Sound Matters

I hope you all had a fun and relaxing spring break. Today’s lack of sun makes the return to campus a bit more difficult, but I hope today’s lesson on Heidi McKee’s Sound Matters: Notes toward the analysis and design of sound in multimodal webtexts, will be entertaining as well as informative and make up for the dreary weather.

This most interesting lesson comes courtesy of James Roller, who will be leading our discussion in person during the 2:00 class session. Below is how I will structure Mr. Roller’s lesson at 1:00. He may organize things a bit differently at 2:00.

To start, we will get into four groups and each group will review the article to find the answers to two of the following questions (about 10 minutes). I will take questions five and six, as they are review of the Manovich’s principles, which we discussed earlier in the semester. As we review our answers to the questions, we will use the videos below to discuss each of McKee’s four elements of sound.

1. From what approaches does McKee draw to discuss her four-part schema?
2. What are the four parts to McKee’s schema?
3. Why does Helen Van Dongen think it is impossible to talk about a movie’s soundtrack separately from its visual elements?
4. What do Kress and Van Leeuwen mean when they argue for “an integrated semiosis?”
5. In order, what are Lev Manovich’s five principles of new media?
6. What is modularity?
7. What does McKee assert we must consider when analyzing webtexts?
8. What does McKee identify as the qualities of vocal delivery?
9. What are Copeland’s three planes?
10. What main purposes does McKee suggest sound effects serve?

Vocal Quality

Music

Sound Effects

Silence