The Sound of My Voice: Self-Revelation Through Autoethnography

Abstract

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 binaryconstructed 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 autoethnographic 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.