The sounds you recorded are available here.
Your soundscape writing (Writing Project #3), hosted on your personal domains, is collected here in the following links:
Kendall, Hope, Kieran, Elsa, Rachel, Jack, Blake, Oscar, Eve, Julia, Jake, Emily.
Khalil, Tavis, Trevor, Louie, Bella, Kyle, Joe K., Beatrice, Noah, Joe N., ChiChi, Shelly.
Assignment:
“The Davidson Soundscape”
Overview:
For your third Writing Project, you will engage with the acoustic environment of Davidson College and the Town of Davidson. As we know from our reading and listening activities, soundscapes are never neutral, and are themselves texts to be read. While you may take an ecological, sociological, or technological approach to your soundscape (as do many of our theorists and practitioners), in any case you will be charged with listening carefully and writing clearly about how to read the sounds that you collect.
Previous projects involved your listening to sounds collected by others; in this project, you will collect sounds from the surrounding acoustic environment. As with the first and second project, you will need to call together a critical and cultural context for situating your work, and you will need to produce a written document about the soundscape that you collect that can nevertheless stand on its own without that auditory supplement. How can you tune your listeners’ ears to the soundscape you record? To what will you call their attention, and how will you contextualize these elements for them? Finally, might it be the case that your soundscape points to new issues in sound-studies, or unheard elements of the acoustic environment of Davidson? What might be the consequences of your close-listening and careful writing?
Requirements: Following Schafer, the Glasgow Sound Map, and our discussions, you will conduct a soundwalk, in which you select an environment and plan a pathway through it. Along your pathway, you will record three separate 2-minute blocks of sound. You will note the GPS coordinates of those specific locations. When complete, you will visit a shared class Google Drive folder, where you will create your own folder and upload (1) a text-file of those coordinates to your folder, and (2) your sound files in MP3 format. Your text-file should follow the format of the file posted in the Sample Folder as “location_info.rtf.” Those sounds will be dropped into a shared Google Map that will document our movement through the auditory environments of the Davidson area. (Or, to put it in other words: What did you record? Why did you record it? How does your set of recordings fit within soundscape writing as we know it?)
In a parallel essay, you will contextualize that audio in a critical, cultural, social, and/or historical context. Your research may including investigations into the built environment, the socio-economic development or status of Davidson, or the ecological profile of the area. After completing a draft of your essay, you will visit the shared Google Map and use links from that map in your final writing; your essay will be hosted on your domain, and those links will be live in your essay. Finally, you will produce (also from that original essay) a short abstract or “pull-paragraph” and accompanying image from the Google Map (or, you may supply your own image relevant to your soundscape). The abstract and image are designed to contextualize your essay and soundscape. When your essay is hosted digitally, this abstract will sit at the top of the page. We will discuss each element of this overarching project, and we will also have assistance from various constituencies across the campus.
Word-count: 1,250 – 1,500 words (essay); 200 – 300 words (abstract).
Audio: three 2-minute recordings in a contiguous location or path.
Image: one image representing the location of your soundscape (from Google Maps or other source).
Assigned: 10/5.
T&I Session: 10/19.
“Cage” activity (33 seconds of sound; see syllabus): record between 10/5 -10/12; due in the class folder before 10/12.
Audio due: Record and post to class folder by or before 10/22.
Workshop week: 10/29 – 11/2.
Final draft posted to your domain (send link to Rippeon): 11/5.
