One of the problems all Lecturers face, is finding ways in which we can encourage all students to participate in class. In teaching Sound and Music, this often relies on speech to verbalise the intangible: as sound is an invisible art form. Within UAL, Sound is often held to the parameters of visual arts, which places it at a disadvantage unless the process of creating and experiencing sound can be articulated and transmitted.

The experiencing of sound can occur both through a cerebral process and through a physiological or sensory process. There can be hesitancy in students as they must first acquire the terminology to ascribe these subtle state changes, that occur internally from an invisible external prompt. We design our curriculum to support the learning of terms and acquiring of language. The classical modes of music notation form a language to describe the invisible, sound, but this language has become elitist as education cuts now mean this is not taught in mainstream education through primary and secondary school.

Within my department I suggested a collaboration a few years ago with the Language school to form a discussion group for international students called “Sound as a Second Language”, as an initiative for decolonising the curriculum. I noted international students had additional barriers to this verbalising of the invisible, but once they have the vocabulary, students still need to develop confidence in using their voice. It is not only an exercise in vocabulary, but a more complex problem which involves the voicing of the invisible, through expressing internal experiences to external stimuli, and feeling supported to explore individual voicing and experience within this.

Sound Art “engages in its invisible and mobile meaning and materiality, and it further considers how subjectivity is constituted in this sonic sphere. It does so not to oppose visual signification and identity but to challenge their singularity”.

– Salome Voegelin, Sonic Senses: The Meaning of the Invisible, (2021) p.349

The voicing of the invisible art form becomes a skill that can not only transmit experience, enhancing the study in this field, but also increase the visibility of the participant within the university, enabling tutors to gather data and feedback to develop teaching.

Paradoxically, the voicing of this artform, sound, can also heighten self-awareness through its inherently self-reflexive nature and thereby result in self-consciousness. This, in turn, can lead to lack of confidence in exploring the sounding on sound, whether in discussion or in creative work, and a student’s progress in acquiring and implementing language skills in connection to subject specific terms can be impacted.

The Voice as a Conduit for Agency:

How do we support students to have more agency to use their voices in class, both in discussion on sound and in their creative sound work?

The hierarchy of the classroom is not unlike the hierarchy of the performance space, and this is a familiar template for all sound and music students, it’s useful to use this as a model in developing agency for students to use their voices. The hierarchy of the performance space can be analysed in terms of agency within the cultural model of disability (Gilson and DePoy, 2000; Linton, 1998), within the ‘Sonic Sensibility’ proposed by Vogelin (2019) to reframe the politics of visibility, and the sonic emancipatory lens of LaBelle (2018), which Renel (2019) describes as “considering forms of sonority through which people negotiate systems of normativity and power”. In this project we can disrupt the hierarchies of the classroom space by holding the workshops within a performance space, where the activities will be designed with a democratic approach to allow the voice of participants to literally and figuratively emerge.

This study is important because it can help us understand the results from different approaches in cognitive exercises related to voicing the invisible in discussion, and creatively in Sound Art academic work. Without the confidence to use their voice, a student is left without agency both in their creative sound work, in discussions and debates with their peers, and in their voicing of feedback to teaching staff. In turn, this points to a missed opportunity for feedback for teaching staff to work with.

This action research project takes three approaches overall:

1. Can we facilitate students to use their voices more in their creative work?
2. Can we facilitate students to use their voices more in class?
3. Can we support students’ in gaining confidence through increasing wellbeing with group singing?

Can we facilitate students to use their voices more in their creative work?

This is an important question to address, in several ways. In the practical sense, facilities become threatened of students do not use them, due to overall constraints in the University on space and budgets. When Sound and Music students are encouraged to use their voice creatively, they are also being encouraged to use studio recording facilities to record their voice, which can direct them away from working entirely at home on their laptops, engaging them with the facilities and the skills necessary for professional audio production in future.

It also develops their creative identity, as identity and voice can be explored in tandem due to the inherent link between voice and identity. Students who use their voice in recordings access theory on artistic identity, as well as the political and cultural positionality of the voice. By collectively engaging students in the scholarly activity of using the voice in a group setting, we can scaffold the structures for their independent study to pursue their creative use of the voice.

This builds on the concept of collectively engaging students in this scenario set out by Korsgard: “In this way, the subject matter—when it enters the classroom—escapes proprietary laws. It suffers a didactical reduction, which not only liberates it from its regular function in everyday life, but also sets it free and makes it common.”

– Korsgaard, M. T. (2018). Education and the concept of commons. A pedagogical reinterpretation. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(4), 445–455. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1485564

Freeing the use of the voice through collectively engaging students in using it as a scholarly activity sets the notion of using the voice free for students to feel they have a proprietary right to use their voice creatively. The most common statement I hear from new participant in vocal workshops is that they have once been told they couldn’t sing and therefore never sang in public again, their proprietary right to use their own voice taken away by a vocal judgement of it. This Action research project is important in addressing this idea of ‘permission’, as something we can collectively approach to disrupt the performance hierarchies and regain the right to use our voices creatively.

Can we facilitate students to use their voices more in class?

As a Lecturer, I have witnessed the cohorts where there are a few dominant voices, and the impact this has on both engagement, achievement and expectations. When there are a few dominant voices in class discussions often other students lapse into a habit of allowing those to speak at the expense of their own voice being heard. This may lead to a lack of engagement with the material, and therefore impact on the grade they achieve. Ultimately this may cause a disparity and difficulties in managing expectations from students related to the grade they achieve, those whose voices have dominated discussion may perceive themselves as contributing more and deserving of a higher mark in comparison to students who do not speak as much in class discussions.

I have previously addressed this in my planning by designing activities that require all voices to participate in class. One of the more successful of these was the use of available texts written by authors, with students extracting words of significance to them and learning to use the microphone with their voice to perform a collective performance of a soundscape made from these words.

This has led to the design of these workshops for this Action Research project, where we expand to use scores with texts by composers who address the sounding of the invisible within accessible scores (not reliant on classical notation due to private tuition now being a requirement for learning this). The experimental choir workshops allow for the use of the voice to become the sole focus of the workshops as they are extra curricular and therefore we are able to explore this use of the voice more broadly and in more detail than in class.

We can connect the commoning practices in education mentioned above with the Lundy model of participation as described by Moreno-Romero et al: the four elements in the Lundy model of participation are set in a logical chronological order: space, voice, audience and influence. In this ethnographic approach, they state “the active listening and critical thinking practices, make it possible for young people to consolidate a safe space to share with others who embody their participation as an audience to influence classmates and stakeholders, aiming at making their needs be heard, respected, and addressed while at the same time benefiting the school community as a whole”.

-Moreno-Romero, C., Enn, Ü., Savvani, S., & Pantazis, A. (2024). Educational commons facilitating student voice: an ethnographic approach. Education 3-13, 52(6), 891–910. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2024.2331952

The need for activities such as this Action research project is reflected in the existence of SEEF funding at LCC to encourage community and collective experiences enhancing and enriching student experience.

-Lundy, L. (2007), ‘Voice’ is not enough: conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. British Educational Research Journal, 33: 927-942. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920701657033

Can we support students in gaining confidence through increasing wellbeing with group singing?

By encouraging students to work with the voice collectively we can build confidence in their use of their voice individually. As a Year Leader I have noted the number of students diagnosed with SEN or seeking support with mental health rise since the start of the pandemic in 2020. Whilst approximately 30% of students I see as a Year Leader complete the process of an Individual Support Agreement, I would estimate that 70% of students discuss mental health difficulties with me in the course of the tutorials they have with me as Year Leader. This informs this Action Research project as group singing has been proven to support wellbeing in mental health, this in turn can help with the barrier around self-esteem and speaking that can ensue from low mood. In the research by Clift et al, the results found that “while people participated in group singing, their mental distress decreased, and quality of life and wellbeing improved with moderate effect sizes.”

– Elyse Williams, Genevieve A Dingle, Stephen Clift, A systematic review of mental health and wellbeing outcomes of group singing for adults with a mental health condition, European Journal of Public Health, Volume 28, Issue 6, December 2018, Pages 1035–1042, https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/cky115

The interesting process of data collection in that study, is that it recorded both the gains and the decreases, in term of measuring through quantitative data collection the improvements in mood and the decreasing of low mood. Instead of just measuring how much better participants felt, they also measured how much less bad they felt, which was more accessible to the participants as a way to measure mental health. This brings me back to the opening point in this post, that within an Arts university, an invisible medium is held to visual arts parameters. Through different approaches to data collection within the workshops I hope to investigate this for myself, in terms of broadening the methods of data collecting to integrate the methodology of data collecting with the medium and methodologies discussed within the data.