Please post your comments, reflections and opinions of each others work.
Assignment 4: Sound Poem / Vox Humana the Wordless Voice
The goal in this project is to see if an array of seemingly unintentional, unrelated sounds can be organized using the poetic structure that we have been employing, to evoke or convey meaning. For this project you are to “write” a poem with sound. Working only with ambient or “found” sound you will assemble the sound clips into a meaningful poetic structure. The final objective is to evoke image and to express an idea built conceptually from these ambient sounds alone.
10 comments:
Like the majority of the class i didn't start with a real idea for my piece. I sort of went with the flow of the sounds and found a way to make the piece fit together. Im not completely happy with how it turned out but i always feel that way about my pieces.
The one piece i found interesting was Max's. It did something slightly different and took a softer route. The feeling it gets across is definitely a grey wintery feel as mentioned in the lecture and even without a pre thought out narrative i still thought it did a great job of taking me to a place (a snow filled sky).
For this next assignment i think i will try to take out a camera due to the awful image quality of my cybershot's video function. If im successful in being able to take one out then i will really be looking forward to this next assignment because while i didn't have a direct idea when making my musical piece i now have a few images in my head of what would accompany it.
I took this assignment as a challenge to try and use 'found' sounds to create a compilation that was rhythmic and pattern-esque but at the same time NOT seem musical. As for the narrative in the compilation, I did not aim for a particular idea or thought, I just assumed that the sounds I chose would evoke a certain emotion/feeling to my audience which is really all I cared about.
After listening to the other sound poems, I found mine to be rather more upbeat...which comes from my choice of quick repetition of short sounds. I thought more people would have done something close to this, however instead I found most of pieces contained longer low-tone sounds. The reason I think I went with shorter repetition sounds was because I wanted to challenge myself to bring my compilation of sounds as close as possible to music without actually being music. I think...or at least hope I succeeded.
After watching the lecture and listening to the responses of the sound poems, one that stood out, or seemed to make the biggest emotional impact on me was Patrick Gill's. The one sound in particular at the beginning of the piece, if I had to guess: blowing over the top of an open bottle was the sound that stuck out most for me. It instilled me with a sense of eeriness with a slight bit of fear. Near the end of the piece, the sounds "pick up" a little bit more which, for me, represented the fear that I had earlier in the piece attacking me. This "pick up" dies off and the eerie wind begins again to haunt it's next victim with its ensuing fear.
I find it rather interesting how virtually everyone's sound poem overlap with each other: typing, technology, urgency, stresses, repetitions. Sort of like a commentary on the life of a New Media student, as we all are.
I really enjoyed the hauntingly calm feeling in Max's piece. I could really imagine it in a scene of a movie. Patrick's piece had a great sense of repetition, increasing the speed each time and deciding to end with the beginning-- the calm. The narrative and the sounds were very recognizable.
Some of the pieces had very distinct sounds and others were ambiguous. I'm not sure which I enjoy more. They both have their pros. A clear narrative with distinct sounds seem to create a more visual picture in the mind while the ambiguous sounds seem to create more of an emotional response, but that's not necessarily the case every time because of the viewer's interpretation and personal experiences.
Sound is one of my biggest weaknesses in Media, I like working with its once I'm satisfied with the music or ambient sounds, but I have difficulty deciding on what to use, because I know the effects of sound and music, and how it can drive or destroy a piece.
I was sitting in on a lecture today with Matt Hulse and he discussed sound and the use of it within the piece, He talked about how for one of his projects (Take me Home) he had someone do the soundtrack for him, but didn't give the creator the footage, but instead asked him to make a soundtrack with a few key sound/clips, and a small outline of where he wanted crescendos or intense parts etc The sound editor found this very difficult but in the end it worked with Matt's images, and his use of time lapse techniques created a abstract visual piece.
"In Take Me Home, technical magician-filmmaker Matt Hulse works through multiple analogue and digital iterations, producing a wonderfully absurdist adventure.."
He played the piece initially for us without the image so we could here the sound and allow ourselves to imagine the images and sense the feeling of it. Sound and video are very different and can work or fail together or individually.
Both in Raphs lecture and Matts talk, they discussed interpretation and how the viewer interprets the piece depending on their own life experiences, and even before they view the piece they already have expectations and frame of reference before even encountering the piece.
After doing a piece in 301 (audio documentary) where we had to do a 'soundscape' I was aware of how without images or context sounds we are usually familiar with are no longer as recognizable. When I was working on my piece I wasn't trying to make the sounds recognizable but just ambient, but its interesting that in Jacob Powers and Patrick's piece, as Raphs points out, with the use of easily recognizable sounds, it gives new context to the piece, and then makes us try to interpret the other sounds and relate them to the ones we were familiar with.
I like Jessie's piece because of the use of the water, which gave it a calming factor, but also ran through the piece giving it a base, the other sounds do feel as if there is a poetic structure to the piece and you can sense the Stanzas and poetic breaks within-it.
I think I over thought this project at first and if I were too do it again I think I would have taken another approach. I had a awful time trying to get audio equitment that was working from the library so I had to use the mic built into my laptop for most of the audio recording.
I got a real sense of place with just about every piece that I listened too. Jessicas piece really gave me a sense of place when the change was thrown onto a table after a sigh. I liked the use of recognizable sounds. Some of the pieces were a little too abstract and I would go in and out of following a rhythmic pattern. I think a few people used alarm clocks and that noise when used was well executed in every piece that used it.ky1
Looking back on my own piece, I have a similar sentiment to other students in that, I did not have any planned outcome when recording my sounds. As I began editing them together, I started to find a pattern of similar sounds that fit together nicely to sort of define a space for the piece.
As it progressed, it seemed the narrative began to take place not necessarily in time, but in space and tone. As Jess said in her post already, a lot of these pieces seemed to have a stressful or busy overtone that comprised a central role in the piece. Perhaps this was because most sounds were taken from technology or maybe because there was a subconscious stress existing within the hearts of the class. Who knows.
While I felt my own piece was more of an exploration in ambience (in a very loose way), Chris' piece really stood out to me. I think this may have been because it was a very rhythmic sort of piece, without him even meaning it to be. With his background in audio and music production, I felt this may have been the reason for the musicality, but that it didn't take away from the piece in any way. The combination of both digital sounds and very concrete, physical strikes made this piece resonate with a sense of strange happiness for me.
For my own personal remix, I want to experience with a more rhythmic piece, but not one that becomes a song. I feel that because the sounds are of a similar type I will be able to remix them in a way that puts the audience in the same place, but takes them a different time. We'll see what I come up with!
I also did not have a plan when it came to my sounds. I pieced them together little logic and had feeling from except a bit of angst. As a general rule I dislike music Concrete ; it is a bit self serving making something only you can understand. I do like the inventiveness that this style of music presents, using natural found sound leads you to many possibilities. This assignment was not a problem and I enjoyed working with sound not images.
Raphael was right when he said that my piece lacked some direction and focus. I haven't ever worked with nothing but sound before, I have always treated it as a secondary part to the visual elements. However, this assignment did open up the possibilities of sound. Probably one of the more difficult parts was trying to find a rhythmic structure with sound that did not turn into music.
Jake William's was interesting, in that he definitely tried to work in what he was feeling. The quick, small noises give a real jittery feel to the piece. I think it was because it sounds like knives sharpening.
Max Ludwig's did have a wintry feel , as mentioned by others in the class. The sounds he used were very soft and smooth, almost reminiscent of ice skates gliding on an ice rink. Winter, even heavy storms have a soft ambient feel, but are still sharp, which is the impression I got from Max's piece.
Patrick's on the other hand, had a very wet feel to it. The sounds he used weren't necessarily of wet things, but the piece as a whole had a definite sloshy element. I think it was how he played with the sound. It wasn't structureless, but it seemed moldable.
Listening to Jacob Power's piece, and Raphael's take on it really hammered home the idea of sound as metaphor. As Raphael said, the on coming train isn't ominous in its own right, but gave the feel of something rushing towards the listener. That's something I hadn't yet gotten the hang of, that is listening to a sound and not trying to hear what the sound was(such as a train). Instead, to listen to what the sound implies.
Isaac's
Isaac's has a really interesting feel to it
there are some really unique sounds within it, sort of like listening to
something through a wall. The idea of pulling a narrative from it seemed a little
difficult, but it was a cool assortment of sounds.
Jake's piece seemed like the most rhythmic of the bunch hands down. We decided as a group that the piece gave us a sense of anxiety as Raph said in the re-recorded lecture.
Patrick's gave us strong signals as to what was going on, and definitely presented the most narrative of all of the piece's that we listened to. I think the alarm clock really formed the rhythm of the piece and the ending was really interesting. The video game type noise was very unique according to the piece.
Jacob's this was really cool, I liked the train noise that sort of extended throughout the piece. The playback sound was also really interesting. I liked the way his sounds were somewhat drawn out and sort of molded together. It did a decent job presenting a narrative through this method.
In coercing myself away from musicality, I tried to think about this project as audio-only abstract storytelling. It was difficult to tell a story without words or music. The themes my piece focused on involved drudgery, repetition, and sleep. When I get busy, i tend to have very literal dreams where i wake up and do lots of boring crap. Then i really wake up and realize i have to do it all again. The sound was meant to capture that feeling, from the dreamlike, non-concrete sounds in the beginning, followed by the alarm clock, and cacophony of office supplies.
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