The Hills are Alive: Aurality and Multimodality Composition as a Semiotic Resource for Making Meaning… or the Sound of Music

Thoughts on Cynthia L. Selfe’s, "The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing"

In the search for “making meaning and understanding the world,” Selfe suggests that “we pay attention to aurality” (618) (to “that which relates to the ear, the sense of hearing”), as well as writing, “and other composing modalities.” In the twenty-first century, according to Selfe, writing is not a stand-alone method of compositional communication. Instructors must recognize the students’ cultural influences, giving credence to those influences, and allowing for an understanding of how they are reflected in the academic efforts, especially in college composition classrooms, made with those influences in mind. Selfe maintains that students have “fundamental issues of rhetorical sovereignty: the rights and responsibilities…to identify their own communicative needs and to represent their own identitites” (618), adding, “the irony of making an argument about aurality in print is not lost on [her]” (619). Having accepted, in principle, the concept of multiple modalities in composition it may further be argued that the idea of presenting such a composition is still contingent on starting with one or another of the modalities as a stand-alone. Perhaps the idea for a presentation would start with a photograph album to which titles or an abbreviated script may be appended. At that point one might add sound and/or music. Or, one may start with a script to which would be added visuals, audio (including voice-over, sound effects and music). In each case the presentation would entail the starting of the project with an idea that would be organized with a script and the concordant modalities to heighten the effect of the entire opus. The caveat is that well-structured multi-modal presentations require a great deal of planning and effort and the conjoining of the various disciplines can, in some cases, lead to what may be best described as confused results. Nurturing the idea of multiple disciplines in presenting an essay is laudable. Encouragement by the teacher is a small enough price to pay, but is effort alone to be rewarded? Does this make the onus for failure more debilitating? Instead of an harmonious sound of music would there be a discordance that brings originality screeching to a halt?
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