Auditory Epideictic

Soundmarks can be described as structures of feeling. They are also enthymematic, and quite important in the rhetorical construction of place.

What does it mean, then, that our soundscapes are becoming increasingly homogeneous? Stores with similar soundscapes, for example, flatten the rhetorical effects of different soundmarks. If places are rhetorical constructions, what effect comes from this trend? What effects for “structures of feeling?” Does it stunt our sense of rhetorical variation?

Intersting that malls are now structures of “relaxation.” See the Ferndale note, and also consider airports.

“Tuning into London c. 1600,” Bruce R. Smith

Smith presents three principles that drives his own historical inquiry into sound. These three reasons also cover rhetorical studies, as well as the humanities as a whole. I want to adopt Smith’s principles as the exigence for my own work with sound.

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“The Auditory Markers of the Village,” Alain Corbin

The emotional impact of a bell helped to create a territorial identity for individuals living in range of its sound. When they heard it ringing, villagers, townsfolk, and those ‘in the trades’ in the centres of ancient towns experienced a sense of being rooted in space that the nascent urban proletariat lacked. (117)

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I am interested in sounds and place because they are an example of mass rhetorical markers. Sounds are distributed, yet they work as a semi-whole.

They’re “accidental enthymemes” insofar as they have no real center of intentionality, yet they still mark out rhetorical meanings of place.

• street sounds
• how sounds work as an enthymeme
• using sounds to create (new) image?
• the creation of an image through sounds?
• street sounds as renewal enthymeme

Charting the rhetorical operation of “street sound,” especially in the active deployment of its effects on civic renewal. Street sound as enthymematic, though a shifting association changes the structured (enthymematic) response.

Street Sounds, Enthymeme, and Civic Identity:

Enthymeme Pitch Shifts: Rhetorics of Sound and Civic Identity

More on enthymeme and epideictic.

Sounds can serve more of a soundsploitation than a trigger, even a causation that draws together articulations. It is an intensifier, rather than a causal operation. This changes (slightly? maybe?) the role of the audio rhetor. What is she roaming to find? Does sound generate or does it solidify/jell together?

Let’s catch up, since this is a work beginning in medias res. This piece is about sounds and the rhetorical construction of civic identity, or the way that places (cities, for example) cobble together popular perceptions of those places as (re)vital(ized) spaces. “Urban renewal” is one way of naming this move, though I don’t think it is limited to urban renewal efforts.

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