The fourth and final movement is the culminating act of this portfolio. As I mention in the overture, the primary artifact—my seminar paper from my DIS with Dr. Graban, “Space, Place, & Sound in Rhetoric and Composition”—is the point of arrival where I first realize the rhetorical potential of “echo chambers.” My initial epiphany occurred when a space I considered myself to be “safe” and comfortable in was thrown into sudden disarray by the political tribulation of the 2020 US Presidential Election. The encounter left me painfully aware of the magnitude of power echo chambers had over an individual’s disposition. Over the course of the next several months, I would go on to investigate, grapple, and struggle with many entangled and complex concepts involving echo chambers. As I explored the spatial and sonic dimensions of echo chambers, I would come to realize that only complex concepts of ambient dwelling from Thomas Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric (2013) and resonance from Byron Hawk’s “Sound: Resonance as Rhetorical” (2018) could sufficiently explain what I was trying to articulate: echo chambers have the power to shape dispositions.

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In my initial comprehension of echo chambers, I understood ambient dwelling as the embodiment of a way of life while existing in a space and resonance to be a harmony in vibrations between an individual and their environment. However, given the complex unpacking required to fully realize these two concepts, I found myself frustrated with the slippage and conflation of terminology I was experiencing during the writing process of my initial draft. Rickert drew on several rhetors like Michael Hyde and Martin Heidegger in his outlining of ambient dwelling with each of their definitions differing in subtle ways. Hawk drew up his ideas of resonance from prior scholarship like Mary Hocks and Michelle Comstock (2017), who delineate between multiple definitions of the term in their own work. To help me navigate these multifaceted ideas with competing definitions, Dr. Graban suggested I create a glossary of key terms that illustrates how I see these various terms functioning in conjunction with echo chambers. The resulting document—found below as “Key Terms”—recognizes some of my main efforts to organize the many moving terms and definitions I found myself contending with in my seminar paper. However, as my paper evolved and gained a clarity of focus, so too did the terms involved in the paper—some terms became an implicit presence in my paper whereas others gained significant prominence. No term, however, became more integral than echo chamber. In later drafts, I would come to understand the necessity in articulating a more developed argument for echo chambers. While scholarship would affirm my provisional definition for echo chamber in the paper as a space where a shared set of ideals between a group of people are insulated from rebuttal (Jamieson and Cappella, 2010; Kitchens et al. 2020), I also realized this definition wasn’t sufficient enough to encapsulate what I was trying to say. Returning to the classroom as a spatial proxy, I realized echo chambers were also spaces of contention, representing a sonic dissonance that could be heard externally (like in Jamieson and Cappella) or internally (as I suggest in my key terms glossary). This, I found, unfolded into the argument I was really making with the paper—dwelling and resonating in contentious echo chambers like the classroom can enable individuals to embody a multivocal and fugal attunement that allows them to reshape their prior dispositions.

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However, the echo chamber(s) I outline in my seminar paper are more rigid and succinct that the echo chambers of the portfolio. In short, the seminar paper was a starting point. One of the issues with echo chambers that Brent Kitchens, Steven L. Johnson, and Peter Gray (2020) identify is that there is a lack of conceptual clarity surrounding echo chambers. For better or worse, this makes them dynamic. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the description of my experience performing the Earth Mass in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine the portfolio’s overture. The cathedral itself is a literal, physical echo chamber. Just like Hawk’s acoustic model of resonance, the sounds produced within the chamber of the cathedral reverberate throughout the space, with some of the sound being reflected back into said space. On the other hand, the anecdote that opens my seminar paper discussing the presidential election is one that is far more rhetorical in nature—the “walls” of this chamber form through a closed loop of beliefs, assumptions, and ideas shared by a group of individuals in a virtual space. This divergence in notions of echo chambers enables me to conceptualize the portfolio not only as a symphonic production tied to my prior identities, but also as the echo chamber that contains the production itself.