The Sound of My Voice: Self-Revelation through Autoethnography

This essay represents my attempt to develop an expanded voice-as-researcher. My intent is to create a space for an improvisatory and playful process of self-discovery through writing aimed at extracting deeply-held, even concealed, possibilities rarely invoked in my practices as researcher. To facilitate this process of self-discovery, I use a binary-constructed notion of my separate musician and researcher voices to experiment with placing three previously created text-based and musical works in dialogue. Reflecting on my bricoleur researcher tendencies, I tinker with methodology, lightly appropriating a post-representational approach to frame these works as co-researcher-provocateurs in this essay. Punctuating the essay with moments of auto-ethnographic writing, I weave these text-based and musical works together with two gestures--the cartographic system of Fernand Deligny's wander lines and the musical form of Charles Ives's String Quartet No. 2--to explore the challenges of navigating identity, voice, and self-disclosure in scholarship. The essay concludes with a confession of anxiety as an illusionary deceit, and the final self-revelation of my voice. My sound.