- Maker: Rafaela Luzuriaga
- Genre: Audio essay
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5340: Studies in Multimodality and Digital Media
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Winter 2023
Description
This audio project is a reading of an old personal essay of mine. I chose to adapt a pre-existing piece of writing I had because I was curious about the different impact a piece of non-fiction could have by switching the medium in which it is presented. I notice that nowadays people gravitate towards consuming memoirs and other types of personal writing, including essays, in audio format rather than the written original. This is interesting to me because it says something about how our composing choices affect the ways people perceive and embrace/reject our work. Writing can be significantly more impactful and more widely circulated simply by choosing its modalities wisely. In order to add even more ambiance to what was now an audio story, I serendipitously chose to record at a moment where I found myself sitting still in my car after having run from the rain. I think the added sound of muffled rain pouring down as I read my piece carries across the nostalgic feel of the writing. I also added music, so as to not have the words begin and end abruptly, and to contribute to the emotional reading.
Reflection
This project was partially informed by two scholars’ articles: Sara Cooper’s “Something Borrowed, Something New…,” and Cynthia Selfe’s “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning…” I read both of these for class and they inspired my choices in creating this particular piece. Cooper’s essay was particularly valuable to my intention with this audio due to a couple of important aspects of new media and multimodality that she discusses —reclaiming the old and reworking/rewriting it into something new, and the multimodal form of composing of assemblage/collage. I think my audio essay touches on both of these topics both thematically (in the words themselves) and literally (in the multimodal and repurposed aspect of the project). Cooper’s example, which is a digital story that represents a family scrapbook passed down a woman’s family, echoes the subject of my own piece, where I speak of my grandmother’s hand-me-downs that I cherish. It’s not an exact parallel, since I don’t repurpose/upcycle my grandmother’s things, but I appreciated the subject of cherishing something of emotional value and wanting to immortalize it in a composition. I aim to embody that same thing in the aural experience of the piece through each layer of sound. Selfe’s ideas on aurality and multimodal composing further informed my choices by providing me with insight into the meaning writing can take on when “translated” to a sound-based modality. Selfe says the point “is not to make an either/or argument… I suggest we need to pay attention to both writing and aurality…” (618). This is exactly what my aim here was. Not to take from the significance of my old piece, but to add to it with a multimodal approach. One complements the other.
Cooper, Sara. “Something Borrowed, Something New: Multimodal Composition through the Reclamation of Vernacular Literacies.” Writing Changes: Alphabetic Text and Multimodal Composition, 2020, pp. 41-61.
Selfe, Cynthia. “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.” College Composition and Communication, 2009, pp. 616-663.
