Overview

Recognizing how sound and powerful listening are essential topics in multimodal rhetoric and composition classes is at the forefront of Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening by Steph Ceraso.  Ceraso presents a compelling argument that promotes the idea that there is a need for individuals (especially students) to expand their understanding of listening and sonic exposure.  Perhaps most central to her argument, Ceraso argues that listening is a full body experience.  To illustrate her point, she explains how sonic engineers depend on sonic experiences and their effects on consumers, and she shares how sonic objects are made taking into consideration features other than just those that produce sound. By providing these examples, Ceraso highlights the need for teaching students how to consider sound in a fresh way.  Ceraso provides not only insight regarding sonic environments and events, as well as sonic composing practices, but she also shares hands-on classroom activities that can be used to engage students toward expanding their listening practices, and transcending the confines of traditional “ear-ing,” moving them toward a more multimodal, interdisciplinary, multisensory, and bodily-inclusive sonic education (and experience). In Sounding Composition, Ceraso extends existing scholarship by providing classroom lessons/projects that include semiotic and whole body immersion in sonic and multimodal events, and she offers practical, engaging, and nuanced ways to entice students into cultivating a new appreciation for listening and sound, and applying that knowledge to both education-related sonic experiences, and to the world outside of school.  Multimodal listening, which is defined by Ceraso as “the practice of attending to the sensory, contextual, and material aspects of a sonic event” (p. 6) and multimodal pedagogy may be unfamiliar concepts, but Ceraso makes them accessible to educators so they can introduce students to sonic experiences that are “holistic and immersive” (p. 6).  Students can then realize that embodied listening is an essential skillset to bring into their lives, thus enhancing their understanding of sonic environments and experiences to which they are exposed every day.  Individuals respond to sound (through their ears and their bodies), and by understanding this idea, students gain the advantage of realizing their potential to reach others; through carefully sculpted sonic creations, the likelihood of reaching others is heightened.  In addition, understanding how others use sound gives individuals an advantage because others (including product manufacturers) are using their knowledge about the powerful impactful nature of sonic-control, and the interaction between sound and material, to persuade consumers to buy their products.  Ceraso explains “multimodal listening pedagogy results with students developing a flexible set of critical competencies and habits that allow them to be alert, savvy participants in the sonic world” (p. 146) [and] “can help students become smart, capable listeners and authors of sonic work—listener-makers who understand how to take advantage of the technical, affective, and semiotic affordances of sound” (p. 149).