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The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

ISSN: 2472-7318

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Rainbow wrapped Ride KC streetcar

TRACK 3: RESONANCE

Track 3 Transcript

Featuring Sarah Elizabeth Adams

The timestamps refer to the complete audio. (VO) = audio that was recorded in my home studio and not captured during interview or sampled from elsewhere / (SA) = audio from a scholar sampled from a longer work / (IV) = audio that was created via interview / (CA) = commercial audio sampled through fair use guidelines.

00:00 (SA) Salomé Voegelin: The artistic and political consideration of the sonic slice of the landscape and the urban environment is intriguing in what it reveals, not about itself only, not against the visual, but about the world as a multi-sensory realm, made from the possibility of architectural construction, social interaction, political government and personal participation. ("Aurality and Environment")

00:26 (VO) Abigail Lambke: That was Salomé Voegelin in a clip from “Aurality and the Environment.” And I’m Abigail Lambke. This is track 3 “Resonance” in the webtext “Kansas City Hear I Come: Sonic Curation for Civic Impact.” In Track 3 I provide a philosophic underpinning for the previous two tracks, probing into how sound operates curatorially due its invisibility, participation, interiority, and simultaneity. I do this by building from two main sources: Voegelin quotes, like the one you just heard, or questions from Sarah Adams, who graciously agreed to listen to an early draft of the webtext and then interviewed me about its composition. This webtext is designed to both use sonic curation as a topic and also practice curation with sound throughout. In Track 3 I address the multi-sensory realm of Kansas City as I present it through the Soundscape and Sound Effects tracks. You’ll hear Wilber’s Harrison’s classic “Going to Kansas City,” and then I’ll dive into my explanation of the soundscape.

01:36 (CA) Wilber Harrison – "Going to Kansas City" Lyrics: Going to Kansas City, Kansas City here I come, / Going to Kansas City, Kansas City here I come, / They've got some crazy little women there / And I'm going to get me one. 

02:00 (VO) Abigail Lambke: I seek in this webtext to represent Kansas City: its virtues, tensions, attractions, divisions, and complications. While this project focuses on post-settlement Kansas City, I am aware of the native nomadic peoples of this region, the Missouri, the Osage, the Kaw, the Otoe. I thank them for their stewardship over this land. Also the Kickapoo, the Shawnee, and the Potawatomie, who were relocated first to and then from the region. This sonic webtext is centered on a place, a place that does not given enough attention to those who were here before European settlement. I work in this webtext with my own field recordings and found audio. And because of the nature of this work, I do not have sonic representation of the peoples prior to settlement. I acknowledge this.

02:50 (VO) Abigail Lambke: But it was in consideration of these people and imagining their soundscapes prior to settlement that I decided to begin with the character of nature, and work to represent sounds that would have been present before the Europeans arrived – the quiet sounds of the river, the constant background of birds and insects, the roar of a thunderstorm, the crackling of prairie fire. Voegelin tells us:

03:18 (SA) Salomé Voegelin: Sound as concept invites us into the materiality of things, not to deny the visual but to recommend how we might see. And it transgresses the boundaries between object and thing, looked at and the space and context of its appreciation introducing a sense of simultaneity instead of preexistence and promoting the reading of experience of things as agitational, interventionist, multi-sensory and captious. Sound produces not an object, neither artistic or every day, but invites a generative perception and throws us towards invisible mobility in between what can be seen. ("Aurality and Environment")

04:00 (VO)Abigail Lambke: I composed this soundscape in this webtext parallel to how Voegelin conceives of sound. I focused on characters as I collected it; the main characters are nature, transportation, and culture. But if we consider them as characters, they are forever interacting in dialog and in gesture, or in Voegelin’s words, not preexisting but simultaneous, and thus their representation in sound mirrors their being in the city. Another way to think about simultaneity, in a geographical sense, is confluence. And I consider Kansas City to be a site of confluence – it is where the Kansas and Missouri rivers come together, it is on the state line of Missouri and Kansas, it is a point between the Western prairie grasslands and the eastern deciduous forest of the Ozarks. It is a place in the middle of the country, a place of confluence, of simultaneity. Relying on sound, for me as composer/curator prompted a generative perception, and that's what I sought for the listeners, too. Kansas City, or any city, does not just be, it is brought continually into existence by our daily actions, and always has been. Perhaps nothing showcases that as well as the character of transportation in the soundscape.

05:27 (VO)Abigail Lambke: Major railways came through Kansas City. Two large interstate highways intersect here: I-70 and I-35. I 70 stretches from Utah to Maryland; I-35 from Texas to Minnesota. In the soundscape we hear that intersection and the sound of travel, of large trucks filled of goods, of small trucks of people, of cars and vans and motorcycles. I include other sounds of transport as well: there are my footsteps on a gravel path, cars on the earliest remaining brick road in Kansas City, train whistles in the distance, and the newly built street car that closes the soundscape. These are familiar sounds to many of us, ones that we hear on and with our bodies each day. And yet, even these standard sounds are products of a place, and importantly, people. Sounds of transportation are called into existence by human action. They do not exist separate from people, and if we stopped, the sounds would stop as well. 

06:31 (VO) Abigail Lambke: People are involved in the transportation section, but they are enclosed often in machines, making mechanical sounds. The sounds of culture, another character in the soundscape, speaks more to the part that individuals might play. Voegelin says,

06:48 (SA) Salomé Voegelin: The politics of the sonic engagement is the politics of the invisible. It is not collapsed into the totality of the image and neither does it fulfill preexisting normative codes, but responds to the demand of the dark when we have lost our anchorage in visible things and rules and are forced to suspend our habits and values to listen in order to see the complex polarity of the real as simultaneous possibilities that include also impossibilities that which has no part in a singular actuality and it makes us reconsider the part we play ourselves. ("Aurality and Environment")

07:31 (VO) Abigail Lambke: The part we play ourselves. In sonic curation that's multi-faceted. While doing field recordings, I play the part of receiver, in editing I play the part of composer or curator. When I do this in service to academic scholarship, I am playing a part too, working to contribute to my field, to add something new to our ongoing conversations about rhetoric, about sound, about curation, about multimodality.  I imagine the listener making sense of sounds stripped of much of the visual, what they will need in the dark, often layering those sounds edited together to provoke simultaneity. Sarah Adams hit on this when talking to me.

08:21 (IV) Sarah Elizabeth Adams: Right from the opening of the soundscape, geography was on my mind. Even though I’ve never been to Kansas City, I could feel myself trying to “place” the sounds I was hearing. What would this space look like? Where in town might this be? So geography, of course also comes up in Caro’s discussions about how to get people to cross Troost Avenue to actually come down and visit the museum, where he is kinda thinking through - how do we show people that this place is a safe place. So, what I’m getting at is that I heard space and geography everywhere in this scholarship that you're putting together, so I want to know more about that connection—what does sound, and listening, and sonic curation have to do, do you think, with geography, or space, or place, whatever your preferred term might be?

09:08 (IV) Abigail Lambke: And I conceived this piece to be about Kansas City, it is about sonic curation generally and I think even without ever being to Kansas City you can connect to it and think about those just general issues. Kansas City is, as all cities are, is a geography and a culture and those are two intertwined things, and I try to make that apparent with this idea of confluence - like, it's, it's a coming together, both geographically and culturally.

09:44 (IV) Abigail Lambke: But I think there is something very special about sound is that we try to place it immediately, we want to know where it comes from. If I was like writing an essay, you wouldn't probably care if I wrote it in a coffeeshop or I wrote it in the library, or I wrote in the fields somewhere. But recording set that kind of place. Right, you want to know where it is because it's bringing in the sound waves of the area. But that's not really authentic. We want it to be authentic, but it's not. And I think that's one of those great paradoxes of sound. 

10:17 (IV) Abigail Lambke: These sounds like evoke something but that doesn't necessarily mean they're true. For example, in my piece I use the sound of thunderstorm to do these kinda of moments. I recorded that by balancing my phone in my mail slot. That isn't really important, but it is like the place where that was recorded, was the mail slot of my house. 

10:39 (IV) Sarah Elizabeth Adams: Yeah, yeah. Well, that's interesting. The cell phone in the mail box thing cause I get what you're saying of authenticity of place. I never would have - right, that is not what I'm picturing when I'm picturing that thunderstorm. I'm picturing this kind of wide open space. I don't know where you would have been. But I was picturing that, that field you mentioned earlier, instead of writing. That you pulled over to the side of the road and you are standing in this field as the storm rolls in - but it is actually your mail box. The place that it evokes isn't the real quote unquote real place. 

11:16 (VO) Abigail Lambke: The place, but not the real place. I am playing the part of field recorder, but in this instance, I was not in a field. And yet it is the real sound of real thunder really encompassing the city. I worked to either record sounds myself or source them locally. Also, I focused on sounds important to me, and I find very little as sonically stirring as the crash of a midwestern summer thunderstorm. That booming sound is one felt on the body through the vibrations, but in a multi-sensory sense it is connected strongly to the feel of rain, the anticipation of a cleansing storm, the fear of potential destruction, the smell of ozone and wet grass. I use that sound in the soundscape to signify moments of transition and change. Voegelin speaks about the idea of field recording in another piece, she says,

12:15 (SA) Salomé Voegelin: The field is not a thing over there that I record, it the sphere that surrounds me. And so when I bring you my recording, I do not bring you the field alone, but myself, plunked right in the middle of that field for you to here also. In that sense, my field recordings sound me and you listen to my field in which you now sit with me. This inhabited field of field of sound is perspectiveless, there is no distance. What I hear and record is not the distance between things that sound but the thing that sounds as distance. The recorded field is not about the over there but about the sounds themselves and how I hear them here in my ears on my body and how you regenerate them on your body that listens and hears in the soundscape itself. In the sonic field the visual field vanishes into a sensorial simultaneity that signifies the reciprocity between myself and my environment. ("The Uses and Abuses of Field Recording").

13:18 (VO) Abigail Lambke: So in my soundscape, I bring you not only the sound of a June thunderstorm, but the sounds of myself. I heard those sounds on and with my body, and now you’ve heard them on yours, if you listened to it. And in listening to Kansas City, you’ve brought elements of that city (a city  perhaps you’ve never visited) into yourself and your body as well. You’ve become a part of the confluence, the coming together of Kansas City. And it being part of the confluence, you are also part of the divisions. Count Basie’s “I Left My Baby” will play us out. Next, I’ll encounter this idea of division again.

13:58 (CA) I Left My Baby – Count Basie - minor key, piano and then trumpet comes in.

14:22 (VO)Abigail Lambke: The confluence of the Kansas and the Missouri is what attracted Lewis and Clark and early settlement to Kansas City although G. S. Griffin purposefully reminds us in the book Racism in Kansas City, that it was not Lewis and Clark alone, but a group of 34 people including slaves who traveled. Including York, whose lifetime owner was William Lewis (Griffin 1). As much as Kansas City is about confluence and coming together, it is about a deliberate, and often debilitating separation. There is the separation of states and the mentalities between Kansas and Missouri that goes back before statehood to the violent question of slavery. You know that nickname Bleeding Kansas? Yeah, Missourians were mainly responsible for the bleeding. Quick American history lesson: Missouri entered the union as a slave state, as part of the Maine-Missouri compromise. Kansas wanted to be a free state. Blood was shed, on both sides. That has not been forgotten.

15:22 (VO)Abigail Lambke: The soundscape offers a perspective on these divisions as they factor into the character of culture. In the track, I included clips to evoke food and drink, and music, and sports of the region. In the piece I have sounds of Gates barbecue “May I Help You,” a tagline repeated frequently in their establishments. As Ralph Caro says in "Sound Effects" – barbecue and music are the reasons people cross Troost. And Ollie Gates, owner of Gates barbecue, is a leader in the community who has used his position to lead initiatives on the east side (Shortridge 177). There is also music: the Walter Page’s Blue Devils, a Kansas City band, the musical tribute to the city manager LP Cookingham played in Loose Park, Marva Whitney ‘s funk “Daddy Don’t Know about Sugar Bears” on the KC label Forte, the Kansas City hip hop icon Tech N9ne’s song “It’s Alive.” Voeglins tell us,

16:17 (SA) Salomé Voegelin: The soundscape as an aural environment offers an alternative perspective on the landscape and the urban scape and even their terminology; the notion of the scape as scenery and terrain is being reframed in a new light by listening’s focus on the invisible, the mobile, and the ephemeral.("Aurality and Environment")

16:38 (VO) Abigail Lambke: And my soundscape is not just environment but also a mash up of culture that lives within the city as place. While not exactly parallel with Voegelin’s work, it too has listening’s focus on the invisible and the mobile, the movement between landscape and urban scape, but with a focus on the sometimes invisible hand of history.

17:02 (VO) Abigail Lambke: Take Tom Pendergast for example, who's mentioned in the Sound Effects track. Pendergast ran the political machine in Kansas City in the first few decades of the 20th century. He was never elected, but held great sway in the city and the state, arguably helping Harry Truman get elected president. It is said that Pendergast did not allow Prohibition to happen in Kansas City, keeping the city, as they say, “wide open.” Kansas City is nicknamed the Paris of the Plains, and there are two explanations for that. One is that the city includes a number of boulevard and parks, much like Paris. But the other explanation has to do with the so-called sin industry here, the drinking, and gambling, and prostitution that was encouraged by Pendergast and was also akin to Paris. You’ll hear the sound of cards, and drinks, and coins in the soundscape, trailing off before the clean-up jingle.

18:01 (VO) Abigail Lambke: While Pendergast contributed to the rise of Kansas City, he also instituted many aspects that perpetuated divisions. He located many of his funded establishments in black areas of town, reinforcing the perception of black people as lawless and sinful. Did this help Jazz develop in Kansas City? By many accounts, yes (Shortridge 2; Clifford-Napoleone 21). There was always work here, gigs to play, liquor to drink. But even when Pendergast fell to the charge of income tax evasion in 1939, many of the associations remained. I include “Clean Up Kansas City” ad in the soundscape. It's undated in the Marr Sound Archives, but here, I want it to represent the “clean up” that happened in the post-Pendergast era. This is when L.P. Cookingham was hired, and the budgets and priorities shifted in KC. The decades following Pendergast was a time were many traditions in Kansas City were whitewashed and the sin industry and its role in the development of the city downplayed. One way to do that was to place blame on the black community, to reinforce the associations between race and poverty and race and crime (Clifford-Napoleone 21, Schirmer 173). Hence the continuing divisions in the city.

19:17 (VO) Abigail Lambke: Chuck Haddix’s co-authored book on Kansas City - Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop, a History, offers a detailed account of the musical moments in Kansas City. It explains Pendergast, and the industries he created in ways that do not try to sanitize it into a wholesome experience. And yet, in mentioning his book, I also have to mention Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender Performance and the History of a Scene, a book by by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone, She argues how Chuck Haddix’s co-authored book on jazz can be read as marginalizing the role of women and gender-play in the jazz clubs (Clifford-Napoleone 77). Queering Kansas City Jazz explains how the clubs were advertised as pretty much white male paradises, at the expense of women and people of color (Clifford-Napoleone 7). Reading Kansas City through a queer lens demonstrates the undercurrents of patriarchy and subjugation that fueled jazz while also monetizing it. And possibly you don't hear that as you listen to jazz; it's part of the invisible world that goes along with it. The invisible world of history that made Kansas City jazz possible and vibrant. 

20:34 (VO) Abigail Lambke: The final point of culture has to go with the sports of the town. The professional football team, the Chiefs, have been in the running for loudest stadium, and held the record recently. I put in one of their loudest moments in the soundscape, right after the induction of Mayor Bartle, who was nicknamed “The Chief” and allegedly, the team was named after. Although, the iconography that uses Native headdress and stadium named Arrowhead implies appropriating the implied warrior aspect of native people and not Mayor Bartle at all.

21:07 (VO) Abigail Lambke: We also have the Royals chant - they're the baseball team. Later, you hear the Sporting KC (or SKC, as they say in the chant), that's the local major league soccer club, fervently supported in the city. In fact, James Shortridge says that the professional sports teams do more to unite Kansas City than anything else except maybe barbecue (204).

21:28 (VO) Abigail Lambke: Now, while I work to represent Kansas City, please know that I do not intend this as comprehensive. The more I explored the sounds of Kansas City and how sound is curated here, the more I realized that it is impossible to be comprehensive. That in listening to the city, I was listening to myself. 

21:47 (SA) Salomé Voegelin: In other words, listening to the field, I hear myself as a sonic subject. As a social subject, defined and generated through my interaction with the acoustic environment understood as the listened to world. ("The Uses and Abuses of Field Recordings")

22:00 (VO) Abigail Lambke: I am in these recordings, all over them, and cannot but be. I cannot present a sonic Kansas City that is not from my perspective, I cannot create field recordings in which I am not present. So, following Voeglin, I want to acknowledge the part I play as recorder and editor in presenting this possible sonic world. Curation, too, is as much about including as it is about omitting. John Potter writes about curation in that it is not just writing or production, but about collecting, distributing, assembling, disassembling, and moving media artifacts (5), and that curation means an active practice that contains all of those practices to make something that is more than its parts (xvi). That’s what I’ve attempted with my soundscape, and what I witnessed in speaking with those engaged in sonic curation at the Marr Sound Archives and the American Jazz Museum.

22:58 (VO) Abigail Lambke: That personal aspect, particularly as it touches on listening, is what you will encounter next, after this transition from Big Joe Turner, one of Kansas City’s blue shouters.

23:11 (CA)  Big Joe Turner "When I Get the Blues" Crowd cheers. Lyrics: Now when I get the blues, get me a rocking chair / (music start - guitar prominent) Now when I get the blues, get me a rocking chair / Move it over baby, going to rock right away from here.  / Now when I get lonesome I jump on the telephone / Now when I get lonesome I jump on the telephone...

23:37 (VO) Abigail Lambke: When we are talking about sonic curation, one of the central things to understand is listening. Listening, as a concept, is one that is of growing importance in rhetoric. We have Krista Radcliffe’s theory of rhetorical listening and more recently, Steph Ceraso writing about pedagogy and embodied listening. And listening is not just the taking in of aural information, what Ceraso calls “ear-ing.” The idea of listening broader than that. It involves our selves as bodies, ourselves as members of a society. And that idea of listening is crucial for all parts of this webtext. Listening is embedded into sonic curation; listening is needed for civic impact. Sarah Adams asked me about this in her interview.

24:27 (IV) Sarah Elizabeth Adams: Ok, so I want to stick with that moment for a second, so this moment where you’re listening to exhibits in the American Jazz Museum with your friend. So, you go to this place, you listen with a friend and that shapes your listening experience, like it seems to really energize your listening practice in that museum. And Caro mentions moments, too, of listening with someone else, with others. He mentions performances before city council meetings, and he also says that he never misses the First Fridays which it sounds to me like it takes place in the museum’s atrium, where he can kinda gather with other community members and listen to performances and listen to children and families learning about jazz. So, those are moments, too, where he, like you, seems really energized and excited by listening. You hear something just a little bit different, maybe, in your voices when you two talk about those moments. So I’m wondering what listening together might have to do with the civic impact of curated sound. How does the way you listen to sound—and who you listen with—at the archives or at the American Jazz Museum contribute to or maybe inhibit those programs’ civic impact?

25:35 (IV) Abigail Lambke: Yeah, I think that is a really interesting observation and a good one. And I think it is a lot clearer in the museum because it is about display and about exhibition. So it is about showing or sharing with the community the sort of communal moments of listening - you do it together. And hopefully invite diverse people into it to share this moment. Most of what they focus on in the Jazz Museum is like the '30s '40s and '50s. Some later stuff too but a lot of that early work in jazz. And so they want people to come together and listen. But a lot of it too is separate, like you are listening through your own headphone at the same time. Me and my friend were listening together. We would each have a headphone and we would have it and we would be kinda talking at the same time.

26:28 (IV) Abigail Lambke: I think what your question makes me think of is - what happens to a sound file when you are not listening to it. Or like a record or a tape. Right. If it just there it's this a repository of something. It's like a closed book; you can't see what is in it. But one of the things about sound is that we can listen together in a way we can't read together. We can share this moment. We might all be experiencing it differently because of different abilities or cultural understanding or connection or just pleasure, right, but we are in the same moment together - you can't do that with reading. And when you are doing it as a community - if you think about a concert or this sort of First Friday's thing - you're having that sort of moment if you think about a crowd laughing together, or shouting, I've done some work on protest this idea of group shouting and how that binds you together in a way that can be terrible or can be great depending on your perspective of what is being shouted and its repercussions.

27:40 (IV) Abigail Lambke: I think when it comes to sonic curation, you get this difference between the museum and the archive in that for one the museum is about display and performance but it is also - we get this a lot with what Caro says - about revenue - they need people to come, and they need people to be engaged. And, so they intensify those moments, and I don't say that to cast aspersions, they want to have these intense moments, they want to bring people together both because they think it is a good thing, but also to bring people to the museum, right. They need revenue streams, they need people to come. In the archives they don't need that - they are in a state school, they don't need people to have that communal listening. And they are also more about preservation, they are keeping that for the future. And so maybe they are working on radio shows or music or things that people might not want to listen to now, but they will in 30 years. Like I put that piece in the soundscape from the "Clean Up Kansas City" ad,

28:45 (IV) Sarah Elizabeth Adams: I love that, yeah

28:48 (IV) Abigail Lambke: I have some feeling there were some decades were people were like "why are we keeping this?" But now, many years later, its like this thing brings out a whole dimension that we don't get in radio jingles anymore. So it's more about preservation and not so much about communal experience.

29:10 (IV) Sarah Elizabeth Adams: So many the civic impact there is a future promised civic impact where the museum can offer one right now, a more immediate one? 

29:23 (IV) Abigail Lambke: And yet, I wanted to present in this webtext how both places – archive and museum – in their curation of sound, work to do something beyond the obvious. They are not just preserving or presenting for the sake of preservation or presentation. These actions intersect with views in the community and have real effects on real lives. I think of the woman Haddix mentions who wanted to listen to her musician friend’s music while in hospice. Or those teachers Caro talks about who had never been to the museum, but might now integrate it in as a field trip and introduce their students to the history of jazz. Listening in those moments connects people to the past but also with the future and the future of the community. And I think there is something special about sound in these endeavors, a way that sound – spoken, or recorded, or musical – opens up the past as a place to listen to. Voeglin says -

30:27 (SA) Salomé Voegelin: So listening generates place, the field of listening continually from my hearing of myself within that space within a dynamic relationship of all that sounds, the temporary connections we make with other listeners, with things, with spaces. So my hearing hears connections, not things connected and as it always includes my agency of listening, my agency of connecting as the motion that produces the field temporarily, invisibly. ("The Uses and Abuses of Field Recording")

30:58 (VO) Abigail Lambke: These invisible connections that form while listening can be transformative. Because it is in being connected to people and the past that we can learn from it and grow as a community. And yet, with sound, or with any type of curation that privileges a sense, it is necessary, always, to think about accessibility. Sarah Adams talked with me about this too.

31:25 (IV) Sarah Elizabeth Adams: I was so happy to hear that Ralph Caro at the American Jazz Museum is thinking about how the museum needs to change in order to ensure that disabled folks can fully access their exhibits and events. Recent sound studies scholarship and rhetorical scholarship, too, is invested in accessibility. What do you think work in sound studies and in rhetorical scholarship might offer folks thinking about access to sonic archives, museums, these kind of curated places?

32:00 (IV) Abigail Lambke: I think this is a really important question and one I should think more about. I think the immediate answer is transcripts, and Derek Long, I don't think this made it into the final piece, talks to me some about that, that they want to get more of their work, more of the things in the archive transcribed so that people will know what’s there, before they listen. Both for those have any sort of impediment to hearing but also students doing research so they can find it quickly.

32:26 (IV) Abigail Lambke: But there is so much that can be left out, I think, in a transcription. I did this soundscape for the RSA proceedings a while back, and there are several soundscapes in it, and they have a document that has all of the transcripts on it, all together, and I look at that and it is amazing how different they are. Everybody's kinda doing something different with transcription. And some of them are incredibly detailed and interesting - mine isn't, mine is pretty basic - but other people do these things like they indicate when sounds get quieter or louder, or there is a pause or they have some sort of - they have a drum in the background and they are doing something that is much more interesting and I think accessible than just writing down the words. And I'm hoping that is the direction we'll go.

33:21 (IV) Abigail Lambke: I think for a museum, after Ralph Caro was talking to me about this, I was thinking about how to make it tactile as well, because so much of music is tactile. It is when you are playing it, right you have the strings, you have the reed, you have the movement but also listening to it. You have the feeling of it in your body. And right now I don't get that when I go to the museum, and I think there is someway they could evoke that in some fashion to show the sort of tactile nature of music - and jazz. I think jazz itself - you know there's so much movement in it! The movement in the music; there is so much movement that can't be captured - certainly not by a straight transcript. Maybe by some sort of transcript that I haven't encountered yet that shows that type of movement. But I feel like there is a lot more work to do there. I feel like Steph Ceraso is doing that work, some of it. I would look to her for more answers than me. But, it is something I think about. 

34:24 (IV) Abigail Lambke: I was thinking about it particularly for the soundscape I did for this piece. I'm redesigning the transcript now so that it is, it shows more of the layering that happens and not just straight linear - this happens for these seconds. I'm trying to color code it too, so that you can see how these things mesh together. But I'm struggling - I'm doing it in Excel right now, but that is not the right program. And I have to figure out how to code it, eventually. So there are a couple of barriers. Right. There are barriers to making these things accessible. It's worth getting through those barriers, but it is hard when you are trying to conceptualize it immediately.

35:06 (VO) Abigail Lambke: Clearly, I value sound and I want to think about sound as a modality and use my voice as aspects of sound as part of my scholarship. And yet, I am aware I do this with a level of physical ability that is not shared by everyone. This piece has a transcript – perhaps you are reading it right now – that is intended to make it more accessible. And I’ve worked harder in this piece - learning from what I've done before that might be insufficient - to include more than just words, but a sense of sounds as well. And I really hope to see this accessibility grow as we keep creating more rhetorics of multimodality. 

35:49 (VO) Abigail Lambke: We’ll hear Mary Lou Williams on the piano playing “Little Joe from Chicago” and then my conclusion about what is distinct about sonic curation.

35:59 (CA) Mary Lou Williams "Little Joe from Chicago" Vibrant piano playing, no lyrics

36:14 (VO) Abigail Lambke: I want to conclude Track 3 by summarizing what makes sonic curation distinct. (If you are looking for a thesis, perhaps this is it, more than 1 hour of intended listening in.) All curation is personal. All archives work to collect and preserve for a community. All museums want revenue and to have an interactive experience that lures people back again and again. But, I’ll describe three elements that set sonic curation apart, all having to do with invisibility, participation, interiority, and simultaneity as they intersect with music and time. 

36:53 (VO) Abigail Lambke: First – sonic curation encompasses music. Sonic recordings and curation are a way to capture the love that people in a culture have for music. The music itself can be invisible, but it still functions as a place to participate together, to come together in joy. It can reach across divisions; it can be a magnet to bring people somewhere they may not otherwise go. And jazz is emblematic of that. Jazz, soul, blues, they are significant in the history of people and of black people in this country, in the incorporation of African roots and slave chants, of creating something new and different as the country changed. And you have to listen, and not just know it exists. A history of culture that does not have music in it is an incomplete one.

37:51 (VO) Abigail Lambke: Second – sound requires time. The space of sound, of music, it's not a physical space but a temporal one. To listen, you have to experience the sounds in their chronological order. Sure, you can speed it up or slow it down if you have access to the right tech. Sure, a visual- or experience-oriented museum or archive also requires time. But unlike, say, paper archives, you can’t quickly page through and skim something and get the sense of a sonic recording. You have to slow down and listen at the proper speed. 

38:29 (VO) Abigail Lambke: That's why one of my favorite aspects of the American Jazz Museum is that there is no time bar when you're listening to recordings – you don’t know where you are in a song. To those of us used to digital recordings, or even analog ones, it is almost unnerving. But it is also liberating. And the more I listen and learn about jazz, the more I think that it is tied to time, or maybe unanchored from time, in a way that other genres may not be. While a track maybe be pre-existing, when jazz musicians play they put it together simultaneously, in a way that is sonic and multi-sensory. 

39:07 (VO) Abigail Lambke: That's why, I think, Caro wants people to come and listen to the live experiences at the museum, not just for the revenue possibilities, but because jazz, as a genre of music, should be shared in the moment, simultaneous, with the performers and the others around you.

39:27 (VO) Abigail Lambke: Third and final – sound comes from inside and then goes inside of others. It is about the interior – think of a guitar – the interior of an acoustic guitar determines what it sounds like for the listeners. And when you listen to a voice, you are listening to breath that has moved inside someone. You are listening to the way their vocal folds are positioned. And the act of listening is one where the vibrations enter you, they come into your body. That vibrational act of sound is one Steph Ceraso talks about in multimodal listening. It is one Salomé Voeglin mentions regarding field recordings and soundscape. This interior of sound is something that makes the curation difficult, because it is sometimes synonymous with invisibility; you can’t see what a track might hold before you press play. But that interiority also makes sonic experiences rewarding, because in listening, you can open up.

40:29 (VO) Abigail Lambke: And with that, thank you for listening. The final track is called “Frequency” and in it I’ll provide further insight into choices made in editing and designing this piece. To play us out we have Jay McShann with his version of “Going to Kansas City.”

40:43 (CA)  Jay McShann " Going to Kansas City" Piano, high hat, drums prominent. Lyrics: Well, standing on the corner, of 12th street and Vine / Well, standing on the corner, of 12th street and Vine / With my Kansas City woman, a bottle of Kansas City wine / Well, I might take a train, take a plane  / If I have to walk I'm going just the same / Going to Kansas City, Kansas City here I come...