“Small Stones” and Sound Design: Looking at Layers

Originally planned as a performance for March 2020, Kaie Kellough, Jason Sharp, and Kevin Yuen Kit Lo’s multimedia piece, “Small Stones”, was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and reimagined as a digital piece in May 2022. This shift in form from the physical to the digital allowed Kellough and Sharp to “compose using a wider sonic palette while still being sourced by just a saxophone and voice” (Ricci, 3:19). Sharp’s description of the audio portion of this piece as a “sonic palette” draws a parallel between sonic art and visual art, as if in recording and mastering the piece, he and Kellough developed a process akin to painting sound layer by layer. My methodology in approaching the annotation of this piece began from the perspective of a sound designer and my own experience manipulating tracks within digital software to create distinct sonic layers; I recognised the layers in “Small Stones” and their interaction as a designed effort to obfuscate the text’s function under the affective power of the piece. It is these layers, along with their moments of intersection, that I aimed to highlight—or rather, uncover—via my annotations. These annotations do not reflect an in-depth analysis of the content of the piece itself—indeed, the visual aspect of the piece has been left out entirely in the interest of sonic focus—but a suggestion towards how academic and artist alike might begin teasing apart the complex ways in which sonic forms interact, intercept, and intercede one another. Rather than considering pieces like this in a holistic sense, or in an arbitrary system based on genre, dividing complex sonic works by layer can provide insight into the transitional moments of a piece, illuminating instances where critical artistic decisions were made, while also highlighting integral moments of a text.

The affordances of sound, as a greater encapsulating form, allow for immersion of the listener to the point of overwhelming them sonically with the richness, complexity, and sheer decibel level of the soundscape. In this sense, the listener becomes acquainted with the affective intensity of colonization and origin-based destabilization that the history of this topic is built on, and that “Small Stones” seeks to embody. Here, I draw on the term affordance from Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, in which she defines affordances by borrowing from design theory:

Affordance is a term used to describe the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs. Glass affords transparency and brittleness. Steel affords strength, smoothness, hardness, and durability. Cotton affords fluffiness, but also breathable cloth when it is spun into yarn and thread. (Levine, 6)

Sound, as a means of communication, is characterised by its own affordances. McGregor and Copeland draw attention to the affective power of sonic work in their series Why Podcast?: Podcasting as Publishing, Sound-Based Scholarship, and Making Podcasts Count:

[T]he affective power of sound and voice can help us better process and comprehend what is being conveyed in our academic research. Podcasting in this sense becomes a mode of affect transmission, a way of amplifying our individual and collective affective signal when bodies cannot be close enough to touch, to feel, and to sense one another. (Episode 2)

The argument for academic podcasting is, at its material base, an argument for the affordances of any sound-based text, including a literary performance. With the affective power of sound in mind, I approached “Small Stones” with the intent of dissecting it as a designed sound work, in which the affordances of the sonic form amplify—or complicate—the literary content of the piece. Migrating to the digital also presented its own set of affordances, as Kellough noted in an interview on a separate, live performance of his: “If this were made in a studio, it would’ve been a different piece because it would’ve been created for audio, right? […] It would’ve been elaborate in a different way as a sonic object” (McLeod, 13:40). “Small Stones” is, in a sense, the hypothetical performance Kellough describes in this interview. With this in mind, my consideration of “Small Stones” as a sonic object dictated two choices before I began annotating. First, that annotating the complex visual aspects of the piece would be overly ambitious and require a project of greater scope. And second, that none of my annotations would reflect an attempt to transcribe the textual aspects of the piece. “Small Stones” being an interdisciplinary piece, there are multiple forms comprised of dedicated layers interacting with each other in complicated ways. Breaking this piece down into four identifiable sonic layers yields an entry point for the scholar to begin analysing the piece. It was AudiAnnotate’s system of classifying annotations that drew me towards analysing the text via its layers. Not to be confused with tracks, I focused on what a listener could reasonably identify, this listener having little to no audio or musical background. I eventually distilled the piece down to four layers:

   1. Voice. The “lead” speaker of the piece, Voice carries the textual weight of “Small Stones”. It is often, but not always, distinguishable from the rest of the sonic soundscape in its delivery of legible words, both in English and French.

   2. Whisper. Occupying the midsections of the piece, Whisper consists of multiple, fragmented voices that are often layered in syncopated rhythm consisting of hard syllables.

   3. Music. Any sound that is not immediately decipherable as vocal, but with the additional identifier of melody. Melody is a subjective characteristic, but for this text I ascribe melody to any rhythmic, varied tone which suggests either an ascending or descending pattern, a musical shift.

   4. FX. An abbreviation for “effects”, I use FX to label sounds that are neither vocal nor musical in nature. In reality, all these effects originate from Jason Sharp’s musical instruments, but have been manipulated in a way to intentionally hit the listener’s ear as a noise rather than a melody. Once again, the distinguishing characteristics of what separates Music from FX in my annotations is admittedly subjective, but for my purposes relating to the research of sound design I find this distinction helpful and generative.

The interconnectedness of each layer with the rest became more apparent with each annotation session; separate, multiple layers began to suggest themselves as one. In the short documentary, “The Making of ‘Small Stones’”, which features interviews with the artists, Kellough describes “Small Stones” as “a mixed-media work. It involves music, literary text, and graphic design, animation, animated typography” (0:41). Sonically, he identifies only two layers, aligned with the artists behind the piece, and from a production standpoint this is more or less the case. However, from the perspective of a designer, the sonic attributes of the piece much more closely resemble what Kellough himself describes as a “collage” which “form[s] a fragmented and prismatic attempt to look at the settling and colonization of the Americas”; each artist brings not only a form but several layers of forms into one “mixed media work” (Ricci, 1:18). My approach in naming these layers was to identify moments in which I could annotate their function, their “ordering, patterning, or shaping”, and to situate these moments in the larger context of the piece (Levine, 3). It would not be inaccurate to divide this piece into three layers (voice, music, and film) and to begin analysis in that sense. However, Levine draws our attention to the fact that, “no form operates in isolation”, and that an attempt to isolate these forms rather than identify where they overlap, even in restricting ourselves to the realm of the sonic, would unavoidably and gratuitously limit the depth of potential research (7). For example, at 5:45 Voice begins, “I was then four years old and saw my world as—” and is interrupted by a foghorn-like tone from the saxophone. The jarring FX layer renders sonic the emotional turmoil of a moment which the speaker cannot translate into words, while the textual aspect affords the noise its narrative context. Similarly, Kellough’s “collage” of vocals—manifested through the interaction between the vocal layers—embodies the fragmented, non-linear narratives that mark his personal experiences in relation to the textual content of “Small Stones”:

The topic that we’re working with is a topic that I have thought about a lot over time because my mum’s family is from Guyana in South America. So you know, those stories of origin and settling and discovery are sort of really part of the history of that region, and are often contested, and challenged, and rewritten, and disputed. (Ricci, 11:31)

Furthermore, when considered alongside Kellough’s performance, Sharp’s musical additions offer “a variety of different tones and moods that can be evoked to accompany those narratives” (Ricci, 12:30). The musical performance by Sharp is also, in many ways, dictated by Kellough’s delivery of the text (Ricci, 4:52); Music and Voice in this case are in the process of exchange with one another. I suggest exchange rather than a one-way relationship where Voice solely defines the parameters of Music because the interplay between these forms in a literary context reflects a greater situation outside the piece, both politically and in reflection of the individual. Levine’s first of her five “influential ideas” pertaining to forms is that “Forms constrain”—that is, they “impos[e] powerful controls and containments” (4). The fragmented experiences of individuals in relation to the settling and colonization of South America can only be accurately related in a fragmented form, in syncopated text and music that plays off one another in a complex, tangled exchange that is, at times, overwhelming, in a way that neither text nor music could convey alone.

In an attempt to be thorough, my early annotations were marked by their absolute fealty to duration; I was devoted to identifying when and where Voice continued and paused. But in a text virtually bereft of silence, my earlier annotations failed to take note of what exactly was filling the pauses between Voice, and how those liminal moments serve the piece holistically. Sharp describes the joint process of creating a score for “Small Stones”:

We blocked out different sections and a progression in terms of how one section leads to another. And then I come here today, absorbing that architecture that’s already been established, which is just a basic framework. And hearing the speech and hearing the content, now in real time, and applying a music backdrop and a way to interact with the language, with Kaie. (2:04)

This “progression” or “architecture” is what the process of annotation uncovered. It quickly became apparent that the duration of a layer offered less analytical insight than the intersection of layers and their introduction/integration into the piece, as they often relied on other layers to ease—or agitate—the transition. These layers exist in relation to one another within the “sonic worlds” that Sharp and Kellough create via Music, FX, and Voice (Ricci 2:57); each sound exists in relation to the others. “Small Stones” applies oceanic language in describing the land in part to represent the relational shift of a perceived stability with the arrival of European vessels. This layered concept is in turn made manifest by shifting the sonic focus of the piece, the “centre”; these moments of relation between layers heighten their differences while highlighting the figurative shifting centre of the piece. In a conversational exchange during “The Making of ‘Small Stones’”, Kellough states that the listener will be “expecting a lead voice”, knowing that as soon as the first lines of Voice are introduced into the piece that the listener will ground themselves sonically via this layer (7:31). The conversation that follows gestures to an intentional effort on behalf of the artists to destabilise the listener and introduce an alternate “lead voice” in the form of music, or Sharp’s saxophone. In order to make space for this new lead “voice”, Kellough arranges an “interplay among multiple voices” of one speaker, via the digital affordances of recorded sound, and to have these voices “speak across one another” (McLeod, 6:30). This moment of transition, annotated at 1:54 in the piece, features a split in the Voice layer, in which the speaker is panned to the right and the left in different—though, sometimes intersecting—readings. Music displaces the voice’s central position in this moment, destabilizing the listener. What follows is an avalanche of sonic play, a representation of the violence, confusion, sudden shifts of power, and subsequent trauma that characterised the early colonization period.

The political and socio-economic topics surrounding the early colonization of South America—which Kellough explores in depth throughout his work—are vast, overwhelming, and multi-faceted, often demanding an artistic expression that goes beyond the affordances of written word. Sonic intersection—that is to say, the intentional intersection of sonic layers via sound design—offers a way to manifest these histories in the present, in no small part due to the temporally-immersive and destabilizing power of sound. This process of representation is both technically complicated and difficult to study, due to overlapping forms within the same medium and a topic that is affectively charged and prone to fragmenting. Identifying sonic layers and moments of intersection can provide the reader/listener with an entryway into similarly difficult, complex texts—a starting point, shifting our understanding of “Small Stones” from a literary piece to a designed sonic object with layers of interoperating forms.

Works Cited

Copeland, Stacey and McGregor, Hannah. Why Podcast? Podcasting as Publishing, SoundBased Scholarship, and Making Podcasts Count. Episode 2. KairosCast.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, 2015.

McLeod, Katherine, host. “The Voice That Is The Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, ShortCuts, Season 3, Episode 5.

Ricci, Stephanie. The Making of "Small Stones" (2021) SpokenWeb Archive of the Present. SpokenWeb.