Hyperrhiz 28

The Flower of Rhetoric

Tim Richardson
University of Texas at Arlington

Citation: Richardson, Tim. “The Flower of Rhetoric.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 28, 2025. doi:10.20415/hyp/028.g02

Abstract: Begun alongside students’ projects for a graduate seminar titled Ambience & Rhetoric, “The Flower of Rhetoric” documents a data sonification/sound art project of the same name that gives both a body and voice to keywords from across the texts read over the semester. As a gesture toward the kind of distant reading the data allows, sounds from the small speakers are quiet so that, while it is common to come close to smell flowers, these require bringing your ear to them. The effect is to call the texts explored over the course of a semester out of their syllabus sequence and to be with them in a different, non-narrative way.

Keywords: rhetoric, sound, research-creation, ambience, reading, sonification, art.

View Project: The Flower of Rhetoric (view from above). Turn sound on.

View Project: The Flower of Rhetoric (view from beneath) Turn sound on.

Artist Statement: The Universe is a Flower of Rhetoric

Well into Seminar XX: Encore, Jacques Lacan enigmatically claims, “The universe is a flower of rhetoric.” He doesn’t elaborate and, for this project, I wasn’t really interested in what he means. Instead, I wanted to make a Flower of Rhetoric.

My project aims to make Lacan’s statement literal by producing a physical object that resembles something vegetal, but that also renders data sonically. It was begun alongside students’ projects for our Spring 2023 graduate seminar titled Rhetoric & Ambience and materials were purchased using funds from the University of Texas at Arlington College of Liberal Arts Faculty Research Endowment Award.

The course took up questions of how we are moved by our surroundings and looked to rhetorical theory, installation and field art, and speculative design as available means of persuasion. As Thomas Rickert argues in the course’s first text, Ambient Rhetoric:

ambience can never be understood simply as presence. Place is not simply an immediate environment; it includes the background by means of which things show up as what they are. Our everyday environment coheres, but it is choreographed in advance, as it were, so that its particularity is hollowed out beforehand. (55)

This choreographing is what we were after, which required that our course include unfamiliar research practices in addition to the kinds of writing we are used to. Another of our texts offered possibilities.

In How to Make Art at the End of the World, Natalie Loveless defines research-creation as “an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation” (6). In addition to reading and writing, we made things. Some of these things worked better than others, but each was a new way to engage with the world and to try to change it a little bit. The Flower of Rhetoric was my project.

The goals for my piece were several. Producing keywords from across a large selection of works (in this case, all of the texts for our graduate course) and generating translatable data from them are standard practices in the digital humanities. I had not worked explicitly with digital humanities methods before, so this approach seemed appropriate to the kind of exploration the course called for. The apparatus, the Flower of Rhetoric, gives a body and voice to the data. As a gesture toward the kind of distant reading the data allows, sounds from the small speakers are quiet so that, while it is common to come close to smell flowers, these require bringing your ear to them. The effect is to call the texts we explored over the course of a semester out of their syllabus sequence to be with them in a different, non-narrative way.

The Process

World, New, Work, Research, and Human.

According to the free text analysis software Voyant Tools, these are the most frequent keywords across the readings for our Spring 2023 graduate course, Rhetoric & Ambience.

Each of the course texts was taken in pdf format, with front matter and Works Cited pages removed to focus on the bodies of the works. Using Voyant, the keywords were discovered and these words were organized by the phrases in which they are used. A phrase is a group of two or more words that is used two or more times. For instance, the word used most often across the texts was “world,” at 1291 times. The phrase “world as we know it” is used four times (that’s more than two) across all the texts for the course and consists of five words (also more than two).

For each of the five keywords surfaced by Voyant—world, new, work, research, and human—two sets of data were collected: the number of words for each distinct phrase (two and up) and the number of times each distinct phrase was used (two times and up). In order to represent both sets of data in one string of comma separated values (.csv) for each of the five words, the number of times a phrase is used was sorted by the number of words in the phrase (the length of the phrase from shortest to longest). For “world,” this meant 165 distinct phrases.

This collated phrase data from Voyant (in .csv format) for each of the five words was then imported into the free virtual Eurorack software VCV Rack using five instances of the free module Loud Numbers by the data sonification company of the same name. As the project plays, each module is clocked by the same (virtual) low frequency oscillator set at 0.1 hz, but otherwise runs independently of the other tracks. These modules convert the collated phrase data for each word to virtual “control voltage” that other modules can work with. The control voltage output by each of these five instances of Loud Numbers is sent to its own sound source, a voltage-controlled oscillator (vco) in VCV Rack.

(An early version was developed using the open-source visual programming language for multimedia called Pure Data. While I was able to get something working software-wise, the discovery of Loud Numbers allowed a more polished version using a platform I’m much more familiar with. This meant moving from a Raspberry Pi to a more robust computer running the Windows operating system.)

Each of the five voltage-controlled oscillators (one for each keyword) was assigned a musical note. Musical notes often conform to a musical scale. In 2003, astronomers at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge offered sonified data of the longest radiation wave issued from an observable massive black hole. The resulting note was a b-flat that “is 57 octaves below middle C or one million, billion times lower than the lowest sound audible to the human ear” (NASA). So, to bring the universe of the Lacan line to this flower of rhetoric, I chose five notes from the b-flat major scale, one for each of the five words. Pitched 59 octaves up, “world” is B-flat, “new” is C, “work” is E-flat, “research” is F, and “human” is A-flat.

(An earlier version was going to use students to voice the words, one voice per word. In the end, voices seemed to demand too much attention and could become annoying as the piece ran for hours.)

The data translated to control voltage by Loud Numbers determines the speed at which the notes are played—the tempo—for each of the five audio tracks. The more often the phrase appears, the more quickly the track repeats its note. So that each track doesn’t simply begin slowly (at two instances of a phrase) and then speed up (three instances, four instances, etc.), the sequence of the tempo data has been determined by the length of the phrases using the given word (from shortest to the longest, as described above). Thus, variations in tempo for each audio track are the result of the tempo data being organized by the length of phrase.

Each of the five words is its own audio track and is output on its own channel to a pair of speakers (there are 10 speakers total, two per word-note). After the track presenting the word with the most phrases— “world”—finishes its run, a chord of all five notes is played across all five channels and the process resets and plays again.    

The physical apparatus is constructed of inexpensive 2-inch speakers soldered to 3.5mm input jacks (among many other things, I learned to solder—poorly—for this project) and attached to 4-foot wooden dowels via metal clamps custom-made by my colleague, artist Darryl Lauster. Patch cables were inserted into the 3.5mm input jacks and wrapped around the dowels, along with a pair of inexpensive lavalier microphones for taking in ambient sound. The base is a premade 10x10x10-inch wooden box with a hinged lid. A larger hole was cut into the top of the box for inserting the dowels and is trimmed with weather stripping. A smaller hole was cut in the side for the power cable. Inside the box, a piece of wood with holes drilled for the dowels was attached to the bottom with Velcro.

A small computer running Windows 11 and the VCV Rack software, a touch screen for interacting with the computer were affixed to a side and the door, again with Velcro. An inexpensive 5.1 channel usb audio interface and a usb light strip tuned to green were both plugged into the computer inside the box via a usb hub.

Via the lavalier microphones, interaction with the object both generates echoes that extend the ambience of the current place in which it is situated and modulates the sound of the notes, making them sound “brighter.” The result is a kind of distant reading—or hearing—that creates a context for the keywords from relationships that are non-narrative (so, different from the ways a syllabus makes an argument) and at any moment are only ever partially apprehended. And the translation of words to musical notes forces a shift of disciplinary approach. Interdisciplinarity is a hallmark for research-creation.

Software, Hardware, and Texts:

Software

• Voyant Tools
• VCV Rack & various modules

Hardware

• desktop mini-pc running Windows 11 Pro, 5.1 channel usb sound card, & 7” touch screen
• usb light strip
• a pair of lavalier microphones
• wooden dowels, wooden box
• 3.5mm mono patch cables & splitters
• Ten 2” speakers
• clamps fabricated by Darryl Lauster (thank you!)

Texts (in the order they appeared on the syllabus)

• Rickert, Thomas. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. U of Pittsburgh Press, 2013.
• Vanheule, Stijn. “Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, 2016.
• Holland, John. “The Capitalist Uncanny.” S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 8 (2015): 96-124.
• Loveless, Natalie. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Duke UP Books, 2019.
• Easterling, Keller. Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World. Verso Books, 2021.
• Selections from Scot Barnett and Casey Boyle (eds.), Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things (U of Alabama Press, 2016):
  • Marilyn M. Cooper, “Listening to Strange Strangers, Modifying Dreams”
  • Katie Zabrowski, “Alinea Phenomenology: Cookery as Flat Ontography”
  • Donnie Johnson Sackey & William Hart-Davidson, “Writing Devices”
  • Cydney Alexis, “The Material Culture of Writing: Objects, Habitats, and Identities in Practice”
  • Brian McNely, “Circulatory Intensities: Take a Book, Return a Book”
  • Kim Lacey, “So Close, Yet So Far Away: Temporal Pastiche and Dear Photograph”
  • Jodie Nicotra, “Assemblage Rhetorics: Creating New Frameworks for Rhetorical Action”
  • James J. Brown Jr. & Nathaniel A. Rivers, “Encomium of QWERTY”
• Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press, 2013.
• Selections from Jordan Lacey (ed.), “Unlikely Issue 06: Translating Ambiance.“ Unlikely, unlikely.net.au/issues/issue-06:
  • Jean-Paul Thibaud, “A Brief Archaeology of the Notion of Ambiance”
  • Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen, “Sounding through Touch”
  • Traci Kelly & Rhiannon Jones, “For we are made of lines”
  • David Chesworth, “Sensory Modalities of the Sonic Frame”
  • Mark Peter Wright, “Go Live in the Middle of Nowhere Obviously”
  • Kristen Sharp, “Drips in the Underground: Creatively Activating Urban Ambiances”
  • Erin Lewis, “Abstract Everywhere: Dressing in Electromagnetic Atmospheres”
  • Luz María Sánchez Cardona, “Intermittent Space: Sound, Violence, Ambiance and Affective Politics of Fear in Contemporary Mexico”
  • Jordan Lacey, “COLD: translating the ambiance of rivulets into air-conditioners”