Sound is very important in today's society of technology. Audio works are very common in the electronic medium to convey ideas, such as music, literature, and entertainment. In Mary E. Hocks' and Michelle Comstock's article, Composing for Sound: Sonic Rhetoric as Resonance, there is an idea called sonic literacy, which is a person's understanding of writing through hearing it instead of seeing it. In composition of literature, sound is an underrated element of its creation and, nowadays, sound has become a much more important articulation of multimodal composition processes. Another topic the authors bring up is sonic rhetoric, which is the study of sound in rhetorical works and practices. This is important in works that involve music, media works, and communication. The authors define this topic as the embodied and dynamic rhetorical engagements with sound. Music is a great example to portray this idea, where the listeners of a song observe the song not by visually seeing it, such as reading the lyrics, but by observing what they can hear and create conclusions or observations from those sounds.
Roy Chun