave.

Addressing Student Concerns Sounds As the students leave the classroom and you begin gathering your various teaching materials (papers, books, pens, dry erase markers, coffee mug) you notice one student approaching you. You stop packing so that you can engage the student who: asks for clarification about the assignment asks for affirmation about a choice they are considering



Listening for Teaching Bodies 65 informs you about an upcoming absence (jury duty, work obligation, elective, surgery, childcare, university sponsored event, family vacation, etc.) questions a grade

You listen to the concern, and try to determine if you can offer an immediate response or solution need the student to make an appointment for a longer discussion

As you engage with the student you notice a small line of three or four other students starting to take shape.

Housekeeping Sounds After everyone leaves the room you notice a sweatshirt on a chair, several plastic water bottles leaning against the legs of the chairs, and a textbook sitting on the floor. You set down your belongings and move to pick up these abandoned objects. At the end of class, you wipe away the words and diagrams on the dry erase board. You glance back into the classroom before turning off the lights and realize that the chairs and rehearsal blocks probably ought to be rearranged. You hastily slide the chairs across the surface of the floor so that they are arranged in rows or a single circle. You slide the wooden rehearsal blocks into the back of the room. At the end of the week of classes you pull out the 48-​inch dry mop and glide it across the expanse of vinyl flooring. You take two steps and push, take two steps push, step step

step step

whoosh whoosh

You flick down the two sets of light switches leaving the room with only the faint blue-​green glow of the computer monitor. You let the heavy metal door swing shut. The latch clicks into place and the heavy door seals shut with a thud.

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Beyond the Classroom Sounds The ding of an e-​mail alert draws your attention. You open the message. It is from a student. You type and send your response immediately. In an interaction with a new neighbor you are asked about your job. They ask what classes you teach. You tell them that you teach performance classes. They do not ask for further clarification. After everyone in your house has gone to bed, you open your bag and retrieve the stack of evaluation forms from the performances you witnessed earlier in the day. You write scores and final comments. You then turn on your computer, and with a few clicks and taps you open the online learning management system, type your password, and begin entering the grades. You type the numeric score for each performance into the assignment column. You turn the graded papers over and continue until all grades are entered. You log off the gradebook, and power down your computer. You will reverberate with the sounds of the classroom as you move beyond the space and time of the class. You will hear the questions and comments made by students again and again as you move through the other roles and responsibilities that characterize your day. You will hear your responses. You will rehearse giving better responses, responses with greater clarity, responses that are more to the point. You will practice out loud, to yourself, to others.

Notes 1 John T. Warren calls for an attention in the communication discipline to the ways identity and difference are produced through the always changing repetitions of interaction with others (305). Here I understand “others” to include context. 2 Aubrey Huber and Chris McRae staged an end of year performance showcase titled Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Curiosities) as a way of accounting for and attending to the material excess of a performance pedagogy, including curating and displaying the leftovers and trash that teachers in the lab collect over the course of a semester (292).

Works Cited Eidsheim, Nina S. Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Duke University Press, 2015.



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Huber, Aubrey, and Chris McRae. Wunderkammer: The Performance Showcase as Critical Performative Pedagogy. Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 3, 2019, pp. 285–​304. Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press, 2016. Warren, John T. “Performing Difference: Repetition in Context.” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, vol. 1, no. 4, 2008, pp. 290–​308.

3 LISTENING AND SOUNDING BODIES

Prelude 3: Ode to the Body Chapter 3 listens to and for the different ways that bodies in the classroom are made in sound. In Chapters 1 and 2 I listen for the ways bodies make sound in educational spaces and interactions, but in this chapter I listen for the ways that sound makes bodies. The instances of listening in this chapter alternate between hearing the production of what Deborah Kapchan refers to as “the sound body,” and listening for the ways institutional policies and practices make “institutional bodies.” Kapchan offers the sound body as an alternative conceptualization of the body that both works to account for the presence of sound, but also to name the transformative possibilities of bodies as they might come to exist in sound. She says, “This is the sound body: a resonant body that is porous, that transforms according to the vibrations of its environment, and correspondingly transforms the environment” (38). The sound body is a prepositional body that exists and emerges in, through, by, and for sound. Kapchan explains, “The sound body, however, resists the property principle. Despite attempts of the market to harness and copyright sound, the sound body refuses to be owned. It inhabits but does not appropriate. It sounds and resounds but cannot be

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captured” (39). The sound body is made in sound and exceeds the finite definitions and limits of policies and institutions. In contrast, the legal body, or what I refer to in Chapter 3 as the institutional body, is a configuration of bodies that is always linked to institutions, policies, and property. Kapchan explains, “In its current incarnation, this body is inextricable from a capitalist and neoliberal body: it acquires, it consumes, it owns, and in so doing it creates waste” (39). The legal body presents a logic for understanding and engaging the body as a site of institutional activation, production, and maintenance. In other words, when bodies are considered for their institutional capacities they can be understood as always defined in relation to the ways that they produce and maintain institutional structures and values. These two ways of theorizing the body (the sound body and the institutional body) offer ways of listening to and engaging the various activities, processes, and interactions that make bodies. Both sound bodies and institutional bodies implicate and are implicated by sound. Sound bodies take sound as a starting place for both ways of being and knowing. In the context of the classroom sound bodies resonate, vibrate, and are entangled with the environment and other bodies. Sound bodies are not limited by institutional characterizations such as student and teacher, human or nonhuman, instead sound bodies emerge, resonate, and vibrate with and through sound. Throughout Chapter 3, I listen for the making of sound bodies and present these instances through writing that attempts to perform the making of sound bodies through descriptive and poetic fragments, lists, and collaged phrases and words.1 Institutional bodies also implicate and are implicated by sound. Institutional policies and structures enable and constrain the ways bodies are made to sound in the classroom. Sounds are regulated and controlled in the service of maintaining various institutional goals and values. Throughout Chapter 3, I listen for the making of institutional bodies and present these instances through writing that attempts to perform the making of institutional bodies through writing that is constrained by syllabic poetry. Each three-​line phrase follows the pattern found in Haiku poetry using a line of 5 syllables, a line of 7 syllables, and a line of 5 syllables. This constrained form of writing is suggestive of the constraining function and logics of institutions on sounds and bodies. The ways bodies are configured, theorized, and produced by sound has material consequences. For example, recognizing and privileging certain modes of classroom engagement over others, like preferring speaking over silence as evidence of participation, is an institutional practice that is always ideologically



Listening and Sounding Bodies 71

and culturally significant (Hao, p. 268). Chapter 3 alternates between hearing the sounds that work in the service of making sound bodies and institutional bodies in the performance classroom in order to consider the transformative possibilities for engaging with bodies in and of sound. By listening for the ways sound makes and is made by bodies (as both institutional members and resonant subjects), new understandings of the bodies that inhabit the classroom can emerge. As does the possibility for inviting new ways of being bodies in the classroom. Sound might also be a galvanizing way of understanding, theorizing, and critically engaging bodies. Sounds are bodies. Bodies are sounds. The implications for students and teachers are that sound becomes a way of circumventing these labels and distinctions, even if for only brief moments of imagining. Thinking and approaching bodies as sound does not erase power dynamics, questions of difference, or the material realities of institutional regulations, policies, and labels; but it does create openings and possibilities for engaging in ways that might better account for the function of asymmetrical relationships and institutional structures in the classroom. Sound bodies might galvanize listening bodies. If the body is sound and sound is the body, then listening might be a way of activating bodies and sounds in an ethical relationship and mode of relating. In this way listening is not merely a way of hearing others or listening for discrete sounds as an opportunity to make meaning. Instead this listening is an ethical response a way of realizing and meeting others, or what Lipari calls a listening otherwise. She explains: The ethics that emerges from this kind of listening arises from intentionally engaging with what is unfamiliar, strange, and not already understood. In its reception of otherness, the listening otherwise that gives rise to ethics is a profoundly difficult way of being in the world because it by necessity disrupts the sameness and familiarity of the always already known. (“Listening Otherwise” 45)

Listening is an act of encountering and engaging others. Listening otherwise might be exactly the kind of listening that sound bodies might galvanize because the body as sound (and sound as body) is already “unfamiliar, strange, and not already understood.” (45). The sound body, or the body as sound, is a way of approaching the body as unfamiliar. Sound bodies and sounding bodies are the vibrations that give rise to listening. And listening gives rise to sound bodies. Elsewhere Lipari suggests that it is in listening that “we become” (“Listening, Thinking, Being” 350). She

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goes on to explain: “Listening is thus a dwelling place from where we offer our ethical response, our hospitality, to the other and the world” (350). Listening is a becoming that works to ethically engage and to sound with others. In the classroom, sound bodies sound with others, sound bodies listen with others, and sound bodies become because of others. There are many kinds of ways sounds make bodies in the performance classroom including:

Emerging Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) A context for interaction is created, is required, is invited: an assignment, a class, an exam, a performance, a reading, a workshop   Bodies begin to dance, echo, interact, move speak vibrate



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Previously Learned Classroom Practices Sounds (Making Institutional Bodies) Some class policies are previously learned sets of classroom practice   These may or may not be written as policy, but they are followed   as such. A form that regulates action and sound not unlike haiku.   Raise your hand to speak Take turns speaking in the class Listen carefully   Speak in order to participate in the class always raise your hand   Don’t yell or shout in the classroom, maintain a mode of civil discourse   Take notes, bring assigned readings to class, ask questions Do not interrupt  

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listening for learning Do not fall asleep Do not text or send e-​mail Do not arrive late

Exceeding Policy Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) interruptions and overlaps and coughs and changes(int) and (er) is (rupt) changed (s) by the performances of others overlaps over laps muffles sounds (inters) rings (erupts) is entangled with other sounding bodies (other students, other teachers, other humans, other nonhumans) vibrates, forgets to silence (ringtones, thoughts, questions) extends the conversation extends the performance is moved moves beyond policy beyond institution beyond sound overlaps and interrupts

Upholding Policy Sounds (Making Institutional Bodies) Verification of names on course roster is required on day one



Listening and Sounding Bodies 75   iteration of university rules and policies in class   going over the course syllabus, objectives, and learning outcomes   reminders about important dates and deadlines on the calendar   announcements about university support and all resources   re-​iteration of university rules and expectations

Vibration Sounds (Making Sound Bodies)2 Students resonate Teachers resonate Chairs Resonate teachers resonate Rehearsal blocks resonate Tables resonate

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listening for learning Light fixtures resonate Desks resonate Computers resonate Students resonate Flooring resonates Students resonate Clothing resonates Teachers resonate Bags resonate Books resonate Food and drink containers resonate Writing instruments (pens, pencils, markers, tablets, notepads, laptop computers, phones) resonate Students Resonate teachers

Regulation of Technology Sounds (Making Institutional Bodies) Institutional policies regulating the use of classroom   technologies change gradually over time. Rules reflect context.  



Listening and Sounding Bodies 77 No tape recorders, pagers, cell phones, or laptops during class meetings.   Grades will be posted outside the classroom using your ID numbers   The use of any electronic recording is not permitted   Silence your cell phones Put away your computers Silence your smart phones   All students must use university issued e-​mail addresses   All students muse use their student network ID to use the Wi-​Fi   Course materials, including the syllabus and course readings, are  

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listening for learning made available on on the university’s course learning system   Download the safety application on your phone for safety resources

Multiplying Bodies Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) one (1) sound in the presence of a body, surface, sound equals and activates an exponentially expanding body one (1) teacher, plus (+) one student, equals (=) the possibility of multiple vibrations, reverberations, and resonance one (1) teacher multiplied to the power of one (1) classroom of students, equals (=) an infinite range of interactions between and among students, teachers, nonhuman and human actors3

AbstractandEvaluativePolicingofSoundSounds (Making Institutional Bodies) Listen actively Use your indoor voice in class Listen critically   Show respectfulness Listen carefully in class Have an open mind   Be willing to play Listen with purpose in class Learn from everyone



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Resonance and Reverberation Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) Classroom interactions resonate beyond the time and space of the classroom shaping interpersonal interactions family dynamics mundane responsibilities and accomplishments   Classroom interactions resonate with the sounds of everyday life Bodies tuned Differently (to the world) Attuned differently (to worlds) Moved by different tunes (of the world)

Policies for Performance Sounds (Making Institutional Bodies) If you are late to class during performances, do not enter the room while somebody else is in the middle of performing their work   Unless there is an emergency, please do not leave the performance.  

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listening for learning Please help to create and maintain an open space for all performers.   Save feedback, comments, and questions, until all the performers finish.   If you forget or drop a line, you may ask for someone to help you.

What Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) What body sounds in the classroom? What bodies sound in the classroom? What is the relationship between sound and bodies? What was that sound? What sounds are listened to? What sounds are listened for? What sounds are performed? What sounds are taught? What sounds are learned? What was that sound? What sounds are pervasive? What sounds are ubiquitous? What sounds are important? What sounds are ignored? What was that sound? What sounds are tended? What sounds are encouraged? What sounds are covered? What sounds are purposively made? What was that sound?



Listening and Sounding Bodies 81 What sounds are repeated? What sounds are questioned?

Indirect Sound Policy Sounds (Making Legal Bodies) Regulate inputs: No food or drink in the lab Control leftovers   Limiting bodies: Capacity 49 Persons in the lab   For orderliness: Return props to the prop room Distribute labor   Resource management: Turn off the projector when it is not in use

Surprise Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) Surprise!!! (happy birthday) Surprise!!! (class is canceled) Surprise!!! (you have a cold, the flu, a headache) Surprise!!! (an emergency phone call from a family member)

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listening for learning Surprise!!! (the interstate is closed) Surprise!!! (we now interrupt your regularly scheduled programming for the report of a significant political or cultural event) Surprise!!! (you are needed at work) Surprise!!! (childcare arrangements fell through) Surprise!!! (a severe weather alert creates a mild panic) Surprise!!! (an emotional response to a performance that sneaks up on you)4 Surprise!!! (an unexpected personal disclosure) Surprise!!! (is sound too coy?)

Policies Regarding Evaluation Sounds (Making Institutional Bodies) This class relies on the attendance of all class members. Attendance   is mandatory. Attendance is encouraged. Attendance is good.   Each absence after two absences will result in a deduction.   Late arrival to class will count as a tardy. Three late arrivals  



Listening and Sounding Bodies 83 will count as absence from class. Arriving more than twenty minutes late   will count as an absence. Attendance requires more than showing up to class.   Excused absences must be approved in writing within two days.   No late work will be accepted. Late work results in a letter grade   deduction. Late work is permitted in cases of excused absence.   There will be one “make-​ up” day during the last week of the semester.   Extra credit is not ever available. All grades are final.   Questions about grades are welcome and encouraged. Questions about grades  

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listening for learning are not permitted during class time. All questions must be made after   class, during office hours and scheduled meetings with the instructor.   If a grade dispute cannot be resolved with the instructor, students   should then contact the course supervisor or the chair of the program.

Sympathetic Vibration Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) Or is sound not coy enough?5 Like a snare drum, sitting untouched in the corner of the room, that rattles and vibrates when a nearby note is sustained on a horn or by a voice, Teachers, students, nonhuman bodies resonate with: A sneeze A sigh A suggestion A synonym A slide A stumbling A smell

A sob A silence A statement A sip A slip A sighting A sound

A sadness A sniffle A speech A smile A slash A sensing A sensation



Listening and Sounding Bodies 85

Policies Regarding Instructor Sounds (Making Institutional Bodies) Textbook orders must be received by the bookstore by no later than

forty-​five days in advance of the start of the first day of classes   Instructors must hold Sixty minutes of office hours for each class Instructors serve as mandatory reporters of any and all   instances, reports, and disclosures of gender discrimination,   sexual violence or sexual harassment per Title IX   Course syllabi must be posted and kept online all semester long  

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listening for learning Romantic  and/​or intimate relationships with students are not   permissible, and pre-​existing relations require disclosure student records and grades are protected and held as private info   The use of in class media should be shared in accessible forms

Impermanent Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) A process (a persistence?) of sounds Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (an air conditioner) The semester begins Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (a computer fan) The semester ends Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (a conversation in a nearby office) A student shows up to class Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (a conversation in the back of the room) A student stops showing up to class Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (a light bulb) Something happens outside of class, and coming to class is never again the same Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (traffic) Something happens inside of class,



Listening and Sounding Bodies 87 Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (an elevator down the hall) and coming to class is never again the same.

Institutional Resources for “Best Practices” Sounds (Making Institutional Bodies) Instructors must find low cost course materials every semester   Trainings, lectures, and webinars are encouraged for all instructors.   University teacher training will be each summer.   Mentorship programs are made available for refining teaching.

Silence Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) A student asks a question The instructor does not immediately respond Another student answers first  

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listening for learning The instructor offers a prompt, a puzzle, an inquiry Nobody answers The instructor realizes the question is loaded Revises, rephrases, re-​asks Students respond   A student completes a performance That offends That puzzles That baffles That enlightens That challenges That transforms Nobody in the audience has a response

Institutional Resources for Safety Sounds (Making Institutional Bodies) A free digital application, for smartphones Features reporting   capabilities, location sharing with the campus police, and   notifications, and alerts. All members of the community  



Listening and Sounding Bodies 89 are encouraged to download and use this free app. Help in just one click.   Text messages are sent through the emergency notification   system with alerts about suspicious persons, and activities.   A response team is available to help with disruptive students.

Reconfiguring Bodies Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) Some bodies carry some sounds (these sounds linger and last) Some bodies do not resonate with some sounds (these sounds fade away) Some bodies reverberate with some sounds in the here and now (these sounds inform change) Some bodies resonate with some sounds later, but not now (these sounds return) Some bodies are activated by some sounds (these sounds articulate bodies) Some bodies repeat some sounds (these sounds are always new and different) Some bodies keep some sounds going (these sounds are sustained) Some bodies echo with some sounds (these sounds might be unexpected)

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Institutional Resources for Academic Support Sounds (Making Institutional Bodies) University office and team for students who may not stay in   classes, school or who may not graduate on time or even at all.   University office is available to aid students with   disabilities to manage and aid in the establishment of   accommodations that are reasonable and in the creation   of accessible environments for students across the campus   Various campus resources offer support regarding issues  



Listening and Sounding Bodies 91 of health and safety. Instructors are encouraged to provide students   with information about these resources and to listen to and   for instances when students may need guidance in using these resources

Constellation Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) sound             teacher       student                   racialized experience class     sexuality             performance      choice                         assignment chronic illness       international student       vocal variation       student audience  member       gender student audience member    performing teacher     critical response                   death in the  family communication apprehension             staging  choice

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listening for learning nationality             teacher as  critic romantic relationship break-​up student performer religious observance use of gesture      (un)intentional misgendering of student pronouns sleep deprivation educational background   academic support       political affiliation food scarcity             performance as critique   job interview podcast           gig economy     parking  ticket peanut allergy         chaos     audience response

Evaluative Response Sounds (Making Institutional Bodies) A response offered immediately after a performance ends   That was amazing I really liked what you did it was just so good   Scribbled comments on an evaluation form mark the performance   Waiting for feedback



Listening and Sounding Bodies 93 and a determination about the attempt   A grade is entered in a virtual gradebook housed on a server

Transformative Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) A transformative approach to sound asks: What sounds matter? (whose sounds?) What sounds don’t matter? (when sounds?) What sounds are present? (where sounds?) What sounds are absent? (how sound?) What sounds disrupt? (which sounds?) What sounds maintain? (sound?) What purposes do sounds serve? (why sound?)   A transformative approach to sound: invites sound invites listening   A transformative approach to sound: Exceeds sound Exceeds listening

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Presence Sounds (Making Institutional Bodies) Office hours held every Tuesday and Thursday from 2 to 3   Digital office hours are available with advance notice   Student e-​mails will be answered in at least twenty-​four  hours   All papers will be graded and returned within no more than one week

Repeating Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) Sound again and again A greeting Never the same sound twice A question But always again An excuse Never the same sound twice



Listening and Sounding Bodies 95 An announcement Sound again and again A reminder

Disciplinary Sounds (Making Institutional Bodies) A prerequisite indicates preparation for the class and work   Permission to miss work enables a student to attend the class   The requirements of the major, fit best with childcare arrangements   Recommendations from friends and even strangers lead to enrollment   The major is found due to a mistake made on registration day

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Infinite Sounds (Making Sound Bodies) Teachers sound even after they are gone. In ways that surprise, in ways that persist. In ways that are infinite. Her voice is one that doesn’t return often, but when it does it’s always meaningful. It’s her lessons that sound the most clearly as time passes. Her lessons about relationships, about life, about care. Her lessons about how a class might be made. Her voice sounds and resounds even after her. Teachers sounds reverberate with the sounds of previous encounters with students and teachers. The voices of some students echo and are activated again and again. A comment, a question, or an idea shared by a student in a class long, long, ago lingers and resonates again and again. His voice shapes the voice of those who learned with him so much that sometimes it’s hard to make a distinction between what he said and what he would have said. His voice changed the conversations. His voice changed what is being talked about, and how it is being talked about. Their voices do not fade. They cannot be contained. They ring on and out into forever.

Notes 1 Ronald J. Pelias, “Performative Writing as Scholarship.” 2 Deborah Kapchan explains, “The sound body is a material body that resonates (with) its environment, creating and conducting affect” (41). This is a conceptualization of the body as material and as matter. Here Kapcahn’s work resonates and reverberates with Karen Barad’s conceptualization of posthumanist performativity. Regarding the significance of matter and materiality Barad explains: Material conditions matter, not because they ‘support’ particular discourses that are the actual generative factors in the formation of bodies but rather because matter comes to matter through the iterative intra-​activity of the world in its becoming. The point is not merely that there are important material factors in addition to discursive ones; rather, the issue is the conjoined material-​discursive nature of constraints, conditions, and practices. The fact that material and discursive constraints and exclusions are intertwined points to the limited validity of analyses that attempt to determine individual effects of material or discursive factors. (823) Both Kapchan and Barad emphasize the intra-​activity and entanglement of matter as it comes in to being. For Kapchan the articulation of matter is notably in and through the



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act of sounding. The sound body is not only the body of students and teachers, but of all material bodies that “resonate(s) (with) its environment.” 3 This multiplication of bodies is inspired by the carnal coefficient that Josette Féral identifies in the sound art of Janet Cardiff. For Féral, Cardiff’s sound installations create presence effects through the activation of the body as carnal coefficient in producing an affective experience. Féral explains: In every “presence effect” on the spectator, there is a carnal coefficient brought into play. The body is interpellated by way of the sensory organs (eye, ear), and also by the spectator’s sensations, a body which is simultaneously an essential element and an obstacle because it has some opacity. (44) In this way the body is a coefficient, or a sensory multiplier, of an aesthetic event. The body enables and constrains the co-​production of the artistic event or experience. The sound body vibrates, resonates, and reverberates. 4 Teaching as a sound body listens in a way that is open (Fiumara, Ratcliffe). As Gadamer says: But this openness exists ultimately not only for the person to whom one listens, but rather anyone who listens is fundamentally open. Without this kind of openness to one another there is no genuine human relationship. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another (p. 355). A sound body is open to the surprise of listening and to the surprise of others. 5 There is nothing inherently productive about the sound body (at least not in a way that aligns with cultural and institutional accounting practices). The sound body does not necessarily enact a critical communication pedagogy (Warren & Fassett). The sound body does not necessarily enact banking models of teaching and learning, nor does it necessarily enact a problem posing pedagogy (Freire 72–​80). The sound body privileges copresence, the moment of encounter, and the emergence of sympathetic vibrations.

Works Cited Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 28, 2003, pp. 801–​831. Féral, Josette. “How to Define Presence Effects: The Work of Janet Cardiff.” Archaeologies of Presence:  Art, Performance, and the Persistence of Being, edited by Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, and Michael Shanks. Routledge, 2012, pp. 29–​49. Fiumara, Gemma C. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. Routledge, 1990. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1970. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, Continuum, 2000. Gadamer, Hans-​Georg. Truth and Method, edited by Garrrett Bardern and John Cumming, Sheed and Ward, 1979. Hao, Richie N. “Rethinking Critical Pedagogy:  Implications on Silence and Silent Bodies.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3, 2011, pp. 267–​284. Kapchan, Deborah. “Body.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 33–​44.

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Kilgard, Amy. “Collage:  A Paradigm for Performance Studies.” Liminalities:  A Journal of Performance Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, 2009, pp. 1–​19. http://​liminalities.net/​5-​3/​collage.pdf. Lipari, Lisbeth. “Listening Otherwise:  The Voice of Ethics.” The International Journal of Listening, vol. 23, 2009, pp. 44–​59. —​— ​—​. “Listening, Thinking, Being.” Communication Theory, vol. 20, 2010, pp. 348–​362. Pelias, Ronald J. “Performative Writing as Scholarship:  An Apology, an Argument, an Anecdote.” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, vol. 5, no. 4, 2005, pp. 415–​424. Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening:  Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Warren, John T., and Fassett, Deanna. L. “Critical Communication Pedagogy: Reframing the Field. The Sage Handbook of Communication and Instruction, edited by Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren. Sage, 2010, pp. 283–​292.

Part 2

L istening

from  L earning  S paces

Within the interdisciplinary field of sound studies questions of context, space, and location are deeply related. Spaces sound and sound makes spaces. Andrew J. Eisenberg notes that “Sound and space—​however one defines these terms—​ are phenomenologically and ontologically intertwined” (193). In other words, regardless of the model of sound employed, space implicates and is implicated by sound. Sound and space are experientially linked, sound and space texture ways of being in the world, and sound and space also shape ways of knowing the world. Scholars working within the field of sound studies take up Eisenberg’s claim about sound and space as phenomenologically and ontologically intertwined in a range of ways. Steph Ceraso engages R. Murray Schafer’s discussion of soundscapes in order to consider the ecological relationship between sound and space. She explains, “sound is part of a larger material, aesthetic, and spatial ecology” (69). For Schafer the soundscape is broadly “any acoustic field of study” (“The soundscape” 7). Ceraso listens specifically for the way soundscapes emerge through deliberate and intentional practices of acoustic design. For Ceraso, acoustic design is both a technical practice and an imaginative act of sonic composition. She explains, “acoustic design is not simply the elimination or suppression of sound, but rather an inventive, process-​based

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composing practice” (73). By considering acoustic design in relationship to the question of sound and space, Ceraso emphasizes the ways sounds and spaces are materially and culturally generated, manipulated, and entangled. Emily Thompson similarly extends Schafer’s discussion of soundscapes in order to attend to and account for the way spaces are both made in and by sounds and are engaged in and by cultural and social modes of listening. Thompson offers a history of sound and soundscapes in the United States in the beginning of the twentieth century in order to demonstrate the ways sound and space are physically and culturally related in terms of architectural design, technological developments, and listening practices and values (1–​2). For example, Thompson describes the treatment and consideration of acoustic design during the early 1900s and explains that noise suppression, sound absorption, and control of noise, in various buildings including schools, via the use of various acoustic materials were linked to an increase in productivity and efficiency. She explains: Acoustical materials were no longer sequestered in churches and concert halls, devoted only to protecting and improving the sacred tones intoned within. Now, there was far more work to be done. As the world outside those sheltered spaces was perceived to become even noisier, and as the deleterious effect of that noise upon human health and productivity was proven more convincingly, sound-​absorbing materials were put to work on working people. Acoustical design came to be seen as “sound” economic practice, and the practice proliferated. Whereas people had previously only visited acoustically designed spaces, they now began to inhabit them. As a result, they gradually become accustomed to the sound—​or lack thereof—​therein. (p. 207)

For Thompson and Ceraso the experience, ways of being, and ways of knowing enabled by the relationship between sound and space are an important site (and sound) of inquiry. Sound and space shape and are shaped by social, cultural, historical, and material practices including design, listening, and practices and systems of use. What these scholars demonstrate, and what the interest of sound studies in the relationship between sound and space invites is a consideration of the material and cultural relationships between sound and space. Sound studies asks:  What are the material implications of the relationship between sound and space? What materials make spaces sound, and how do the sounds of space shape the material experience of space? What are the social, cultural, and historical factors that shape the ways sound and space are intertwined? How do



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space and sound work together in the service of power, knowledge, and value systems? Performance as a heuristic and performative listening as a method of performance offer a way of approaching the questions raised by sound studies regarding sound and space that focus on the ways bodies are situated within, impacted by, and impact the intertwined formations of sound and space. Performance presents a generative framework for describing and analyzing sound and space as always enacted and made by various doings. As Judith Hamera explains: Performance is both an event and a heuristic tool that illuminates the presentational and representational elements of culture. Its inherent “eventness” (“in motion”) makes it especially effective for engaging and describing the embodied processes that produce and consume culture. As event or as heuristic, performance makes things and does things, in addition to describing how they are made or done. (5–​6)

In this way performance presents an opportunity and vocabulary for understanding and hearing space and sound as culturally made or accomplished and as always in the process of being made and enacted by various cultural and social practices and performances. Performative listening engages in the heuristic and logic of performance in a way that is particularly attuned to sound and space as always constituted in and by performances of listening and sounding (McRae 41–​43). In terms of the relationship between sound and space, performative listening works to acknowledge the ways various cultural and social performances shape the material reality of sound and space (119). Performative listening also works to enact a critical reflexivity that recognizes the ways these culturally and socially enacted locations and sounds shape the performance of listening. Finally, performative listening casts the listening body as a location that facilitates the ways sound and space are understood, experienced, and narrated (122–​124). Performative listening works to account for the ways the body, as location, generates a culturally specific performance of listening and way of engaging the relationship of sound and space. Throughout the chapters in Part 2, performative listening is engaged as a method for attending to the relationship between sound and space in the context of pedagogical spaces. The focus of these chapters is a performance lab classroom; however, the hope in engaging this specific site is to mark an opening for listening and engagement with other classrooms and pedagogical spaces. Classrooms are experientially spaces made in and by sound, and sounds

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shape the experience of classroom. Classrooms, and the sounds of these spaces, texture and invite some ways of being and exclude others. And finally, classrooms, as sites of knowledge production, work to produce and maintain sounds, ways of sounding, and practices of listening. In each of the chapters in Part 2 performative listening is employed as a strategy for attending to questions and concepts that emerge in the interdisciplinary field of sound studies in the context of the performance lab classroom. In this way I  place performance and performative listening in conversation with sound studies through a performance of listening to learning spaces. The chapters in Part 2 build on the constraint based on Underwood and Liwska’s children’s books used throughout Part  1 of 29 instances of sound and sounding. In Part 2 I also engage the format used by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart in their account of the affective production of “ordinaries” in The Hundreds (5). Berlant and Stewart explain: “The constraint of the book is that our poems (makings) are exercises in following out the impact of things (words, thoughts, people, objects, ideas, worlds) in hundred-​word units or units of hundred multiples” (ix). Therefore, each chapter in Part 2 works with the technical constraint of 29 fragments written in hundred-​word units or units of hundred multiples. Each chapter also plays with (and takes seriously through play) Berlant and Stewart’s conceptual constraint of “following out the impact of things.” In this way listening to learning spaces and listening for the relationships between sound and space is a matter of attending to, playing with, and following (listening for?) the impact of things.1 Kathleen Stewart discusses her own following out of things as related to what Sedgwick calls “weak theory.” Stewart explains hers as a “Theory that comes unstuck from its own line of thought to follow the objects it encounters, or becomes undone by its attention to things that don’t just add up but take on a life of their own as problems for thought” (“Weak” 72). In this way theory does not dictate or determine the ways the world can be attended to, instead the world is attended in its unfolding. Elsewhere, Stewart provides a series of questions in her discussion of what she refers to as atmospheric attunements as a way of further conceptualizing and clarifying this approach. She asks: What happens if we approach worlds not as the dead or reeling effects of distant systems but as lived affects with tempos, sensory knowledges, orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force fields …? What might we do with the proliferation of little worlds of all kinds that form up around conditions, practices, manias, pacings, scenes of absorption, styles of living, forms of attachment (or



Listening from Learning spaces 103 detachment), identities, and imaginaries, or some publicly circulating strategy for self-​transformation? (“Atmospheric” 446)

Atmospheric attunements align with and help move performative listening toward a way of generatively engaging with, experiencing, and hearing the relationships between sound and space. Thomas Rickert’s work on ambient rhetoric also engages with the process of attunement as a way of being with and coming to know the world that moves toward a relational way of encountering and experiencing the world. He explains: Rhetoric can no longer remain centered on its theoretical commonplaces, such as rhetor/​subject, audience, language, image, technique, situation, and the appeals accomplishing persuasive work, at least as they are predominately understood and deployed. Rather, it must diffuse outward to include the material environment, things (including the technological), our own embodiment, and a complex understanding of ecological relationality as participating in rhetorical practices and their theorization. (3)

Ambient rhetoric indicates the significance of context and environment as a dynamic and pervasive feature of experience. Rickert goes on to describe attunement as a way of attending to ambience saying: While perception remains important to understanding ambience, other important aspects include feeling, mood, intuition, and decision making. This gets us to the issue of attunement. That is, ambience involves more than just the whole person, as it were; ambience is inseparable from the person in the environment that gives rise to ambience. (8)

Attunement in this way emerges from the entanglement of the person and their environment. For instance attunement to the ambience of the classroom always implicates and is implicated by the person who is attuning to this environment. Berlant and Stewart, Stewart, and Rickert provide an opening and challenge for putting performative listening in conversation with sound studies by inviting and encouraging an attention and attunement to the ways spaces and sounds become related and revealed through mundane, ordinary, and even unexpected moments, happenings, and feelings. Performative listening, as a way of understanding listening as both a way of attending to and generating the world, attempts or is inspired and informed by this attunement or following of things through the performative and imaginative stance of listening.

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Chapter 4, “Listening to and from the Performance Lab,” is a consideration of the sounds that are made by the educational space of the performance studies classroom as meaningful features of the space. In this chapter I ask how the performance lab sounds, how the performance lab invites listening, and how the performance lab might be transformed in and through sound and listening. In detailing his phenomenology of auditory experience and listening Ihde offers a description of the auditory field as a phenomenological feature and way of approaching and understanding auditory experience as always situated within a broader phenomenon. He says: The field is what is present, but present as implicit, as fringe that situates and ‘surrounds’ what is explicit or focal. This field, again anticipatorily, is also an intermediate or eidetic phenomenon. By intermediate we note that the field is not synonymous with the thing, it exceeds the thing as a region in which the thing is located and to which the thing is always related. (73)

The auditory field is a “situating phenomenon” in which auditory experience occurs helps to clarify the emergent nature of auditory experience. (73). Ihde goes on to note that the auditory field is uniquely characterized by the copresence of both the surroundability of sound and the directionality of sound (77). Attending to the auditory field is then a matter of accounting for both the direction and surrounded nature of sound. He explains: Quite ordinarily, sounds are taken directionally. The hammering from next door is heard as from next door. The sparrow’s song in the garden presents itself from the garden. But if I put myself in the ‘musical attitude’ and listen to the sound as if it were music, I may suddenly find that its ordinary and strong sense of directionality, while not disappearing, recedes to such a degree that I can concentrate on its surrounding presence. (77)

This discussion of the spatial nature of auditory experience in terms of directionality and surround is a useful model for providing a descriptive account of and way of experiencing the auditory field. However, what is most interesting about Ihde’s discussion of the characteristics of the auditory field is his play with the phenomenological conception of a “natural attitude” in his call for the utility of a “musical attitude” as a phenomenological stance. The musical attitude suggests a mode of listening that might be better suited to encountering and apprehending the auditory field than other modes of listening and engagement with sound. But it is also a stance that invokes a logic of embodied performance. That is the musical stance is something we



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might “put ourselves in” or try out as an imaginative way of engaging and understanding the auditory field. In Chapter 4, I present a performance of listening for the performance lab from the stance of a musical attitude and present 29 fragments of this listening that work toward describing, experiencing, and attending to the feeling of the performance lab classroom as a sounded space. Chapter  5, “Listening for Reverberations,” listens to and for the sounds and sounding of the performance classroom space as reverberations of other cultural and social spaces. This chapter listens for the context of the performance studies classroom in a particular institution, and it works to hear links between current soundings of the classroom to other cultural and social spaces and practices. In reflecting on the significance of the archive and the repertoire as sites of knowledge, Diana Taylor points to the importance of performance studies, and performance, as a site of embodied ways of knowing and transfers of knowledge. She explains, “Embodied and performed acts generate, record, and transmit knowledge” (21). For Taylor, the knowledge that is generated in and through the repertoire of embodied performance is a vital site of knowing and transmitting knowledge. Rather than focus only on texts and narrative as sites of cultural inquiry, Taylor proposes “scenarios as meaning-​making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes” (28). The scenario, as a site of inquiry, is a site of culture being made in and through embodied acts. Taylor presents a conception of the “scenario” as a paradigm for making sense of social structures that provide a generative framework for listening to and for reverberations that texture a space. Parts of Taylor’s explanation of the scenario informs the ways that I listen for the reverberations of the performance classroom with other spaces in the 29 fragments of performative listening throughout Chapter 5. For Taylor, the scenario offers a framework for making sense of cultural, social, and political events and practices, but the features of the scenario also provide a way of engaging the performance classroom as a site that is always culturally, socially, and politically implicated. Taylor explains the scenario is linked to the physical location or scene. She explains, “The two, scene and scenario, stand in metonymic relationship: the place allows us to think about the possibilities of the action. But action also defines place” (29). In terms of Chapter  5, the physical location is the performance studies classroom and the educational institution where this classroom is situated. The actions of the classroom and educational context work to characterize and (re)produce these physical locations as meaningful social

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and cultural sites. In Chapter 5, I listen for the reverberations of this particular classroom space, as a kind of scenario, with other culturally meaningful spaces of action. Taylor goes on to explain the scenario as a site of embodied actions and performances. Taylor explains, “But scenarios by definition introduce the generative critical distance between social actor and character” (30). Scenarios invite social actors to enact various roles within the scene of action. She explains: Whether it’s a question of mimetic representation (an actor assuming a role) or of performativity, off social actors assuming socially regulated patterns of appropriate behavior, the scenario more fully allows us to keep both the social actor and the role in view simultaneously, and thus recognize the areas of resistance and tension. (30)

The performance classroom, as a scene or scenario of action, also invites social actors to take on various roles (including as students, teachers, performers, audience members) and socially regulated patterns of appropriate behavior (including patterns of gender, sexuality, race, ability, and class). In addition to the embodied performances that might be expected in this particular space, the embodied performances that emerge also often resonate or reverberate other “socially regulated patterns of appropriate behavior” that might be found/​ learned/​and practiced in other spaces (30). By using the logics of metaphor and metonymy, the fragments in Chapter 5 point to some of the reverberations the performance classroom, as a kind of scenario, has with other social and cultural spaces. These reverberations emerge through the ways the space is configured, and through the actions that constitute the space. The fragments, and this listening, are suggestive of the ways the performance classroom may be (through metaphor) similar with, or (through metonymy) may be related to and contiguous with other social and cultural spaces. Finally, in Chapter  6, “Listening and Sounding Spaces,” I  listen for the ways the performance studies classroom is made by sounds. The classroom is a designed acoustic space that not only makes sounds and reverberates with other spaces, it also occurs within and amongst surrounding sounds and spaces that help differentiate the classroom as a unique space. In this chapter, I listen for the ways the classroom is surrounded by and emerges within other ambient contextual features. In his discussion and specification of ambient rhetoric, Thomas Rickert, explains ambience as an active process that interacts with and is integral in shaping human experience. He says:



Listening from Learning spaces 107 So ambience here refers to the active role that the material and informational environment takes in human development, dwelling, and culture, or to put this differently, it dissolves the assumed separation between what is (privileged) human doing and what is passively material (3).

The ambient and material environment is entangled with and inseparable from human action. Rickert later turns to ambient music in order to clarify the ways material and affective environments are produced by and generative of the actions and perceptions of actors. In terms of the ambient genre of music he explains, “Thus, the local environs are not background for music’s emergence but, in countless ways, an active player in their own right” (29). What is significant about ambient music for Rickert, is that environmental sounds that might otherwise be considered background or otherwise insignificant are treated as centrally meaningful. Rickert’s discussion of ambient rhetoric works to attune experience, context or location, and action, as interrelated and mutually informing. He explains: The world reveals itself in a musical way, but it does so in such fashion as to transform our experience of place itself. Ambient rhetoric, analogically, brings the world to us but in doing so transforms the disposition of our inhabitancy. This, as I have stated already, is my reworking of what rhetoric is: the world is revealed differently, at least potentially so, in a way that calls for some action. By implication, rhetoric from an ambient perspective can no longer be situated solely in human subjective performance. (29–​30)

Ambience, and ambient rhetoric, bring together and work to emphasize the ways environments emerge, present, and shape and are shaped by our experience of the world. Listening, or as Rickert says, attuning, in relationship with a space like the performance lab is a practice that both shapes and is shaped by the classroom as it emerges within and is characterized by its surrounding contexts. The 29 fragments of listening and sounding spaces presented in Chapter 6 work to indicate ways that I hear and experience the performance classroom emerging in and being produced by the sounds and contexts that shape and inform the ways this particular space emerges. These fragments attend to the ambient sounds and contexts that might otherwise be considered background to the classroom as centrally important to the formation of the classroom space. These fragments also work to directly point to and at the ways my listening and lived experiences shape and are shaped by this space.

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As with the focus of Part  1, the chapters throughout Part  2 focus on a specific classroom space, the performance lab where I teach. However, these fragments and listening examples are also offered as an invitation for practicing and engaging in performative listening in relationship to other pedagogical spaces in order to engage, discover, and potentially transform the ways these other spaces are configured, experienced, and perform. Each chapter in this part offer a different way of engaging pedagogical spaces through the logics of sound and listening that might be extended to other pedagogical spaces. Listening to and from pedagogical spaces is a way of attending to and accounting for these spaces as they make, invite, and limit different sounds and ways of sounding. Listening for the reverberations of pedagogical spaces with other social and cultural spaces is an opportunity for noticing and noting the ways pedagogical spaces are linked to and informed by various related and unrelated spaces. Finally, listening in ways that attend to the contextual or ambient features that texture and shape pedagogical spaces is a way of listening that hears spaces as made by and in surrounding sounds, material contexts, and lived experiences. Listening and hearing pedagogical spaces as they make sound, reverberate, and are made by sound may lead to other transformative possibilities in terms of the ways pedagogical spaces are designed, theorized, and inhabited. This listening may also yield new ways of interacting in pedagogical relationships that might acknowledge the ways the configurations of space enable and constrain what it means to teach and learn. Ultimately, my belief is that this listening in relationship to pedagogical spaces, in of itself, is a transformative act because it takes and treats the spaces of teaching and learning, not as static or background to other interactions, but as dynamic and integral to shaping the ways we theorize and practice pedagogical interaction.

Note 1 This play with the impact of things is also informed by Elyse Lamm Pineua’s discussion of educational play within performance pedagogy (13–​15). She explains, “The concept of play, with its attendant implications of experimentation, innovation, critique, and subversion, breaks open conventionalized classroom practices” (15).



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Works Cited Berlant, Lauren, and Kathleen Stewart. The Hundreds. Duke University Press, 2019. Ceraso, Steph. Sounding Composition:  Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening. Duke University Press, 2018. Eisenberg, Andrew J. “Space.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 193–​207. Hamera, Judith. “Introduction:  Opening Opening Acts.” Opening Acts:  Performance in/​ as Communication, edited by Judith Hamera. Sage, 2006, pp. 1–​10. Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. 2nd ed., SUNY Press, 2007. Jones, Steven. “A Sense of Space: Virtual Reality, Authenticity, and the Aural.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 10, 1993, pp. 238–​252. McRae, Chris. Performative Listening: Hearing Others in Qualitative Research. Peter Lang, 2015. Pineau, Elyse L. “Teaching is Performance:  Reconceptualizing a Problematic Metaphor.” American Educational Research Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, 1994, pp. 3–​25. Rickert, Thomas. Ambient Rhetoric:  The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Stewart, Kathleen. “Weak Theory in an Unfinished World.” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 45, no. 1, 2008, pp. 71–​82. —​— ​—​. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 29, 2011, pp. 445–​453. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire:  Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity:  Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America 1900–​1933. The MIT Press, 2002. Underwood, Deborah. The Quiet Book. Illustrated by Renata Liwska, Houghton Mifflin, 2010. —​—​—​. The Loud Book. Illustrated by Renata Liwska, Houghton Mifflin, 2012.

4 LISTENING TO AND FROM THE PERFORMANCE LAB

Prelude 4: Overture on Vibration Nina Sun Eidsheim begins her consideration of voice and music as multisensorial phenomenon with a reflection on the popular hypothetical question, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Rather than attempt an answer to the question, Eidsheim draws attention to the arbitrary and impossible separation of sound from the other experiential phenomena that a falling tree would involve. The reduction of a tree falling in the woods to a question of sound works to reduce and maintain what she refers to as the “figure of sound” (2). Eidsheim explains, “With this term I attempt to capture the process of ossification, through which I argue that an ever-​shifting, relationally dependent phenomenon comes to be perceived as a static object or incident” (2). Approaching sound as a singular figure yields understandings and questions about sound, voice, and music that are acontextual reductive. Eidsheim instead proposes a rethinking of sound as a practice of vibration rather than as a static and measurable object (a figure of sound). She explains the paradigmatic approach to music enabled by the practice of vibration in contrast to the paradigm of the figure of sound explaining, “Vibrations, however, are unbounded: their relations are defined by process, articulation, and

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change across material” (17). What the practice of vibration does for Eidsheim is importantly to create a more nuanced understanding of sound, listening, and music making as dynamic, relational, multisensorial, and intermaterial acts of transmission. Sounds as a practice of vibration emerge in processes, relationships, and engage multiple senses and materials.1 Some of the implications that Eidsheim notes in this shift extend beyond musical contexts to encompass social and cultural contexts. For example, the figure of sound as an approach to music might entail and enable reductive assessments of musical origins, identification of musical notation, and definitions of what is and is not music. In social and cultural contexts Eidsheim explains: The figure of sound paradigm so structures listening to voices that it can lead to appraisals such as “this is the sound of a woman’s voice.” This appraisal is based on perceived similarities and dissimilarities between one sound and another—​in this case on similarities to other human vocal sounds and on dissimilarities to, specifically men’s and children’s voices. (19)

This reductive and essentializing approach to voice and listening also informs reduced understandings of listening and voice in terms of other essentializing classifications of identity via figures of sound including race, class, sexuality, and ability. In other words, attributing sound to a singular source works to create and maintain binaries based on questions of similarities and differences. The sound as practice of vibration paradigm works to engage sound as a relational accomplishment. Eidsheim situates her turn to vibration not as a turn toward a prelinguistic or posthuman understanding of sound and music, but as an interconnected and processual approach to these phenomena. The implications that Eidsheim identifies regarding this shift are ontological, epistemological, and ethical. As vibration, music and sound are ontologically emergent social processes rather that fixed objects that might be attributed to singular or discrete sources. Epistemologically music and sound conceptualized in terms of the practice of vibration are not dependent on specialized knowledges (for instances of musical theories). And finally, she explains, “this epistemological shift replaces the central tenets of musical ethics and values, moving from fidelity (questions of identity and difference) to charity (concern for the material implications of our actions on others)” (21). In other words, sound, music, and listening are practices that implicate and are implicated by relationships. Sounds are produced relationally, music happens relationally, and listening emerges relationally.



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Eidsheim’s call for a consideration of sound as practice of vibration presents useful implications for my attempts at performatively listening to and from the performance lab as a space that invites listening and is a site of sounds. By putting Eidsheim’s definition of sound as practice of vibration in conversation with Ihde’s phenomenological approach to auditory experience listening to the performance lab emerges as an act of attending to the relationships, processes, and multisensorial and material practices from which the classroom emerges and is continually made and re-​made. Throughout this chapter I  offer instances of listening that attempt not to figure what the performance lab sounds like, but instead to engage in a performance of listening that follows Ihde’s phenomenological approach to describing the auditory field as a practice of vibration. As Ihde explains, “The field is the specific form of ‘opening’ I have to the World and as an ‘opening’ it is the particular perspective I  have on the World” (73). The sounding of the performance lab, and my listening for the auditory field, is presented here as an account of the emergent relationships and multisensorial processes that texture the vibrations of the performance lab. The work of this chapter resonates with R. Murray Schafer’s approach to describing and analyzing the significant features of soundscapes (9–​10). Schafer offers thematic categories for accounting for the significant features of soundscapes including keynote sounds, signals, and soundmarks. Keynote sounds are those that are underlying sounds that characterize and texture a soundscape (9–​10). Schafer describes signals as “foreground sounds” that are “listened to consciously” (10). Finally, soundmarks are the sounds that are unique to particular communities within a soundscape (10). Kati Ahern and Ashley Rose Mehbacher’s build on Schafer’s categories in their analysis of classroom soundscapes across different genres of classrooms (including biology, creative nonfiction, dance, design, history, nutrition, and psychology). These categories provide a framework for thinking across these different genres of classrooms and draw attention to the ways genre and sounds are entangled. Ahern and Mehbacher explain the potential of this work for creating an expanded approach to listening to the classroom. They say, “We suggest, then, that while we may be attuned to the “signal sounds” of our classroom genres, we must also become attuned to the ambient sounds of our spaces and the keynote sounds that ground our classrooms and establish their more subtle tonalities and dissonances.” This call for continued attunement to keynote sounds, or those sounds which are often background, as of central importance to the formation of classroom spaces and experiences is a call this chapter works to engage.

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Ahern and Mehbacher’s use of Schafer’s typology to emphasize the importance of the background sounds of classrooms not just the sounds that are foregrounded provides a clear framework for organizing the sounds of classrooms. The fragments presented in this chapter focus on a specific classroom; however, rather than categorize the kinds of sounds of the space I present my performance of listening that emphasizes the lab as a unique space that is socially and culturally produced and situated. This performance of listening, and the following fragments, are a compilation and composite of my listening experiences (as a student and as an instructor) in the lab for over a decade.2 Working from the commitment of performative listening for context and location (McRae 41–​43), I listen to the lab in order to attend to and account for my experience and encounter of the auditory field of the lab as it emerges in and through sound as a practice vibration. Using constraint of Berlant and Stewart’s fragments written in one hundred word or multiples of one hundred in the form of writing these accounts of the auditory field of the classroom is a formal choice that engages the ways space is always constrained by sounds as social and cultural practices of vibration. These fragments are also offered here as openings for future acts of listening to classroom spaces. Following Eidsheim, my belief is that attending to the ways classrooms are made in and by sounds as vibrational practices teachers and students might work toward enacting an ethical stance of “concern for the material implications of our actions on others” in the context of educational spaces (Eidsheim 21). There are many kinds of ways the performance lab sounds and is made in sound including:

A Heavy Door The main door to the classroom is a heavy steel door with a small vertical window. There is a blue sign posted on the door that reads “No food or drink in the lab.” Often there are also four white pieces of typing paper taped to the door printed with a grid that shows the days of the week, the classes scheduled in the lab, and penciled in reservations of the space by various students and faculty members. During class times the door is often propped open with a rubber doorstop. Sometimes the door remains closed when the room is in use; however, the door locks when it is shut. Entry into the room requires the use of a key, or the help of somebody within the classroom. Help is sought by knocking, tugging on the door handle, waving through the window, or simply



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standing and staring through the window. From the inside, opening the door requires a forceful tug, and the door must be held open or the pneumatic hinge will bring the door closed again.3 The door of this classroom is located on the third, and final, floor of the Communication & Information Sciences Building. The building is located on the southeast corner of a state university in west central Florida. The building was constructed in the early 1990s on a campus that that opened to students in the early 1960s. The building houses multiple departments, classrooms, and offices. One of the unique characteristics of the building is an atrium in the center of the building that rises from the ground floor to a ceiling made of windowed panels. The door to the performance is opposite a row of offices that look out over this atrium, and that are occupied by faculty members, graduate students, and academic advisors. Some of these doors are open. Some of these doors remain closed. Bits of conversations from office hours with students and colleagues emanate from these offices. The movements of people in the hallway outside the door to the performance lab are impacted by the number of students enrolled in the communication degree program, the number of students enrolled at the university, and the time of day (which is impacted by the time of office hours of individual instructors and times of classes, times of student’s work schedules), and the time of year or semester (which is impacted by students making meetings with advisors for scheduling of classes, and students making appointments to speak with instructors about assignments and grades, and instructors and advisors having availability for meetings). Students line the hallway (sitting and standing) waiting to enter the performance classroom, waiting for meetings with instructors, and waiting for appointments with advisors. These waiting students scroll through apps on electronic devices and talk with each other. Occasionally somebody walks down the hall traveling to a different part of the building, to the staircase, or to the elevator, murmuring “excuse me’s” and “thank you’s.” The waiting students adjust their positions to clear a path for the travelers. Some of those who are sitting pull in their outstretched legs. Some of those who are standing move closer to the wall. Occasionally a small group conversation of two to three people is interrupted by a traveler, and an awkward dance follows. The traveler tries to go around the group, the group tries to move to one side, but ends up further blocking the traveler, the group expands, the traveler ducks, and the conversation is interrupted.

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If the door is closed and a class, lecture, presentation, or workshop is happening in the lab the movements and sounds of voices, laughter, or applause can not necessarily be heard through the shut door. If the door is open and a class, lecture, presentation or workshop is happening in the lab the movements and sounds of voices, laughter, and applause easily find their way into the hallway.

Flooring Material In a meeting with a designer from the campus Facilities Department to discuss upgrades to the decades old carpeted flooring, the option for a vinyl interlocking tile flooring surface is agreed upon as the best option for the space. The vinyl tile that is selected for the space also has a cork backing, which is presented by the designer as an ideal option because it might help mitigate and dampen the sounds of people moving in the lab from becoming too disruptive to the people in the rooms and offices that are below the performance lab on the second floor.

Curtains An aluminum track is mounted on the ceiling of the classroom. Black polyester theatre curtains hang around the perimeter of the room. There are eight large pleated curtain panels that hang from the ceiling to the floor of the room. When the curtains are drawn closed the entire classroom space is surrounded by these drapes. The different panels can be pulled open to reveal different features of the room: a projection screen, a whiteboard, the double-​sided glass of the sound booth, a sliding barn door that opens to the prop and storage room, one of three doors to the classroom.

Whiteboard On the wall opposite of the main door to the classroom, behind the curtains, there is a whiteboard. The surface is smooth and reflective. The board reflects sounds, and as part of the auditory field, this surface impacts the textures and dynamics of the emerging sounds of the room. The whiteboard also invites a kind of interaction that sounds through both the use of markers and erasers



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on the board, and the kind of lecturing and questioning that accompanies the educational use of the whiteboard. The location of the board also has an impact on how students and teachers position themselves in the room (facing the board for lectures, glancing at the board to read notes and reminders, standing by the board to write instructions and notes).4

Back Wall The back wall of the lab usually remains hidden by the curtains. However, when the curtains are pulled back a double-​sided mirror is revealed. The mirrored surface reflects both visually and sonically. Behind the mirrored window is a narrow room with a counter and several metal cabinets. On the counter sits a steel rack filled with various electronic components including a Wi-​Fi router. The machines on the rack emit a low and persistent hum and tiny green lights flash in an intermittent but continuous pattern. The router remains hidden in the back room, but the connection it offers is ever-​present.

Projectors Mounted to the grid on the ceiling are three projectors, each facing a different wall of the room allowing for flexibility in the arrangement of the space. When they are turned on the images are projected against one of the three screens that retract into wall-​mounted housings. When turned on, the motorized fan inside the projector unit begins to whir and hum. Projection of slides or images is often accompanied by narration from the teacher, a student, or from an audio accompaniment to a video. The projectors, like the whiteboard, draw attention and focus from the people in the room.

Chairs Durable plastic chairs with metal legs are stacked on rolling racks in a corner of the room. The chairs can be slid across the floor, they can be intentionally tipped over in a performance, and they can be stacked together. The chairs are easily moved and rearranged. The arrangement of the chairs changes the configuration and proximity of bodies in the classroom.

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Sometimes the chairs are spaced out in a circle, inviting a kind of class discussion with a moving focal point. Thoughts and questions are spoken into the open center of the circle. Sometimes the chairs are arranged in rows to differentiate a staged performance space from the audience space, the bodies of audience members are seated closely together. The sides of the chairs are touching. The sounds of bodies are intimately audible. The space is made so that a solo performer or small ensemble can move around the space and project their voices in ways that fill the room. Sometimes the chairs are arranged in groupings of three to four seats in small clusters throughout the room, the students can hold multiple conversations simultaneously. On occasion the chairs are all stacked and put away creating an open floor.

Computer A rolling computer lectern sits in the corner farthest from the main door to the classroom. The computer on the desk is connected to the projectors and the classroom audio system. When the computer is turned on, a log in screen asks for a university network ID and password. The plastic keys on the keyboard click when tapped. An authorized ID and password wake the computer and a startup chime plays through the ceiling mounted speakers in the classroom. The volume of the chime depends on the volume setting on both the computer and the master audio controls on the separate switcher that controls the projectors, screens, and sound system. The computer is plugged in to a power strip, and is connected, through ethernet cable, to the internet router in the sound booth. The computer can be used to project and play films, video clips, audio tracks, present PowerPoint presentations, display websites, and other supplementary materials for instruction. The computer can also be used, with or without projection, to allow access to e-​mail, social media websites, learning management systems, gradebooks, and other files and programs. The computer can also be used to project digital video and audio components of performances.

Windowless Walls The lab is surrounded on three sides by hallways. One hallway, where the primary entrance to the lab is located, is a main thoroughfare on the third floor of the building. The other hallways surrounding the classroom are accessible only



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through a locked doorway, or through the main entrance to the Department of Communication. These hallways are home to faculty and graduate student offices. There are two doors to the lab that open into these back hallways. Aside from the vertical windows on the doors, and the double-​sided mirror on the back wall, there are no windows in the lab.

Back Hallways The hallways surrounding the lab on two sides are filled with faculty offices. The wooden doors to these offices are often closed or slightly ajar. Much of the time these offices are unoccupied. When instructors and faculty members are working in their office the volume level of the work rarely exceeds the threshold of the office door, and possibly never travels through the wall into the lab. The volume level of the work happening in the lab often spills into the hall, and into the most nearby offices.

Ceiling Mounted Speakers In each of the four corners of the lab there is a ceiling mounted speaker. The volume levels of the speakers are controlled by the master audio controls on the computer podium and can be used to play audio files as well as audio that accompanies video clips and movies. The audio is used both by teachers during class lectures and discussions, and by students during presentations and performances. When in use, the speakers can fill the room with sound. If the master volume is not turned down after the use of the speakers, there is often a persistent hissing.

Fluorescent Light Bulbs The house lighting for the lab consists of two rings of fluorescent light bulbs that are controlled by a wall switch near the main entrance. One switch controls the outer ring of lights, and the other switch controls the inner ring of lights. Either ring of bulbs casts enough light to fill the space. Three bulbs by the computer podium remain disconnected so that the projection screen is easily visible without turning all the lights in the room off. There is a faint buzzing sound when the lights are on that is audible and persistent, but not particularly noticeable or distracting.

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Stage Lights and Grid A grid of ten stage lights hangs from the ceiling of the lab. These lights are controlled by a light board that is stored in a filing cabinet in a locked office. Sliding controls adjust the brightness of the individual lamps. Buttons turn on and off preset lighting configurations. When the stage lights are in use, and the house lights are turned off, the performance space is washed in a glow of blues, yellows, and reds. The lit area of the room is enlivened. These lights heat the space, and as the lamps become hotter, the lighting apparatus pops and clicks.

Prop Room and Properties of the Lab On the north wall of the lab there is a sliding barn door that opens into a prop room. The room contains several props for use during the creation and presentation of performances including several wooden stools, several rehearsal cubes of various sizes, and several household items including pots, pans, pitchers, plates, and vases. There is also an assortment of leftover props from past student performances (a doll, artificial flowers, a newspaper, a lamp, a jacket, a scarf, etc.). There are two doors in the room that open out into the back hallway, that are often blocked by the various props. The prop room can be closed off from the rest of the lab by closing the sliding door. The room is often used by students as a semi-​private, and quieter, rehearsal space during in-​class workshops when an entire class of students are practicing in the lab. The prop room is also visited by students prior to their performances so that they can retrieve a needed block or prop. The sounds of students rehearsing, talking, and moving around in the prop room are muffled in the classroom, but these sounds are always louder in the back hallway and nearby offices.

Rehearsal Cubes A set of wooden rehearsal cubes of various sizes (1 foot by 1 foot, 2 feet by 1 foot, 2 feet by 2 feet) are available for use by performers, students, and teachers. The cubes can be used as set pieces to suggest countless objects or locations with various possible vertical levels. When these cubes are left in the lab, they transform the auditory possibilities of the space. The cubes may reflect sounds, they may function as obstacles that are accidentally bumped, and they provide



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an opportunity for new kinds of interactions. For example: as writing surfaces or alternative seats.

Heating and Cooling System The central heating and cooling system for the building can be adjusted via a thermostat in the lab. The temperature in the room is usually in the range of 72 to 78 degrees Fahrenheit. In the summer months the room is cooler, in the winter months the room may be slightly warmer. Slight variation in the temperature of the lab results in different embodied response. Makeshift fans are created and waved to create a cooler feeling. Sweatshirts and hoodies are put on to try and create a warmer feeling. Immediately before and after performances, performers body temperatures tend to elevate.

Fire Drills and Emergency Alert Tests Monthly testing of emergency alert systems fills the open spaces and sidewalks outside of the building that houses the lab. These exterior sounds are barely audible in the lab if the doors to the room are open, and even less obvious when the doors are closed. However, tests and emergency alerts from the fire alarms located throughout the building, including the hallways surrounding the lab, are both audible and visible from inside the lab. These alerts and alarms disrupt and change the dynamic of the entire building. The strobing sound and light make it all but impossible to remain inside.

Before or After a Special Event The performance lab is often used for other departmental events, workshops, and guest speakers. The size of the space, the possibility of rearranging the seating, and the central location within the department make it an ideal location for these gatherings. When these events precede or follow a regularly scheduled class, the dynamics of the auditory field shift. If a special event is ending in the lab prior to a class beginning, there are more people lingering in the room before the class starts than usual. Conversations amongst faculty members and with invited guests delay the start of a class. And these conversations about research, theories, and methods have a tenor and tone that seems removed from the day-​to-​day interactions of the

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lab as classroom space. Chairs are rearranged, the projectors are turned on with displays of notes from lectures and workshops that are not directly related to the content of the class. Students hesitate to enter the space until cued by the instructor. If a special event is taking place in the lab after a class, then eager participants gather excitedly at the door to the room. Some participants may enter the classroom, unaware that a class is still underway.

Building Maintenance Occasionally the sounds of hammers and drills from somewhere in the building signal a renovation or repair that is taking place in a nearby office or common area. The vibrations from the power tools and hammers shake the walls of the lab ever so slightly. Occasionally maintenance workers walk by the lab door carrying ladders, tool bags, clipboards, and walkie talkies as they survey different spaces in the building. Occasionally a crew of painters apply coats of paint to the walls of the hallways throughout the building. The sounds of talking and radios float in and out of the lab.

Evenings, Weekends, and Holidays The lab is a space that is activated by students, teachers, classes, workshops, performances, and presentations. The doors to the lab, when closed, are locked. Except for evening classes and performances, the lab is darkened and empty of people over night. On the weekends and holidays, access to the building is limited to staff with authorized ID cards that can be used to unlock the doors to the building. On these days the lab is doubly locked. On the rare occasion the lab is opened and used on evenings, weekends, or holidays there are rarely other people inhabiting the building.

Time of Day The temporal rhythm of the sounds of the lab are structured by the time of day, university schedule of classes, seventy-​five-​minute class periods during the day, one hundred sixty-​five-​minute evening class periods, an academic calendar approved by a board of trustees and university committee, time of year, and individual course schedules for each class.5



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Geographic Location Located in a large city in west central Florida, the university, the building that houses the lab, and the lab itself, are subject to the dynamics and textures of the region. Some of these dynamics include the fact that the university is in the proximity of flight patterns for an international airport, an Airforce base, and a nearby private airport. Sounds from airplanes can be heard and felt throughout the day. At least three hospitals are in a 1-​mile radius of the campus making the sound and frequency of medical helicopters and ambulances common. The building that houses the lab is located near the southern perimeter of campus which is bordered by a six-​lane divided avenue that is a connecting roadway to two interstate highways. Sounds of police, fire, and ambulance sirens sometimes travel from this roadway to the building. This roadway also makes the university accessible to students who do not live on campus and may drive to school from neighborhoods within the city as well as from nearby cities and towns. Throughout the school day the movement of cars in the parking lots around the building provide a consistent and constant background to the working of the lab.

Thunderstorms The summer months are characterized by the predictability and frequency of afternoon thunderstorms. These storms happen at the same time every day and last for about half an hour. Thirty minutes of rain, lightning, and thunder offer a brief break in the rising temperatures. From inside the lab the low rumble of thunder sounds distant. The downpour of rain falling on the roof of the building echoes loudly throughout the lab. Sometimes a storm will start after a class starts and end before that same class is over. Sometimes a storm will start a few minutes before a class begins. Students arriving late to class often appear at the door to the lab drenched with the evidence of the intensity of the storm. Umbrellas are leaned against the wall by the door, wet shoes squeak, and dripping clothes become part of the class. Sometimes a storm will start in the final moments of a class. Everyone in the lab glances nervously at one another in a silent acknowledgment of the inevitability of either being stuck inside until the storm passes or of becoming hopelessly wet. Some unpack umbrellas, some pull on hooded sweatshirts, and others steel themselves for the shower.

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Hurricane Season From June to late November, the Atlantic hurricane season presents the possibility of a tropical cyclone making landfall in or around west central Florida. These tracked storms lead to preventative campus closures that bring the activities of students, instructors, and performers in the lab to temporary halt. The auditory field of the lab is radically shifted and altered by these closings. The movement of bodies in and out of the space is slowed, and if a storm makes landfall the possibility of power outages further shifts and changes the auditory dimensions of the lab for an extended period of time.

Oak Pollen The north side of the building is surrounded by dozens of live oak trees draped in Spanish moss. The sprawling branches of these trees provide shade from the hot rays of the sun throughout most of the year. In the late winter months and through the spring the trees begin to drop a steady blanket of yellow pollen as new leaves sprout. The pollen from these (and other oaks throughout the campus and around the city) activate a seasonal allergy response in a great number of students and instructors that includes watery and itchy eyes, coughs, sneezing, and runny noses.

Cold and Flu Season Most of the days during the fall and spring semesters coincide with the annual cold and flu season. Reminders for flu vaccines start to appear in mid-​October. Students send e-​mails explaining that they have contracted the flu and will miss several classes. Some students do not send messages and just stop showing up to class. Some students continue to attend class despite displaying symptoms. Some students and instructors contract these viruses while interacting with others in the lab. Both viruses impact the auditory field of the lab by impacting the number of students who do and do not attend classes.

Food Truck Rally On a Thursday morning, during the third week of the month, half a dozen food trucks pull up and park alongside the curb on the west side of the building.



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A DJ in a van parks in between the food trucks and sets up PA speakers along the sidewalk and begins spinning beats for the early lunch crowd. Every time the automatic doors of the building slide open the rhythmic thumping of the bass and drums becomes louder and clearer inside the building. And on the third floor, in the performance lab, the pulsing grooves ebb and flow like waves.

Capacity 49 Persons The maximum capacity of the lab is posted as forty-​nine persons. The average class size has a capacity of around twenty-​four students. Each body brings various other bodies (bags, devices, food and drink containers, etc.) with them into the room on any given day. At just under half of the designed capacity, the room reverberates with the sounds and vibrations of these bodies. The room provides an opening and the space for these bodies (both human and nonhuman) to move, to breathe, to talk, to interact, and to act. The room provides a capacity for sounds, for teaching, and learning.

No Food or Drink in the Lab A sign posted on the door to the lab instructs: “No food or drink in the lab.” This instruction does not prevent people from bringing in food and drink into the lab, and often goes unenforced. The sounds of food wrappers, drinks, drinking, and eating are often part of the auditory field of the room. There are no trash cans or recycling containers inside the room which may result in food and drink containers remaining in the room indefinitely. Some take the sign on the door very seriously and remain just outside the lab as they finish eating and drinking.

Notes 1 Eidsheim’s work is related to Christopher Small’s specification of music as a process he calls musicking. Small explains: “To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing” (9). 2 These performances of my experience work towards an evocation of what Kathleen Stewart refers to as “senses of place.” For Stewart senses of place emerge through action, talk, and cultural practices. She explains, “The problem of considering ‘senses of place,’ then, is a problem of tracking the force of cultural practices subject to social use and thus filled with

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moments of tension, digression, displacement, excess, deferral, arrest, contradiction, immanence, and desire” (139). 3 Waiting outside the door to the classroom the auditory field emerges as intermediate as Ihde describes: “By intermediate we note that the field is not synonymous with the thing, it exceeds the thing as a region in which the thing is located and to which the thing is always related” (73). 4 The board is part of the auditory field, but it also emphasizes Ihde’s point that the auditory field is phenomenologically experienced as always in time and motion. As Ihde reminds, “The intimate relation between animation, motion, and sound lies at the threshold of the inner secret of auditory experience, the timefulness of sound. The auditory field is not a static field” (83). The whiteboard impacts sound, and it also invites motion that sounds. 5 In discussing temporality and the phenomenological experience of sound Ihde explains the relationship between time and sound in terms of rhythm: “The temporal rhythms of daily sound are structured rhythms, and it is in rhythm that the background or field of auditory temporality is located” (87).

Works Cited Ahern, Kati, and Ashley R. Mehlenbacher. “Listening for Genre Multiplicity in Classroom Soundscapes.” Enculturation:  A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, vol.  26, 2018, http://​enculturation.net/​listening-​for-​genre-​multiplicity. Berlant, Lauren, and Kathleen Stewart. The Hundreds. Duke University Press, 2019. Eidsheim, Nina S. Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Duke University Press, 2015. Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. 2nd ed., SUNY Press, 2007. McRae, Chris. Performative Listening: Hearing Others in Qualitative Research. Peter Lang, 2015. Schafer, R. Murray. Ear Cleaning:  Notes for an Experimental Music Course. Clark & Cruickshank, 1967. Small, Christopher. Musicking:  The Meanings of Performing and Listening. 1998, Wesleyan University Press, 1998. Stewart, Kathleen C. “An Occupied Place.” Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, School of American Research Press, 1996, pp. 137–​166.

5 LISTENING FOR REVERBERATIONS

Prelude 5: Sampling Reverberations The classroom is a dynamic cultural and social space. Or as Judith Hamera argues, “space is not simply an inert context, a barren stage waiting for actors to show up” (76). Spaces, like classrooms, are active and vibrant spaces that produce and are produced by social and cultural interactions and configurations. This chapter presents examples of listening for the classroom that work to hear and attend to the ways the space might reverberate and resonate with other social and cultural spaces and practices. This approach to sound and space is in part informed by what Andrew S. Eisenberg refers to as an ecological modality of space (195). An ecological approach to sound and space works to consider the relationships between sound, space, and social configurations (197–​198). Steven Feld’s conception of acoustemology enacts this ecological modality of space in the consideration of the relational ontology and epistemology that are embodied in and by sound and listening (12–​15). Feld explains, “This relationality is both a routine condition of dwelling and one that produces consciousness of modes of acoustic attending, of ways of listening for and resounding to presence” (15). Acoustemology marks the ways sound and listening are practices that are always entangled with social arrangements, histories,

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and spaces. In this chapter, I listen for the ways the classroom, as an ecological modality of space, emerges and enacts an acoustemology, or way of knowing in and through sound, that is always relationally connected to and with other social and cultural structures and practices. The performances of listening in this chapter engage this relational approach to sound and space via the language and theories of performance studies. By layering performance theories of “scenes” with a relational approach to sound and listening I  generate moments and examples where the performance classroom suggests and cites the structures and implications of other spaces that are both real and imagined. I begin with Diana Taylor’s discussions of the repertoire and scenario as a starting place for locating this listening. Taylor explains that performance studies is well suited to attend to what she refers to as the repertoire of embodied practices that function as sites of knowledge production and transmission (26). The repertoire, as a site of knowledge, works outside the analytical frameworks and logics of texts and narratives traditionally found in archives of written knowledge. In order to account for both knowledge as it is transmitted in archives and through repertoires, Taylor offers the scenario as a method of analysis for attending more fully to the implications and textures of the repertoire of embodied practices. The scenario as a mode of analysis moves beyond narrative and text-​based approaches to understanding and explaining cultural forms and practices by attending to sites and scenes of action. She explains: The scenario includes features well theorized in literary analysis, such as narrative and plot, but demands that we also pay attention to milieu and corporeal behaviors such as gestures, attitudes, and tones not reducible to language. Simultaneously setup and action, scenarios frame and activate social drama. (28)

For Taylor, the scenario is an analytic framework that accounts for the ways individual actions and embodied practices are always produced by and constitutive of social and cultural forms and structures. One implication of the scenario as an analytic framework that Taylor clarifies is an emphasis on scenes, or physical locations, as materially and culturally generated by and generative of embodied practices. She explains, “The two, scene and scenario, stand in metonymic relationship: the place allows us to think about the possibilities of action. But action also defines place” (29). For example, the classroom is a scene that creates the possibility for various actions. And the actions that emerge in the classroom also work to specify the space.



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In the moments of listening I  share in this chapter; I  engage Taylor’s discussion of scene and scenario in order to listen for the classroom as a scenario and scene of embodied practices that extend beyond the specific pedagogical use of the classroom space. The repertoire of embodied knowledge that is created in and by the classroom as a social and cultural space reverberates with other cultural and social practices. In this way listening for the classroom begins to track and trace the cultural forms that are layered with the space. Performative listening provides a logic for engaging the scene of the performance classroom as one that is always produced by and generative of other cultural and social spaces through a commitment to listening for context and location “as dynamic characters that interact with human interaction and experience” (McRae 43). However, in this chapter I listen for the context and location of the classroom not only as a dynamic character that interacts with human interaction, but also as a space that is textured by and reverberates with other dynamic spaces. Listening for the classroom as a space that reverberates with other spaces helps to contextualize the classroom as a cultural space that is situated in relationship to and with other spaces. In his discussion of the relationship between jazz music and spatial experience Andrew S. Berish creates an analysis of what he refers to as the “specificity of sound” (1). He explains: Musical sounds themselves have a kind of semantic content. That content is much more indeterminate and flexible than spoken and written language, but it is nonetheless real and identifiable. To delineate this interaction between sound and discourse means correlating music analysis with a sensitive accounting of how people understood these sounds. (17)

Specific musical performances and sounds reveal meaningful insights about social and cultural understandings and practices. He goes on to argue that “music does not only engage existing spatial arrangements; it allows the creative expression of new ones” (26). For Berish, music both reveals and produces spatial arrangements. Although I am not listening for musical sounds, I am approaching the classroom as a site of sounded performances that reveals social and cultural understandings about education and practices of teaching and learning in classroom spaces. Berish’s work helps clarify my listening as an act that works to both hear the ways sounds engage existing spatial arrangements like the performance classroom, and to hear the ways sounds express and reveal new spatial arrangements.

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Classrooms are spaces that reverberate with the sounds of a wide range of other spaces. In this chapter, I  listen for these reverberations with other spaces as they emerge both metaphorically through comparisons and similarities, and metonymically through associations and relationships of difference. In this way I am treating the classroom as a space that performs through its interaction with others. And I am treating reverberation as a continuous effect of this performance. The description of performance as functioning metaphorically and metonymically offered by Mary S.  Strine, Beverly Whitaker Long, and Mary Frances Hopkins is particularly useful for specifying my listening for the reverberations of the performance classroom. Through performance as metaphor comparisons are accomplished that are made by approximations and substitutions (185). Therefore, some of the descriptions of reverberations in this chapter indicate ways the performance classroom functions metaphorically in ways that compare to and approximate other spaces. The classroom is like these other spaces. Through performance as metonym meanings emerge relationally. “The performance is contiguous to; it is partial, thus opening the study to a wide range of associations or affiliations …” (Strine et  al. 185). When reverberations are metonymic the classroom is not like other spaces rather it is affiliated and associated with other spaces. The classroom is contiguous with these other spaces. In the 29 fragments presented in this chapter I use metaphor and metonymy to listen for the ways the lab reverberates with other spaces. The first implication of this performance of listening is that these fragments are suggestive of the ways space is a culturally specific site that is always linked to and informed by various ideologies. For example, Paulo Freire’s critique of transactional models of education echoes in the classroom space. He argues “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor” (72). The effects of this banking model of education are present in the ways the classroom reverberates with various spaces of production, labor, and business. The second implication of listening for the metaphoric and metonymic reverberations of the lab with other spaces is that this classroom is suggestive of spaces that are used for similar pedagogical purposes. The performance lab reverberates with the theoretical and methodological commitments of the kinds of courses taught in a performance studies classroom found in a communication department, in a school of humanities, as part of a larger college of arts and sciences, at a large public university, in the Southeastern United



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States, in the twenty-​first century. For example, the theatrical and imaginative work of the classes that deal with questions of performance, identity, culture, relationships, and communication reverberate with spaces where similar questions are asked, issues are raised, and approaches are practiced. Finally, the fragments in this chapter also work to engender a kind of reflexivity that attends not only to the listening self, but to the ways the listening self is always enabled and constrained by location and context. In this way, listening for reverberations is reflective of my own individually limited and context-​bound listening practice. The metaphorical comparisons and the metonymic relationships I hear and describe are restricted to my own incomplete list and listing of similarities and associations. In terms of sound and music, reverberations can be characterized by their continuous function. In this way the following 29 fragments are offered as openings to an infinite set of ongoing possible ways classrooms might reverberate with other similar spaces or might yield associations with vastly different sites of interaction.1 These reverberations might indicate moments of possibility and transformation to how classroom spaces are listened for and inhabited. There are many kinds of ways the performance lab reverberates with other cultural and social spaces including:

No Food or Drink The sign on the door to the lab clearly prohibits food or drink in the space. The performance lab is intended to be protected from the possibility of spilled crumbs or beverages. This marking of the space calls to mind other similarly protected spaces:  computer labs, study rooms on a quiet floors libraries, biological, chemical, or scientific laboratories, medical facilities, archives, museums, historical sites, antique stores, gymnasiums, community swimming pools, conference rooms, workshops, factory spaces, art studios, dance studios, music studios, theatre studios, dark rooms, practice rooms, religious spaces, and other spaces where food and drink are unacceptable and unwelcome.

Exit Signs The glowing red signs signal two points of exit and entry on the north side of the room. The two doors on the south side of the room are unmarked. A culturally specific conversation emerges amongst students before class that

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imagines the possibility or impossibility of safety and finding, creating, and maintaining a sense of security in the room: I think the room is safe, I mean, there are no windows. No way, there are too many doors. But they lock when they are closed. I count at least four ways into the room. Don’t forget the prop room. Five.

Seats Arranged in a Circle Over five hundred square feet of floor space in the lab, and two racks of fifty moveable chairs enable a variety of seating configurations. On the first day of classes the chairs are often arranged in a circle inviting members of the class to sit and face one another with no clear defining location of the teacher or leader. The circled chairs call to mind other circular arrangements used in classroom spaces including preschool games like “duck, duck, goose,” elementary school story time circles, small group meetings, roundtable discussions, and arts based educational practices like theater warm-​ups and choral rehearsals.

Theatre Space This performance lab is not by design a theater classroom (though some performance studies classrooms are located in theater departments and some theater classrooms are used for performance studies education). However, certain features of this room are suggestive of a theater space. The grid of stage lights, the black curtains, the dark floor, the windowless walls, the back room filled with props are all features found in theater spaces. This is a space that is designed for theatrical, staged, and embodied work. In the same way that some public spaces are designed for private use (like libraries with study rooms).

Imagined Spaces Part I The lab is designed for the creation, study, and witnessing of performance. The lab enables the teaching of courses in performance that invite imaginative and



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experimental play and work with questions of “What if.”2 These classes, and these performances, resonate with a range of culturally recognizable scenes and interactions. An empty stage is occupied by a performer, and a performance, of labor. The empty stage is transformed into a work space. Repeated movements, gestures, actions, and spoken cultural scripts create a scene of customer service. “Welcome to … my name is … how can I help you?” An empty stage is inhabited by a performer, and a performance, of domesticity. The empty stage is transformed into a living space: a bedroom, a kitchen, a porch, an apartment, a house. The arrangement of props and chairs create a scene of shared dwelling complete with couches, tables, beds, and televisions. An empty stage is visited by a performer, and a performance, of grief and loss. The empty stage is transformed into a funeral site. Ritualized gestures, movements, and scripts create a scene of burial, memorialization, and reverence. The placement of flowers, a prayer, a tear, and a goodbye.

Lecture Halls The chairs are arranged in rows facing a lectern with a computer that is positioned in the upstage left corner of the room. A projection screen is lowered displaying a slideshow, that is full of slides that are dense with words. A singular figure stands next to the podium and gestures towards the images on the projection screen. The figure alternately speaks to the bodies sitting in the chairs and to the screen. The configuration of the room calls to mind lecture halls found in various buildings throughout the campus, and that are represented in countless television shows and films.

Imagined Spaces Part II During performances, workshops, and rehearsals the lab is imagined as and reverberates with the sounds of fictional, fantastical, and magical worlds. The room, and the practice of performance, engenders the creation of and experimentation with alternate worlds. An empty stage is encountered by a performer, and a performance, of exploration. The empty stage is transformed into an enchanted swamp. Rehearsal blocks are elevated platforms offering protection from hungry alligators, treacherous quicksand, and pits of venomous snakes. Performers weave in and out of trees, duck under low branches, and jump over and across dangerous pitfalls.

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An empty stage is navigated during rehearsal, by performers and performances of superhuman powers and abilities. The empty stage is transformed into gravity defying terrain. The floor becomes ice, clouds, water, the surface of the moon, honey. Performers glide, fly, swim, bounce, and trudge around the room. An empty stage emerges around a performer during a performance of possibility. The empty stage is transformed into a magical realm. Creatures are encountered, new worlds are suggested, and fantastic phenomena are experienced through movement, gesture, and narration. The stage, and the room, becomes a space found in fiction and made possible in the future, and the far away.

Dance The smooth vinyl floor, when free from obstructions like chairs and bags, provides room for a range of movement. A dance floor emerges. Gliding, skipping, twirling, twisting, tapping, hopping, walking, shuffling, skipping, bopping, bouncing, rocking, rolling locomotion, arms flailing, popping, locking, dropping, stopping, starting. Feet and bodies move in and out of synchronization. A swelling cacophony of genres and styles convey time, tempo, and sound:  good dancing, bad dancing, line dancing, shadow dancing, finger dancing, contemporary dancing, ballroom dancing, tap dancing, ballet dancing, jazz dancing, hip hop dancing, interpretive dancing, slow dancing, fast dancing, break dancing, happy dancing, sad dancing, seductive dancing, repulsive dancing, imaginary dancing.3 The smooth vinyl floor, even when it is full of obstructions and obstacles, creates the opportunity for a range of movement. A  dance floor appears in unexpected spaces. Bodies weave, wobble, navigate, negotiate, stumble, trip, hesitate, and confidently move around, over, under, and through the space. Weight is shifted. Adjustments are made. And even when there is no dance floor to be found, dancers emerge and appear unexpectedly. Pens and pencils dance across pages, pages are shuffled, toes and fingers rhythmically tap, and words bounce and glide around the room. Movement and play abound.

Construction Site Ladders and buckets of paint surround the perimeter of the room. Drop cloths are pushed against the baseboard. Drywall is patched. New coats of paint are



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added. Tracks for curtains are removed and re-​installed with cordless drills. Styrofoam cups are left on paint splattered coolers next to shock resistant radio players. Stainless steel screws bounce and scatter across the floor. Ceiling mounted projectors are replaced with newer and more efficient devices. Retractable projection screens are installed, adjusted, tested, and readjusted. Electrical wires are threaded into existing holes in the wall, new holes are created as needed in order to connect computers, routers, speakers, and projection systems in the most efficient and effective ways possible. Measurements of the square footage of the floor and walls are taken with retractable tape measures. Old carpet flooring is removed with an industrial floor striping machine and the room is filled with a cloud of dust. Voices are raised to volumes in order to compete with the sound of the machinery. New vinyl-​tile flooring is installed with an adhesive that gives a pungent wave of toxic vapors that linger in the windowless room for several days. Afterwards, debris is collected, swept, contained, and hauled away.

Confessional Part I A stage is set for an intimate performance. The floor length black curtains encircle the room. A single chair is positioned in the center of the room. Three stage lights illuminate the seat in a bright wash of blues, reds, and yellows. The remaining chairs are arranged in rows in a darkened third of the room facing the chair in the lit staged area. A performer sits in the chair facing into the darkness, awaiting a response from a listening audience member. An audience member sits in the darkness awaiting a performer to take their seat and begin the performance.

Movie Theater A projection screen is lowered, a projector is powered on, and a film is started on the attached computer. The lights are turned off and the sounds of the opening credits blast through the four ceiling mounted speakers. Adjustments to the volume are made on the control panel, the door to the room is closed, and the viewing proceeds with minimal distractions and interruptions. The classroom, the lab, is turned into a movie theater. The performances and sounds resonate with and are common to public movie watching events (somebody starts eating a snack, somebody leaves, somebody returns, somebody whispers, etc.).

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Confessional Part II After a class ends and all the students leave the room, the instructor remains to erase the notes from the whiteboard, to turn off the computer, or to organize a stack of papers and notes. One student returns and walks towards the instructor and away from the open classroom door. The student addresses the instructor with a question or concern about a grade, an assignment, an absence, or a personal matter. There is no documentation of the conversation, and though it takes place in the public space of the classroom, it is kept private by the emptiness of the room.

Gallery The lab is converted, for a class period, into a temporary gallery in order to accommodate an assignment that involves the display of small art installations. The chairs are stacked and removed from the main floor. The projects are displayed on tables, stools, and rehearsal cubes around the perimeter of the lab. Students mill about the space glancing at the projects, reading brief descriptions of the projects, talking quietly to one another, and occasionally taking pictures or notes. Small clusters of students gather in front of the various projects. Multiple muffled conversations emerge simultaneously from different points around the room.

Practice Rooms Somewhere on campus a musician stands with instrument in hand next to a black metal music stand and an old piano in a room designed to isolate sound and enable practicing. Meanwhile in the performance lab, a performer stands in the center of the room, script in hand, next to a black rehearsal cube and an old desk ready to practice. The curtains and heavy steel door do not fully isolate sound, but they do block most of the sounds from outside of the room. However, it is the feel of the space that resonates with the musician’s practice room.

Imagined Spaces Part III The performance lab is infinitely malleable. Performers take to the stage and escape to countless familiar and culturally recognizable spaces through their



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words, movements, arrangement of objects, and relationships to and with the audience. Different spaces are evoked, familiar sounds are suggested, and memories and futures are imagined, revisited, and intertwined. An empty stage is visited by a performer, and a performance, of vacation. Modes of transportation, epic journeys, and memorable destinations are represented. Bags are packed, vehicles are loaded, and trips are taken by land, air, and sea to destinations that include natural wonders, scenic vistas, and historic landmarks. An empty stage is played on by a performer, and a performance, of recreation. Stadiums, fields, playgrounds, gymnasiums, courts, tracks, and backyards are created. Lines are approached, plates are stepped to, laces are tied, muscles are stretched, and corners are squared. Throws are made, swings are taken, positions are readied, maneuvers are completed, and victories are secured. An empty stage is witnessed by a performer, and a performance, of spectatorship. Music venues, performance spaces, and living room movie theaters are formed. Concerts are listened to, theatres are entered, and movies are watched from lawns, balconies, bleachers, folding chairs, and couches.

Past Teachers Features of the room that impact the ways sounds move through the space are often design choices made by previous performance practitioners and teachers who have worked and taught in the lab with a wide range of disciplinary genealogies, interests, and strengths. Some of these choices are recognizable as explicitly related to questions of performance, performance studies, and oral interpretation including a list of rules for the “theater” posted by the door to the room, a cement block (used for propping open the door) with the word “limen” stenciled across the top, the sliding door that opens into the converted office that now serve as a prop room for the lab, a set of wooden rehearsal cubes stacked in the prop room, three projector screens and ceiling mounted projectors, the light grid, the curtains, and the moveable chairs. And though the chronology of the design of the room is not always clearly marked, documented, or attributed to individual instructors and practitioners, the echoes of these choices linger in the ways the room is and can be used. The echoes of these choices enable and constrain the sounds of the room and they inform and impact any possible future design choices.

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Designed Classrooms Though the performance lab is a unique classroom space, it also resonates with design features of other classrooms across the university. These characteristics enable and invite particular ways of sounding and containing sounds. Like other classrooms spaces, the performance lab is scheduled for seventy-​ five-​minute class periods with a limit on the number of students who can enroll in any given class. Classes are scheduled in the fall, spring, and summer semesters, and almost always taught by a single instructor. Seating is available for all enrolled students, a podium, a whiteboard, and internet connectivity engender ways of teaching and learning that are similarly enabled and expected in other classrooms. The room is separated, with walls and doors, from other classrooms, offices, and common spaces in the building. The room is designed with structural, architectural, and technical features and systems that are common amongst other classroom spaces that are found in the modern (late twentieth century) buildings across this university campus. This includes characteristics that regardless of designed intent impact the ways sound happens in the classroom including insulation, electrical writing, ethernet connections, wireless modems, central heating and cooling, fluorescent lighting, fiberglass ceiling tiles, fire alarm systems, and emergency backup generator power.

Confessional Part III Chairs are arranged in rows toward the back of the room, creating two distinct spaces in the lab. One space is an open stage or performance area. This space allows for ease of movement and separation from the area where the seats are arranged in rows. The chairs are positioned with minimal space in between each seat in order to maximize both the size of the stage area and the number of bodies that can be seated in the audience. Audience members lean in towards one another with admissions of lack of preparation, increased nerves, and desires to be elsewhere.

Workshop Sounds of building, making, and creating fill the air. Instructions are studied. Ideas are discussed, debated, and decided. Lists are organized, calendars are



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synchronized, and plans are devised and drafted. Workspaces are cleared. Cuts are made. Steps are measured. Pieces are fixed together using different tools and techniques. Mistakes happen. New decisions are made, new measurements are taken, and new strategies are considered. Disagreements are voiced and discoveries are celebrated. Failures are evaluated and assessed. Plans are revised. Details are hammered out. Steps are retraced. New cuts are made. New tools and techniques are attempted. Dust settles. The work continues.

Break Room In between classes, the lab serves as a kind of break room for students who may be early for the next class, or who may linger in order to talk with friends. Jokes are made. Stories are shared. Frustration about roommates, classmates, assignments, classes, and teachers are expressed. Some use the space to catch up on a few personal tasks. Text messages are sent. Phone calls are made. Schedules are reviewed. Notes are studied. Others use the space to relax and refresh. Snacks are eaten. Coffees, teas, and smoothies are sipped. Naps are taken. Headphones are used to pump music.

Past Classes The space resonates and echoes with the vibrations of previous classes. There are immediate and easily noticeable effects of a previous class like the arrangement of the furniture, forgotten or lost objects left in the room, the projector that remains on, lights that are switched off, adjustments to the thermostat in the corner of the room that leave the space feeling warmer or cooler than usual. There are less noticeable effects of classes held in the space in previous semesters like the habituated practices for how the room is and can be used that are carried forward by students and instructors who previously enrolled or taught in the lab. This includes seating arrangements, where to place personal belongings, and knowledge of the two available electrical outlets that can easily be used to charge cellphones and laptops. There are barely noticeable effects of classes held in the lab over the years like scuff marks on the walls, worn-​down surfaces, peeling paint on the doors, and deteriorating and aging technological tools. Echoes of these previous classes impact and inform how the current pedagogical use of the space

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through various theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical shifts and realizations that emerged in this pedagogical space.

Ritual Space Sometimes the lab feels like a sacred space. The open door offers a threshold that separates the mundane world and activities of the hallway from the transformative space and possibilities of the classroom. The room functions as a site of ritual change.4 Opening remarks are made. Participants take their places. Rules are learned, followed, and upheld. Words are spoken, gestures are made, and procedures are followed. Memberships are confirmed, affirmed, and conferred. Witnesses are present. Communities are enacted. Proclamations are made, promises are shared, and verdicts are delivered. When the door is opened, the mundane world of the hallway awaits.

Office Space The lab is a site of productivity and work. Like an open office space, the room is buzzing with students working on projects. Chairs are rearranged and supplies are organized. Some work alone and some work in small groups. The solitary workers make workspaces that are separate from others. Often, they wear headphones as they focus on their individual projects. Some pull out laptops, tablets, or smartphones and begin typing notes, searching the internet for images and information, and organizing materials. The collaborators gather in clusters to discuss while drawing diagrams, chat while charting plans, and rephrase while revising products.

Studio As a studio, the lab is a quiet space that is full of possibilities for creation and discovery. It is a space for the work of artists, artistry, and artistic inquiry. Sometimes it is a comfortable space, a retreat, with limited distractions and interruptions. There are no windows, the doors are heavy and thick, the lights can be dimmed, and personal soundtracks and playlists can be plugged in to the sound system. Ideas bounce off the floor and are caught in the folds of the curtains. Great discoveries are made. Brilliant ideas are devised. Beautiful art is developed. The cozy solitude of the lab-​as-​studio feels infinitely generative.



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Sometimes the lab-​as-​studio is a demanding and unforgiving space filled with agitations and obstructions. The windowless room creates a feeling of isolation. The heavy doors seal out new ideas and new ways of thinking. It is a space where failures lead to frustrations that do not immediately yield brilliant aesthetic choices. Ideas fall flat against the floor and are lost in the folds of the curtains. The quiet, comfortable, uninterrupted, and distraction-​free space invites personal scrutiny, self-​doubt, and reflexivity. New practices emerge. The confining solitude of the lab-​as-​studio generates infinite opportunities for self-​discovery.

Performance Classrooms The lab resonates with the sounds and configurations of other performance classrooms. There are the black box theater classrooms fully equipped with the technical capacity for staging full-​length productions. There are the makeshift performance classrooms, not made for performance pedagogy at all, with desks and tables pushed into the corners of the room in order to make space for embodied modes of learning. There are the designed performance classrooms, much like this lab, with the ability to accommodate both traditional classroom practices through features like podiums, whiteboards, and desks; and performance practices through open floor space, moveable seats, and rehearsal cubes.

Evaluative Space The four walls of the room square off a space for the presentation and evaluation of creative works and acts. The lab is isolated from other public spaces on the third, and top, floor of the building. The sounds of judgement, evaluations, and critique of performances first emerge within and are contained by this exclusive space. Scribbled notes about performances and immediate feedback offered by audience members, performers, and instructors are all staged within the insulated confines of the lab. Suggestions are absorbed. Descriptive observations resonate. Imaginative interpretations enliven. Affirming comments echo. Sharp assessments sting. Incisive analysis swells and lingers.

Celebration After a particularly emotionally moving performance, the lab erupts with applause. Upon the completion of a particularly challenging performance, the

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lab erupts with cheers. At the end of a carefully prepared and thoughtful performance, the lab erupts with murmurs of appreciation. Following the conclusion of a full round of performances, sighs of relief, congratulatory remarks, and expressions of gratitude and awe are shared. These celebratory moments fill and exceed the confines of the space spilling out into the hall, around the corner, down the stairs, into other classroom spaces, and out onto the sidewalks that lead away from the building.

Archive The room vibrates with the faint remnants of ideas and practices generated by previous classes and past instruction. The lab is an archive of felt information that is stored in echoes and passed down and along through the entanglements of interaction. Where there are no written documents, there are spoken stories. Where there are no images, there are witnesses. Where there are no recordings, there are memories. Where there are no first-​hand accounts, there are the outward rippling effects of embodied performance. Pedagogy encountered by a student or colleague in the lab and elsewhere yields new theories and techniques of performance. Disciplinary conversations staged in and beyond this space characterize the interactions within the lab. Staged performances witnessed here and elsewhere by various audience members are generative of future performance choices. There are echoes of the broadly construed choices and decisions about possible ways to use the space for classes, rehearsals, workshops, and staged acts. There are echoes of disciplinary, theoretical, methodological and pedagogical philosophies about the content and objectives of the curriculum. There are echoes of the specific, but always culturally and politically informed, choices made by individual performers about the use of voice, body, and space in performance.

Conference Room The lab is the stage for a group meeting: a conference between teacher and students, amongst a group of performers, and even across a disparate collection of audience members. The room is configured to accommodate the group. The space is readied for a meeting of people, concerns, and goals. The conversation fills the room. Some participants in the conference are unable to hear what is



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happening at the other end of the room. Some participants engage in conversations and interactions that are not meant for everybody else. Some participants tune out due to some combination of distraction, disinterest, or boredom.

Notes 1 Walter S. Gershon develops a theory of sound for making sense of human interaction in qualitative research that emphasizes the mobile and dynamic function of reverberations and resonances. He explains: The metaphor of sound can be applied to all forms of human interaction in the ways we respond to one another. This piece further documents the theoretical and methodological potential for textual and sonic reverberations as tools for conceptualizing and enunciating ways of what I call beingknowingdoing, the inseparable understanding that to be is to know is to do, regardless of which aspect one must focus upon to better explicate the particulars of any of its constituent parts. (2) For Gershon, reverberation is a productive way of attending to and articulating the entanglement of ways of being, doing, and acting that resonate with the fragments in this chapter. 2 In performance studies, Ronald J. Pelias and Tracy Stephenson Shaffer connect this imaginative play with the mode of what if with Constantin Stansislavski’s notion of the “magic if” in which performers play with identification in developing performance choices (105). 3 This listing of dance reverberates with the discussions and examples of dance performance studies scholar Barbara Browning offers throughout The Gift (Or, Techniques of the Body). 4 Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance.

Works Cited Berish, Andrew S. Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ‘40s. University of Chicago Press, 2012.f Browning, Barbara. The Gift (Or, Techniques of the Body). Coffee House Press, 2017. Eisenberg, Andrew J. “Space.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 193–​207. Feld, Steven. “Acoustemology.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 12–​21. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1970. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, Continuum, 2000. Gershon, Walter S. “Reverberations and Reverb: Sound Possibilities for Narrative, Creativity, and Critique.” Qualitative Inquiry, 2018, pp. 1–​11. Hamera, Judith. “Introduction:  Opening Opening Acts.” Opening Acts:  Performance in/​ as Communication, edited by Judith Hamera. Sage, 2006, pp. 76–​79.

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McRae, Chris. Performative Listening: Hearing Others in Qualitative Research. Peter Lang, 2015. Pelias, Ronald J. and Tracy S. Shaffer. Performance Studies: The Interpretation of Aesthetic Texts. 2nd ed., Kendall Hunt, 2007. Strine, Mary S., Beverly W.  Long, and Mary F.  Hopkins. “Research in Interpretation and Performance Studies: Trends, Issues, Priorities.” Speech Communication, edited by Gerald Phillips, Southern Illinois University Press, 1990, pp. 181–​204. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire:  Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003. Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance. PAJ Publications, 1988.

6 LISTENING AND SOUNDING SPACES

Prelude 6: Sampling Space In Alvin Lucier’s 1969 performance, I Am Sitting in a Room, Curatorial Assistant of the Museum of Modern Art, Martha Joseph, explains: Lucier read a text into a microphone. Attempting to smooth out his stutter, he began with the lines, “I am sitting in a room, the same one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice.” As described in the text, his voice was recorded, then played back into the room. This process was repeated, and with each iteration Lucier’s recorded speech grew muddled, sounding distant, and specific sonic frequencies started to dominate the recorded sound. These tones that began to overwhelm the text and abstract the sonic landscape are the room’s resonant frequencies and are entirely specific to the architectural particularity of a given space.

One feature of Lucier’s performance that I  find compelling for thinking about listening and sound as practices that create space is that the repetition of recording creates a gradual, but noticeable shift in perspective from voice to space. What at first seems to be the recording of a voice is a recording of a space. Steven Jones’s explanation of the function of sound recording is in line with Lucier’s performance. Jones says, “Sound recording thus captures

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ambient sound, or put another way, the sound of the space surrounding the sound source” (241). Lucier’s performance exemplifies Jones’s definition of the function of sound recording. The 29 fragments presented and performed in this chapter work from the point that is sounded by Lucier and Jones. These fragments perform the sounds and soundings that surround the “sound source,” which in this instance, is the performance classroom. Lucier’s performance and Jones’s comments on recording underscore the ways that spaces like classrooms not only facilitate and privilege certain ways of sounding and listening, but these spaces are made of and by sounds and practices of listening. Steph Ceraso’s discussion of acoustic design as a rhetorical practice of shaping the experience of space similarly indicates the ways that spaces are made in and by sound in ways that are purposeful and always also culturally and socially specific (75). Emily Thompson’s history of architectural acoustics in the early twentieth century in the United States details how spaces are made in and by sound and listening through various design features and choices. Regarding changes in acoustic and architectural design in the early twentieth century Thompson explains: A fundamental compulsion to control the behavior of sound drove technological developments in architectural acoustics and this imperative stimulated auditors to listen more critically, to determine whether that control had been accomplished. This desire for control stemmed partly from new worries about noise, as traditionally bothersome sources of sound like animals, peddlers, and musicians were increasingly drowned out by the technological crescendo of the modern city. It was also drive by a preoccupation with efficiency that demanded the elimination of all things unnecessary, including unnecessary sounds. Finally, control was a means by which to exercise choice in a market filled with aural commodities; it allowed producers and consumers alike to identify what constituted “good sound,” and to evaluate whether particular products achieved it. (2)

The ways that spaces sound is always a question of how these spaces are made to sound. And as Thompson indicates, how a space is made to sound is always a question that is linked to social, cultural, and political values about sound and listening. For examples, in the 2015 publication, Acoustics of Schools: A Design Guide, the Institute of Acoustics, a professional organization in the United Kingdom of professionals working in acoustics and vibration offers the following statement regarding the acoustic design of schools:



Listening and Sounding Spaces 147 The design of rooms for speech is a critical aspect of the acoustic design of a school. Rooms must be designed to facilitate clear communication of speech between teachers and students, and between students. Without good design for speech, teaching and learning spaces may not be suitable for their intended use. (40)

This statement specifies the goals of acoustic design for school spaces, but it also indicates the ways making a space sound are always linked to cultural and social values. For instance, this approach to acoustic design specifies what pedagogical interaction might entail (speech between teachers and students, and between students and students); and what constitutes the intended use of pedagogical spaces (clear communication of speech). These are not necessarily good or bad goals for acoustic design of a school space, but they do demonstrate a link between acoustic design and pedagogical configurations and practices. Classroom spaces are made in and by practices of sound and listening, and these spaces are designed to privilege or emphasize some ways of sounding and listening over others. In this chapter I present instances of performatively listening to the sounds and contexts that make the classroom based on my experiences inhabiting the performance classroom over the past twenty years as student and teacher.1 I also engage the logics and language of music that I encountered in my education and experience performing in the cultural context of the United States in order to listen to the sounds and contexts that might otherwise be considered ambient that make the classroom space.2 The following 29 fragments perform my experience of the performance classroom as a space that emerges in and is made by sounds and experiences that surround and saturate the classroom. There are many kinds of ways the performance lab is made by sound and listening including:

Openings A deep breath, a first note, a first chord, a drumroll, an unaccompanied vocal, an instrumental solo opens the performance.3 The opening is a start of something new and an end of what came before. I pull out a key attached to the green carabiner clipped to the belt loop above my right hip. The other keys jingle as I slide the key into the lock of the door to the lab. I turn the key to right and shove my hip against the door. The door sticks and then with an extra push swings open into the darkened space.

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Humming On most days when I teach, I enter the building where the performance lab is located, through the north stairwell. This entrance is on the opposite side of the building from the faculty lot where I park my car, and it is around the corner from the main entrance of the building that opens into the atrium and lobby. I walk around the far side of the building through a worn path in the grass to get to this entrance. The north stairwell is closest to my office and to the lab, and it is also infrequently used so it affords me a few final moments of solitude before I enter the spaces where I am compelled to perform as teacher and colleague. The catchy pop tune that was just blaring on the factory installed speakers in my sedan, as I pulled into the parking lot, is now stuck in my head. I whistle the melody as I walk around the perimeter of the building towards the north entrance. As I ascend the steps to the third floor, my whistling echoes throughout the stairwell. I stop halfway up the staircase just so I can play with the ways my whistling bounces off the floor and ceiling of this enclosed space. I open the door on the third-​floor landing and, aware that I  might now encounter students or colleagues, switch from the loud projection of a whistle to a barely audible hum. I  turn the corner and unlock the door to the lab. I  enter the room, still humming the tune, and turn on the lights. I hum the melody again and again, as I arrange the seats, write my introductory notes on the board, and get set for class. The effects of my humming on the room are barely noticeable.

Duration The lab sounds like a classroom through the interactions that happen during the scheduled classes that are held in the room throughout the year. During the fall and spring semesters, classes run for a duration of seventy-​five minutes twice a week. Classes held during the evenings and on Fridays meet once a week for one hundred sixty-​five minutes. During the summer semesters, classes are scheduled to meet in the space three times a week for one hundred forty minutes. For the duration of these scheduled times the space is used by teachers and students for classroom activities and academic interactions. I am regularly scheduled to teach all my classes in the lab two days a week. Some semesters this means I will be in the lab for two back-​to-​back class periods for a total of one hundred fifty minutes in the lab twice a week. Sometimes



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these classes are not continuous, and I will leave the lab after one class and return later in the day. During the semesters when I am scheduled to teach a graduate class I return to the space in the evening for a once a week, almost three hour long, session in the lab.

Tempo Though there is always variation from class to class and semester to semester, there is also a predictable and even expected pace to the sounds and use of the lab. In musical terms, tempo might be marked by a measurement of beats per minute. Some musical compositions use Italian words to characterize speeds through qualities of movement (Adagio: slowly; Moderato: moderately; Presto:  very fast). The shifting speeds of the use of the lab could be measured in institutional terms like registration, midterms, and break. They could also be measured in terms of dispositions: tentative, energized, and bored. At the beginning of the fall semester I enter the space with a feeling of renewed energy. I am excited to begin again and to meet new students. I make introductions before the class begins, and we quickly move into a group warm-​ up, I discuss goals for the class, and the class period is over in a flash. Towards the middle of the semester I start worrying about upcoming conference presentations and other mundane obligations. Without a clock on the wall in the lab, the period seems endless. At the end of the semester the pace of the class feels steady and even.

Rhythm Unlike tempo, which focuses on speeds, rhythm deals with placements. Musically, notations signal rhythmic placements of long notes, short notes, and shorter notes. The rhythms that constitute the lab might, in a related way deal in the sequence and placements of sounds. Over the course of a single class period there may be any number of spoken rhythmic combinations and sequences of long sounds (explanations, commentary, etc.) and short sounds (greetings, answers, etc.). There may be other rhythmic configurations of sounds (movements, breathing, etc.). The lab emerges in and through the rhythms that are always also characterized by shifting tempos.

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My placement in the lab is always as a student, but with varying rhythms over time. I first entered the lab as an undergraduate student, unsure about my place in the space. After completing my undergraduate degree, I returned to the lab again as a student in the MA program, this time with a commitment to taking a place in any and all classes dealing with performance studies. And then fortuitously, I was hired, and placed, as an instructor, and later as an assistant professor, in the lab. This time learning from the rhythms of the students who I encounter.

Resting In music, the space between notes are marked and characterized as rests. These are momentary pauses that precede and follow the placement and production of other sounds. During classes the lab emerges in rests (including pauses in instruction, during lectures, for everyone to take their seats, for the performer to set the stage, in-​between performances, for laughter, for responses, for feedback, and for directions. Throughout any given class, on any given day, the number of rests that characterize my teaching varies. I  enter the room, and rest. I  greet students, and rest. I  provide a preview of goals for the day, and rest. I introduce a new concept or idea; I ask for questions. Rest. Students talk and rest. I lead the class in an activity, and rest after (rest) every (rest) single (rest) instruction (rest). Students move and rest after (rest) every (rest) single (rest) action (rest). I provide reminders about upcoming assignments and rest. I answer questions, and rest. Class ends. Rest. The lab is also characterized as a space through the rests that surround the scheduled class periods including the time in-​between classes, the time before classes, and the time after the final class of each day.

Subito (Suddenly) It’s the first day of a new semester. I am in the lab thirty minutes before my first class (the first class in the lab since the summer) cleaning and setting up the space which was last used for a departmental orientation. There are tables, chairs, and a podium left out in the lab that are not needed for the upcoming class. I drag the last table that was left out in the room behind the curtains and into the prop room. When I return from the prop room into the lab, I part the curtains and step forward to find a student in the space. The student, who is



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early for class, is startled by my entrance from the back of the room. The student lets out an audible gasp of surprise and jumps back. In return, I flinch in my own surprise at the appearance of this student and their response. I quickly offer an apology and introduce myself. I part the curtains to show the student that the space extends into the adjoining prop room. The student nods, and then explains that they will be back closer to the start of class. I  continue arranging the room.

Electrostatic Discharge The darkening summer sky as clouds rapidly form, signal the approach of an intense impending weather event. And yet, for some reason, today I choose to deny my embodied knowledge and decades of experience with the consistency and known (often deadly) effects of the daily late afternoon summer thunderstorms of central Florida. And I head outside to try and buy some coffee from the snack shop in the building next door fifteen minutes before I am set to teach my graduate level performance theory course. Today I am sure that I can avoid, outrun, and outsmart the weather. I open the ground level door at the bottom of the staircase and start my short walk across the field to the building that cannot be more than fifty yards away. In an instant the wind increases, the sky darkens, and a low rumble fills the air immediately after a strike of lightning hits what must be no more than ten feet from me. I feel the sound of the air parting, and I jump ten more feet under the cover of the nearby building. I send a text message to the students in my class saying that I will be late.

Breathing Breath activates the lab. The bodies of students and instructors move, learn, and interact throughout the space, always while breathing. Right before I enter the space, I  inhale. Right before the performer takes the stage they inhale. Right in before feedback is offered, the speaker inhales. And when the performance ends, when the lesson ends, when the interaction ends there are sighs, exhalations, and the release of withheld breath. The lab is also a space where breathing is made possible. Air is circulated (and heated and cooled) throughout the space. The lab breathes: inhaling and exhaling bodies, ideas, and feelings.

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Crescendo The volume builds and adds, increasing through both levels and quantities. The groups of students are standing, talking, moving, getting ready to share their work. Twenty-​four students feel like fifty. I  am standing in the middle of the room trying to find a good place to call the class back together. I try to signal the class, “Okay, y’all!” No response. I move towards the front of the room. “Hey, everybody!” Nothing. I move to the back of the room. “Time is up!” Still, no response. I recall my days as the drum major during my senior year of high school. I remember standing on the podium facing over two hundred musicians on a football field. I remember the feeling of cupping my hands to produce a clapping sound that could travel across the width and length of the field. I remember the feelings of calling the band to attention, taking a deep breath, of producing short rapid, bursts of air, and speaking with my full voice. I return to the middle of the room, hesitate, and decide against using my loudest voice. I walk towards the door to the room and turn the lights on and off.

Decrescendo A decrease in volume in the lab follows and is noticeable during different interactions: the opening remarks at the beginning of class; after instructions for in-​class assignments are shared; during lectures; when the air-​conditioner turns on; during group work; throughout in-​class discussions; the moment after the performer takes the stage and before the performer begins their performance; after the performer takes their seat; after the audience applauds a performer; when feedback is offered; following a tense exchange; after evaluations are returned; on Mondays; before lunch; after lunch; at the end of a class period; at the end of the semester.

Volume Volume can measure the capacity of a space, and it also can measure levels of sound. Volume makes a space in terms of size and sound. As an abstraction, volume offers a way of making sense of how sound and space might interact. Standing in the corner of the smoky bar on Wednesday nights during the first two years of my doctoral program next to the snare drum, an electric guitar



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amp, and a fifty-​watt floor monitor, I alternated between playing the bass guitar and trumpet during the four-​hour gig. I knew about volume before those gigs, and I had played in other bands, on other stages many times before. However, it was during those gigs that I first experienced a ringing in my ears that led to my choosing to play while wearing earplugs. Now, when I  enter the performance lab to teach, I  am aware that the workshops I lead, the activities I choose, and the participation that I encourage may often be “too loud.” But I am also aware that, given my experiences with volume, I don’t always have the same point of reference for what others might consider to be too much volume for the space.

Capacity On June 12, 2016, forty-​nine people were killed, and fifty-​three people were wounded at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Towards the end of the same year my niece was born in Orlando, Florida. I’m kind of from Orlando. I mean it’s always a tricky question for me when folks as me where I grew up because my family moved to Orlando the month before I turned thirteen. Which means that I spent my pre-​teen years somewhere else. I  also sort of am from Orlando in the sense that it’s where my parents first met when they were working summer jobs at Disney World. So, even if I hadn’t ever lived in Orlando I would have always, in a way, been from Orlando. Then I  left Orlando to go to school less than eighty miles away at the university where I coincidentally now also work. Incidentally, it’s probably not really a coincidence at all, but I like to call it a coincidence because it helps me clarify that I never intended to work at the same university where I completed my BA and MA degrees. It was just a fortunate or maybe fortuitous turn of events that yielded a job opening while I was seeking full-​time employment that led me to even apply to work at a university that was only eighty miles from my parent’s house. The house where I did some of my growing up. And I guess in a way I also kind of grew up at the university where I now work. It was the final month of my teenage years when I first stepped foot in the performance lab classroom (where I now teach). And there was and is still this blue square sign posted on the wall next to the light switch by the door that reads: CAPACITY 49 PERSONS. And it was just a sign that indicated a directive by the Fire Marshall or the designers of the space about how many people were meant to fit in the space. And then it became, for me, this sign

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that hauntingly memorialized the 49 persons who were murdered at the Pulse Nightclub. And importantly it’s not just a sign that indicates a number of people, but it’s also a sign that indicates capacity and what it means to have a capacity. Incidentally, I don’t think that sign is much of a coincidence at all either. And even though I’m from Orlando, and I visit often, I don’t typically go downtown. But then in the final month of 2016 my niece was born at a hospital near downtown, and I went to the hospital for the first time to meet her and to marvel at her capacity, and to congratulate her parents on their capacities. Leaving the hospital meant making a right-​hand turn, and for the first time, as I sat at the light, I saw the Pulse Nightclub, still fenced-​off with black privacy cloth, and for an instant it all took my breath away.

Silence I sit in the silence. Waiting, listening, breathing. I shift my weight in my chair. I sigh. I stand and walk across the room. I write a note on the board. I move a chair. Students quietly enter the space. Class begins. Before anyone begins to speak, before any instructions are given, before any lessons are stared, there is a momentary silence. We are present, not absent, of each other: the room and those who are inhabiting the space. The room holds us, and we hold the room. Our silence is not silent, instead it shows us to each other.

Pitch Halfway through a night class, a graduate level performance seminar, the students return from a break. The class is getting ready to discuss and offer feedback on a student performance. We position our chairs in a circle, take out our notes, when a high-​pitched alarm starts pulsing in the hallway. In vain, we try to continue our discussion, but the sound persists. One of the students gets up to close the door, and notices that others are starting to leave the building. “I don’t think it’s a drill.” We gather our belongings and head downstairs and outside of the building.

Static The four ceiling mounted speakers in the lab, are connected to the main control panel in the front of the room. The speakers can be used to play sounds on



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a DVD player, the computer, or any auxiliary devices that are plugged into the system. The volume for the speakers can be toggled on and off on the control panel, and when the volume is raised to and left on the highest level the speakers crackle and hiss when not otherwise in use. In the designed pauses during a round of student performances, the static is all I seem to notice.

Signals On the corner of the intersection that is closest to the building where the lab is located there is a cell phone tower that extends above the canopy of live oak trees. The antenna on the tower boost signals for cellular phone usage amongst the more than sixty thousand students, faculty, and staff that attend and work at the university. Receiving a signal for cellular connectivity and use from within the lab is typically not a problem, and the wireless internet connectivity signal is readily available to anyone in the lab who is currently enrolled or employed by the university. Incoming calls, text messages, and other alerts are frequent and common phenomena within the lab. I bring my phone with me into the lab when I  teach. Sometimes the phone is practical because I can use it as a watch or timer. And sometimes the phone draws my attention to the ways the room is enlivened by the signals that saturate the space:  a phone call from an unmarked number, a notification from my cell phone provider about the end of the billing cycle, a text message from my partner. Each call and alert marking the space as always connected.

Tuning In music, tuning is a process of matching and finding shared frequencies or an established standard to produce pitches. Tuning requires adjustments and agreements on the shared standard. In this way tuning is not neutral, or free from value, but it is always relational. Sometimes the relationships are in-​tune and sometimes they are out-​of-​tune. I enter the lab as instructor, and tuning is always happening. Tuning amongst students. Tuning with me. Tuning with the course materials. Tuning to and with the room. Sometimes we are in-​tune and sometimes we are out-​of-​ tune. And we are all always adjusting.

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Proficiency Musically, I am limited in my expertise as a musician by my years of education and experience playing in bands deeply situated in predominately Western conceptions of music. I am also enabled and constrained by my privilege as someone with access to particular and often exclusionary ways of learning about and playing music including affording personal instruments, private lessons, spaces and time for practice, and opportunities for playing with a range of musicians in different contexts.4 My proficiency as a musician shapes the ways I  think about and enact musical performance and understanding including the ways that I engage with and cite various logics of music throughout this chapter. Similarly, the lab or classroom always emerges in relationship to the proficiencies of those who enter and interact with/​in the space. For example, I make the lab in ways that are always informed by my experience and educational background as a performer, a teacher, and a researcher with an interest in performance studies as it is configured in the field of communication.5 And my privileged social and cultural positions (including but not limited to my class, race, gender, sexuality, ability) all mark the ways I move through and create the space.

Whispering The lab is a contained space. The doors close, the curtains are drawn, and secrets are shared. A confidential judgement is made. A confession is offered. A desire is made explicit. A shortcoming is expressed. The room absorbs these secrets. Some hushed tones fade as they rise towards the ceiling. Some hushed tones are trapped by the curtains. Some whispered secrets make no contact at all. The walls keep their lips pursed. The floor will never tell. The light fixtures can certainly be trusted. And some whispers cannot be contained by the room. The secrets travel. The hushed tones move.

Water The lab is situated on a university campus in west central Florida less than fifty feet above sea level. The Gulf of Mexico is less than 40 miles to the west, and the Atlantic Ocean is less than 140 miles to the east. There are rivers and



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lakes even closer to campus. Water flows in and around the space. And at a smaller level water always moves throughout the space. The air conditioning system draws moisture from the air, and the bodies of students and instructors (which are composed of water) breathe moisture into the air, sweat, and sometimes cry.

Wind In the late summer months, the frequency of developed tropical storm systems increases. Often these systems turn into hurricanes that are predicted to impact the region where the university and performance lab are located. Administrative decisions to close the campus based on these predictions often result in canceled classes regardless of the direct impact the storm has on the campus. In these instances, the lab remains unoccupied by the students, instructors, and classes that might otherwise activate the space. Sometimes there is rain. Sometimes there are high winds. Sometimes there are power outages. The space is (re)made by these phenomena.

Distance Halfway through the spring 2020 semester, the COVID-​19 global pandemic led to universities and colleges around the world suspending face-​to-​face instruction and turning to emergency remote learning for the delivery of courses. Students and teachers moved out of classrooms, including the performance lab, to digital spaces for the completion of their teaching and learning interactions. Two months after being reminded of the ways the lab is connected, at microscopic levels, to the rest of the world, the lab remains closed (at the time of this writing) indefinitely. Students and teachers may be instructed to move out of classrooms, but classrooms are also instructed to physically remain empty of teachers and students. The lab, in this moment of distance is made in part by the sounds of this emptiness of human bodies and interaction. The lab may be silent of voices and movement, but the building is still connected to and made in sound through electrical systems, air conditioning systems, and to the physical location of the space on the north side of the university. Meanwhile, distant sounds of teaching and learning continue to shape the lab and what it may become and how it may be used in future instances.

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Crackling and Hissing The needle drops into place in the grooved vinyl. A crackle and hiss precede the amplified variations on the surface of the record. The dust and imperfections on the record vibrate and hum. A thin and barely visible layer of dust covers the surfaces throughout the room: the floor, the corners of the room, the curtains, the computer, the projectors, and the lights. The room crackles and hisses as these surfaces are activated by the needles of touch from bodies, electrical currents, ventilation and air circulation. And as these needles move, new dust settles into place, ready to be played.

Improvising A jam session unfolds and unfurls. A tune everyone knows is called. Chords are outlined. Rhythms are established. Melodies are stated. The improvisation begins. Turns are taken. Citations are offered. Common phrases and articulations are inverted, juxtaposed, and repeated. Something new emerges and the stage is transformed. The lab is made and remade in jam sessions and improvisations. A tune everyone knows is called: it is an idea, a topic, a theme. Structures are outlined, schedules are established, and improvisations push at and reveal the boundaries of the interaction and the room. Something new emerges and the room is transformed.

Synthesizing The room is made into a synthesizer as creates new combinations. Voices, bodies, objects, and signals are blended and blurred together producing new, different, and transformed sounds, signals, and frequencies.6 A conversation is added to an electrical hum. A chair is dragged across the surface of the floor, and at the same time someone sneezes, and a page in a book is turned. A  cell phone rings, and the signal interferes with the computer causing an image to flicker. Someone leaves the room in the middle of a presentation and everything changes again. The room emphasizes the intra-​and inter-​connections.



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Amplifying Amplification can make sounds louder, travel farther, move through space with greater power. I plug one end of the quarter-​inch connector cable into the electric guitar and the other end into a fifteen-​watt practice amp. I turn on the amp, strum a chord, and sound fills the room. The lab is amplified by the sounds of its use. For example, during a class, the room is amplified and seemingly brought to life. But the space is also amplified after its use in the ways it is effects are brought forward. For example, through my descriptions and stories of the space.

Sustaining A note or pitch is held for a prolonged duration before eventually fading away. Sustaining notes and pitches make and remake the lab. These are the lasting and lingering effects of pedagogy and performance, of bodies and interaction, of space and sound. Something is said, a gesture is repeated, a movement is made, and the lab is reconfigured again. The space echoes with a new way of knowing, feeling, and being in the world. The sustained note or act creates a shift in how the lab is experienced: as a site that is at once both profound and unremarkably mundane.

Closings The closing notes fade, the cymbals crash, the last chord reverberates, there is an exhale, the performance comes to an end. The closing is a finishing point of something that just happened and an opportunity for an unknown next to emerge. I stand by the door, holding it open as the students exit the room. I let the door swing partially closed. I check to make sure everyone is out, to make sure nothing is left on, to make sure nothing is left behind. I turn off the lights and let the door fully close on the now darkened room.

Notes 1 Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements.” 2 Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric.

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3 The novel-​length poems of David Grubbs, Now that the Audience is Assembled and The Voice in the Headphones, are exemplary texts in writing the performance and emergence of sounds in spaces and events. 4 Julia Ecklund Koza analyzes and explains how whiteness is maintained and reproduced systemically through undergraduate school of music auditions that privilege performances that are linked to class, race, and exclusionary and restrictive understandings of musical proficiency (145–​146). 5 Tracy Stephenson Shaffer, John M. Allison, and Ronald J. Pelias offer a disciplinary history of the live body in performance within the field of communication in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. Jake Simmons and Travis Brisini provide a review of the trends in performance scholarship within communication in Text and Performance Quarterly, the National Communication Association’s journal dedicated to performance studies scholarship (1–​49). 6 Tara Rodgers considers the work of noise musician and synthesizer designer, Jessica Rylan, in articulating the possibilities synthesis offers for rethinking sound. Rylan’s approach to synthesis emphasizes “the hearer’s experience of sound versus positioning sound as an external phenomenon to be analyzed and controlled by the performer” (217). This configuration of synthesis as based in experience aids my conceptualization of the classroom as a space that is made in and by the synthesis of sound. The experience of sound is never external to the experience of the room, instead the ways sounds are experienced are always entangled with the room.

Works Cited Acoustics of Schools:  A Design Guide. Institute of Acoustics and the Association of Noise Consultants, 2015. Grubbs, David. Now that the Audience is Assembled. Duke University Press, 2018. —​—​—​. The Voice in the Headphones. Duke University Press, 2020. Jones, Steven. “A Sense of Space: Virtual Reality, Authenticity, and the Aural.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 10, 1993, pp. 238–​252. Joseph, Martha. “Collecting Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room.” Inside/​Out: A MOMA/​ MOM PS 1 Blog, 20, Jan. 2015, https://​www.moma.org/​explore/​inside_​out/​2015/​01/​20/​ collecting-​alvin-​luciers-​i-​am-​sitting-​in-​a-​room/​. Accessed 24 May 2020. Koza, Julia E. “Listening for Whiteness:  Hearing Racial Politics in Undergraduate School Music.” Philosophy of Music Education Review, vol. 16, 2008, pp. 145–​155. Rickert, Thomas. Ambient Rhetoric:  The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Rodgers, Tara. “Synthesis.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 208–​221. Shaffer, Tracy S., et  al. “A Critical History of the ‘Live’ Body in Performance Within the National Communication Association.” A Century of Communication Studies:  The



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Unfinished Conversation, edited by Pat J. Gehrke and William M. Keith, Routledge, 2015, pp. 187–​206. Simmons, Jake, and Travis Brisini. “Performance Studies in Communication.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–​48. Stewart, Kathleen. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D:  Society and Space, vol. 29, 2011, pp. 445–​453. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity:  Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America 1900–​1933. The MIT Press, 2002.

Part 3

L istening

to  P edagogy

Pedagogical interactions and experiences emerge between and amongst bodies. Teaching bodies and learning bodies work together and in tension to create pedagogical experiences. And these bodies are also always entangled with and situated in educational contexts and locations that work relationally on, with, and against the ways these bodies interact. In the first two parts of this book I listen to bodies in classrooms in order to develop a sense of the ways listening and sound shape relationships and pedagogical interactions. In these final chapters I turn an ear toward the theories and methods of teaching, the pedagogy, that activates and characterizes the interactions between bodies and the relationships of these bodies with educational spaces. Throughout Parts  1 and 2 the separation of bodies from spaces in the context of pedagogical practices is artificial at best. The sounds of learning and teaching bodies are also the sounds of classroom spaces. The institutional configuration of classrooms is maintained by the institutional configuration of bodies. And the possibility of interrupting and disrupting taken-​for-​granted pedagogical interactions through sound and listening is always a possibility that is both about bodies and spaces. The chapters in Part 3 work to address and listen for the ways bodies and spaces are entangled in pedagogical contexts. These chapters listen for pedagogy as a distinct practice that makes and

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is made by listening and sounding. In these chapters, pedagogy is defined as the theories and practices of teaching and learning. Pedagogy sets bodies and spaces in motion. Performatively listening for pedagogy is an act of engaging with the implications and possibilities pedagogy has for how bodies and spaces are and might be related. The listening in these final chapters is again guided by the commitments of performative listening:  listening with curiosity, listening to and with the body, listening for context and location, and listening with accountability (McRae 37–​45). My listening in these chapters turns with curiosity towards pedagogy as a site of sound and an invitation to listen. Pedagogical interactions, spaces, and practices generate, transform, and are shaped by sounds and listening. These final chapters also attend to listening and sound as pedagogical. Listening and sound present an opening for considering the performative implications of pedagogical practices, interactions, and spaces. Listening and sound also present an opportunity for generating new pedagogical practices and theories that engage vibration, attention, and compassion. Throughout Part 3 I engage the same structure of 29 fragments used in the other chapters of this book to present and perform moments of listening to and generating pedagogies of sound and pedagogy. Each chapter presents 29 fragments; however, unlike the fragments in the previous chapters of the book which are organized as a collage of separate moments, the fragments in the chapters in this final part of the book are written as a connected or continuous series of events or moments. In his book length prose poems, Now that the Audience is Assembled and The Voice in the Headphones, musician and Professor of Music, David Grubbs, creates a continuous and emerging experiences of sound and music performance. Both texts perform, through the continuous book length poems, experiences that occur during the performance, creation, and experience of music making. An important accomplishment of these texts is the performed and felt sense of duration that the prose poem evokes. This formal choice animates the structure of the chapters in Part 3 of this book. The goal of this structure is to evoke and experiment with the pedagogical function and possibilities of sound and listening not as disjointed performances, but as durational, continuous and unfolding events. In Chapter 7, “Listening as Pedagogy,” I begin the final part of this book by attending to and listening for the ways listening is a practice that emerges via pedagogical interactions. This chapter engages Nina Sun Eidsheim’s analysis of vocal timbre. For Eidsheim, it is through specific cultural approaches to listening and sound that the possibility emerges for vocal timbre to indicate



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both learned aesthetic ability, such as musical styles of performing voice, and identifiable social categories, such as race, ethnicity, and gender (Race of Sound, 40–​60). And it is through the political act of listening that categories of difference are maintained by assigning essentializing interpretations of social value, such as racial categories, to vocal timbre (57–​58). In order to analyze and transform listening practices that maintain dominant power structures, listening practices must be interrogated. Or as Eidsheim says, “listening to how we listen” (57–​58). Chapter 7 attends to the ways listening emerges pedagogically through a series of accounts that are based on my own experiences learning to listen in classrooms and other pedagogical contexts. Pedagogical practices and choices create conditions for embodied pedagogical interactions. These practice and choices shape the ways bodies listen in the classroom and the ways classroom spaces become meaningful and generative in and through listening. The 29 continuous fragments in this chapter present listening as a way of critiquing, configuring, and conceptualizing pedagogy. In Chapter 8, “A Pedagogy of Sound,” I listen for and outline a pedagogy of sound. Sound vibrates and reverberates throughout pedagogical encounters. Bodies sound, classrooms sound, and pedagogical practices sound. Sound is, as Eidsheim explains, an “event through the practice of vibration” (Sensing Sound, 3). Sound performs. Sound is an expansive, dynamic and ongoing process. Sound is pedagogical. And sound also indicates and presents an opening for considering and developing a pedagogical practice. A pedagogy of sound engages the metaphors of sound, the materiality of sound, and the relationships engendered by and enacted through sounds in order to generate pedagogical practices that feel and listen first. A pedagogy of sound also sounds and plays with the possibilities of sound as a performance that generates and transforms pedagogical practices and encounters. The fragments in Chapter  8 play with and listen for sound as a metaphorical, material, and relational practice and experience that shapes and is shaped by pedagogical choices, interactions, and contexts. The fragments in this chapter emerge from my own pedagogical use and experience of sound in the performance classroom. I start with the performance classroom to listen for and perform a pedagogy of sound. The hope here is not to offer a definitive pedagogy of sound, but instead to signal sound as an important and productive site for future pedagogical inquiry and practice. In the final chapter of the book, “A Pedagogy of Listening,” I listen for and propose a pedagogy of listening. A pedagogy of listening is an embodied and

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ongoing act of learning, feeling, and being, with and in the world. Just as a pedagogy of sound embraces the expansive and pervasive qualities of sound, a pedagogy of listening embraces listening as an expansive mode of engaging the world and others. The pedagogy of listening presented in Chapter 9 is informed in part by composer Pauline Oliveros’s conceptualization and practice Deep Listening. For Oliveros, Deep Listening “is learning to expand the perception of sounds to include the whole space/​time continuum of sound—​encountering the vastness and complexities as much as possible” (xxiii). A pedagogy of listening similarly works to create an expansive perception that is attuned to the vastness and complexity of the world and others through listening and sound. A pedagogy of listening is also informed by an ethic of compassion and care as described by Lisbeth Lipari in her discussion of listening otherwise. As Lipari explains, “To listen otherwise is to welcome the other inside, but as an other, as a guest, as a not-​me” (56). A pedagogy of listening is guided by this other-​centered approach to listening where the other is invited in as a way of being in relation and feeling with, rather than as a matter of understanding. By merging Oliveros’s “Deep Listening” practice, of expanded attention and attunement, with Lipari’s “listening otherwise,” of welcoming the other as a guest, a pedagogy of listening emerges that is attuned to and welcomes the sounds and vibrations of the world and others. The 29 fragments in Chapter 9 play with and present a pedagogy of listening as an ongoing relational and reflexive practice. These fragments emerge again from my own practice and experience listening in and to the performance classroom. And these fragments also emerge as openings created by the performances of listening to bodies, spaces, and pedagogy presented throughout this book. A pedagogy of listening is a pedagogical practice where listening is a generative stance of engaging the world and others. The focus of Part  3 is on pedagogy and how listening and sound shape and are shaped by pedagogical practices and theories in the context of the performance classroom. However, this final part is also offered as an invitation for practicing and engaging in performative listening in other pedagogical contexts. Each chapter in this final part considers the relationship amongst sound, listening, and pedagogy that might easily be extended to other pedagogical contexts. Pedagogical practices in and beyond the performance classroom shape our understandings, evaluations, and practices of listening. Sound is a phenomenon with material and metaphorical implications that might be used to alter and reimagine a wide range of pedagogical practices and contexts. Similarly, listening as a mode of attending to the world and an ethic of



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engaging others might engender new or reimagined critical pedagogical practices well beyond the limits of the performance classroom. Listening and sound are inseparable from pedagogical practices and theories. Listening to and for pedagogy is an attempt at tuning in to the pedagogical implications and possibilities of sound and listening. This listening turns towards pedagogy as an opportunity for sound and listening to create new ways of relating with others and being in the world.

Works Cited Eidsheim, Nina S. Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Duke University Press, 2015. —​—​—​. The Race of Sound:  Listening, Timbre & Vocality in African American Music. Duke University Press, 2019. Grubbs, David. Now that the Audience is Assembled. Duke University Press, 2018. —​—​—​. The Voice in the Headphones. Duke University Press, 2020. Lipari, Lisbeth. “Listening Otherwise:  The Voice of Ethics.” The International Journal of Listening, vol. 23, 2009, pp. 44–​59. McRae, Chris. Performative Listening: Hearing Others in Qualitative Research. Peter Lang, 2015. Oliveros, Pauline. Deep Listening. iUNiverse, Inc., 2005.

7 LISTENING AS PEDAGOGY

Prelude 7: Learning Listening In her discussion of the racial formation of vocal timbre, Nina Sun Eidsheim demonstrates the ways vocal timbre is constituted as innate via informal and formal pedagogical practices (40–​60). She explains: “Voice is not innate; it is cultural. Voice is not unique; it is collective. Voice’s source is not the singer; it’s the listener” (40). For Eidsheim, vocal features, like vocal timbre, come to be understood as either performed (e.g. learned aesthetic qualities) or essential and natural (e.g. racial, ethnic, or gendered) based on an understanding of sound as a knowable and stable form. Eidsheim refers to this as the “figure of sound (FoS)” (50). The figure of sound engenders a practice of listening that approaches and discerns sound as identifiable and knowable, which yields distinctions that include both identifications about aesthetic vocal qualities and about voice as an indicator of social categories like race and ethnicity (56). In order to unpack racist discriminations based on interpretations of vocal timbre Eidsheim explains: In carrying out an analysis that is conscious of the fact that any voice is part of the collective voice, and that listening contributes to shaping that voice, we must listen to how we listen. With the knowledge we gain from listening in this way, we can

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deconstruct the situations that without such an analytical breakdown, will serve only to reinforce structures of power. By insisting on voice as event, as encultured even before birth, and as collectively projected, we can understand voice as the result of an ongoing pedagogical enterprise. (57)

For Eidsheim, listening, and how we listen, is central to shaping the interpretations and performances of vocal timbre. Attending to listening and vocal timbre as always already cultural acts offers a way to understand both how and that vocal timbre is culturally and collectively made by cultural and collective acts of listening. Jennifer Lynn Stoever makes a similar argument in the theorization of the “listening ear” that works to maintain the “sonic color line.” For Stoever, the sonic color line demonstrates the ways sound is racialized via culturally dominant modes of listening. Stoever explains: The sonic color line describes the process of racializing sound—​how and why certain bodies are expected to produce, desire, and live amongst particular sounds—​and its product, the hierarchical division sounded between “whiteness” and “blackness.” The listening ear drives the sonic color line; it is a figure for how dominant listening practices accrue—​and change—​over time, as well as a descriptor for how the dominant culture exerts pressure on individual listening practices to conform to the sonic color line’s norms. (7)

The listening ear is a material and cultural practice that works to distinguish, evaluate, and maintain sound as racialized. In this way, listening is not only a learned practice of marking racial difference, it is also a practice that functions to maintain formations of white supremacy. Moving away from a figure of sound approach to listening, and recognizing the ways listening practices enact the logics and assumptions of the figure of sound can engender performances of listening that work against understandings of voice and sound as a natural and static indicator of social identity categories such as race. For example, Eidsheim explains: In a paradigm of naturalized vocal timbre, instead of examining vocalists in all their idiosyncrasies and the communal projects in which they have participated and of which they are a product, listeners seek to find ways to explain the category or form, such as race, that they believe to be true. However, by attending to the performed aspect of vocal timbral production, individual listeners can denaturalize vocal timbres one at a time while helping to effect a broad cultural shift. (60)

The work of both Eidsheim and Stoever, point to the importance of recognizing the role listening plays in creating and maintaining categories of



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difference especially in terms of race and racial formations. Their work also draws attention to the pedagogical function and implications of listening. Listening is a practice that is learned and taught directly and indirectly, and it is a practice that assigns cultural meaning to sound in ways that often works to maintain cultural hierarchies and exclusions. Understanding and accounting for the ways listening is learned and practiced demonstrates the cultural functions and material implications of listening as a performative and constitutive act.1 Recognizing that listening makes relationships, cultural formations, and worlds can also function as an act of what Bryant Keith Alexander refers to as pedagogical reflexivity. As Alexander explains, pedagogical reflexivity, “is an acknowledgement that the products or results of our labor have already been affected by the known and unacknowledged variables of those involved in the processes of teaching and learning” (43). Listening is an act, and a stance, that is learned through repetition, through teaching and schooling, and it is an act that shapes and is shaped by pedagogical interaction. In this way listening is a performance that can and should be analyzed and critiqued for the ways it is taught and learned, and for its cultural functions and implications. As a performance, listening is also an act that can be imagined and enacted differently. And it is in this way that listening presents the possibility for reconfiguring pedagogical practices. The logics of a reimagined listening practice might generate pedagogical possibilities for creating new relationships, cultural formations, and worlds. The 29 fragments in this chapter present listening as a way of critiquing, configuring, and conceptualizing pedagogy. These fragments draw, in part, on accounts of my lived experience learning to listen in classrooms, schools, and other pedagogical contexts. These fragments also suggest listening as a way of theorizing and enacting pedagogical relationships and interactions. There are many kinds of pedagogical implications of listening including:

Expectations The expectations for interaction precede a first meeting as a class. Each participant has prior knowledge and training about how to act, how to interact, how to learn, how to teach, and how to be in the classroom. when to raise a hand

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when to speak how to speak who is allowed to speak who is not allowed to speak who will speak first who will ask questions who answer questions

Each participant knows how to listen, why to listen, and what listening is for. And each participant is about to find out how their experiences and training as listeners works in relationship with the experience and training of the other participants. Something new is about to happen. The listening practices of all the participants will be changed. They will be ready for

Another First Time I walk into the performance classroom at the beginning of the class, as the instructor, for the forty-​first  time over the past ten years in the exact same classroom. A swirl of past encounters and interactions with students, ideas, performances, policies, personal experiences, and political events texture my entrance. I enter this classroom for another first time of entering a classroom for years of entering classrooms throughout a lifetime of schooling including: classrooms in graduate school (six years), undergraduate school (three and a half years), high school (four years), middle school (three years) and elementary school (six years) in the cultural and political context of the United States in the late twentieth century and early twenty-​first century.2 All these classrooms presented various instructions for listening exchanges and

Economics In elementary school it’s a lesson in listening and embodiment. The smell of paste and crayons fills the air. The brightly decorated classroom is full of



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images that reinforce lessons with pictures of letters, numbers, calendars, seasons, and holidays. The teacher offers a repeated instruction about how to listen, how to be a body that is listening: “Please keep your eyes toward the front of the classroom, sit facing forward, sit still, keep your hands to yourself, and pay attention.” pay attention to the teacher pay attention to the lesson pay attention to what is being said pay with your attention buy, buy, buy (listen) attention is capital listening is credit knowledge is for sale but only if you listen and when you listen you might be learning

Correctives for not listening appropriately sometimes result in punishment. In elementary school, a failure to listen correctly might result in a note sent home to parent with an appeal for additional support. In middle school, a failure to listen appropriately leads to a lesson in public shaming. “You were speaking during my lecture. You should be listening. You have now lost your recess privileges.” listening is a behavior that is corrected, adjusted, and monitored. expectations are clarified and reinforced. listening is trained, habituated, and practiced3 listening is refined, made to serve appropriate

Functions In some classes listening is a technique that is cultivated for a particular purpose. In high school band it’s a lesson in tuning and pitch. A standard pitch is established, and a goal is presented. All members of the band are expected to match this pitch. New technologies are introduced to assist listening for tuning.4 The band director explains how to use the electronic strobe tuner before

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class in order to facilitate this directed listening. “This is an expensive piece of equipment. Please use it to tune your instrument, but do not touch the tuner.” tune in/​listen measure adjust repeat listening is used to create a common sound a collective effort a banding together a set of shared

Tips In university classes lessons about listening arise indirectly and are almost always linked to accomplishing understanding of course material, assignments, and instructor values. Listening precedes and accompanies learning. Some tips are offered for improving listening comprehension. Instructors offer clues about how to listen in order to meet course objectives. “At least one third of the questions on the upcoming exam will come directly from examples I share during my lectures.” always take notes always write down what you hear always write down what you think about what you hear always write down questions you have about what you hear show appropriate nonverbal feedback show that you are listening show that you are engaged and ready for

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A lifetime of learning lessons about listening in schools as a student shapes my entrance, and these experiences are complemented by my experience learning about listening through my practice as an instructor. I enter this classroom for another first time of entering a classroom for almost ten years of entering this classroom, interacting with and learning to listen from a range of students including: students who are new to the study of communication, students who are new to the study of performance, undergraduate students who are reluctantly fulfilling a degree requirement, undergraduate students who are not sure how they ended up in a performance studies class, undergraduate students who are excited and eager to take another performance studies course, graduate students who are new to the study of communication, graduate students who are new to the study of performance, graduate students who are nervous but curious about performance studies as an area of inquiry, graduate students who are excited to take another course in performance studies and are dedicated to performance as a mode of research and artistic practice. All these students presented various lessons about listening and

Silence In some classes, some students are quiet for the entire sixteen-​week class. They do not ask questions. They rarely offer comments, observations, or arguments. But these students are never silent. They move, they inhale and exhale, they attend and attend to the class with an unmistakable intensity. They glance, they take notes, they check messages on their phones and laptops, they listen to music on headphones. They are present. These students ask for a different kind of listening. They ask to be listened to in a way that acknowledges their presence and acknowledges their absence of talk as evidence of participation5. They teach a lesson of listening to silence as: full of meaning6 full of possibilities full of context full of questions full of challenges full of opportunity and insight full of

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Frustration In some classes, some students teach a lesson about listening and reaction to feedback. These lessons emerge in ways that are often directly related to course materials, assignments, content or other class interactions. A student becomes frustrated with an evaluative remark, a critique, or a grade. Expressions of disappointment, dissatisfaction, and disappointment are presented and sounded. Sometimes the response is self-​directed, “I can’t believe I did that!” Sometimes the response is self-​deprecating, “This is all my fault.” Sometimes the response is an exclamation directed to no one in particular, “Dammit!” Sometimes the response is pointed towards an individual, “This is all your fault!” Sometimes the response is unaccompanied by words, a dejected sigh, a glare, a slumping change in posture. Each reaction is a lesson in listening and acknowledging an effect of a pedagogical choice: grades critiques assessments evaluation valuation of learning and

Emotion In some classes, some students teach a lesson about listening and engaging human emotion. These lessons are not always related to the content of the class, and they are rarely planned. Before class starts a student learns that a grandparent had a fall and is now in the intensive care unit of a hospital that is just over one thousand miles away, “I don’t think I can come to class today.” A student shares a little more than expected information about the dissolution of a romantic relationship, “We just had this terrible argument, and we broke up.” A student begins to tell the story of a recent car accident, “My brother was driving, and I’m sorry … I just can’t even …” Each account is a lesson in listening and witnessing the humanity of others and the complexity of lived experience that permeates the classroom: loss grief



Listening as Pedagogy 177 sobbing an outpouring shock disruption and uncertainty shared in an unexpected (but not surprising) place of

Revelation In some classes, some students teach a lesson about listening to the experience of learning out loud. These lessons are in moments of surprise, synthesis, and sometimes shock. These are responses and reactions to a concept that startles, “What?!” A critique that explains, “I had never thought of it that way before.” An experience that destabilizes a worldview, “I’m stunned.” And sometimes these revelatory moments are accompanied by moments of speechlessness that might be identified as such, “I’m speechless.” And that sometimes are embodied as such “…” These responses teach a lesson in listening that acknowledges the importance of a shift in perspective. These lessons are moments that bear witness to a shift in ways of knowing, ways of being, and ways of making the world as it is constituted and is to be constituted through

Interaction In some classes, some students teach a lesson about listening and interaction. These students engage in conversations with other students, with the instructor, with course material, with various technologies, with the classroom, with the world. These lessons are ongoing, layered, and contextual. Conversations start on one side of the classroom and are picked up on the other side of the

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room. Questions are posed and answered simultaneously from multiple interested parties. Bodies move in and out of the space constantly shifting the dynamic of the class. And some exchanges exceed the boundaries of the physical classroom. These interactions offer a lesson in listening as a mode of being in relationship to difference: different voices different modes of engaging different perspectives different

Processes In some classes, some students teach a lesson about listening and the ongoing, unfinished, and often messy process of learning. These lessons are characterized by incomplete thoughts and the gradual formation of new ideas. Sometimes there is resistance to change and being changed, “This is too hard.” Sometimes there is an admission of learning, “I just don’t get it.” And often there are no accompanying statements. The process of learning is not punctuated by discrete moments, and it is not located in individuals. A class of students and instructors learn together over time and through repetition of interaction and engagement. This process offers a lesson in listening that is expansive and that does not focus: on objectives outcomes finite and singular instances of understanding for

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in the exact same classroom. A personal history of embodied experiences in this classroom and in other classrooms set a stage full of expectations and learned practices about how to listen. I enter this classroom for another first time of entering classrooms after years of entering this classroom as an instructor (almost ten years), of entering this classroom as a student (almost five years), and of entering a range of classrooms including lecture halls, conference rooms, classrooms with rows of desks, theatre spaces, art studios, music and band rooms, and classrooms built in portable structures. All these physical spaces presented various trainings in listening and

Focus In some classrooms, the space is configured for the kind of instruction that locates the source of information and teaching at a singular source. The room is arranged so that the attention of students is drawn to a distinct front using rows of desks facing a central focal point (a podium, a whiteboard, a projection screen, a teacher’s desk). The room is designed to limit the sounds and movements outside of the classroom from coming into the classroom (through insulation and closed doors). These spaces teach lessons in listening as an act that is forward facing, singularly focused, and directed towards: advancement improvement productive modes of

Participation In some classrooms, the space is configured for the kind of teaching and learning that relies on group interaction and participation. The room might be arranged so that the students can move around an open floor space. Desks or chairs are moveable and are placed in a circle or semi-​circle to facilitate interaction. The room is designed to limit the sounds and movements outside the classroom from coming in (through insulation and closed doors). The room is also designed to limit the sounds and movements inside the classroom from reverberating excessively and possibly leaving the space (through sound

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absorbing tiles and heavy curtains). These rooms teach lessons in listening as an act that is relational, dynamic, and contained. This listening is: inward focused attentive

Moving In some classrooms, the space is configured and reconfigured for the kind of teaching and learning that meets the needs and desires of the students and the instructor in relationship to the content and methods of the class. The room might be furnished with standardized classroom equipment (desks, tables, chairs, whiteboards, projectors, projection screens, and podiums). However, in some classes the arrangement and use of the equipment and furnishing is not standardized. Desks and chairs are moved and temporarily removed, tables are used to subdivide the room, and projectors and whiteboards are shared by students and instructors. The room is still designed to contain the sounds and movements of the class. But in some classes, even the boundaries of the classroom are breached as students and instructors engage in teaching and learning that moves into hallways and common areas. These rooms teach lessons in listening as an act: that cannot be contained and that can transform spaces for

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An amalgam of social, cultural, and individual experiences and practices of listening and engaging the voices and bodies of hundreds of students and dozens of instructors in the classroom precede and shape my arrival. I enter this classroom for another first time of entering classrooms after years of entering classrooms always shaped by my experience and practice as a teacher including as an educator, and as a student of performance, communication, and listening. All these experiences and practices presented various trainings in teaching and

Waiting In some classes, asking questions is a strategy used for: Starting a class discussion, “How do you feel about (insert topic)?” Assessing comprehension of an assigned reading “What do you think is the main argument being made by (insert author)?” Or for facilitating a critique or feedback session “What are your thoughts about the performance presented by (insert performer’s name)?” Questions are also used to gauge understanding of assignments and expectations, “What questions do you have about (insert assignment title)? Asking a generative question can be tricky and waiting for answers can be even trickier. The practice of listening and waiting for answers to these questions is taught and learned in informal and formal discussions about teaching, and through experience: waiting pausing for thinking for reflecting for responses from multiple voices

Witnessing In some classes, performances and presentations are assigned, created, shared, and evaluated. During a performance listening is a mode of engaging is a learned practice. Sometimes this mode of listening follows a clearly defined set of parameters and instructions on an evaluation form or rubric: “Does the

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performer fulfill the requirements of the assignment?” “Does the performer demonstrate adequate preparation?” “Does the performer make meaningful choices?” Sometimes this mode of listening is a sincere act of support and encouragement: “You can do this!” “You are doing great.” “You were fantastic!” Sometimes this mode of listening is awestruck: impressed enthralled haunted by

Privilege In some classes, teaching follows culturally recognizable structures and forms. A  teacher might lead class discussions, makes assignments, provide instructions, share information, ask questions, or pose problems. Each of these forms and structures privilege certain modes of response (often directly related to content), certain ways of learning (sometimes through verbal responses), and certain ways of being in the classroom (including the presentation of cues and clues about degrees of participation). Listening is also a learned practice enacted by instructors that accompanies and is shaped by the cultural form and structure of teaching. Instructors learn to listen in ways that privilege certain voices over other, certain ways of learning over others, and certain ways of being over others. Listening can: create hierarchies maintain exclusion uphold the status quo and sometimes listening can tune in to the function of privilege as a factor that shapes sounds and listening in the classroom through direct and indirect



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Regulations In some classes, institutions require the implementation of policies, regulations, and procedures by instructors. Certain actions, disclosures, and behaviors are designated as warrants for the initiation of institutional processes of intervention. Institutional trainings, flowcharts, and memorandums aid in specifying actions, disclosures, and behaviors as concerning, risky, threatening, in need of support services, or requiring the creation of documentation and formal reporting. These institutional policies mandate a kind of listening practice that is on alert, comparative, and discerning on behalf of the institution. Listening is: an institutional tool an accountability practice a legal obligation a duty a compulsion an opportunity for

Disruption In some classes, disruptions create opportunities for unexpected lessons. Something happens out of the ordinary (a power outage, an accident, an outburst), something surprising is said (a personal disclosure, an incisive comment, a sincere reflection), or something amazing is accomplished (a challenging performance, an unlikely collaboration, a synthesis of ideas). A disruption knocks everyone off balance and changes the course of the class. Disruptions teach lessons about listening as a practice that (like teaching and learning practices) can be changed, that can be accomplished in different ways, and that can function differently. Listening is: not fixed singular or static it changes it turns back it practices

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Reflexivity In some classes, moments for reflection are possible for all participants over the course of a class meeting, a unit, or a semester. In these moments instructors and students may reflect on and revisit significant instances of interaction (an intense conversation, a powerful performance), designed elements of the course (a graded assignment, an evaluation of teaching and learning), or on individual actions (questions asked, statements made). Reflection invites a kind of listening that is directed at noticing and understanding what happened. Reflective listening can turn reflexive when the consideration of past events and interactions moves beyond a recognition that an event occurred and towards a questioning of how the event came to be in the first place.7 Reflexive listening attends to and accounts for the cultural, historical, and contextual implications and logics of events. Reflexive listening: understands interactions and events are always entangled with and made possible by systems structures and previous iterations for

Another First Time I walk into the performance classroom at the beginning of the class, as the instructor, for the forty-​first  time over the past ten years in the exact same classroom. A combination of past experiences and practices listening and performing as a listener in a range of different contexts including classrooms, stages, and practice rooms inform my entrance.



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I enter this classroom for another first time of entering classrooms after years of entering classrooms shaped in my performance of listening by my personal experience as a musician and performer (in school bands, in paid and unpaid bands, and through countless hours of rehearsal and individual practice). All these experiences and practices presented various trainings in listening for

Grooves In some classes, events unfold and are organized in ways that seem connected, layered, and synchronized. Interactions and conversations amongst participants progress over the structures of the room (the space is scheduled, electricity is on, doors open and close, seats are arranged). Grooves are established and maintained through the repetition of learned and shared routines (breathing exercises, vocal warm-​ups, movement warm-​ups, group focus exercises). Patterns of action and interaction are repeated (brief lectures, workshop instructions, group discussion, rehearsal, presentation, feedback session). Listening to the events of a class as a form of organized rhythms is a practice of feeling: connections and changes over and with time creating

Dissonance In some classes, events unfold in ways that seem unruly, tense, and fraught. Conversations and interactions seem at odds (class members talking over one another, a phone ringing and being answered in the middle of a class discussion, an argument amongst collaborators), class participants seem to be working towards different ends (a late arrival, somebody falling asleep in the middle of a presentation, a whispered conversation amongst audience members in the middle of a solo performance), and opposition seems palpable (an expressed disagreement of beliefs and values, an audience member getting up to leave mid-​performance, an upset and personal remark directed from a member of the class at another member of the class). Listening to and for dissonance as

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it occurs in a class is not a matter of identifying what is good and bad or right and wrong, instead it is an opportunity to locate the generative pull of tension: a pedagogy of the unresolved unsettled moving and bending towards uncertainty and unexpected

Harmony In some classes, events unfold in ways that seem unified and coherent. Interactions seem supportive (class members encourage one another, share ideas, and willingly agree to suggestions and revisions), class participants seem synchronized (there is a balance and balancing of participation), and compatibility seems to be a defining yet intangible quality of the class (there are tears on the last day of class, and a group picture). Listening to and for harmony as it occurs in a class is a celebration of the transformative possibilities of complementary effects and affects: buzzing humming clicking together for

Another First Time; Listening Again I walk into the performance classroom at the beginning of the class, as the instructor, for the forty-​first  time over the past ten years in the exact same classroom. Listening to learn, listening to teach.



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I enter this classroom for another first time of entering classrooms as a listener working to refine a practice of listening as pedagogy. Performing as listener. Tuning in to others, to the world, and to the ways my own lived experience shapes the ways I listen and engage. Always learning and listening again.

Notes 1 Chris McRae, Performative Listening 2 This listing of past pedagogical experiences is in part informed by John T. Warren’s call for a reflexive pedagogy that engages and interrogates the ways past pedagogical experiences inform teaching practices (140–​141). 3 As Beard clearly explains, “Listening can embed us in social relationships or replace social relationships altogether; in either case, it can expand or complicate our identity” (15). 4 The act of learning to listen for particular purposes is extended by Ingrid Monson’s discussion of perceptual agency as a way of shifting the focus of listening attention in order to identify different musical qualities and features in a given musical performance (s 39). 5 Richie Neil Hao discusses the implications of dominant Euro-​centric and Western US pedagogical practices that privilege speaking over silence in the classroom as an indicator of participation (270). 6 In her discussion of Western biased theories of communication, Patricia O.  Covarrubias offers a distinction between consumptive silence and generative silence in order to demonstrate the culturally different ways silence and listening might be theorized and configured in the context of Native American communication practices. She explains: In consumptive silence, enactors of silence are seen as static, weakened, disenfranchised, and/​or ontologically disconfirmed. The type of silence that serves as a creative and powerful communicative means within which communicants achieve productive personal, social, and cultural ends, I will call generative silence. (268) 7 Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren offer the offering distinction between reflection and reflexivity that informs this fragment: Discerning how our communication, our performances and our language, creates who we are and defines our work as teachers and researchers is a reflexive act. It is not simply an act of reflection, an ordering of what was said when and to whom, but rather a process of reflexion, an ongoing effort to call out, to illumninate the (re)creation of our selves, our values, assumptions, and practices. (50).

Works Cited Alexander, Bryant K. “Critically Analyzing Pedagogical Interactions as Performance.” Performance Theories in Education: Power, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity, edited by Bryant Keith Alexander, Gary L. Anderson, and Bernardo P. Gallegos, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005, pp. 41–​62.

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Beard, David. “A Broader Understanding of the Ethics of Listening:  Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Media Studies and the Ethical Listening Subject. International Journal of Listening, vol. 23, 2009, pp. 7–​20. Covarrubias, Patricia O. “(Un)Biased in Western Theory:  Generative Silence in American Indian Communication.” Communication Monographs, vol. 74, no. 2, 2007, pp. 265–​271. Eidsheim, Nina S. The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre & Vocality. Duke University Press, 2019. Fassett, Deanna L., and John T.  Warren. Critical Communication Pedagogy. SAGE Publications, 2007. Hao, Richie N. “Rethinking Critical Pedagogy:  Implications on Silence and Silent Bodies.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3, 2011, pp. 267–​284. McRae, Chris. Performative Listening: Hearing Others in Qualitative Research. Peter Lang, 2015. Monson, Ingrid. “Hearing, Seeing, and Perceptual Agency.” Critical Inquiry, vol.  34, 2007, suppl. S36–​S58. Stoever, Jennifer L. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York University Press, 2016. Warren, John T. “Reflexive Teaching:  Toward Critical Autoethnographic Practices of/​in/​on Pedagogy.” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, vol. 11, 2011, pp. 139–​144.

8 A PEDAGOGY OF SOUND

Prelude 8: Playing with Sound In their introduction to Keywords in Sound, David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny describe sound as both material and discursive. They explain, “Sound is vibration that is perceived and becomes known through its materiality. Metaphors for sound construct perceptual conditions of hearing and shape the territories and boundaries of sound in social life” (1). The materiality and metaphorical dynamic of sound offers a productive starting place for considering the pedagogical implications of sound. In the fragments presented in this chapter I  am interested in exploring and identifying ways sound is configured metaphorically and has material consequences for pedagogical contexts and interactions. And as Novak and Sakakeeny go on to explain: “Sound resides in this feedback loop of materiality and metaphor, infusing words with a diverse spectrum of meanings and interpretations” (1). The materiality of sound and the metaphorical descriptions of sound are not separate phenomena. Sound teaches and shapes teaching in ways that are always both metaphorical and materially configured and experienced. Nina Sun Eidsheim emphasizes the embodied and relational consequences of the ways sound is framed and defined. For Eidsheim, not only are there

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material implications for the understanding and naming of sound, but there are also relational consequences. She advocates for an understanding of sound not as an object, but as “event through the practice of vibration” (Sensing Sound, 3). Eidsheim goes on to explain that there are relational implications for the theorization of sound as a multisensorial event. She explains: I undertake this project not merely as a linguistic corrective. Rather, I believe that how we think about sound matters, and that reducing a dynamic and multisensory phenomenon to a static, monodimensional one has ramifications beyond our use of the concept and metaphor of the figure of sound. My concern is that this limiting conceptualization extends to and affects all who engage with it. That is, if we reduce and limit the world we inhabit, we reduce and limit ourselves. (Sensing Sound, 3)

In other words, metaphors and definitions of sound implicate embodiment, relationships, and understandings of and approaches to the world. For instance, by conceptualizing sound as an event that impacts the constitution of the world, we create opportunities for engaging, questioning, and possibly transforming our ways of relating and interacting within the world. A consideration of the ways sound works relationally, is a pedagogical opportunity. Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich’s work to identify points of contact and conversation between Sound studies and Deaf studies offers a clear example of the pedagogical possibilities and importance of understanding sound as a relational and multisensorial event. For Friedner and Helmreich, Sound studies and Deaf studies have much to offer each other in terms of approaches to sound. They explain, “In Deaf studies, a focus on the visual may erase deaf experiences of sound. Scholars in Sound studies, meanwhile, may miss deaf and Deaf experiences of sound because of audist assumptions” (81). In other words, limited understandings and definitions of sound yield limited and limiting understandings of the dynamic range of possible experiences of and relationships to sound. Friedner and Helmreich’s demonstration of the points of contact between Sound studies and Deaf studies exemplifies Eidsheim’s points about the relational implications of understanding sound as a dynamic and multisensorial event. What each of these discussions about sound indicates is that sound is a phenomenon with material and relational implications for the ways we understand, experience, and relate to the world, our selves, and others. A pedagogy of sound takes sound as a starting place for understanding how pedagogical practices emerge in relationship to and with sound. In other words, how does



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pedagogy shape sound and how is pedagogy shaped by sound? In this way a pedagogy of sound is a kind of critical performance pedagogy where embodied practices and experiences (like those that sound engenders) are not only a site of analysis, but they are also a site of learning.1 The 29 continuous fragments in this chapter play with the possibility of a pedagogy of sound and listen for the way my own pedagogical practice sounds, uses sound, and shapes sound. In these fragments I  present sound as a phenomenon that is used in pedagogical contexts metaphorically, materially, and relationally to accomplish pedagogical goals and aims.2 I also consider the ways pedagogical practices inform the production of sound. In other words, I consider how pedagogical choices and practices directly and indirectly enable and constrain the production and experience of sound. A pedagogy of sound is a pedagogy that attends to sound, that sounds, and that engages with the possibilities of sound for generating and transforming pedagogical practices. There are many kinds of ways to play with describing, defining, and generating a pedagogy of sound including:

Listen up! Today we are going to tune in to … Today we are going to turn an ear toward … Today we are going to talk about … Today we are going to take a look at … Today we are going to sniff around … Today we are going to work on … Today we are going to dig deep into … Today we are going to get a taste of … Today we are going to get a feel for … A mixed sensory metaphor that starts at the ear, vibrates throughout the body, and sounds a pedagogy of sound

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Sound Good? Does this all make sense? Do you understand? Do you get what I am saying? Do you catch my drift? Do you like how this all sounds? Does this sound good? Alright? Like a plan? A rhetorical question tucked into an idiom and based on a positive evaluation of sound. Or maybe it’s a question of what sound is in the first place. I’ll try to use

Sound Reasoning when making creative choices critical analysis interpretive descriptions Sound reasoning is a reasoning that is reasonable rationale acceptable complete sound. Or maybe not. Maybe sound reasoning is resonant vibrating unbounded3 uncontrollable beyond reason playful



A Pedagogy of Sound 193 performative partial.

Hush Shhh4 Please be quiet. A pedagogical directive, expectation, and strategy: asking, requesting, and requiring active efforts to: Silence your self your cell phone, your sounds, your urges and desires to speak out to speak up to sound out to sound off this is

Quiet Time please be quiet during this time (class time, study time, rehearsal time, lecture time, workshop time, performance time) please be quiet in this space (the classroom, the theatre, the studio, the laboratory) please quiet this space, and this time by clearing

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distractions obligations instructions This is a time and space for you to use for pedagogical aims, pedagogical aims that are encouraged via the maintenance of and privileging of “quiet.” This is a quiet time and space for study, individual work, concentration, reading, writing, learning, rehearsal, memorization, A quiet time and space that may be juxtaposed with a pedagogically accepted use of

Background Sound In order to (ostensibly) help with the concentration of students, of teachers, of the class Turn on and amplify a recorded selection (an instrumental musical composition, something with pianos and violins, or with wind instruments and wire brushes on a snare drum and ride cymbal, a repetitive synthesized bass groove played over a simple drumbeat created on a drum machine, a repeated loop of the recorded sounds of an electric washing machine, or a recording of the undiscernible sounds of conversation in a public space) The pedagogical practice of using specific kinds of sounds ubiquitous5 noise static



A Pedagogy of Sound 195 sound as a pedagogical backing track, supplement, accessory, complement, for texturing and facilitating a kind of learning and teaching practice. Or perhaps the use of background sounds is the lesson, the pedagogical feature, the when and where everything is

Humming Along The machinery of pedagogical exchange Is working as designed as expected as hoped for all the right parts are in the right place working efficiently in a coordinated effort a sound practice where teaching and learning produce a strong and clear complete, whole, and unified

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set of ideas, theories, and understandings. Or perhaps a pedagogy of sound emphasizes the fragment, the partial, and the incomplete, where vibrations are not always sensed (felt, seen, heard, grasped) clearly. Perhaps a pedagogy of sound sputters, surprises, and is best characterized by a curious

Buzzing Of conversation Of ideas Of light bulbs Of questions about what a classroom might sound like what learning might sound like what teaching might sound like what sounds should be carefully and purposefully attended to and what sounds should be carefully and purposefully



A Pedagogy of Sound 197 ignored, disregarded, overlooked? No, not overlooked Maybe willfully

Tuned Out Is a better way to put it Because can you really overlook sound? I’m not sure, but the mixing of sensory metaphors does seem to get at sound as a pedagogical strategy. Sound is learned, taught, and experienced as meaningful, important, and significant or not Depending on a range of factors like What’s considered relevant in each class or educational interaction or which voices are considered important and worthy of attending to or what histories, ways of knowing, and ways of being are elevated, privileged, or to return to a metaphor of sound:

Turned Up … … the volume so loud, that the windows rattle, the ground shakes and shifts, ceiling fixtures sway, curtains move, walls creak, and time slows.

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A pedagogy of sound is loud, it is disruptive and excessive6 in its practice of attention and attending to sound and vibration, sensory engagement, felt experience, and relational being. A pedagogy of sound strives to create a space and experience where everything becomes

Clear as a Bell Cutting through the din and the silence of institutional policies, mundane practices, behaviors, ideologies, ritual performances, cultural values, and taken-​for-​granted  norms of pedagogical interaction. Sound points and is used to point attention to signal beginnings and endings, emergencies,



A Pedagogy of Sound 199 needs for attention calls for help, action, change to the ways sound discriminates.7

Is This Thing On? Do I make any sense at all? If you don’t respond (in a way that I recognize as a response), it doesn’t mean you aren’t listening8 it doesn’t mean you aren’t attending, attuning, or asking your own questions. If I keep talking and trying (in a way that I recognize as a request for attention) it doesn’t mean I’m getting any clearer it doesn’t mean I’m getting any more important, more interesting, or more self-​involved. Is this thing on? A pedagogy of sound recognizes and embraces the ambiguity of sound as a creative space, an opening, an opportunity to try again. A pedagogy of sound

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Amplifies Sound as a pedagogical practice by asking: how is sound used in educational contexts? how does sound function in educational contexts? how is sound theorized in educational contexts? how does sound teach, learn, evaluate, exclude, include, distract, specify in educational contexts? Sound as a pedagogical practice amplifies sound as a way of making sense of pedagogical practice by asking: how is sound instructive? how does sound characterize teaching and learning? how does sound make educational contexts?9 how might sound transform education contexts? Or maybe I should listen for sounds that are

Muted or dampened, subdued, quieted in pedagogical practices by asking: What sounds are discouraged in pedagogical practices? Sounds made by bodies (breathing, restoring, digesting, aging, ailing) Sounds made while learning (qualifiers, apologies, stolen ideas) Sounds made by nonhuman devices (ringing, buzzing, clicking, whirring) Or maybe I should listen for sounds that are hidden in pedagogical practices by asking: What sounds are not encouraged in pedagogical practices? What bodies are privileged? What bodies are excluded?



A Pedagogy of Sound 201 What sounds are allowed? What sounds are dismissed? And in the middle of all these questions, and of all this reflexive contemplation there is a

Loud Crash That jolts me back into a present moment Sounding a pedagogy of here and now What was that? Who was that? Where did that come from? How did I react? Why was that startling? What happens next? A startling reminder to question the taken-​for-​granted, to uncover and acknowledge sounds that are hidden, and to reconsider sounds that are discouraged A shift in perception, a re-​adjustment toward sound as creative, generative, and transformative pushing past

Sound Barriers Or artificial limits and constraints (with material implications) on sounds that are possible or on the possibility of sound in pedagogical contexts. Barriers to making sound, barriers to sensing sound,

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barriers to a pedagogy of sound. Unnecessary restrictions on sound MATERIAL AND MOVEMENT OF

METAPHORICAL

STRUCTURES

sound as a source of knowledge, as a way of being, as a mode of learning, as a method for teaching. A pedagogy of sound listens to and for these barriers and resists the approximation of a sonic

Vacuum Where sound is absent. Is sound ever absent? Can sound be erased? Can soun be erased? Can sou be erased Can so be erased? Can s be erased Can be erased? What would become of pedagogy without sound? Or does the possibility of the absence of sound simply point back to the importance of sound as always entangled with and relationally linked to

RESTRICTING

THE



A Pedagogy of Sound 203 embodied and sensory qualities of pedagogy? Perhaps, a pedagogy of sound is really about this acknowledgment, recognition, and questioning of the embodied and sensory ways that pedagogy emerges in and through

Mundane Sounds Otherwise unremarkable actions, practices, and events. everyday occurrences moods, feelings, happenings. Not necessarily the sounds of singular things, objects, or patterns, but the general sense of sound and sounds as a way of marking and materializing routines, habits, and procedures interactions, intra-​actions, and connections10 A pedagogy of mundane sounds asks for an attention to the taken-​for-​granted

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as instructive, as a learning opportunity, about self, other, and the world. A pedagogy of sound Can also emerge in and through

Aesthetic Sounds The highly stylized, culturally and skillfully produced, and carefully organized and culturally categorized sounds (often recognized and described as “music”)11 present multiple opportunities for learning and teaching. Not only do these sounds invite listening to and learning about cultural values, political beliefs, and identity formations including gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability, that are presented in the formations and performances of these sounds these sounds also teach lessons and invite reflexivity about listening (to aesthetic sounds) as stylized and culturally specific practices of engaging

Meaningful Sounds or sounds as meaningful. These are sounds that are significant. Although the significance and meaningfulness of any sound (or sounds)



A Pedagogy of Sound 205 is always also (importantly) a matter of interpretation, evaluation, and theorization. A pedagogy of sound is interested in the meaning of meaningful sounds, but a pedagogy of sound is even more interested in how meaningful sounds come to be meaningful, and who these sounds come to be meaningful for over time and as

Repeated Sounds Sounds that happen again and again in pedagogical contexts. Sounds that are familiar (sound familiar?) are always new, always slightly different.12 Sounds that happen once again, never occur in an unchanged context or relationship. Even the sounds that are expected and anticipated Are surprising, different, new. Sometimes the regularity of repeated sounds

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is disrupted, transformed, noticed, and sometimes the regularity of repeated sounds is maintained, sustained, or regulated in a

Sound Policy An institutional mandate, a pedagogical objective, an evaluative assessment, requiring and limiting sound. Definitions of sound as an object as an objective to be controlled, contained, configured. A pedagogy of sound attends to the implications of these policies by asking: What assumptions about sound do these policies uphold? What assumptions about pedagogy do these policies uphold? What are the stated goals of these policies? Who or what do these policies serve?



A Pedagogy of Sound 207 Who or what do these policies attempt to regulate or control? What are the consequences of these policies (for sound, for pedagogy, for the bodies of students and teachers, for the classroom? What are the limits of these policies? a pedagogy of sound exceeds policies and re-​imagines the sounds of

Bodies learning and teaching in the classroom, characterized by vibrations, relationships, and points of contact. A pedagogy of sound listens for the ways bodies are shaped by sound, and for the ways bodies shape sound. A pedagogy of sound interrogates the formation and function of categories, distinctions, hierarchies, and binaries. A pedagogy of sound plays with the possibilities of bodies making sound performing sound as sound13

Knowledge Knowing through sound14 in sound

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and with sound. Knowing how to create use change and transform sound. Knowing that sound matters, and that sound knowledge is a dynamic LOUDER softer rising falling f a d i n g fleeting

Feeling That resonates reverberates vibrates and echoes. A pedagogy of sound engages all the senses together and at once. Connected rather than separate15



A Pedagogy of Sound 209 Entangled rather than distinct. Touching, moving, smelling, looking, tasting, hearing, in a playful

Performance of sound Where sound provides an opportunity for creating New ways of being, knowing, and feeling in the classroom, in pedagogical interactions, and in other educational contexts. In performance16 sound can function as a mode of creating understandings and misunderstandings sound can function as a generative practice of learning and failing to learn. In performance and as performance a pedagogy of sound experiments and plays with sound as a way of and opening for explaining questioning disrupting and transforming pedagogy through an embodied

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Critique Of pedagogical practices as sound practices—​as vibrations—​ that texture relationships amongst students and teachers and relations to and with pedagogical spaces. Pedagogical practices as sound practices—​as vibrations—​ create and support reverberations and resonances with course content and with lived experiences. Pedagogical practices as sound practices—​as vibrations—​ transform taken-​for-​granted approaches, techniques, and strategies for teaching and learning by shifting attention, leading with feeling and centering

Listening as a critical effort in generating a pedagogy of sound: Where listening is a performative act that makes and marks sound as a site of inquiry.17



A Pedagogy of Sound 211 Where listening is a way of reflexively considering how sounds are noticed, become meaningful, and are evaluated. Where listening is a mode of relating to sound as an embodied and sensory experience. Where listening is a creative performance of making connections, hearing relationships, and generating new possibilities for learning and teaching and enacting a

Pedagogy of sound. A playful performance of producing and (re)producing, mixing and (re)mixing, sound as learning sound as feeling sound as engaging the world sound as making the world A pedagogy of sound keeps listening and often lingers with sound.

Notes 1 In her discussion of critical performative pedagogy Elyse Lamm Pineau explains: The pedagogy I am advocating embraces performance as a critical methodology that can be fully integrated throughout the learning process. The shift from “body-​on-​display” to the “body as a medium for learning” requires clarification. In disciplinary terms,

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performance methodology means rigorous, systematic, exploration-​through-​enactment of real and imagined experience in which learning occurs through sensory and kinesthetic engagement (Pineau). In more colloquial terms, performance methodology means learning by doing that might include any experiential approach that asks students to struggle bodily with course content. In addition, performance methodology emphasizes process over product by requiring students to use their bodies systematically over a period of time, rather than simply at the end of the unit. (50) 2 The consideration of the ways sound is used metaphorically is informed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s insights regarding the epistemological and ontological functions of metaphors. As they explain, “Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives” (244). Similarly, the metaphors of sound used in pedagogical contexts indicate a great deal about how both sound and pedagogy are understood and practiced. 3 In her description of performance as promiscuous lover, D.  Soyini Madison explains, “Performance as metaphor, as promiscuous lover, is less the naming of a thing for another thing (i.e. its likeness/​displacement) but more a way to make sense of it all, such is the case with metaphors” (201). In a similar way, metaphors of sound offer a way of making sense of sound and the pedagogical functions and implications of sound. 4 Mack Hagood argues that the word “hush” is an indicator of the function and affect of sound that is often controlled and mediated through the use of various technologies (5–​6). 5 Anahid Kassabian describes ubiquitous listening as the condition and practice of experiencing and encountering the ubiquitous presence of popular music in everyday life (137–​139). 6 In her discussion of Director Peter Brook’s notion of the “empty space” of theater, Stacy Holman Jones explains “Brook’s stripped-​back theatre was not minimalist in its focus on encounter but, instead maximal” (115). My contention that a pedagogy of sound is loud embraces this quality of encounter and the empty space of theatre as maximal: in terms of effects, affects, and possibilities. 7 As Nina Sun Eidsheim reminds in her discussion of vocal timbre, sound does not discriminate independent of a listening as a practice that formulates and categorizes sound (The Race of Sound, 190–​191). Eidsheim also suggests that listening might be practiced in ways that move away from essentializing identifications and towards a recognition of the ways listening is a practice that is always configured by individual beliefs and learned forms of acting (The Race of Sound, 199). 8 For example, Patricia O.  Covarrubias identifies at least two possible understandings and enactments of silence: as generative and as consumptive. Silence functions, is practiced, and can be theorized as communicative action in various ways (266). 9 Steph Ceraso’s multimodal approach to composition exemplifies a pedagogical practice that takes seriously the pedagogical functions and possibilities of sound, sounding, and listening (12). 10 Karen Barad explains intra-​action as a move that exceeds interaction in theorizing the relational. She explains: The notion of intra-​action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities or relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-​actions that the boundaries and properties of the



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components of phenomena become determinate and that particular concepts (that is, particular material articulations of the world) become meaningful. (139) Intra-​action works to account for and recognize the ways phenomena are never entirely separable. For example, sounds are phenomena that are separable from mundane action, instead sounds make and are made by mundane actions. 11 Philip V.  Bohlman reminds there are multiple possible ontological configurations and understandings of music including music as object, as process, as embeddedness, and as adumbration (17–​19). 12 In his discussion of repetition and difference regarding the production of racism, John T. Warren explains repetition not only functions to do something again, but repetition is always a new act. Warren states: Thus, even repetition (as a repeating) cannot be the same, as the markers we seek to look at are themselves obscuring other possible patterns, many of which may suggest quite a bit of divergence. This supports the notion that when an act is done (some iteration spoken, some bodily movement made, etc.), it is always an original act—​its originality is only being obscured by the lenses of our perception, a falsehood imposed on us by our cultural past, imbued with the ideology any culture will inevitably produce. (298) Repetitions are in this way are generative and creative acts. The occurrence and experience of sound in pedagogical contexts and interactions as repetitions is similarly not a “once again,” but also a first time. 13 Kapchan, Deborah. “Body.” 14 Feld, Steven. “Acoustemology.” 15 Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich point to the possible generative connections be\ tween Sound studies and Deaf studies that do not maintain hierarchies amongst sensory modes of perception and being (73–​75). 16 As Michael LeVan says of sound and performance: “Performance is of sound, in sound, in spite of sound, for sound, by sound, through sound, around sound, after sound, and until sound” (p. 1). 17 McRae, Chris. “Performative Listening.”

Works Cited Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007. Bohlman, Philip V. “Ontologies of Music.” Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 17–​34. Ceraso, Steph. Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Covarrubias, Patricia O. “(Un)Biased in Western Theory:  Generative Silence in American Indian Communication.” Communication Monographs, vol. 74, no. 2, 2007, pp. 265–​271. Eidsheim, Nina S. Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Duke University Press, 2015.

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—​—​—​. The Race of Sound:  Listening, Timbre & Vocality in African American Music. Duke University Press, 2018. Feld, Steven. “Acoustemology.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 12–​21. Friedner, Michele, and Stefan Helmreich. “Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies.” The Senses and Society, vol. 7, no. 1, 2012, pp. 72–​86. Hagood, Mack. Hush: Media and Sonic Self-​Control. Duke University Press, 2019. Holman Jones, Stacy. “The Empty Space and Creative-​Relational Inquiry.” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, vol. 9, no. 2, 2020, pp. 114–​119. Kapchan, Deborah. “Body.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 33–​44. Kassabian, Anahid. “Ubiquitous Listening.” Popular Music Studies. Edited by David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus. Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 131–​142. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2003. LeVan, Michael. “Sounding off on Sound.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, 2007, pp. 1–​2. Madison, D. Soyini. “Performance is a Promiscuous Lover.” International Review of Qualitative Research, vol. 3, no. 2, 2010, pp. 199–​201. McRae, Chris. “Performative Listening.” The Handbook of Listening, edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham Bodie, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2020, pp. 399–​407. Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeny. “Introduction.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 1–​11. Pineau, Elyse L. “Critical Performative Pedagogy:  Fleshing out the Politics of Liberatory Education.” Teaching Performance Studies, edited by Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002, pp. 41–​54. Warren, John T. “Performing Difference: Repetition in Context.” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, vol. 1, no. 4, 2008, pp. 290–​308.

9 A PEDAGOGY OF LISTENING

Prelude 9: A Song for Listening Listening is a performance. Listening is an embodied act of engaging, encountering, and interacting with others and the world. Listening is performed. It’s an act that is staged, danced, and played. Listening is a turning of and returning to the body. Listening performs. Listening makes possible new ways of being, thinking, and feeling. Listening is also performative. It’s an iterative act that builds on previous learned practices and performances of listening. Listening is cultural, social, material, and political. And listening can be disruptive and transformative. Listening can make new connections, new relationships, new possibilities. In her compositions and workshops, composer and performer Pauline Oliveros created a practice she called “Deep Listening.” For Oliveros, Deep Listening “is learning to expand the perception of sounds to include the whole space/​time continuum of sound—​encountering the vastness and complexities as much as possible” (xxiii). This directed practice of listening as an expanded form of connection with and through sound is a meditative and generative act. She explains, “The practice of Deep Listening is intended to facilitate creativity in art and life through this form of meditation. Creativity means

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the formation of new patterns, exceeding the limitations and boundaries of old patterns, or using old patterns in new ways” (xxiv-​xxv). Oliveros’s Deep Listening is a performance practice that plays with and emphasizes the pedagogical possibilities of listening. There are two implications of Oliveros’s concept of Deep Listening as a pedagogical practice that resonate with the goals of this book and this final chapter. First, Deep Listening is an expansive practice of attending to the world through listening. The performance of listening enacted throughout this book similarly works to create an expanded and expansive approach to pedagogy through a performance of listening to and for the sensory experiences, the vibrations, and the relationships that texture, permeate, and transform pedagogical interactions. A pedagogy of listening engages this stance and practice of attentiveness towards the various ways educational practices and experiences emerge and reverberate. A  pedagogy of listening acknowledges and recognizes that listening is not a finite act. Even throughout this book, the instances of listening presented are not comprehensive and finite. Instead, these are beginnings and openings for future and continued listening to the vastness of educational interactions, spaces, and pedagogical practices. A pedagogy of listening keeps listening and always listens again. The second way Oliveros’s Deep Listening practice resonates with the aims of this book is that Deep Listening encourages and recognizes performances of listening as creative acts. Listening is a generative and productive act that makes realities and relationships. Similarly, the performance of listening presented throughout this book, and the performance of a pedagogy of listening presented in this final chapter, play with the creative and generative possibilities of listening. Listening to bodies, listening to learning spaces, and listening to pedagogy are all acts of engaging with listening as a creative and transformative mode of engaging pedagogical interactions and contexts. A pedagogy of listening presents an opportunity for reframing, reconsidering, and revisiting the experience of pedagogical interactions, spaces, practices. A pedagogy of listening is also a creative act of listening where, through repetition, the practice of listening is continually transformed and new ways of listening, interacting, and relating emerge. In addition to the attentiveness and creative possibilities of Deep Listening, a pedagogy of listening also resonates with an ethic of listening as a compassionate practice. Lisbeth Lipari argues for an understanding of ethics as emerging from “a process of listening that is committed to receiving otherness” (45). She calls this process “listening otherwise,” and offers the following summary of this listening:



A Pedagogy of Listening 217 In brief, it is listening that is fully present, embodied, and centered. It is an internal but not an isolated state—​it is fully within reach of and open to receive the other. It listens to the other’s suffering as a kind of hospitality, invitation, a hosting. To listen otherwise is to welcome the other inside, but as an other, as a guest, as a not-​me. It doesn’t insist on understanding or familiarity, or shared feelings. (56)

Lipari’s description of listening otherwise emphasizes the function of listening as an embodied act that is first and foremost receptive to and of the other. “Listening otherwise” does not privilege understanding or empathy, but instead it engenders ethic that works towards compassion and “bearing witness” or standing with the experience and reality of the other (57). Lipari’s discussion of “listening otherwise” presents an important lesson and reminder that guides the performances of listening enacted throughout this book and in the pedagogy of listening presented in this final chapter. These performances of listening do not aim to understand through listening to bodies, spaces, and pedagogical practices (though a kind of understanding surely emerges). Instead, listening is practiced as a stance of recognizing, acknowledging, and welcoming the sounds and vibrations of educational practices and contexts. A pedagogy of listening enacts the stance of engaged witness: feeling and being with others in educational interactions, feeling and being with educational spaces, and feeling and being with pedagogical practices. A pedagogy of listening enacts a compassionate stance through listening, and through a creative attention to the vast and dynamic sounds and vibrations of bodies, spaces, and pedagogical practices. A pedagogy of listening also invites ongoing and repeated performances of listening as a mode of feeling, learning, and being with the world and others. In this way, a pedagogy of listening attends to the past (the echoes, the before, that which precedes), the present (the resonant, the now, that which is unfolding), and to the future (the reverberations, the not yet, that which lingers). These final 29 continuous fragments consider and present a pedagogy of listening as generative opening for engaging, teaching, and learning from and with listening and sound. There are many kinds of ways to play with describing, defining, and generating a pedagogy of listening including:

Curiosity A pedagogy of listening is curious. The double meaning here is intended.

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A pedagogy of listening is curious: It is curious about the world and others. It is curious about sounds, and bodies, and spaces. It wants to learn, to engage, and to witness. It assumes the stance of a listener as a way of being, knowing, and relating. And a pedagogy of listening is also curious. It’s a strange approach to pedagogy. Perhaps a pedagogy of listening is even a bit odd. It wants to listen and to witness as a primary mode of teaching and learning. It wants to listen first, but it also wants to listen as an end in and of itself, rather than as a means to some other end.1 It’s a pedagogy that’s happiest listening, and being in

Wonder Or awe of the world and others, language, words, movements, bodies, feelings, moods, fragments. A pedagogy of listening wonders and stands in wonder of the world and others.2 A pedagogy of listening wonders and listens for

Resonance3 And connections reverberations between and among



A Pedagogy of Listening 219 performances practices A pedagogy of listening listens to and for practices in the classroom and pedagogical interaction as always connected to and informed by cultural beliefs, social norms, and institutional values. A pedagogy of listening

Curates these resonances and connections in ways that are expansive and prolific.4 Every action, interaction, and scene, presents an opportunity for listening even those actions, interactions, and scenes that might otherwise be leftover, ignored, or disregarded as unimportant. A pedagogy of listening

Leans in and lingers5 on taken-​for-​granted

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modes of teaching and learning. A pedagogy of listening attends to sounds, not as more important than other sensory experiences, but as phenomena that work in relationship with and to other phenomena (including those that can be experienced through sight, smell, taste, and touch) to emphasize the here and now. A pedagogy of listening enacts a stance of leaning where

Eavesdropping Sometimes happens without any effort or intention (an accidental fragment encountered and sometimes apologetically qualified as an overhearing). Sometimes eavesdropping happens on purpose6 (a purposeful attempt at collecting insights). And sometimes eavesdropping leads to a personal realization7 (a powerful encounter of the self through the other). A pedagogy of listening eavesdrops on conversations,8 interactions, performances, relationships, sounds, vibrations, and spaces.



A Pedagogy of Listening 221 And a pedagogy of listening learns from this act of overhearing (or of hearing too much) about the self and others, and about all the

Questions That are yet to be asked. A pedagogy of listening asks: about that which surrounds, sounds, or does not sound, is witnessed, is encountered. A pedagogy of listening is insatiable in its asking, and it remains unfulfilled by answers. A pedagogy of listening strives to ask and recognizes that

Learning Like listening, is an ongoing process and practice that is always shaped by larger structures and individual efforts9 Listening, like learning, in pedagogical contexts and interactions

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emerges as a practice that often reveals larger cultural values and beliefs about what listening is how listening should be practiced and how to listen in order to learn. And learning, like listening, is also a practice that exceeds pedagogical contexts and interactions and that can alter and transform educational spaces and relationships. A pedagogy of listening embraces the possibility of learning and listening as practices that can remake and reshape

Teaching as an act of listening that produces dynamic relationships, modes of relating and ways of being. And though a pedagogy of listening might teach something about listening by modeling a kind of listening that could be learned and emulated, the goal of a pedagogy of listening is not to teach listening, but instead to conceptualize and practice teaching as an act of listening: an active and fully embodied mode of engaging others. Where teaching is about learning about connecting,



A Pedagogy of Listening 223 reflexively, and deeply attending to

Sounds as pedagogical. The rush and hum, of vibrations. The mundane whir of voices, of machines, of bodies, of weather. The rhythms of daily interactions and phatic communication. The greetings, the nods, the nervous laughter. The melodies, harmonies, and dissonance of classroom interactions. The arguments, the agreements, the revelations, the critiques. The constant shift in volume: The rising and falling that adds emphasis and creates a dynamic scene Of learning, of teaching, of performing. The echoes and reverberations that amplify histories, institutional policies, and cultural ideologies. Sounds perform a starting place for practicing a pedagogy of listening that is attuned to the metaphorical function of sound: the descriptive and evaluative comparisons (this sounds like it’s going to be bad doesn’t it?). A pedagogy of listening is also attuned to the metonymic function of sound:

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the juxtaposition that extends contact (a reverberation with the past or with the institution). A pedagogy of listening attends to sounds as

Generative performances make and expand. As a generative performance,10 a pedagogy of listening finds connections, with others: an idea sparks a new way of thinking, something overheard resonates with a lived experience, a performance challenges an assumption about the world, a movement yields a recognition across difference, an experience of sound presents an opportunity for making new ways of being and knowing, an act of listening creates a new

Process for generating performances, relationships, and possibilities11 in an ongoing and emergent effort, a labor of listening, work that is unfinished, unfolding, not defined by a product,12 but by returning again and again and again



A Pedagogy of Listening 225 to listening. Like an album played on repeat by a musician studying a style, a solo, a progression. Learning with each repetition about inflection placement quality of tone and breath. A pedagogy of listening is a process that continues to change context in context always learning, revising, and

Reaching for connection, with others, students, technologies, spaces, classrooms, institutions. A pedagogy of listening reaches, without grasping or arriving, stretching and extending: like a plant turning toward sunlight like a child trying to retrieve an item from a tall shelf like a vibration extending from a speaker out and away into the farthest corners of a room like the pursuit of a curiosity or a question in an act of ongoing and unending

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Researching Searching repeatedly for information, insights, ideas searching with and from the body searching with and from all of the senses looking, listening, feeling, touching, smelling, tasting re-​searching a pedagogy of listening searches and re-​searches an effort that is always incomplete, always active, sometimes finding, often

Mistaking and making errors. A pedagogy of listening mistakes, mishears, missteps. Sometimes accidentally, sometimes purposefully, and sometimes without any awareness that a mistake was made at all. Each error revealing



A Pedagogy of Listening 227 and resounding with the social position, cultural privileges, and lived experience, and limits of the listener and of listening as a pedagogical act. Each mistake presents an opportunity for learning, for reflexivity, for starting again. Each mistake is a

Disruption to pedagogical interaction. A welcome break drawing attention to the emerging process of education, and questioning what is working, and what isn’t working. Taking the taken-​for-​granted and listening to why and how practices are practiced. Taking the taken-​for-​granted and listening for who benefits or is excluded.

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A pedagogy of listening disrupts, challenges, and interrupts teaching, learning, and classroom

Spaces Where bodies gather to teach and learn. Theatres, studios, laboratories, lecture halls, conference rooms, study rooms, offices, libraries, homes, parks, restaurants, backyards, front porches, online, offline, phone line, pages, and stages. Vibrant fields of action and interaction often designed for and by sound13 often produced in and through listening. A pedagogy of listening creates, attends, and listens to spaces for teaching and learning, recognizing the ways listening shapes space, is made by space, inhabits space, plays with space, reverberates with space, and opens space for being present with



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Bodies that resonate, bodies that emerge and fade, transform and blend, together and apart, away and near, bodies without clear boundaries or borders.14 A voice becomes a cymbal becomes a whisper becomes a computer fan becomes a chord progression becomes a chorus of laughter becomes a ringing phone becomes a deep breath becomes a horn becomes a heavy sigh becomes an open door becomes an invitation to listen again listen with listen and learn listen and

Imagine a space for learning and teaching for exploring and sharing without constraint,

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or maybe full of constraint, or perhaps with just the right amount of constraint depending on the context, the time, the situation, the bodies, the content, the mood. Imagine learning is teaching, and teaching is learning, and these processes happen at any and all times in any and all spaces. A pedagogy of listening imagines possibilities and alternatives,

Playfully generating and experimenting15 with sound and listening as modes and methods for being in the world, for learning, for creating knowledge, and for relating to others. Playing with sound as a pedagogical effort: finding sound, being moved by sound, making sound. Playing with listening as a pedagogical process: Listening as a dance16



A Pedagogy of Listening 231 Listening as improvisation Listening as

Movement Muscles activating, stretching, tensing, shifting, animated. Listening in motion forwards backwards side to side, slow and fast, up and down rigid and soft, thick and thin. Listening from the body, with the body, as a body. A pedagogy of listening pushes and pulls contracts and expands the

Capacity Of the self for the other, for learning

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for awe. Each act of listening creating an increasing capacity, in terms of quantity and quality, for listening with

Generosity When encountering the experiences and sounds of others. Tending, holding, witnessing. Listening practiced as an offering, as an opening,17 as an opportunity, for the realization and enactment of worlds, bodies, experiences. A willingness to listen, to learn, to engage, in an act that bends towards something like

Compassion18 full of care carefully listening, sensing,



A Pedagogy of Listening 233 feeling, the possibility of different perspectives and experiences of the world that is always tempered by a stance, that is not quite empathy, not quite a recognition of the impossibility of ever fully knowing19 the experience of the other, but an acknowledgment of the limits of the listener through a practice of

Reflexivity Where the tendencies, inclinations, values, and privileges, of the listener are revisited, reconsidered, and questioned: Why was that sound, vibration, body, or space noticed? Why was that sound, vibration, body, or space evaluated or experienced negatively? Why was that sound, vibration, body, or space evaluated or experienced favorably? In order to continue the work20 of reflexivity and of listening as a pedagogical act that

Opens and turns towards others21 an adjustment of the body

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an active and engaged mode where vibrations are invited, expected, encouraged to change self and others to re-​form? re-​vise? re-​sound? spaces and worlds in new and unexpected ways a readiness and

Flexibility for moving with, sounding with, vibrating with, moods, feelings, events, experiences, values, politics, ideologies, emotions, insights, questions, discussions, atmospheres,22 that emerge in and surround pedagogical contexts. A pedagogy of listening bends willingly and is attuned to the often-​unnoticed bending that happens in mundane ways



A Pedagogy of Listening 235 throughout everyday pedagogical interactions Listening in the midst of amongst with listening as a performance, accomplishment, act,

Fabrication a making a putting together a creative synthesis of bodies and sounds ideas and feelings vibrations and atmospheres teaching and learning forms and techniques repetitions and practices often

Exceeding and excessive just a little too much given listening is given it’s not a given but it is something given

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an offering of a resonant body that activates and is activated by the sounds of learning

Notes 1 McRae, Chris and Keith Nainby. “Engagement Beyond Interruption:  A Performative Perspective on Listening and Ethics.” 2 This use of wonder is informed in part by Stephen Greenblatt’s definition of wonder in his discussion of new historicism as a theoretical approach to historical events and practices that emphasizes the ways cultural forms and practices, and the studies of those forms and practices are always both individually and culturally shaped. Regarding wonder, Greenblatt explains: “By “wonder” I mean the power of the object displayed to stop the viewer in his tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention” (20). 3 Resonance here is also informed by Greenblatt who says:





By “resonance” I mean the power of the object displayed to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which-​as metaphor or, more simply, as metonymy-​it may be taken by a viewer to stand. (19–​20). For Greenblatt resonance and wonder are both concepts that work to demonstrate the connections between past events and objects and the experience of these events and objects. 4 In terms of a pedagogical approach the concepts of resonance and wonder help establish a guiding ethic that privileges process and feeling over product. Or as Aubrey Huber and Chris McRae explain: “Wonder and curiosity also offer a guiding ethic for collecting and curating pedagogical practices by calling for a consideration of the otherwise mundane, overlooked, and disregarded remnants of performance pedagogy as rare and precious objects” (291). 5 Pelias, Ronald J. Leaning: A Poetics of Personal Relations. 6 Kim Stafford confesses to eavesdropping as part of his approach to writing and witnessing the world (17). 7 In the context of scholarly discourse, Krista Ratcliffe proposes eavesdropping “not only as a rhetorical tactic but also as an ethical choice, or tactical ethic” (104). Ratcliffe goes on to explain, “eavesdropping emerges not as a gendered busy-​bodiness but as a rhetorical tactic of purposely positioning oneself on the edge of one’s own knowing so as to overhear and learn from others and, I would add, from oneself” (105). In this sense, eavesdropping is a strategy and a recognition of the listening self as always learning from the other.



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8 Krista Ratcliffe presents a pragmatic implication of this pedagogical practice. She suggests, “When my students are talking before class about one of our readings (when they know I am in the room and can hear them even though they are not directly addressing me), perhaps I should eavesdrop and use their questions, concerns, and applications as a way into class discussions” (106). 9 Stuart Hall theorizes this relationship between larger structures and individual practices through the concept of double articulation. He explains: By “double articulation” I mean that the structure—​the given conditions of existence, the structure of determinations in any situation—​can also be understood from another point of view, as simply the result of previous practices. We may say that a structure is what previously structured practices have produced as a result. (95) In other words, practices, like learning and listening, are both produced by and productive of larger cultural structures. 10 Alexander, Bryant Keith. “Skin Flint (or, The Garbage Man’s Kid): A  Generative Autobiographical Performance based on Tami Spry’s Tattoo Stories 11 McRae, Chris and Aubrey Huber. Creating Performances for Teaching and Learning:  A Practice Session for Pedagogy. 12 Anne Harris refers to this as a “process-​focused creativity” (20). 13 Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America 1900-​1933. 14 Deborah Kapchan’s discussion of the sound body informs this fragment (38). 15 Pauline Oliveros embodied practice of “Deep Listening” exemplifies an experimental approach to sound and listening. For Oliveros, “Deep Listening is a practice that is intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible” (xxiii). Throughout Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, Oliveros offers a detailed account of Deep Listening exercises and practices that resonate with the aims of a pedagogy of listening. 16 Barbara Browning offers a vivid description of learning and practicing dance as a way of becoming in sync resonates with this notion of listening as a dance (87–​88). 17 As Hans-​Georg Gadamer (1979) explains: But this openness exists ultimately not only for the person to whom one listens, but rather anyone who listens is fundamentally open. Without this kind of openness to one another there is no genuine human relationship. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another. (355) 18 Lisbeth Lipari defines compassion as “feeling together with” (49). 19 In her discussion of the problem of empathy Lisbeth Lipari explains: Ironically, both the modernist and postmodernist rejections of empathy privilege knowledge and understanding over compassion, feeling, and emotion. While it is undoubtedly correct that one’s knowledge of the other will inevitably be impartial and incomplete, the problem with empathy may not reside in the fact that one cannot ever fully know the other, but with the fact that that one fails to feel with the other. (48–​49)

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Lipari goes on to make the case for compassion as an ethical response and feature of listening. She argues, “In short, compassion is not and never can be the fruit of our labors to understand. Compassion is instead the very ground from which listening, and thence understanding, may spring” (53). In other words, compassion, as an ethical approach to the experiences of others, precedes understanding and yields listening. 20 This acknowledgment of reflexivity as work follows D.  Soyini Madison’s call for conceptualizing reflexivity as labor. She explains, “This is the goal:  employing the critical performantive-​I as both a point of departure and motivation toward how we might seek reflexivity’s ongoing effects by casting reflexivity as labor” (131). 21 Ronald J. Pelias similarly describes performance as an opening. He says, “Performance is an opening, a transitional, liminal space, where one learns, for bet-​ter or worse, the heart of the social, the clash of the cultural, and the twist of the lin-​guistic. After, one is never the same” (173). 22 Stewart, Kathleen. “Atmospheric Attunements.”

Works Cited Alexander, Bryant K. “Skin Flint (or, The Garbage Man’s Kid): A Generative Autobiographical Performance Based on Tami Spry’s Tattoo Stories.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1, 2000, pp. 97–​114. Browning, Barbara. The Gift (Or, Techniques of the Body). Coffee House Press, 2017. Gadamer, Hans-​Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd ed., 1975. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, Continuum, 2004. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Resonance and Wonder.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 43, no. 4, 1990, pp. 11–​34. Hall, Stuart. “Signification, Representation, Ideology:  Althusser and the Post-​Structuralist Debates. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 2, no. 2, 1985, pp. 91–​114. Harris, Anne. The Creative Turn: Toward a New Aesthetic Imaginary. Sense Publishers, 2014. Huber, Aubrey, and Chris McRae. “Wunderkammer: The Performance Showcase as Critical Performative Pedagogy.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 3, 2019, pp. 285–​304. Kapchan, Deborah. “Body.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 33–​44. Lipari, Lisbeth. “Listening Otherwise:  The Voice of Ethics.” The International Journal of Listening, vol. 23, 2009, pp. 44–​59. Madison, D. Soyini. “The Labor of Reflexivity.” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, vol. 11, no. 2, 2011, pp. 129–​138. McRae, Chris, and Aubrey Huber. Creating Performances for Teaching and Learning: A Practice Session for Pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. McRae, Chris, and Keith Nainby. “Engagement Beyond Interruption:  A Performative Perspective on Listening and Ethics.” Educational Studies:  A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, vol. 5, no. 2, 2015, pp. 168–​184.



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Oliveros, Pauline. Deep Listening. iUNiverse, Inc., 2005. Pelias, Ronald J. “Performance is an Opening.” International Review of Qualitative Research, vol. 3, no. 2, 2010, pp. 173–​174. —​—​—​. Leaning: A Poetics of Personal Relations. Left Coast Press, 2011. Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening:  Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Stafford, Kim. The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft. University of Georgia Press, 2003. Stewart, Kathleen. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D:  Society and Space, vol. 29, 2011, pp. 445–​453. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity:  Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America 1900-​1933. The MIT Press, 2002.

INDEX

Accountability  23, 25, 164 Acoustemology  20–​21, 127–​128 Acoustic design  15, 99–​100, 146–​147 Ambience  103, 106–​107 Apprehension  31–​32, 37, 41 Archive and Repertoire  7, 105, 128, 142 Attunement  102–​103, 113–​114 Audience  38, 41   See also Witness Auditory experience  104 Auditory field  104–​105

Bodies  Institutional body  69–​71 Learning body  8–​9, 23, 25, 30–​31 Legal body  21 Sound body  21, 26, 69–​71, 89 Teaching body  23, 25, 49–​50   See also Embodied knowledge Boundaries  34 Breathing  34–​35, 151

Classroom  8, 22, 50–​52, 129–​130, 138, 141, 146–​147 Collage  26–27 Communication studies  2, 13 Compassion  166, 216–​217, 232–​233, 237–​238 Composition studies  15 Context  20–​21, 24–​25, 72, 103, 107, 112, 114, 72 Conversation  35, 45, 54–​55 Critical reflexivity  4   see also Reflexivity Curiosity  24, 164, 217–​218, 225

Deaf studies  190 Disruption  38, 183, 227

Educational Spaces  see Classroom Embodied knowledge  7, 15 Environment  20, 50

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Epistemology  2, 5, 20–​21, 112, 127–​128, 212 Ethics  71–​72, 112, 114, 166–​167, 216–​217, 236–​238 Evaluation  53, 62–​63, 66, 78, 82–​84, 92–​93, 141

Feedback  44, 63 Fragments  9, 11, 22, 25–​26, 27, 70, 106–​107, 114, 130

Identity  6, 66 Imagination  5, 229–​230 Institutional policy  74–​75, 79–​80, 81 Intra-​action  15–​16, 96, 203, 212–​213

Liner notes  10 Listening  Active  78 As heuristic  29 Causal  15–​16, 23 Critical  78 Deep Listening  166, 215–​216 Ear-​centric  24 Electricity  12–​13 Listening ear  170 Listening otherwise  71–​72, 166, 216–​217 Multimodal  15–​16, 24 Performative listening  3–​5, 5–​7, 23–​25, 103, 114, 129, 164 Loud  19–​20

Metaphor  106, 130 Metonymy  106, 130 Movement  33, 57, 231 Music  10, 129–​130

Ontology  5, 99, 112, 127, 187, 212, 213 Oral interpretation  2–​3, 13–​14, 137 Ordinaries  102

Pedagogy  Critical performative pedagogy  5, 8 Multimodal pedagogy  15 Pedagogical interaction  163–​165 Pedagogical practices  163–​167 Pedagogy of listening  216–​217 Pedagogy of sound  190–​191 Performance  As contested  5–​6 As heuristic  101 As metaphor  5 As object  5 As method  5, 22–​23 Autobiographical  46 Conspicuous aesthetic  39–​40, 61–​62 Performance studies  2, 5–​7 Performance lab  2 Performative listening,  see Listening Performative writing  7–​9, 21–​22 Performativity  5–​7 Poetry  26 Presence  20, 29, 69–​70, 94 Privilege  3, 33, 182

Qualitative research  4 Quiet  19–​20

Race  106, 112, 169–​171 Reflexivity  131, 171, 184, 233   see also Critical Reflexivity Rehearsal  36 Resonance  78, 79, 218–​219 Reverberations  129–​131

Scenario  105–​106, 128–​129 Scene  128–​129 Silence  29, 39, 87–​88, 154, 175 Sound  As immersive  1 Figure of sound  111–​112, 169–​171 Knowledge  4, 8–​9

Phenomena  8–​9 Performances of  9, 20, 80–​81 Process  86–​87 Recording  145–​146 Signal sounds  113 Sonic invention  16 Sonic rhetoric  16 Vibration  50, 75–​76, 84, 111–​113, 165, 189–​190 Soundscape  99–​100, 113 Sound Studies  13, 99–​100, 190 Space  99–​101, 127–​128, 145–​147, 228

Teaching  2–​3, 38, 222–​223   See also Pedagogy Technology  43, 55, 76–​78

Index 243 Utopian performative  7

Vocal timbre  164–​165, 169–​170 Voice  33, 35–​36, 169

Warm-​up  33 Weak theory  102–​103 Witness  62, 181–​182 Workshop  35–​36, 55–​56, 59, 138–​139