Sound

Sound Engineering: Toward a Theory of Multimodal Soundness (2006)

Shipka (2006) is a professor of a first year composition course in which she allows her students the freedom to choose "their mix of materials, methodologies, technologies and rhetorical strategies" in her open ended assignments. Two students chose to use sound as their method for composing and her purpose is to show that their text is "sound in the sense of being purposeful, rigorously crafted, or soundly constructed."
Her class is unique because it allows the students to choose their mode of communicating. They determine their materials, resources, etc. to communicate their assigned task. Part of their assignment is to list several possibilities in order for them to be flexible and open to methods they may not have used before.
The two sound projects that she shared with us were definitely complex. The one where the student wrote his own music using the dictionary to create 3/4 of his text shows how not just the words he fit together to be the lyrics, but how the rhythms and melodies supported the points he wanted to make in the goals he set, getting his point across. For example, he felt writing about compounds would be tedius and produce lyrics that were hard to listen to so he also made the melody hard to listen to by making it a bad heavy metal song.
The museum of greed used sound to meet the goals of getting the audience excited with an exciting song--music heard at sports events "to get adrenaline flowing" , or lack of sound to "make it dull."
By looking at her assignments, I feel that she made sure that the work produced would be "sound" and rigorously crafted in all these ways because she asked her students to follow a specific process to guide their decisions and all of her assignments required students to respond to a set of questions that made sure they followed the process. The examples above show how the two students fulfilled her requirements of thinking in depth about why they chose to use the materials, and what sound would do better than other material choices. The students were required to justify why this method of composition was the best way, and in this way their product was "purposeful."
I think that her students definitely exposed to a variety of modes of composing, and like how at the end of the semester, they could choose someone else's work, or their own to decontextualize and reproduce. What a great way for students to see other ways they could have gotten their message across using different types of text.