Current Projects
Composing American Harmony
This dissertation centers on harmony as an American civic virtue with important rhetorical resonance. Harmony requires difference to hold together, and is not always pleasant. I pair dissonance--harmony's counterpart--with dissent in rhetoric's literature in order to better account for when dissonance of discourse is divisive or unifying. Using pan-historiographic methodology to examine songs and images, each content chapter works towards establishing harmony and dissonance as musical/rhetorical terms that build relationships between individuals in a civic body. Because harmony and dissonance are most prominent in discourse immediately before and after nationwide conflict, each chapter takes a slice of american history--post-revolution, Reconstruction, and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement--to examine the sights and sounds of harmony and dissonance.
Sonified Space: Sublimity and Gravitational Wave Remixing
With the 2015 detection of gravitational waves, this scientific discovery has been primarily circulated to the public through the sonified data. This chirp--translated from light waves to sound--has been circulated through popular and news media as a means for listening to the cosmos. When articulated by experts, their description of the phenomenon mirrors the rhetoric of sublime as articulated by Longinus. After all, it isn't every day one can hear two black holes colliding and proving the predictions of Albert Einstein correct.
Yet in the campaign to popularize this discovery, the sound is the primary mode of conveying the magnitude of such complicated scientific revelation. By using sound to circulate the scientific to wider lay audiences, the sublimity of sound complicated and potentially lost when remixed into other forms beyond their original contexts. For popular audiences the chirp of black holes colliding is still sublime, but also a source of inventional play (remix) that complicates and potentially reduces the sublimity by rendering the sound malleable and earthly.
Resounding Resonance
A sonic composition project that arose from the 2018 Digital Field Methods Institute at UT Austin, this sonic work sounds out different kinds of sonic resonances that can be found in everyday material environments. By juxtaposing pairs throughout this 5 minute work, the piece encourages audiences to think and embrace the resonances of daily encounter. The recordings used in the piece were made around Austin, TX in July of 2018.
Harmonia from Pythagorean Women
A project in rhetorical reclamation, this article establishes the female teachers in the Pythagorean tradition as rhetors of the sonic, civic, and cosmic intersections. Building on the teachings of Pythagoras, Damo, Pythia, Perictione, and Theano's letters and treatises offer an ancient Greek feminist articulation of rhetoric through harmony.