As I sit quietly, I slowly become aware of the fact that my left leg is shaking, a sign that I’m experiencing feelings of underlying anxiety. Around me, a congregation of more than a hundred people sit in silence among the pews, waiting with rapt attention for a cue from a single individual positioned at the stage’s edge. The anxiety I feel in this moment is not out of the ordinary—they are the nerves and jitters every performer experiences right before a performance. It is, so to speak, the “calm before the storm.” However, it is also in this moment of suspension—of anticipation—that my high school freshmen self takes in, admittedly with wonder, the sheer magnitude of his surroundings. While at first glance, I see nothing more than a sea of grey stone, I gradually begin to discern the granite floor from the towering rows of support columns layered by grey brick, standing almost transparent against the wall of grey lining the backdrop. To my freshman self, the arched ceiling high above reaches as far as the sky and the ends of the room span the horizon. Yet the storm of monochrome that assails my sight is assuaged by a single circular window, perched high on the wall like the first rays of a sunrise peering over a mountaintop. And perhaps the rays of light that glimmered through the blue-stained glass were symbolic of the sun as they filled the halls of the cathedral with a radiant light.

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But the moment I have absorb my expansive surroundings is nothing more than that—a moment. A moment of powerful silence in a grand echo chamber. A moment broken as the conductor atop their podium gives the downbeat for the orchestra to begin the opening canticle, the first part of the two-to-three-hour mass. A torrent of jubilant cacophony fills the vast halls, fading into and reverberating from the surrounding space. Many measures and several pages later, we—the chorus—enter the conversation, vocalizing, “All praise be yours to Brother Sun, all praise be yours to Sister Moon…”. It is a rare instance and space where I find myself singing proudly and boldly, wholeheartedly embracing the joyous atmosphere that we—musicians from all walks of life—are creating. Yet my memories of performing Paul Winter’s Missa Gaia/Earth Mass in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City amount to much more than a moment, but rather to a collection of fugal moments and voices that together create an experience. It includes wolf calls of “Kyrie,” conjoined with the distant tenor voice of our high school choir director as lead cantor. It includes the songs of humpback whales, interceded and interspersed throughout “Sanctus and Benedictus.” It includes soaring solos by Paul Winter himself, playing on his soprano saxophone. It includes the sound of pets barking and meowing—multiplying into mooing, bleating, braying, neighing, cooing—as a lengthy procession of animals file into the church two-by-two, as they did in the story of Noah’s Ark. It includes a rare moment of genuine appreciation from a friend who stood next to me for the service, saying he was honored to sing with me during such a momentous occasion. The experience I had became an integral part of my identity as a singer and musician. It permeated into my future choir performances, from the Texas All-State Choir in San Antonio to the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. It echoed throughout my life as a musician, influencing the ways I understood and performed music and offering a glimpse of what I aspired to be. This interplay between space and sound that I witnessed and experienced in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine similarly echoes throughout this portfolio as I gradually move towards a more complex understanding and conceptualization of what “echo chamber” is and how it affects me and my various identities.

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Ultimately, echo chambers are a combination of the spaces we DWELL in and the ideas we RESONATE with. But they can appear in various forms. Like the cathedral I performed in, they can be physical spaces that capture sound. As Byron Hawk (2018) notes, the acoustic space of a cathedral can retain and sustain reverb of up to four seconds (317). This can then be felt by the bodies in the space which, if following Hawk’s model of resonance, “allows humans to feel their bodies vibrate empathetically” (315). Yet not all echo chambers are physical—in news media, they are portrayed as a set of beliefs and ideas shared among group of like-minded people. Here, the echo chamber is delineated by a performance in rhetoric. Yes, the rhetoric produced may still exist in a physical space, but that rhetoric can also be contained in a recording or audiated by a listener. When Glenn Gould presents his radio documentary “The Idea of North” (1967), there is a series of recorded sounds that overlap with each other—the spoken rhetoric of interviewees, sometimes concurrently, is interlaced with the ambient noise of the arctic winds and rolling trains. Together, they create an “idea” of what north is—a particular soundscape that is shared among Gould’s listening audiences. Abigail Lambke’s text “Arranging Delivery, Delivering Arrangement: An Ecological Sonic Rhetoric of Podcasting” from Kairos (2019) combines the approach of recorded sound with audiation. To embody the idea of podcasting, one of the unique elements of this text is the aural component Lambke includes—not only does she provide a voice-over for most of the text the audience reads on the page, but interspersed are blocks of audio text presented by authors of the podcasts she references. An audience who only audiates the written text on the page, then, loses something without Lambke’s audio recording. Yet the reverse is also true: there are certain elements—excerpts from Collin Gifford Brooke’s Lingua Fracta (2009), for example—that are completely absent from exclusively listening to the audio recording. The work, then, requires acts of listening and reading in order for resonance to occur. Audiences must dwell in the spaces that Lambke has produced in order to begin grappling, unpacking, and eventually, understanding it. Echo chamber, then, is a site of learning, much like Dr. Yancey’s WAC-Transfer class was for me (as seen in this portfolio). But as I articulate later on, they can also be sites of resistance. This portfolio, then, is both an unraveling of how I have come to realize the complexities of echo chamber and an observation in the roles they have played in my own graduate work. I see echo chambers as both an external and internal phenomenon. They are external in that they exist in a shared space of beliefs and ideas and internal in that we choose which beliefs and ideas to resonate with and embody.

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My internal echo chamber is tied to my identity as a musician. It is what has cultivated my interest in sonic rhetoric and led me to seek inquiries between sound and composition. To capture these dual identities as a musician and scholar that encapsulate my echo chamber, I have organized this portfolio through the structure of a symphony, opened by this overture. Like most symphonies, it is split into four movements, with tempo markings [titles] that follow typical symphonic order: Allegro con moto, Andante, Rondo, and Finale. The first movement—ALLEGRO CON MOTO—houses three teaching philosophies that I composed over the last two years as a graduate student. As the tempo marking suggests, this first movement is fast (allegro) in the sense that involves the breadth rather than the depth of my research interests, thereby complemented by brisk movement (con moto) between each of the main, yet divergent, ideas that predominated each philosophy (multiculturalism, writing transfer, and sonic rhetoric). Together, the three philosophies represent an overview of my journey to realizing “echo chamber” through dwelling and resonance, with the subsequent movements representative of the specific sites of learning and frustration I encountered along the way. The second movement—ANDANTE—scales back the rapid tempos of the first movement to a walking speed (andante) with an in-depth dive into my first significant site of learning at FSU: transfer. As I discover with my reflections on my second philosophy and critical race theory (CRT) paper, writing transfer began to proliferate in my own echo chamber whenever I considered my pedagogy. However, it is a transformative site of learning for me, likely because I took WAC-Transfer in my first semester of teaching. My final project for WAC-Transfer then—a concept paper—became a space for me to develop the intersection between the concepts I learned in Dr. Yancey’s class and my own ENC 2135 class. From the project, I gained direction for how to approach instruction in my composition classrooms through concepts that I resonated with. Unfortunately, as I find in my third movement—RONDO—this would lead me to a site of frustration the following semester that manifests in my CRT course. Like a Rondo, the third movement revisits and retreads what came before, with slight variation. That slight variation comes in the form of critical race theory, fine-tuned from my previous interest with multiculturalism. However, the efforts of my CRT paper to resee the third project of ENC 2135 as a practice in counterstory fall short of the mark because it exists at odds with writing transfer. Because I felt both to be essential to ENC 2135, I could not fully realize the potential of either concept in this limited space. The fourth movement, however—FINALE—sees all of these seemingly discrete sites come together under the idea of “echo chamber.” The seminar paper housed by this movement is both an act of pulling away from prior knowledge to reshape my attunement (aided by my key terms glossary offering a clarity of direction) and articulates my point of realization as to the function of echo chambers. In it, I explore how ambient dwelling and resonance work in echo chambers and observe how multivocal attunement informs our dispositions. The paper itself represents a point of arrival that each of the preceding movements is working towards and—like the finale of a symphony—is the culminating act of this portfolio. The last part—the CODA—is like an epilogue; it projects where my idea of "echo chamber" might go next and explores the need for further research into echo chambers and dispositions. Lastly, it acknowledges the people who have helped me on this incredible journey.

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My experience performing the Earth Mass in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine was unlike anything I had ever experienced before and anything I had since. As we [the choir] moved through each movement over the course of two to three hours, I found myself resonating, not only with the music, but also with the animals, the smells, the masses, the wonder, the chamber, and the ambience—I was attuning and embodying the multivocal and fugal nature of the experience. I was embodying music. It is a rare moment in a musician’s life when someone is truly in-sync with the experience around them. And as my college choir director once said to me, it is those incredibly rare moments that are few and far between that we constantly seek and strive for. I believe writing is no different. As writers, we produce many works that leave us unsatisfied; many works we wish to revise (sometimes extensively); many works we may even be proud of. But there are only a few works to which we are truly attuned to through dwelling and resonance. Because—like music—writing is a process. We are constantly and forever tinkering with old ideas and inventing new concepts, adjusting our rhetoric to fit the needs of the composition and circumstances, just as I do with this portfolio. Like all virtual public spaces on the Internet, it is a living work that is always changing and evolving as I unpack new ideas and grapple with old ones. It represents my struggles and victories to make sense of the polyphony of voices and echo chambers I have contended with during my time at FSU, whether it be writing transfer, critical race theory, or sonic rhetoric. Ultimately, however, this portfolio has become a physical, written manifestation of my own echo chamber as an academic and scholar. It is my hope, as readers move through each movement in this symphony of echoes, that they can witness the unity, resistance, and attunement to the many voices that live in this multifaceted composition.