Identifying and Applying Sound Design Principles for Multimodal Content Creation: Analyzing Professional Content Creators’ Adobe Instructional Videos

Abstract

Incorporating sounds in multimodal compositions is an essential skill to develop. The subfield of study that involves the rhetoric of sounds has several names, including aural rhetorics, aurality, sonic composition, and sound studies. Instructional videos (i.e., how-to videos) often use sounds—any sounds—to professionally communicate, such as educating non-expert audiences in how-to-do tasks. My research project analyzes several of these types of instructional videos, ones from members of a professional content creator community, Adobe, for principles of multimodal composition and professional communication, with an emphasis on sound usage. By analyzing what we hear, we make meaning and communicate. It is also important to analyze how people utilize other types of sounds in conjunction with visual and textual elements. This interplay, with the goal of a well-balanced multimodal composition that communicates on a professional level, is where this research study is situated. In this study, I investigate how these Adobe professionals integrate sounds into their works and how audiences might interpret the messages from these sounds. This is “sound design,” which I define as the rhetorical decisions that content creators make about how to use sounds to communicate their goals to their audiences. To inform this set of principles and decisions, I analyze how sounds function rhetorically with the visual and textual elements to create content in a specific setting. The implications of this analysis will inform a set of principles that could be used by content creators. My primary research question is this: How do members of the professional Adobe-based content creator community rhetorically use the sound design principles from my proposed model in creating multimodal instructional videos? These sound design principles are derived from a mixture of physics-related, musical, and colloquial concepts that intersect across these disciplines and all pertain to sound: volume, speed, clarity, pitch, and modulation. Every component of sound design must be considered on some level, just as visual and textual designs must be crafted with care for composition efficacy. This presentation will report on the results of this sound design analysis that have implications for rhetoric, TPC, multimodal composition, and pedagogy. As multimodal compositions and other types of non-traditional essays become both more prevalent and more popular, I argue that it is important to gain a better understanding of how different modes of communication, particularly aural aspects, function rhetorically in digital environments. The sound design principles function as a tool for teaching how to analyze sounds and as a tool for learning how to analyze sounds in multimodal compositions.