SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening
Pedagogy at the convergence of sound studies and rhetoric/composition seems to exist in a quantum state—both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. This realization simultaneously enlightens and frustrates. The first page of Google results for “sound studies” and “writing instruction” turns up tons of pedagogy; almost all of it is aimed at instructors, pedagogues, and theorists, or contextualized in the form of specific syllabi. The same is true for similar searches—such as “sound studies” + “rhetoric and composition”—but one thing that remains constant is that Steph Ceraso, and her new book Sounding Composition (University of Pittsburgh Press: 2018) are always the first responses. This is because Ceraso’s book is largely the first to look directly into the deep territorial expanses of both sound studies and rhet/comp, which in themselves are more of a set of lenses for ever-expanding knowledges than deeply codified practices, and she dares to bring them together, rather than just talking about it. This alone is an act of academic bravery, and it works well.
Ceraso established her name early in the academic discourse surrounding digital and multimodal literacy and composition, and her work has been nothing short of groundbreaking. Because of her scholarly endeavors and her absolute passion for the subject, it is no surprise that some of us have waited for her first book with anticipation. Sounding Composition is a multivalent, ambitious work informs the discipline on many fronts. It is an act of ongoing scholarship that summarizes the state of the fields of digital composition and sonic rhetorics, as well as a pedagogical guide for teachers and students alike.
Through rigorous scholarship and carefully considered writing, Ceraso manages to take many of the often-nervewracking buzzwords in the fields of digital composition and sonic rhetorics and breathe poetic life into them. Ceraso engages in the scholarship of her field by demystifying the its jargon, making accessible to a wide variety of audiences the scholar-specific language and concepts she sets forth and expands from previous scholarship (though it does occasionally feel trapped in the traditional alphabetic prison of academic communication).. Her passion as an educator and scholar infuses her work, and Ceraso’s ontology re-centers all experience–and thus the rhetoric and praxis of communicating that experience–back into the whole body. Furthermore, Ceraso’s writing makes the artificial distinctions between theory and practice dissolve into a mode of thought that is simultaneously conscious and affective, a difficult feat given her genre and medium of publication. Academic writing, especially in the form of a university press book, demands a sense of linearity and fixity that lacks the affordances of some digital formats in terms of envisioning a more organic flow between ideas. However, while the structure of her book broadly follows a standard academic structure, within that structure lies a carefully considered and deftly-organized substructure.
Sounding Composition begins with a theory-based introduction in which Ceraso lays the book’s framework in terms of theory and structure. Then proceeds the chapter on the affective relationship between sound and the whole body. The next chapter investigates the relation of sonic environments and the body, followed by a chapter on our affective relationship with consumer products, in particular the automobile, perhaps the most American of factory-engineered soundscapes. Nested in these chapters is a rhetorical structure that portrays a sense of movement, but rather than moving from the personal out into spatial and consumer rhetorics, Sounding Composition’s chapter structure moves from an illustrative example that clearly explains the point Ceraso makes, into the theories she espouses, into a “reverberation” or a pedagogical discussion of an assignment that helps students better grasp and respond to the concepts providing the basis for her theory. This practice affords Ceraso meditation on her own practices as well as her students’ responses to them, perfectly demonstrating the metacognitive reflection that so thoroughly informs rhet/comp theory and praxis.
Steph Ceraso and students share a “sonic meal.” Photo by Marlayna Demond, UMBC.
Chapter one, “Sounding Bodies, Sounding Experience: (Re)Educating the Senses,” decenters the ears as the sole site of bodily interaction with sound. Ceraso focuses on Dame Evelyn Glennie, a deaf percussionist, who Ceraso claims can “provide a valuable model for understanding listening as a multimodal event” (29) because these practices expand listening to faculties that many, especially the auditorially able, often ignore. Dame Glennie theorizes, and lives, sound from the tactile ways its vibrations work on the whole body. From the new, more comprehensive understanding of sound Dame Glennie’s deafness affords, we can then do the work of “unlearning” our ableist auditory and listening practices, allowing all a more thorough reckoning with the way sound enables us to understand our environments.
The ability to transmit, disrupt, and alter the vibrational aspects of sound are key to understanding how we interact with sound in the world, the focus of the second chapter in Sounding Composition. In “Sounding Space, Composing Experience: The Ecological Practice of Sound Composition,” Ceraso situates her discussion in the interior of the building where she actually composed the chapter. The Common Room in the Cathedral of Learning, on the University of Pittsburgh’s main campus, is vast, ornate, and possessed of a sense of quiet which “seems odd for a bustling university space”(69). As Ceraso discovered, the room itself was designed to be both vast and quiet, as the goal was to produce a space that both aesthetically and physically represented the solemnity of education.
Cathedral of Learning Ceiling and Columns, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Image by Flickr User Matthew Paulson (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
To ensure a taciturn sense of stillness, the building was constructed with acoustic tiles disguised as stones. These tiles serve to not only hearken back to solemn architecture but also to absorb sound and lend a reverent air of stillness, despite the commotion. The deeply intertwined ways in which we interact with sound in our environment is crucial to further developing Ceraso’s affective sonic philosophy. This lens enables Ceraso to draw together the multisensory ways sound is part of an ecology of the material aspects of the environment with the affective ways we interact with these characteristics. Ceraso focuses on the practices of acoustic designers to illustrate that sound can be manipulated and revised, that sound itself is a composition, a key to the pedagogy she later develops.
Framing the discussion of sound as designable—a media manipulated for a desired impact and to a desired audience–serves well in introducing the fourth chapter, which examines products designed to enhance consumer experience. “Sounding Cars, Selling Experience: Sound Design in Consumer Products,” moves on to discuss the in-car experience as a technologically designed site of multisensory listening. Ceraso chose the automobile as the subject of this chapter because of the expansive popularity of the automobile, but also because the ecology of sound inside the car is the product of intensive engineering that is then open to further manipulation by the consumer. Whereas environmental sonic ecologies can be designed for a desired effect, car audio is subject to a range of intentional manipulations on the listener. Investigating and theorizing the consumer realm not only opens the possibilities for further theorization, but also enhances the possibility that we might be more informed in our consumer interactions. Understanding the material aspects of multimodal sound also further informs and shapes disciplinary knowledge at the academic level, framing the rhetorical aspect of sonic design as product design so that it focuses on, and caters to, particular audiences for desired effects.
Heading Up the Mountain, Image by Flickr User Macfarland Maclean,(CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Sounding Composition is a useful and important book because it describes a new rhetoric and because of how it frames all sound as part of an affective ontology. Ceraso is not the first to envision this ontology, but she is the first to provide carefully considered composition pedagogy that addresses what this ontology looks like in the classroom, which are expressed in the sections in Sounding Composition marked as “Reverberations.” To underscore the body as the site of lived experience following chapter two, Ceraso’s “reverberation” ask students to think of an experience in which sound had a noticeable effect on their bodies and to design a multimodal composition that translates this experience to an audience of varying abledness. Along with the assignment, students must write an artist statement describing the project, reflecting on the composition process, and explaining each composer’s choices.
To encourage students to think of sound and space and the affective relationship between the two following chapter three, Ceraso developed a digital soundmap on soundcities.com and had students upload sounds to it, while also producing an artist statement similar to the assignment in the preceding chapter. Finally, in considering the consumer-ready object in composition after the automobile chapter, students worked in groups to play with and analyze a sound object, and to report back on the object’s influence on them physically and emotionally. After they performed this analysis, students are then tasked with thinking of a particular audience and creating a new sonic object or making an existing sonic object better, and to prototype the product and present it to the class. Ceraso follows each of these assignment descriptions with careful metacognitive reflection and revision.
Steph Ceraso interviewed by Eric Detweiler in April 2016, host of Rhetoricity podcast. They talked sound, pedagogy, accessibility, food, senses, design, space, earbuds, and more. You can also read a transcript of this episode.
While Sounding Composition contributes to scholarship on many levels, it’s praxis feels the most compelling to me. Ceraso’s love for the theory and pedagogy is clear–and contagious—but when she describes the growth and evolution of her assignments in practice, we are able to see the care that she has for students and their individual growth via sound rhetoric. To Ceraso, the sonic realm is not easily separated from any of the other sensory realms, and it is an overlooked though vitally important part of the way we experience, navigate, and make sense of the world. Ceraso’s aim to decenter the primacy of alphabetic text in creating, presenting, and formulating knowledge might initially appear somewhat contradictory, but the old guard will not die without a fight. It could be argued that this work and the knowledge it uncovers might be better represented outside of an academic text, but that might actually be the point. Multimodal composition is not the rule of the day and though the digital is our current realm, text is still the lingua franca. Though it may seem like it will never arrive, Ceraso is preparing us for the many different attunements the future will require.
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Featured Image: Dame Evelyn Glennie Performing in London in 2011, image by Flickr User PowderPhotography (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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Airek Beauchampis an Assistant Professor of English at Arkansas State University and Editor-at Large for Sounding Out! His research interests include sound and the AIDS crisis, as well as swift and brutal punishment for any of the ghouls responsible for the escalation of the crisis in favor of political or financial profit. He fell in love in Arkansas, which he feels lends undue credence to a certain Rhianna song.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Queer Timbres, Queered Elegy: Diamanda Galás’s The Plague Mass and the First Wave of the AIDS Crisis– Airek Beauchamp
Botanical Rhythms: A Field Guide to Plant Music -Carlo Patrão
Sounding Our Utopia: An Interview With Mileece–Maile Colbert
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Cardi B: Bringing the Cold and Sexy to Hip Hop
In “Asesina,” Darell opens the track shouting “Everybody go to the discotek,” a call for listeners to respond to the catchy beat and come dance. In this series on rap in Spanish and Sound Studies, we’re calling you out to the dance floor…and we have plenty to say about it. Your playlist will not sound the same after we’re through.
Throughout January, we will explore what Spanish rap has to say on the dance floor, in our cars, and through our headsets. We’ll read about trap in Cuba and about Latinx identity in Australia. And because no forum on Spanish rap is complete without a mixtape, we’ll close out our forum on Thursday with a free playlist for our readers. Today we continue No Pare, Sigue Sigue: Spanish Rap & Sound Studies with Ashley Luthers’ essay on femme sexuality in Cardi B’s music.
Liana M. Silva, forum editor
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“Ran down on that bitch twice” was all I heard in this tight, dark basement filled with black and brown bodies, sweat dripping everywhere from everyone. Girls danced all over, yelling and shouting lyrics as they clapped and pointed along to the fast, upbeat rhythm of the song, feeling their own sensations and pleasure from the vibe, and rapping with the catchiness of the repeated phrase, “Ran down on that bitch twice!” As everyone was jumping, the space around me shook because there was so much body movement and flow; it was lit. This wasn’t the first time I heard Cardi B, but dancing along to her song “Foreva” was definitely the first I remember hearing her. Since that dark basement party, I realized that the attitude and energy Cardi B invokes through her raps and lyrics is addicting.
Listening repeatedly to “Foreva,” and the rest of her debut mixtape Gangsta Bitch Music Vol.1, has attuned me to Cardi B as a stone cold, gangster bitch: someone who is fearless, tough on the outside and inside. She doesn’t hesitate; she doesn’t bluff. She gets straight to the point and lets you know that she will fuck you up if and when necessary. A ‘G’ she is, as some would say when describing a person who shows no fear and is always hustling—except that someone is imagined as a black male from the so-called ‘hood who affiliates with drugs, gangs, etc. The music itself reflects this gangster feel, through the hard trap sounds and beats in every track. Trap music as a style and subset of Hip-Hop, and arguably a genre on its own, originated in Atlanta, and has over time become mainstream all across the U.S. specifically within the Northeast region. Within Cardi’s performed, stone cold bitch lyrical persona, she embodies an aggressive femme sexuality, a racialized femme hunger for sex with black men, and an emotional depth that makes her endearing to listeners. Her embodiment of this multiplicity—stone cold attitude, femme sexual thirst, and emotional complexity—can be heard in her music, through the explosion of beats, rhythms, and lyrics that keep listeners hooked to the sound of her self-image. In other words, Cardi B’s sonic and lyrical movements work in tandem with her audio-visual construction of black, Caribbean, Bronx femme desire.
Nowadays this audio-visual construction is visible across her music and social media, but I want to focus on the image of her debut mixtape cover, Gangsta Bitch Music, Vol.1. This image hailed me and continues to hold me in thrall after lengthy meditations on it. In it, Cardi B sits in the backseat of a car, high-rise apartments peering through the back window, with her legs spread wide open. Between her legs, a big, black, faceless, tatted man gives her head as she casually drinks her Corona. The man’s back sprawls in the place where we might imagine Cardi B’s junk/pussy; he’s her bitch. The audacity of displaying her desire mid-sex-act intrigues me and does more than merely assert black femme sexual desire. The media blew up when Nicki Minaj did her lollipop photoshoot in which her legs are wide open, and her crotch is heavily exposed. But Cardi B’s mixtape cover has a different impact, because of the positioning of its vulgarity and audacity.
I’ve seen pictures of Nicki Minaj and Lil’ Kim where they’re half naked, open to giving men pleasure, and completely distorting the expectation of respectable black women to cover their bodies and assets. But what makes Cardi’s mixtape visual different even from Lil’ Kim’s and Minaj’s visual constructions is that it shouts power from the position often occupied by cis-male desire. Cardi B is seizing her own sexual power and gangster agency while she asserts her business hustle from the seated position of power that is often assumed by cis-male gangster rappers and performers. In the angle and composition of the mixtape image, we, as viewers, are positioned to look up at her as we witness her experiencing pleasure. She’s above us, and her chosen sexual object, who is a big black man, a figure whose masculinity is historically challenged by normative and respectability-obsessed society, and who is historically susceptible to being emasculated, is situated beneath her: there’s a troubling of power’s embodiment, specifically through sex, in this image. She’s visually insisting on getting play.
I connect Gangsta Bitch Mixtape Vol. 1’s cover image to the sounds, vibes, and lyrics of Cardi B’s tracks within the mixtape. In “Foreva,” for example, she raps, “Silly muthafucka who raised you/ a nigga with a pussy how disgraceful.” It’s at this point that we realize that the “bitch” that she “ran down on,” “twice,” is also a dude. In the lyrics, she alternates between beefing with trifling chicks and dudes; for Cardi, bitches breach a gender dyad. She raps from a masculine position as a femme, which ultimately illustrates her mixtape cover’s reversal of who is in the receptive and dominant position of sexual power. In “Foreva,” she’s talking down on black men the same way that most of these men speak on black women in the Hip-Hop industry. Cardi twists the normative misogyny and disrespect that is often demonstrated towards black women in Hip-Hop and instead uses that towards apostrophic black men. The lyrics of “Foreva” and the Gangsta Bitch mixtape cover both sustain this idea of Cardi B working within masculine tropes as a woman in the industry. On the mixtape cover, she is the one who is receiving pleasure, instead of giving it to a man. Lyrically and physically, she’s in a place where she’s on top, looking down on her subject/object of sexual desire, and inviting her audience to watch.
Sonically, “Foreva” and other tracks fits within the genre of trap music. Many of the songs in the mixtape have aggressive beats. The genre is characterized by a deep, hard mood created by the fast beat: Justin Burton describes it as “one of the most iconic sonic elements of trap is the rattling hihat, cruising through subdivisions of the beat at inhuman rates.” This is what we hear and feel from Cardi’s music itself. Specifically, the BPM for “Foreva” is 161 which fits into the range of typical Trap music. The way she sounds is what she embodies. The flow of “Foreva” tells us as listeners that Cardi B isn’t here to play and she damn sure won’t let anybody stop her from making her money. The rest of the music on the mixtape takes a similar route, in that these crisp rhythms speak to her power, her urban upbringing, coming from the Bronx, and her days as a stripper. She owns her sexuality and claims it through the music. The cover reflects this: she is poised and looking directly at us, her stone-cold persona manifested in how she also appears utterly unbothered by you, us, looking at her, looking at us.
Cardi B’s a freak. Clearly. (As if we didn’t know this.) But the way she visually and sonically expresses her sexual yearning is more complicated than the word freak can capture. The thing with Cardi B is, she’s not afraid. In fact, she doesn’t care about respectability. Even when she raps about making money or callin’ shots on someone, she never hesitates to slide in something sex-related because she knows she’s good at getting and giving play, both sexually and musically: “Fuck him so good he gonna want to spend all that/ Pussy got him on the jugg he gonna re-up and come right back.” If you read the lyrics from “With That,” you could think the lyrical subject is a male rapper, like trap’s Future or Gucci Mane. In fact, this song is a remake from Young Thug’s “With That,” which comes from his album Barter 6. Young Thug is one of the big faces in the Atlanta Trap music scene and his track “With That” reflects the life of a rapper like him. Poppin pills, stacking money tall, Thug knows he’s killing the game and shitting on these other rappers with his sounds–Cardi B echoes that bravado in her remake.
Drugs, sex, money, hustle: Cardi B, in a way, replicates the masculine attachment to these tropes. But we are not listening to an abstract, masculinist lyrical subject on her mixtape; we are listening to a black femme subject. So, this goes beyond ‘replication’, as we may wonder whether it has ever historically not been the case in the Americas that black women also had to hustle, grind, find stimulation to escape normative constraints, and take care of their sexual desires. Which is to say, black men are not the OG hustlers; arguably, black women are, and Cardi B channels that historical force in her audio-visual construction of a stone-cold bitch who knows how to get play, and still have feelings in a hatin’ ass world.
We’re introduced to this hard, stone cold Cardi B inside and outside of her music’s lyrics as she repeatedly performs that she is not at all ashamed of the fact that she used to be stripper, aka, someone who hustles hard. Her choice of the trap genre, as a black Latina, acknowledges the existence of that hustle theme within it—even honors it. Her refusal of shame and respectability affects that take a specific toll on black women in the Americas, circles me back to the welcoming aura she displays on the mixtape cover. She wants viewers to see her in her happy place; she wants us listeners to hear how good she is in bed; she wants the world to know she’s a freak. This is her way of fucking with the mythical construction of masculinity in Hip-Hop where cis-men are the most badass, aka, the “most political” subjects; she acts on her own urges and desires, which does a lot more than just show femme as “sexy.” She’s sexy and she’s cold and so is her music too: the kick drums, synth lines, and hihats make her sonically ominous and cold.
In one of Cardi B’s latest tracks, “Money,” I still hear echoes of “Foreva,” but I’m hearing so much more. I find myself paying as much attention to the audio as to the visual constructions that Cardi B’s generous yet cutting aesthetic offers: in the cover image for “Money,” we see her naked body, positioned in a way that shows off her peacock thigh tattoo, suggesting but keeping her junk from you. She’s wearing a plethora of gold watches, almost as if they’re long-sleeve gloves, and a gold hat, the shape of which channels both Beyoncé’s in “Formation” and Jeffery’s (aka, Young Thug) on the cover of Jeffery. Unlike the cover of the first mixtape, Cardi does not give us her hair in this image, and she does not give us her gaze; while she directs her face at the camera, the hat dripping with diamonds conceals her hair and her eyes from us—or, she is giving her gaze to herself, to the inward rewards of her hustle. The ice is cold, but the image is warm as a swarm of gold bling and golden light surrounds her.
Lyrically, on “Money,” she’s doing what she does best, rapping about her hustle, her money, and still managing to throw in a little something about her love for sex. Sonically, this is pure trap. We hear an orchestration of keyboards, brass, and drums. As for us, listening viewers, we not only consume her music, but also continue to take in everything Cardi B has to offer because it fascinates and pleases us. She returns our pleasure (in her pleasure) to us, and nothing less than that.
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Featured Image: Still from “Cardi B ‘Foreva’ (Live) Choreography By- Hollywood”
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Ashley Luthers is currently a Senior at Wesleyan University studying English and Economics. She has spent the past year researching and studying Cardi B inside and outside of the classroom. Her final senior essay revolves around Cardi B as a black femme artist in Hip-Hop through an analysis of different theories surrounding the black female body.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“The (Magic) Upper Room: Sonic Pleasure Politics in Southern Hip Hop“–Regina Bradley
“What Feels Good to Me: Extra-Verbal Vocal Sounds and Sonic Pleasure in Black Femme Pop Music” -Robin James
“I Love to Praise His Name”: Shouting as Feminine Disruption, Public Ecstasy, and Audio-Visual Pleasure–Shakira Holt
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