"The Legacy of Music," by Sonya Borton tells listeners about the musical talents of various members of her Kentucky. In relating her narrative, Borton weaves a richly textured fabric of interviews, commentary, instrumental music, and song to support her thesis that a love of music represents an important legacy passed down from parents to children within the family.

The elements and layers of this aural text lend detail, emphasis, and authority to Borton’s text, her first attempt at digital audio composing. The rhetorical ethos of this aural essay—established through the combined resonance of Sonya’s grandfather’s, mother’s, and daughter’s voices—is deeply inflected with the accents of rural Kentucky.

The essay’s weight of aural detail and narrative structure is sedimented in the stories of family members, and forms an intergenerational basso ostinato that traces the individual historical notes of a regionally-situated family history (a handcrafted dulcimer, a guitar ordered through Montgomery Wards, a family farm worked with a team of mules) onto the score of a nation’s history (the Great Depression, the great Louisville flood of 1937, the post-war baby boom). The importance of this work, as Michelle Comstock and Mary Hocks (2005) point out, involves students in considering “their personal and cultural voices within a larger shifting soundscape” and creating resonances between their own voices and those of others.

The affordances of sound characterizing this text—the emotional tone and historical information contributed by melodies and instruments; the meaning carried by accent and volume; the nuance conveyed by pace, quality, and tone of voice—could never be fully replicated in print text, although such a text would have its own affordances. As Sonya (2005) noted about this essay, quoting Glenda Hull (2003), composing in the modality of sound, lent “a special performative power and an aesthetic dimension” (p. 231)” to her essay even though many of the challenges she faced were similar to those she encountered with writing:

I…had to take into account many of the same things that I would have had to consider in a written composition. I had to have an introduction where I pulled my audience in. I had to have a thesis so that my audience would know the purpose of investing their time in my project. My narrative had to follow a logical path to its conclusion, and…the conclusion had to leave my audience with something to remember…[E]ven though audio…gave my narrative an aesthetic quality that I couldn’t have achieved on paper, I still used many of the same analytical skills a written essay would require.