Scene 2 starts with the player waking up inside the cockpit after a crash landing on an unknown planet. Spaceship cannot be launched and therefore we are forced to leave it and look for help on the planet. In order to open the cockpit’s door, the player is forced to solve the musical puzzle. When succeed, we can open the door and exit the spaceship. Sound of opening and closing the cockpit door, I have designed. As the planet is quite big, Doris has created a “floating starfish guide”, who shows us the right path to reach our next destination. I have designed 2 sounds for it. In the background, a player can hear the ambient sound/ white noise, which I have designed as well. Following the “floating starfish guide”, we reach a system of tunnels. I have designed some magickal ambient sounds for tunnels, however, I don’t know yet if they will be used and which out of the 3 submitted. Our work has stopped here.
Audrey Chen started her musical career using a cello, then a voice, and since 2003 she delved deeply into her version of narrative and non-linear storytelling, using her voice in an unconventional way and occasionally analog electronics. For nearly two decades, her predominant focus has been her solo work with the cello, voice, and electronics, but she has more recently, in the last four years, begun to shift back towards the exploration of the voice as a primary instrument. Aside from her solo concerts, Chen performs currently in duo with Phil Minton; as BEAM SPLITTER with trombonist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø; as MOPCUT with Lukas Koenig and Julien Desprez; as HISS & VISCERA with modular synth player Richard Scott; as a trio in SEN RYO NO with modular synth players Tara Transitory and Nguyen Baly; in duo with electronic music artist Kaffe Matthews; as AFTERBURNER for voice/live electronics/light with Doron Sadja; and as VOICE/PROCESS for voice/live digital process with Mexican sound artist Hugo Esquinca. Notable past collaborators include German conceptual artist John Bock and abstract turntablist Maria Chavez. First of all, I was fascinated by how incredible sounds you can achieve using just voice without adding any effect. Sometimes I even thought a particular sound has to be modulated but there Audrey was performing live in front of everyone. Another aspect, that surprised me, was that any other time high-pitched sounds would put me on edge, however when Audrey made them, I found them highly relaxing. I love Audrey’s connection to the microphone and her point of seeing it as another instrument and not an obstacle or just part of the background. Julien Cowley from The Wire says: “Audrey Chen has created an uncompromising and idiosyncratic music, tightly disciplined yet acoustically wild and heavy with implication. Her ultra-verbal vocalising, often reminiscent of the visceral and emotionally charged sound poetry of François Dufréne or Henri Chopin, exposes physiological aspects of utterance that are concealed within standardised articulation and day to day speech. Fleshy, breath-driven and flecked with spittle, Chen’s voice emanates not just from her mouth but from an ensemble of upper body surfaces, channels, passages, and cavities.”
During today’s class with Ingrid, we started a very interesting and I would say existential discussion. In the first part of the class, while seeing the presentation on VR, its prime rules that need to be preserved, and its future, we approached Zenka’s ted talk on “Will virtual and augmented reality move us into the knowledge era?”. I have mixed feelings about what was said and because of m own opinion on that question, I have decided to develop this topic on my blog. It is quite a bold statement first to assume that VR is going to be element that will move us to the “knowldge era” and secondly it sounds to me like all the knowledge gathered through centuries is disregarded. Honestly, I am quite pessimistic about putting our personal life into virtual reality and basically giving up on our real life and world. Maybe it is so, because my biggest fear, just like presented in the movie by Alex Proyas called: “I, Robot”, is robots will take control over humans and makes us prisoners of our own life. Of course, it doesn’t need to be robots, just like in the movie, but simply technology taking control over us which is happening already. However, right now, in my opinion, it is within safe limits because laptops, phones, cameras, and VR sets for games proved to be very useful and handy in day-to-day life. But the problem is that hunger for more will never stop and the biggest problem of humanity is that we never learn a lesson from history and history likes to repeat itself. It starts with creating games in VR and will end with living our virtual life instead of a real one. We will stop caring for other people and maintaining any social skills. Life will be unbearable and people will choose to live a simpler life in VR than working on one on earth. Another very important aspect that was brought up during our discussion was that we will get so involved in creating a new world that we won’t care and put enough attention into maintaining and saving planet Earth. It won’t be a priority anymore as first of all while maintaining the planet and life that is not perfect, and secondly, even if the planet will be destroyed we have an alternative world created in VR. Of course, VR has positive sides as allowing physically disabled people to live life to the fullest with a body that works perfectly fine in the virtual world. Broadening our knowledge and developing new ways of learning when it comes to medical subjects for instance. But it is important to be moderate and not give up on our real life for sake of a virtual one.
Lately, I am very interested in the cohesion between sound arts and the human body. In my essay for Contemporary Issues in Sound Arts module, I would like to expand on the way sound influence speech, listening, and human brain activity. I was always fascinated by how the human brain works and the depths we didn’t discover yet, especially in the context of multi-personal disorders. When one of the people created by our brain can speak fluently in a language we have never learned or generate personalities and characters we have never had, which is giving life to a completely new person inside our body. Nevertheless, I have never thought about combining the source of my interest with the field of my studies. Therefore I have decided to dedicate the current essay topic to dissolve around those two specifications. I will vocalize the therapeutic and harmful effects of sound, how it affects our body on mental and physical levels, the philosophical meaning of sound, and how our brain interprets it. I aim to investigate the art of sound not solely as commonly known music but also as silence and noise and reach the deepest nooks of the meaning of sound and its effect on the human body.
I would like to start with research on the existential level. I divide my work into disruptive and undisruptive sounds but what are “noise” and “silence”? Christoph Cox in his article called “Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious” disclose the nature of those two terms and their inseparable meaning in the universe. According to Cox noise is:
“…is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic… Background noise may well be the ground of our being.”
He contradicts the common statement that ” noise” is a secondary phenomenon and something disruptive. In reality, is necessary to distinguish signals from background noise, which allows us to notice and focus on what is important to us. Noise is not some linear accumulation of signals. Rather, noise is the set of sonic forces that are capable of entering into differential relations with one another in such a way that they surpass the threshold of audibility and become signals. John Cage was calling for a shift from music to background noise. “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise…When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating” he wrote in 1937. Noise is no longer merely one sound among many, a sound that we do not want to hear or cannot hear. It is the ground and the condition of possibility for every significant sound, as that from which all speech, music, and signal emerge. On the other hand, Cage equated ‘noise’ with ‘silence’; by the same token, he rejected the conventional conception of ‘silence’ as the absence of sound. His most famous piece “4’33” open our eyes to what silence’ is in his opinion, which we can perceive more or less such as the shuffling of feet, wind, rain, and the muttering of the audience but he also draws our attention to what remains out of earshot: the global field and flow of noise, which we perceive only obscurely. Christoph Cox says:
“Silence is the sound of the mill or waterfall, the perceptual back- ground that we no longer hear. But it is also the sound of the seashore, whose roar registers the inaudible intensive forces that produce it, a noumenal essence that we grasp without distinctly hearing it.”
Silence and noise despite being completely different are inseparable and essential for each other to be distinguished and noticed. Noise is not the only term for something disruptive and interfering, as well as silence, is not just an absence of sound. What’s more, they can have a deep and everlasting impact on the human body and mind. Therefore in the next paragraph, I will focus on the physical and mental effects sound has on us.
In everyday life situations, humans receive complex sounds which contribute to the way one perceives reality. Studies show an interconnection between the physics and psychology of hearing. Blowing of the wind, sea waves, and birds singing are more than audible sounds. They can interact with the emotions and mood of a human being and create feelings. Sound contributes to communication and conveys information with semantic and emotional elements.
