“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 observe and collect.
Previous projects involved your listening to sounds created or curated 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 engage with an acoustic space, and writing critically and reflectively about that space. The space you select may be in-doors or out-of-doors, and the space itself may be a pathway or transitional space between other spaces. You may also consider a comparative approach: identify spaces that are linked in some manner (either conceptually, culturally, or spatially), and consider what parallel and comparative listening tells us. Record audio and/or collect images of your space (if this is an obstacle for technological or logistical reasons, please let me know privately, and we’ll work out a solution).
Once you have selected and engaged with your space, you will create an essay exploring the critical, cultural, social, and/or historical contexts “present” in that soundscape. You are the primary agent of inquiry and exploration–what do you hear? What does this tell you about the space and its uses? How can your listening attune your readers to hear the space differently, and to what effect? Your research may including investigations into the built environment, the socio-economic development or status of Davidson, or the ecological profile of the area.
Once your essay is drafted, you will produce a short abstract, to be accompanied by an image. The abstract and image will sit at the top of your essay on your domain, and will be designed to grab a reader’s attention. 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).
Abstract: ~100 words (preface to the essay).
Media: Image(s) or sound)s of your space.
Assigned: 3/18
Writing Workshops: 3/27 and 3/29
Workshop//informal Peer-Review: 4/1
Final draft posted to your domain (send link to Rippeon): 4/8
