Teaching "sonic literacy" Comstock, M., & Hocks, M. E. (2006). Voice in the cultural soundscape: Sonic literacy in composition studies. Computers and Composition. Retrieved May 7, 2007 from http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/comstock_hocks/index.htm

    Attending to how students' writing “sounds” leads students to adopt audience perspectives. In working with college students’ audio productions, Comstock and Hocks (2006) describe their students’ enhanced audience awareness:

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. They are also more apt to see composing as an iterative process that requires

listening, getting feedback, revising, and starting over again. (p. 6)

    Comstock and Hocks argue that employing digital sound tools requires the use of “sonic literacy” as “a critical process of listening to and creating embodied knowledge, of understanding our soundscapes as cultural artifacts, of achieving resonance with particular audiences, and of developing the technological literacies involved in recording, amplifying, layering, and mixing sound” (p. 6).

    In their teaching of “sonic literacy” to college students, they begin with focusing on listening critically to material to develop an ear for effective use of audio production techniques. For example, in one of their assignments, they ask students to create “a documentary on a campus and/or community figure, organization, movement, event, or issue” p. 6). Based on research and interviews for this documentary, they then create a script that includes a voice-over narrative script.

    To understand how to create a voice-over narrative, students listen to radio shows or view documentaries to attend to the performance and technical aspects of the use of sound. In writing their scripts, students listen to performances of the scripts and then revise their scripts to improve the performance. When they then begin to edit their documentaries, they consider how their audio track meshes with the video track.