Sound helps in designing sense of space. Movie or advertisement without sound is flat and inexpressive. Sound influences our emotion and their appearance. When we hear birds singing, we feel calm; hearing someone, we don’t like, make us annoyed and hearing something, we love, make us happy. Sound is everywhere and makes everything different, more pronounced.
For me Sound Art is a mean to express my emotions, thoughts in a way words won’t be able. Sound is like a letter filled with my feelings, which accompanied moment when I created it. And finally sound is my way of doing art and transforming my artistic vision, from my head, into real product.
inspired by Alan Licht’s article: “Sound Art: Origins, development and ambiguities”
My responsibility in a project was to find and collect sound effects, I thought were suitable based on the script, as well as creating sound piece for the ending. Reading text I noticed that there are a lot of moments where audience is laughing, therefore most of, submitted by me, sound effects were „crowd laughing” sounds. Finding them, consumed the most of my time, because most recordings had too high pitch, which will not fit the atmosphere, or sounded artificial. Also as in the script are six moments, where audience is laughing, I needed to find at least that much different samples. According to my group’s concept we wanted atmosphere in a radio to remind „late show ” with live audience. Therefore my suggestion was to start interview with applause from the audience, so I was looking as well for a recordings of that. I found the same obstacles as during looking for „crowd laughing” samples. Finally I managed to find six versions, I was satisfied with the most. Another idea was to use sound of „glitch”, which I wanted to remind one we can hear while losing TV connection, as in the 2/3 of the script „supercut” happens. My idea was to create feeling of whole connection being cut, not only Cindy’s voice, and to show it in a clear way. Next sound effect, I thought would be useful, is the recording of people talking in the background. In the script, at some point, Cindy becomes glitchy, audience being witness of this unexpected woman’s behavior, surely, not knowing what is happening, would be in a shock. Therefore I came up with an idea to find sound of people starting to exchange, between each other, their thoughts in the background. Keeping in mind that the whole interview is taking place in a closed space it’s important to accurately create suitable atmosphere for it. In order to do that I thought about using sound of white noise.
Lastly to give our project a little bit of myself, I created sound piece called „outer space”, which is my vision of space. I designed this sound, thinking about moment in the script after super cut, when, according to my group’s idea, we wanted to create soulful and peaceful ambience. Additionally I tried to make a piece which will match the atmosphere and keep the same theme as leading song „Coctails in space”. In creating my work I used only plug-ins that gave me magical feeling and would meet my expectations in making a real product out of my idea such as “Cosmos” or “Unfolding layers”and layered them up in order to make piece three-dimensional . To give my creation something literally connected to the space, as the background sound I used recording of Jupiter made by NASA. I designed ” outro space”, thinking about moment in the script after super cut, when, according to my group’s idea, we wanted to create soulful and peaceful ambience. Additionally I tried to make a piece which will match the atmosphere and keep the same theme as leading song „Coctails in space”.
Collaborative work is always a challenging process especially these days, when we cannot meet in person and talk our thoughts over. It is crucial that everyone has a clear vision of entire group’s idea for a project and participate in creating a real product out of it. Therefore first of all it is essential to make a transparent and understandable script as the basis for the future work. Next element is to divide roles and make sure everyone knows what to do. As the group we made sure to keep in touch and gave a report of how our personal work is progressing and create deadline for people responsible for sound effects, sound pieces and, in our case, person in charge of recording an interview to have them ready and upload in our folder in OneDrive. Secondly in order to create final product and make sure everything is at the right spot, all collected pieces had to be organized and their parameters had to be customized to fit atmosphere of the project. Lastly as our project is going to be broadcasted in radio we needed to have person responsible for broadcasting our creation and second one , in case first person will lose connection during demonstration.
I would like to talk a little bit about radio project, I am creating with my group.
Our project is based on book “La Société du Spectacle”(1967) by Guy Debord, which was an inspiration to create fictional character “just_cindy”. Book talks about ideology imposed on us by capitalist society that in order to be happier and live better life, we need more products. Over 60 years ago, when ” La Société of Spectacle” was published, there was no such a thing like social media. These days this monster, that was created in early 2000s, is getting bigger and more affecting. Social media allow us to create online new version of ourselves, happier and more successful. We become some kind of advertisers, showing places and products that will change your life. “just_cindy” is an Instagram influencer, whose whole persona was created to make money out of people, who wants to be like her.
Cindy is constructing imitation of reality in which everyone would love to live in.
Thomas De Quincey, in his essay “On the knocking at the gate in Macbeth”(1823), is studying the problem whether knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect. De Quincey suggests ” time must be annihilated”. At the first I couldn’t understand what he means by that. However if we think of time as a sign of changes or precisely saying, seeing “our demons”, that has been created by our bad decisions in the past, catching up with us and affecting our present/future, it all makes sense as time indicates impossibility to do something with that. I would like to bring up the topic how sound is related to all of this. Contrary to appearances it is really easy to be explained. Talking specifically about Act II, Scene III in The Tragedy of Macbeth, to which Thomas De Quincey refers in his work, the sound of knocking is direct event before Duncan’s murder which will affect Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s lives.
Sound is the indicator of changes and passing time and knocking at the gate, by itself, can be seen as knocking to the hell and crossing the line between reality and dark underworld, which completely distorts time that is known to us or even annihilate it if we assume that outside our world time doesn’t exist like in black hole in outer space.
Sense of seeing can kill all other senses. There is no need for smelling, hearing and touching if all we need is to just see an object and know what it is. But as simple as it is, it also destroys any magic which accompany not knowing the truth. Great example of that statement is broadcast created by BBC in 1997 called: ” Touching the Elephant”, which tells the story about four blind people touching and feeling an elephant for the first time. If they have known how an elephant looks like there would be no place for imagination . Brain, having that knowledge, will dismiss any information, which was gathered before using sense of smelling, hearing and touching, because they were simply means to get to know how the examined object looks like. Using our hands we can feel the texture, with our nose we can smell and with our ears we we can hear. Four blind people could experience that magic because for them their minds were their eyes.
Referring to Bonnie M Miller and others, the statement: ” the pictures are better on radio” is indeed true, because like blind people, mentioned in the broadcast, all radio listeners are blind. The only sense we can use while radio listening is the sense of hearing and it gives us whole new spectrum. Imagination can be wild and unexpected, creating inside our heads image which accompany particular piece of sound or just brings memories. The most beautiful aspect of radio listening is that there is no image imposed on us which gives us possibility to see sound through our minds.
based on BBC’s broadcast from 1997 called “Touching the Elephant”
Listening to the soundtrack from “Blue Planet II” is giving me unexpected feeling of comfort.
I can’t get rid of the sense of hearing beautiful symphony based on image of a life underwater. It feels so familiar and completely out of the reach at the same time, which is basically how I perceive nature. That’s what makes this soundtrack authentic.
The most fascinating aspect of the sound created by Hans Zimmer and Jacob Shea & David Fleming is that despite being so rich, I get an air and space to breathe. In my opinion that’s the hardest request for a sound designer, therefore my biggest congratulations to Kate Hopkins.
based on the soundtrack from “Blue Planet II” on BBC Earth
Do you know the feeling when you are among a lot of people and feel alone?
Do you know the feeling of being lonely but finding comfort in it?
What exactly is “loneliness”?
While listening to ” Coma” by Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres I feel like listening to personal statement of someone who is feeling lonely, who is feeling anxious. It’s like emotions enclosed in melody sent to blank space without expectation of response and that part is the worst. Feeling of loneliness and not having anyone to share it. When you spend to much time inside your head and all you see is your point of view and nothing above your problem can be horrible. As we are our worst enemies because we know ours tender points. However despite all of these sorrowful emotions melody created by Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres brings comfort and peace. It’s like a hug from someone close to our heart in the middle of crowdy street. It’s like comforting words form our best friend that everything will be okay and this situation is not the end and in moments like this it’s all we need. Loneliness does not need to be something negative. Everyone needs it from time to time. It lets us focus on our thoughts, work on ourselves.
For me it feels like Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres created soothing sound for everyone who feels lonely, for everyone who does not have someone to share their emotions, their apprehensions, as well teaches us that loneliness doesn’t need to be something sad but something necessary for personal development.Sound can be cure and “Coma” can definitely be an example of it.
based on “Coma” from “2 Years Stranger” album created by Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres
lovesick image enclosed in two stories told in sequence
two different people whose obsession over old lover unable them to live freely and at the same time force them to look constantly for another toxic, blind love.
Soundtrack which accompany each story is not diverse but the same comes for character’s love stories, trying to overcome toxic addiction to ex-lover and therefore trying to fall in love with someone new, who at the end will leave them for someone/something else like previous partner. It could be almost said that one song in particular leads us through narration.
In the first part image is blurry, dark and is the sound based on strings interrupted by clarinet played in high notes, creating some kind of disturbance in constancy of the main sound line.
The second part focuses on changing and dreaming about going to California. The lead song for this story unsurprisingly is “California dreamin'”. Not only the whole atmosphere of this part is casual and stable but as well melody created by The Mamas&The Papas makes it even more loose.
Not everything is always in our hands. Unwanted events happen all the time no matter how hard we try to make things go perfect. But is it a bad thing when it comes to art work?
When everything is on the point without any blemishes it can lose its color, its unpredactibility. When audience make breathing noises or start sniffling they give their own presence into act, they give life and they bring their own experience into the viewing of your piece ,making it something new, something which wasn’t intended from the beginning. They will all be able to hear something else and go through this experience in completely new way.
John Cage in his work called “4’33” created space for silence, room for the audience to bring piece of themself and therefore be part of this art work. This three movement composition can be presented with any instrument or instruments but they are only background to the sounds of the environment which creates the real creation. Not everything is about what we can see or hear. Sometimes what is more important is what we feel, imagine in our head or simply us. Different personalities, different experiences create tones of alternative ways of perception. People can look at the same exact monument, can hear the same piece of the sound ,but who they are inside and what they bring with them to experience this art work, will make them perceiving it in completely distinctive ways.
So putting on others specific way of reception or understanding our art work, is really what we want to achieve?
