Author: Sephora Pietrzak

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Global Sonic Cultures// UK’s Grime

I have an older brother who always had some hiphop in his bedroom. I didn’t really like ones, my brother was listening to, but it definitely stayed with me. When I was 15, I got into American Hip Hop. I absolutely loved how true and aggressive it was. Since then whenever I had bad day I would listen to my favorite rappers. It gave me  energy and made me feel untouchable. Therefore finding an appreciation for Grime wasn’t hard. I listen to artists like: Dizzie Rascal, P Money, Kano. I can’t say I prefer UK’s Grime more than American Hip Hop, because sometimes some Grime’s songs are just too electronic. Recently I am obsessed with Stormzy, who doesn’t create typical Grime.

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PROJECT #3// final thoughts

our album’s front and back cover

Our groups, for this assignment, have been changed and beside one person, I did not know anyone. Therefore I was really worried in terms of how this project will come out and how working process will look like. Fortunately everyone in my new group wanted to be present in creating process and share their ideas, thoughts. Work went really smoothly and lightly as we made sure that everyone knows what to do and agree with overall theme. Moreover I truly loved our topic as it allowed me not only to create piece that I sympathize with but also design sound that shows my personal story of finding my true self during Pandemic in 2020. Futhermore creating whole album as a group has been an amazing experience as it made me feel that from the start to very end we are creating product completely on our own, which is much bigger than just sound composition and that as a group we have created an album that constitute memory of this particular moment.

For our album title we decided to go with “religare” which translated from Latin is considered a stem for the word religion and has the meaning of binding, “to tie something with something”, the human and the divine, “to connect” in some way.

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PROJECT #3// in process 2/2

I decided to divide my work into three parts, which are going to represent three phases of my mind. First one is starting with dark sound, which I wanted to give this feeling of insecurity, that represents my negative thoughts, caused by reality, I found myself in. As the first piece of sound is coming to the end, my vocal recorded in falsetto(mostly) is showing up , taking listener gradually into second part. This moment in my work is mirroring my mind trying to pull me out from my negative state of mind and put me in alternative reality, I’ve created in order to find happiness, enthusiasm to do anything again and to run away from real life I didn’t want to participate in, in that particular moment. Therefore for this part I wanted to use medium that will perfectly show how not confined in space this phase was. And lastly I decided to end my work with piece that it’s supposed to represent this surrealistic and magical world I have designed.

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PROJECT#3// in process 1/2

My first idea of how to approach topic of “reconnecting with myself” was showing what I am doing to achieve that.

Pandemic brought a really hard and dark times to me. I lost completely any enthusiasm. A lot of my plans were completely destroyed and I couldn’t do anything about that. I felt so small and powerless. I didn’t see sense of doing anything productive, so I wasn’t. I shut up in my shell, where there was only me and my thoughts. Covid showed me as well, how cruel and even more scary this world is(than I thought before). Everything is around money and connections. People losing their jobs and their only source of income, because they aren’t important enough. In order to survive this hard time I created my surreal reality I wanted to live in inside my head. I would like my piece to mirror my mind and make it possible for listeners to see how I am reconnecting with myself.

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PROJECT#3// inspiration

Inspiration for my piece was my state of mind. I tried to capture how I was feeling inside my head during Pandemic and allow listeners to understand me. During lockdown I was feeling really lonely. I’ve lost enthusiasm to do anything, because in my opinion it was pointless. My sound piece is full of sad, low tones reflecting my emotions and also high vocals ,overlapping each other creating composed chaos, which for me mirror my head trying to drown out my negative thoughts and create alternative reality, allowing me to live fully even if it’s just inside my head. When I listen to my piece I see image above, which is “Tree of Souls” from “Avatar”. My mind was, for me, like this three for Na’vi people, source of hope and healing energy. My work is basically journey through my mind in 2020.

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PROJECT#3// idea

For this assessment, as a group we had to create album which will consist of every person’s individual sound piece, along with album’s cover. We had complete freedom of how we want to approach this project and how we want our album cover to looks like. As a group we wanted to keep our album around one common keynote and to create sound pieces about something, that everyone can relate to in this weird and unstable times; something that people can truly understand, because they went or are going through it and finally show how this “something” we perceive and what it means to us. For our theme we chose topic of “reconnecting with myself“, according to which everyone of us can share their personal story of finding true self in times where sense of reality has been lost.

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Creative Sound Project//PIXELSYNTH

During lecture on Sound Creative Project module, we’ve been acquainted with Lofi video synthesizer, created by Olivia Jack, called “PIXELSYNTH”. What interested me the most, is how creative and fun to work is this synth. Sound you can design using controls, no matter of combination, is always on high pitch. It’s definitely not for everyone, however it’s surely worthy trying out. You can not only play with sound, but also create your own drawing, play with existing background image or upload and modify one, you have uploaded.

My favourite combinations are: Chinese Pentatonic starting from C# and Kuomi Pentatonic starting from G#( both starting from first octave).

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Global Sonic Cultures(3)// Italian opera “Turandot”

Pavarotti’s talent and artistic belongings are undeniable. Sound piece I would like to focus on the most, is called “Nessun Dorma” from “Turandot” opera composed by Puccini. Composer first began working on the opera in 1920. “The world of Turandot is a place of absolute cruelty and horror, but somehow love still exists within it.” says udiscovermusic. According to one theory, work is response to overturn of World War I. Paradox between cruel reality and beautiful, almost magical vision of love we believe in, is fascinating and states Puccini’s favorite topic as he expressed this subject in all his operas.

Pavarotti’s performance of “Nessun Dorma” is full of emotions. Every time I listen to this piece, I feel like it wasn’t meant for listener’s ears but for the only person in the world he truly loves, what makes the perception of this aria honest and even more beautiful. You can understand my shock when I read lyrics and I found out that “Nessun Dorma” instead of talking about this true love, presents story of blind lover who forces his chosen one to marry him. Pavarotti’s emotions in performing this piece completely mislead me which ,except disappointment in my adjudication, is really fascinating process in psychological meaning.

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Global Sonic Cultures(2)// K-POP

I was introduced to K-pop by one of my friends in 2015. As a person, who was growing up on American Pop and Hiphop, at first I didn’t like it at all. It was too colorful, music video was too fast-paced and generally there was too much of everything. After first, not so successful, approach, I tried to listen to this one particular song again and I completely fell in love. Aspects I found weird, were now incredible. I loved how it was different from western music. A well compared to most american’s music videos, in K-pop MV is like a movie. Unfortunately at the time I started listening to K-pop it wasn’t that popular, as it is now, and I faced a lot of criticism because of that. However this experience didn’t change my attitude towards Korean music, as I know that it’s natural behavior for people to hate stuff they don’t understand. I don’t know why is it like that, why we all cannot just respect everyone’s opinion and music taste.

K-pop is music genre you cannot just pass, you will love it or hate it. It definitely changed the way I think and see things. In K-pop everything is possible, artists change their aesthetic every time they have a comeback and sometimes as well completely new artistic vision every year. Korean music showed me that we have complete power over ourselves, not society we live in. It doesn’t matter if someone does not like how we look and what we wear, it’s our body and our life and we can do with this whatever we want. K-pop gave me also confidence to dream big and to be not afraid of being different.

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Global Sonic Cultures(1)// GRIMES

Grimes is an example of an artist who created new persona separated from existing human’s body through sound. With human’s body come limitations and expectations from society. There is no freedom when we are trapped in cage of what people think we should do and who we should be. Sound is about designing new reality based on our artistic vision. Liberty and room to develop are essential. As Grimes said: “humans need to put humans in boxes. Therefore I would like a non-human self that more easily escapes the boxes”. With separating personal life and art comes freedom and space for creating, we can see that mostly in artist adopting their stage name. Singer not only did that but also adopted completely new artistic body called “WarNymph”. Grimes accurately pointed out that:” The avatar allows us to play to the strengths of digital existence rather than be human trying to navigate a world that isn’t made for us”. With alternative persona comes alternative world which we need to understand in order to appreaciate.

based on the interview with Grimes by “The Face”