Listening and becoming through sound: audio autoethnographic collaboration as critical communication pedagogy

Abstract

This performative, dialogic essay and experimental performance in sound for 2+ voices explores collaboration through audio as an embodied and emergent critical communication pedagogy. We frame two audio projects as inherently pedagogical forms of creative inquiry while evoking the uncertainty, joy, and chaos of our evolving processes on the page and in aural resonances. Sound-based collaborations as critical communication pedagogy offer an intimate third space where an expanded “we” emerges and communicates in concert with other environmental actors, such as the seasons, birds, and vibrant matter. Using audio as a uniquely intimate medium, we explore critical inquiry through context-based assemblages of seemingly disparate parts and experiences that coexist and can (re)constitute each other. Voices and sounds become coagentic through affective and material gestures; there are many dramatic movements and messages in play, if only we listen.