Create a script (before you record) or a transcript (after you record) of your podcast. Put it on the Web. Link to it from the RSS information for your podcast.

Horrified, my colleagues remained behind to gather his thoughts and to record whatever he could the rest of the afternoon, and that evening, he captured a remarkable event: the lone surviving male beaver swimming in slow circles crying out inconsolably for its lost mate and offspring.

I’m sure that after a century of being “the noisiest city on Earth,” folks have gotten creative about it.

Moreover, if we accounted for the history of zoning in the neighborhoods that have the most or the least complaints it would add another layer of analysis to the data.  Are some of these neighborhoods used as entertainment zones, for example? Is it easier to open up bars there than elsewhere in the city?

Although it may not be possible to gather who the 311 callers are, including factors such as race and class may lead to very different noise maps.  For example, what would a noise map of Manhattan look like if researchers brought income into the equation?

This is where the data falls short. Can it be assumed that those who are calling about the noise are mostly people who live in the neighborhood?

At a glance, loud parties, loud people, and loud car stereos seem to be the major complaints in those areas, according to Sluis’s visualizations

This is key information because it reminds viewers that this neighborhood is a lot more ethnically diverse than other neighborhoods with a smaller number of complaints. It brings to mind: what role does race play in these complaints, in terms of those who complain and those who are the focus of the complaints?

The city may be noisy, but “noisy” is relative. Sluis’s map shows some predictably noisy areas for those of us familiar with Manhattan’s soundscape (Union Square, Times Square) but it also draws attention to other areas not as predictable in the mainstream imagination (East Harlem South, Hamilton Heights).

what stands out is that the major circles of noise complaints are also places where there are different racial and ethnic groups mingling (for example, Times Square) or places that are populated by mostly minorities (Hamilton Heights).  Whereas Sluis flattens out the noise complaints, demographic stats point to the racial/ethnic contours of each neighborhood.

Drawn from 2010 census data, the CUNY map clearly delineates neighborhoods and color-codes the groups in each neighborhood per block: blue for whites, green for Latino, orange for black, purple for Asian, and grey for “Other.” Although the Center for Urban Research, CUNY Graduate Center’s maps cannot be superimposed on Sluis’s maps, they help give a general idea as to where neighborhoods are located in addition to racial demographics.

We must remember that annoyance oftentimes stems not just from physical reactions to noise but rather one’s perceptions about noise

40, 412 complaints, to be exact

but neither takes into account the fact that some of the areas with a higher concentration of noise complaints are not just densely populated but densely populated with racial and ethnic minorities

New York City isn’t the only loud city out there

Although New York City isn’t the only loud city out there, there are many reasons it’s called “The City That Never Sleeps”—and sound has a lot to do with it, depending on which neighborhood you call home.

Through the food opera project, we hope to show how the application of real-time music generation techniques, originally developed for use in the virtual worlds of video games, can increasingly be applied to score the unpredictable, real-time phenomena of our everyday physical environment, which we observe to be a rapidly growing arena of cultural production.

The case became of interest to the disability community because it dealt with the “legal ramifications of manipulating data in order to access it

To retrofit is to add a component or accessory to something that has already been manufactured or built. This retrofit does not necessarily make the product function, does not necessarily fix a faulty product, but it acts as a sort of correction

For many deaf people, like me, it is difficult to follow an oral presentation without another channel for accessing the information that is embedded in the sound of the presenter’s voice reading their paper, and consequently, opportunities for engaging in the circulation of ideas within the presentation (or afterwards) are lost

my hearing is something that bothers other people far more than it bothers me.

Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain.

The physical pressure wave enables perception but does not force it. Listening is active. It allows age, experience, expectation and expertise to influence perception.

Listening has very little definition compared to hearing

an epiphenomenon

Very little of the information transmitted to the brain by the sense organs is perceived at a conscious level

While the rise of writing has, over the centuries, made language increasingly silent, to simply map voice back onto language is ultimately to disregard voice as something more than language, as that which language cannot say.

my voice is not something that I merely have, or even something that I, if only in part, am. Rather, it is something that I do. A voice is not a condition, nor yet an attribute, but an event. It is less something that exists than something which occurs” (4).

In this sense, we might say that defining voice—even as a concrete physiological process—is a deeply rhetorical act.

At the same time, to place voice in opposition to language is clearly not a suitable alternative. As we have seen, such a move risks either reinforcing the dominance of the linguistic ideal or falling back onto essentialized notions of metaphysical presence

For Dolar, these “presymbolic uses of the voice”—forms of voicing that work explicitly against the goals of signification—risk drawing attention to the process and structures of signification itself (29).

In this sense, it seems fair to say—as Dolar suggests—that “if we speak in order to say something, then the voice is precisely that which cannot be said”

In this framework, the voice is no longer a medium for conveying or transmitting language, but rather, in the words of Paul Zumthor, “an unutterability suited to clothing itself in language” (5)—an untterability in which there is always a material excess.

vocality (voice), as a peculiar category of sound that attends speech but also exceeds it, and as a mediated material that pushes the boundaries of human embodiment and agency.

At the very least, they suggest a need for more explicit attention to the role of technology in producing our experience of and relationship to voice in contemporary digital environments.7

voice is often taken up either as a function of song in the so-called non-representational realm of music5 or as a welcome return to rhetoric’s roots in classical oratory and live, embodied speech.

Although the technological literacies of sound, the foundational literacies of the editing software tools, and the time it takes simply to listen actively and hear consciously can pose challenges for writing students and instructors, sonic literacy offers writing students the knowledge and means for producing their own spoken words, their own soundscapes, and situating those projects within larger cultural and political contexts.

Sonic literacy, with its focus on critical listening and speaking, is important to a composition studies curriculum aimed at developing individual and collective voices.

while their use of archival images offers the backing--the logos--for their claims about how quickly and dramatically changes take place when areas undergo rampant development.

Using this man to frame the video creates resonance for students because he is often seen and recognized as one of the many homeless near the university. The eerie soundtrack of singing creates dissonance as an unfamiliar non-Western musical form that imbues the slowed image with deliberate emotion. This lyrical expression and use of sentiment creates a powerful political and cultural statement that relies on sound.

Of course, just as no instrument can be completely in tune, no voice can completely resonate. There are levels of resonation, which are dependent upon cultural context and space. As Miku discovered firsthand, in order to achieve resonance, one must write descriptively and concretely, with special attention to emphasis.

words are alive

claiming that certain individuals cannot "conquer" or tame their own voices:

Even though Christy considers herself a feminist, and writes like a feminist, her default response was to feature the voices of her male friends.

Christy's voice-over narration, including rhetorical questions for the audience and one audible question posed to her interview subjects, provides our only impression of her subjectivity.

Thus, for our students and ourselves there's an aural novelty and particular self-consciousness in hearing one's own female voice, the voice of the ordinarily silent. The politicized silences described by Cheryl Glenn can operate in tactical ways, but an explicit female authorship, which includes the female physical voice, her use of language, and the authorial voice of the script, can become a radical countermove to the silencing effects of often male-dominated mainstream print and film discourses.

As our students have discovered, listening to recordings of oneself inspires a self-conscious perspective (a form of analytical listening) on what's being said, how it's being said, who is saying it, and to whom.

Recently, desktop multimedia tools that focus exclusively on sound sculpting have appeared in operating systems and as free downloads. Even the most rudimentary of these tools allows users to create, capture, import, edit, loop, and layer sound files

Such is the case with more modern digital sound tools that allow us to re-frame and thus enhance sound by splicing, mixing, and layering it. Much like desktop publishing has transformed writers into publishers, digital modes of music distribution (e.g., the MP3) have transformed listeners into DJs or soundscape artists.

Although the ability to use basic sound technologies to reduce background noise and enhance sound levels and quality is important and useful, sound must be captured initially at a high quality (of data-rate and megahertz), with good microphones, and with appropriate input levels; otherwise, the resulting files will be distorted (too loud), inaudible (too soft) or simply of poor quality.

Our lack of earlids becomes more of a concern as our environments grow increasingly louder--a trend far more threatening to our physical well being than the blooming billboards and skylines. Media theorist Arjen Mulder argues that we are taking this general trend for granted, claiming "Our ease of hearing is the true reason why it is so frequently said that we live in a visual culture, but the increase in the number of images over the past century is insignificant compared with the rise of sound levels in the city and countryside. Sound is the blind spot of visual culture..."

We've noticed that when our students create and manipulate sound files, whether in the form of a voice-over narration or soundtrack, that they develop a stronger, more embodied sense of audience and of our popular cultural soundscapes. When they record a voice over, for example, students develop a closer attentiveness to how their words and sentence structures resonate with their own voices and their chosen audiences, and as a result, produce better texts with more awareness of the emotional impact of tone and style.

How then might we critically engage these newer everyday literate practices with our students in the composition classroom?