Portfolio 2: Composing with the Aural Mode + Rationale

In Steph Ceraso's paper "(Re)Educating the Senses: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Learning, and the Composition of Sonic Experiences," he discusses how multimodal listening is to experience sound with more than one sense- for example, feel the vibrations in the sound or move your body with the sound. Ceraso also included an example where they found they enjoyed a certain album more after experiencing it in a multimodal form at a live concert. In my own private life, I love music and actually had a conversation with a friend recently about how musical performances and songs can have textures. I wanted to express this sensation of "musical texture" for my project, but couldn't do it in words, so decided to use video as an aural and visual mode to demonstrate multimodal listening in terms of "musical texture".

I first created a playlist of live versions of songs I love, each that have a different "texture" and feel to them that makes them wonderful examples with which to practice multimodal listening. I then went back and downloaded an .mp4 file of each of the videos and edited them so that a small clip of each would be present in a shorter, ~3 minute long video. This way, they would be more palatable for musical and visual consumption. I also included a title slide before each clip introducing the song and saying what kind of texture I "hear" it as. I then created a "cover" and "tracklist" for the video using an online photo collage website.

In the video, I included clips from five different performances, each with a unique texture. For example, the first clip, a live performance of "Sadistic Desire" from 1989, features heavy rhythm guitar contrasted with rapid drum beats and high-pitched vocals. The contrast between the deep, throbbing rhythm guitar and frantic vocals, interspersed with the low whine of the lead guitar creates a sort of "aural dissonance" that I can only describe as crunchy.

Or, for another example, the live performance of "Requiem" includes not just the singer and musicians, but also an array of dancers, men in gold paint shooting arrows into the audience, a clown, crossdressers, some kind of box being set on fire, and more. In this way, the music is not just a sonic experience, it's very much integrated into a visual and kinetic multimodal experience as well. The warmth of the saxophone leading into guitar, backed with steady percussion combines with the visuals to create a full-figured, rounded, warm multimodal listening experience, conjuring the sensation of brass, or warm copper. To tie this composition in with previous works, I continued using the themes of music and foreign language learning. All the songs presented are in Japanese and are, to state the obvious, music. In addition, a task for this assignment was to incorporate our compositions with some sort of social cause we are passionate about.

I changed my mind several times on what social cause I wanted my project to reflect. At the time of making this composition, my main focus for the project would be on improper access to mental health care/treatment in the US. Therefore, all the songs in the video are about or deal with themes of mental illness. Sadistic Desire and Baroque are about homicidal impulses, The Final is about suicide/shooting oneself in the head, and Solitude and Requiem are about isolation, despair, loneliness, and death.