I recently corresponded with an academic journal editor about the captions and accessibility of an arts-integrated piece a colleague and I have coming out in the journal. The piece features parts of our audio paper published in Seismograf Peer plus creations housed in our ensemble Forms of Freedom. Sound design, signal processing and effects, and performative aesthetics are all part of these pieces. So the question we are working through is how captions should work for pieces like these. Here is how I described the dilemma in an email to the editor.

[How to do captions] is a really interesting point to me with the audio paper and tune-ins since the sound is often performative, affective, and non-discursive. Meaning, the performance is not just what people are saying or the “mood” of music. I can see how putting words on it (e.g., “sad music plays”) forecloses on the meaning by making it discursive rather than material/felt/embodied. I think this is one characteristic that separates audio papers from, say, podcasts — the leaning into subjectivity, affect, and embodiment through the base material of sound. I’ve never seen audio papers have captions (maybe they should?), and I’ve suspected/wondered if that is because the genre sits in the affective and embodied realms and often position themselves against the discursive. There’s another side of this too where def and hard of hearing people talk about embodied listening, so feeling the sounds. This is all to say, I’m definitely not arguing against the captions or trying to think through accessibility with a performative genre like this. I’m wondering how accessibility or captions should work given the affective and performative orientation of the tune in and audio paper. Open to your thoughts here.

I think this email describes the issue and challenge quite well. The editor was very receptive, and we are working together to find a solution – for example, justifying captions left, right, or center to approximate the performative panning of sound across the stereo field. Another idea is to make the text overlapping in some parts – and thus challenging to read – to approximate the strategic overlapping of voices in some of the audio pieces that make it difficult to separate speakers. There’s a tech and platform side to this as well, so it takes a number of people at the table working together to come up with a solution.