At the final town hall meeting of the 2011 Computers and Writing conference, Byron Hawk called for more attention to sound, suggesting that composition studies is perhaps the best disciplinary home for the topic.
He's right. Sound and music studies played loudly at C&W--in the panels, the performances, and the posters. Many of those presenters (including Hawk) were featured in the recent issue of Currents in Electronic Literacy on Writing with Sound, evidence of the field's growing interest in the topic since the groundbreaking 2006 special issue of Computers and Composition, "Sound in/as Composition Space," edited by Hawk and Cheryl Ball. And two months earlier, you could hear the bass notes of sound studies drifting through the floors of CCCC in Atlanta.
This interest group, then, is designed as a studio home, a middle C for us to move toward the future. At the least, it will serve as a collection of names to stay in touch with as we move forward with sound-based projects. Beyond that, we can use the group to share citations, links, experiments, tunes, and teaching practices--and whatever else we come up with.
Let's turn the levels to 11 and see what crumbles.