Vibrational Affect

Sound Theory: Resonance and Knowledge

To arrive at an understanding of why sound might be important to qualitative researchers across fields and disciplines—as opposed to being relevant only within disciplinary boundaries such as ethnomusicology, musicology, or sound studies—requires a closer examination of how sounds are affective vibrations that resonate, and, as such, form educational systems of knowledge. As intimated in the introduction, everything vibrates. Stillness is a lack of perception rather than a lack of movement. Solids are produced not by immobility but by highly patterned movement. Vibration is patterned oscillation. It is this patterned movement that causes resonance, a system that is constantly fluxed, moving and out of phase with itself and its layered ecologies. Resonance, then, is the intersection of a system, regardless of its size and complexity, with its self and its “not-self.” ¹

Resonance is theoretically and materially consequential. Theoretically, if everything vibrates, then everything—literally every object (animate and inanimate), ecology (“natural” or “constructed”), feeling, idea, ideal, process, experience, event—has the potential to affect and be affected by another aspect of everything. It is the ability of one’s self and/or not-self’s affect (object/not-object, ecology/not-ecology, etc.) to effect in a multidirectional fashion. This is an understanding that is now as common in physics as it is in Buddhism, as at home a thought in affect theory (e.g., Greigg & Seigworth, 2010; Massumi, 2002) as it is in anthropology (e.g., Paerregaard, 2002; Stewart, 2007). Materially, from how words create feelings or a touch lingers after a hand is gone, from the ways in which a security blanked matters to a child or sitting by a stream releases tension, resonance impacts bodies. Phrased in a slightly different manner, resonance is affective knowledge that strongly informs how one “is” and what one knows ² —what Brian Massumi refers to as “ontogenic,” ever emergent processes of ontology, that lead to what might be called epistimogenic, similarly emergent ways of knowing. It is for these reasons that resonance has been linked with questions of creating knowledge in affective, sensory, and cognitive ways (e.g., Lepselter, 2012; Paerregaard, 2002; Stewart, 2007).

Sounds are a form of resonance and can therefore be understood as a kind of vibrational affect. My use of sound here is meant as a large umbrella that encompasses all sound possibilities including talk, music, and noise and I seek to make no valuation of either one over the other. Similarly, following scholarship in materiality (e.g., Miller, 2005), this conceptualization of the sonic does not necessarily value human sounds over sounds made by animals, flora, fauna, objects, constructed or otherwise, and the like.

Recent scholarship in the field of sound studies notes that although sound is technically that which can be perceived by the human ear, sounds exist both above and below the range of hearing (e.g., Goodman, 2010; Price, 2011). Similarly, scholarship within this burgeoning field reminds us that what one hears is socioculturally contextualized and necessarily individualized (e.g., Back, 2009; Sterne, 2003). One attends to some sounds and not others, has particular constructions of what sounds are significant, and constructs different sets of meaning systems based on the ideas and ideals attributed to given sounds (see, for example, Feld, 1982). For example, what is unintelligible noise to one person is significant and important to another, the ways in which a child who has only lived in the city might have difficulty sleeping amid the “sounds of nature” that others find soothing and restful. In addition, considering processes, experiences, ideas, ideals, and ecologies in, as, or through sound can interrupt ocular metaphors in important ways—what constitutes a blink of an ear (Kim-Cohen, 2009) or how does a frame sound (Gershon, 2011b)?

Sounds, then, not only interrupt commonly held metaphors, but can also be utilized to queer the pitch (Brett, Wood, & Thomas, 2006) of contemporary notions of thought and practice (see, for example, Sterne, 2012). Not unlike an omnidirectional microphone that cannot help but constantly receive information, the sonic constantly informs our everyday ways of being and knowing. Sounds resonate in our bodies. They do so not only in our ears but also as something that is felt. There are sound weapons (Goodman, 2010) and sounds used as deterrents for particular populations (Sterne, 2005), just as there are sounds used for healing, prayer, and love, vocal, instrumental, and otherwise. Finally, while at one level sounds “are,” their interpretation and how they are utilized is inexorably linked to questions of power. This is manifest not only in sound weapons and deterrents but also related to questions of agency and voice as can be seen in discussions of noise abatement related to social class or the loss of hearing for workers on factory floors.

Sounds can therefore be understood to form educational systems of knowledge that not only make previously hidden understandings audible but can also be utilized materially to interpret the ordinarily sensible, everyday acts of sense-making (Gershon, 2012; Stewart, 2007; Tsing, 2005). The sonic is resonance and knowledge, vibrational affects that effect how individuals and groups are and know. How these theoretical understandings can inform qualitative research methodology is the focus of the following section.

Sound Method

From a qualitative research perspective, sounds are methodologically valuable as they sit at the paradox of human experience—utterly individualistic and inescapably sociocultural in their interpretation. As part of the sensorium, the multitude of possible ways that groups construct the senses (Howes, 2009), sounds can be utilized to conceptualize how individuals or groups conceptualize themselves, others, objects, and ecologies. Sounds also simultaneously reveal not only nested layers of participants’ local and less local norms and values but also the researcher’s(s’) ideas, feelings, and ideals—a tool for reflexivity as well as for qualitative inquiry.

Parallel to the theoretical understandings presented in the previous section, the explicit use of sounds in all stages of research, particularly in reporting findings, have additional methodological advantages for qualitative researchers. The ability to represent and otherwise coconstruct participants in/as/through sound simultaneously removes a layer of translation while adding important affective and sensual information. For example, representing sounds sonically allows participants give voice for/to themselves while retaining information lost when translated to text—from the tone and tenor of prosody (see Erickson, 2003) to the combined sonic stories of spaces and places. ³

This can also be understood as an ethical act that addresses important ethical questions of agency in the crisis of representation for qualitative researchers. Along similar ethical lines, sounded representations of qualitative research can provide the same kinds of protections for participants as text while providing the kinds of additional affective, sensory, and other information in ways that text cannot. Finally, listening is a qualitatively different experience than watching, that often requires a kind of slowness and attention that text and video do not.

Yet, it is important to remember that sounded representations are as manipulated as any other kind of representation, necessarily incomplete, and are intentional acts of interpretation and translation, a point to which I return in the description of how this sound/work for this piece was constructed. My argument here is therefore not that sounds cannot be misheard, are not social constructions from the kinds of recording equipment used to the kinds of sounds that are recorded to the ways in which those sounds are represented, or that sound representations are in some way more “real” than other representations. Rather, my point is that sounds provide an opportunity to move from ocular metaphors of “framing” to “sonic imaginations [that are] necessarily plural, recursive, reflexive, driven to represent, reconfigure and redescribe” (Sterne, 2012, p. 5). In a similar fashion, the ability to present sounds-as-sounds rather than text-as-sounds can remove a layer of authorial translation and interrupt Western notions of the centrality and authority of text and the written word over other forms of expression (literally and figuratively) while providing an opportunity for others to be heard in their own voices, prosody, inflection, affect, and intention intact.

There have been calls for a sounded anthropology (Feld & Brennis, 2004; Samuels, Meintjes, Ochoa, & Porcello, 2010) and discussions of the possibilities of sound as data in qualitative research, talk, music, noise and all (Bauer, 2000; Erickson, 2004). In part a response to such methodological discussions of the possibilities for sound and in larger part to a longitudinal collaborative interpretive research project that was particularly sound-focused as well as a continuing interest in sound, I developed a methodology called sonic ethnography (see Gershon, 2012, in press b). Sonic ethnography is the sounded representation of ethnographic data. As suggested in calls for sounded or sonic approaches to anthropology, processes of data collection and representation follow contemporary tenets of ethnographic research practices (e.g., Agar, 1996; Atkinson, Coffey, Delamont, Loughland, & Loughland, 2009; Ortner, 2006). To date, it has been used in combination with text (Gershon, in press b) and in sound-only formats, sound installations that were parts of national conferences in education and anthropology as well as exhibited at museum of contemporary art.

This exhibition, Making Sense of Science: The Sounds of Teaching and Studenting in Four Urban Classrooms (Gershon & The Listening to the Sounds of Science Project, 2012), serves as a strong example of the methodological possibilities for sound in qualitative research more generally and for ethnography in specific. The sounds utilized in this sound/installation were recorded in a year and a half of a 4-year, collaborative ethnography that began as an inquiry into whether songwriting might serve as a means to help surmount continuing race and gender gaps in science education for urban students.

Focused on first-, fifth-, and two seventh- and eighth-grade classrooms, interested teachers included writing songs about the science content they taught in a fashion that fit their pedagogical needs. This decision was due to a combination of my understanding of teachers as those most familiar with students’ academic and social needs as well as the ever-increasing pressures they face for their students to score well on annual standardized measurements. Over the course of the study, this project became the listening to the sounds of science project, the sounds of how participants made sense of academic content not only in their songs but also through their processes of songwriting and in daily classroom lessons more generally.

Sounds collected for this study included audio and video recordings of daily classroom lessons, students working on their songs, documents related to daily lessons (i.e., worksheets) and songwriting (i.e., lyrics), formal recorded and informal unrecorded interviews, and field notes. In addition, stereo field microphones, handheld digital audio recorders, a large diaphragm condenser microphone, and occasionally built-in microphones on desktop and laptop computers recorded a wide variety of sounds.

Similar to hearing and different from images and video recordings, there is no inside/outside framing of sound or blinking of an ear in audio recordings. The sound of everyday classroom noises like chairs moving and the surusurus of student talk are imbricated with the sounds of students working on their songs in the same ways that the sounds of students working on their songs are braided into concurrent daily classroom lessons. As a result, every aspect of the classroom soundscape contributed to analysis in this study as can be heard in the sound/work that accompanies this text.

I wondered what might happen if I followed these rules to create sound/art or sound/works rather than texted representations of the ethnographic data collected. In addition to experimenting with audio in ways that might function as texted notes, I also began creating sound/works or sound/art from the wealth of sonic data collected. What I often found was that the ability to listen to multiple contexts tapped into the sonic imagination in terms of questions of representation, the ability for the audience to have an embodied, aural experience with participants’ voices, ideas, and soundscapes in ways that conveyed an affectively rich sense of place (Feld & Basso, 1996). The ability to listen to such sounds as students’ interviews across multiple years, students’ working on their songs across contexts, or the songs students produced next to one another or simultaneously, tapped into the sonic imagination in ways that were also methodologically important. Through these reconfigurations of data, I could hear the resonances between and within contexts, the plurality of simultaneously occurring events, and reflexively redescribe what participants’ found to be significant as heard in their words, interactions, and processes.

Sounds Beyond Data

Sounds are and resonance is: Feelings, ideas, and processes resonate. Are sounds, resonance, feelings, ideas, or processes inherently data? It takes a researcher’s presence to turn someone’s daily experiences into data.

On one hand, as argued in the previous section, sounds can be categorized as data and utilized to strong affect and effect in qualitative research. On the other, it may well be the case that sounds do not need to be “data” to be of use to qualitative researchers. Sounds are indeed a way to conceptualize emergent ontogenic and epistemogenic understandings that help individuals and groups interpret the nested layers of ecologies, norms, values, and other iterations of the ordinarily sensible that inform our daily lives. They exist continually, noticed and unnoticed, buffeting our bodies, vibrating our selves. It may therefore be the case that the movement from sound to sonic data in fact removes some of the emergent immediacies, the liminal power of the sonic, inadvertently adding a sheen of translation where none is necessary.

Yet attention to sound is one definition for listening. While a debate about the line between listening as intentional hearing and hearing as inescapable information continues to blur in sound studies, there nonetheless remains an attention to sound that is part of our everyday experiences. We notice one sound and not another, tune in and out of conversations, and mishear. Sounds help us understand our worlds. Perhaps, then, sounds reside in the neither/nor, neither data nor not-data. The assemblage of sounds in qualitative research does not require their categorization as data but does appear to necessitate the kinds of focused attention to hearing that is listening.

Sound/work and Sonic Resonances

Construction of this sound/work is an example of how sonic ethnography can function in practice, smaller in scale yet similar in form and function to the exhibition at the Akron Art Museum. The central difference in construction for this piece was that I wanted it to both reference the exhibition and explicate the processes detailed in this texted portion of the piece. The result of this intention was that additional attention was given to the sound/files as a springboard for the associated sound/work.

Practically, I selected one section of the installation to be shared here, a portion where students were having a heated discussion/argument as they wrote a song about the water cycle followed by the song. Following this decision, I then returned to the day that this data was recorded and listened to all associated sounds recorded throughout the just over two hours that day in Mrs. Grindall’s class. That day, Brandon worked by himself, Aleena, Yearveon, and Jadah worked on their song with Garrison working with them a bit while they solved their disagreement (and then left), and D’Ovvion and Zion tried to record their song on the other side of the classroom while the kids working on the water cycle song had their argument. From each of these files, I selected portions that were overlapping chronologically and, when combined, represented the kinds of sounds in the class that day, adding more and different details from the kids’ argument than was used in the exhibition. I then panned the sounds so that the discussion and the creation of the water cycle was more prevalent in the left side of the recording and other sounds were more audible to the right. Featuring the voices of students Yearveon Garrett, Brandon Klapp, Aleena Saeed, Jadah Smith, Zion Robinson, Garrison Hearst, and D’Ovvion Williams, their teacher Karen Grindall, master’s student Bayu Widyatmoko and myself, the sounded portion of this piece can be found at the following URL: https://soundcloud.com/vibrationalaffect/gershon.

This is a sounded representation of ethnographic study, an iteration that makes material the theoretical and methodological discussions in the previous two sections. These sounds resonate, affecting our bodies, ideas, and feelings in a literal fashion that text cannot. Here they have the potential to queer the pitch of much of the mainstream discourse about students of color and girls’ lack of success in understanding science while constructing educational systems of knowledge, ways of conceptualizing how urban middle grades students understand themselves, others, processes, and their ecologies. In light of such pervasive national conversations about girls’, students’ of color, urban, and poor and working class students’ lack of success in science, the ability to hear such students skillfully negotiate and academic content can be understood as an act of social justice. Their sound representation provides an opportunity for traditionally marginalized youth to be heard in ways that utilize the sonic to interrupt mainstream conceptualizations of their social and academic lives as unsuccessful and does so in an affectively embodied fashion that is simultaneously theoretically and materially resonant—vibrations that affect and are in turn affected by others’ nested layers of resonances.

Then there is the remaining question of possible pathways of and for interpretation. The sounded portion of this piece is similar in kind to listening to a radio program, a concert, or a talk. It is also similar to sound/art, sound-oriented works of art, yet functions in precisely the same way that video or film represents ethnographic data for ethnographic film, pictures function in visual anthropology, or a dramatic representation functions in ethnodrama.

Just as one would not tell a reader how to interact with a text, a listener to interact with music, or how to watch a film by Jean Rouch, the associated sounds are the sonic ethnography and, as such, open to the listener’s interpretation. Yet, these sounds are already interpreted, by media, people, objects, ecologies, and most recently by the researcher as described at the beginning of this section. In sum, the sounds, from their recording to their representation, are consistent with contemporary ethnographic practices.

In sum, listening to ecologies, people, animals, objects and the like, both lie at the heart of qualitative research practices and is inevitable. In this way, whether regarded as sounds or as data, the sonic can serve as a strong means for considering how people live their lives and, as such, are significant for qualitative research—vibrations that resonate in our bodies, feelings, ideas, ideals, and processes.