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Asher’s Final Project Statement

This piece is composed almost entirely from recordings I recorded in the Middlebury bike shop of tapping, grinding, and spinning sounds created using a single bicycle and additional objects in conjunction with the bicycle itself. Additionally, I recycled online recordings of a human heartbeat and the sound of a bike race which you will hear throughout the piece.

My goal with this piece was to create a sensory experience without a traditional narrative. In previous projects, I found myself immediately jumping towards creating a narrative arc. This helped me formulate ideas for pieces and helped me create structure, but in retrospect, I think it hindered the impact and overall feeling my pieces were able to create. In this piece, I stayed away from creating a single narrative from a wide berth of sounds and weather attempted to create something entirely new and unique from a restricted selection of sounds that are associated with a known object and activity.

I did not apply any reverb, compression or any specialization to any of my tracks. Since I was sourcing my material from a known source, I wanted every sound to be recognizable but the collective combination of those sounds to be unique and provoking. I did however, record every sound to three different tracks using three different microphones simultaneously. I used a shotgun mic, a hypercardiod mic, and a contact mic that was strapped directly to the bike frame. This variation in recording allowed me to have variation in the editing process without using software specialization.

I designed the piece to move back and forth between rhythmic repetition and arrhythmic textural sounds. There are portions that are satisfying and other portions that are jarring. I found this similar to the experience of riding a bike. Riding a bike can be rhythmic and therapeutic, but it can also be painful and  filled with anguish when biking up a steep hill or nearing the end of a long race. This piece embodies that contrast.

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Final Project Proposal

I plan on creating an audiovisual piece composed solely of sounds recorded from bicycles. My plan is to record sounds in the Middlebury Bike Shop. I will record conventional sounds of the bike. Pedaling, shifting, etc but spend more time creating sounds using other materials in interaction with bicycles. 

In the piece, I hope to represent the differing styles in which people ride bikes. Road bikes, mountain bikes, campus bikes, and tandem bikes all have different characteristics and make different sounds. I hope to take advantage of the wide spectrum of texture and rhythm of sounds that the bicycles have to offer.

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Week 8 Reading Response

I really enjoyed Westerkamps Kits Beach Soundwalk when her narration first kicked in, I was skeptical. It didn’t take long, however, for me to begin following along with great intent. The narration provided a commentary in which I was able to guide myself through the piece. I especially enjoyed the segment in which she spoke about the different levels of noticing the city noise. Most importantly, it really struck me as to the power we have as sound designers. What we choose to include, amplify, or process has a huge effect on the piece. Westerkamp also mentioned in her SFU article the difference between visual perception and auditory perception as the difference between outside and within. Visual images are very much an exterior stimulus on the body, but sounds are internalized. How we notice sounds in our day to day soundscapes is constantly changing based on our moods and attention. In a soundscape, we can utilize this invoke feelings and emotions that are very much unique to the listener but also designed to invoke such a feeling.

I thought that Schafer’s writing on keynote sounds is very relevant and important to our work. While listening to my own work and my peer’s work in class. I have noticed a pattern in a piece’s efficacy. The pieces with strong keynote sounds seem to come together more cohesively. Pieces without some sort of central theme (i.e. the barnacles in Westerkamp’s piece) tend to lose the listener.

On another note, I am very excited to experiment with sounds of wind traveling through different objects and environments. I really enjoyed how Westerkamps describes how those sounds create interesting and unique aural spaces

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Week 6 Reading Response

The relationship between architecture and sound in Alvin Lucier’s piece struck me. It specifically struck me after completing my semantic heavy, remix assignment. Lucier describes that “sound and space are inextricably connected”. In his I am Sitting in a Room piece, he shows that semantic speech can be subverted into a resonance that still retains qualities of the original speech, i.e. his stutter, but reflect the resonant environment as an equally important factor in the sound.

In my remix piece, I included recordings of various student and community speakers voicing their opinions on activism at Middlebury as well as professionally recorded advertisements for the college. These environments in which the speakers spoke varied greatly. Some spoke to a crowd in Meade Chapel, some spoke into a college radio recorder, and others were recorded for an advertisement. I wished I could’ve picked up on this variety and used it to create an architectural effect. If I had used the techniques in I am Sitting in a Room, I could’ve distorted the speeches to reflect the audience environment more than the semantic meaning of their words, and thus explore the environments in which different opinions were received.

In Weheliye’s piece, I had one specific thought. He spoke of the vocoder as almost more human than the use of cell phone sound distortion because of it’s “innocent” roots in the 80’s. When I think of the most modern vocoder-esque tool in the musician’s cabinet, I think of the digital voice. It has the sound of a vocoder but is clearly produced from a computer reading textual speech i.e. Siri. Does this still have the nostalgic effect of the vocoder, or is the non-human aspect of it too overpowering? To me, a millennial kid. The digital voice has the same emotional effect that the vocoder does. Perhaps, certain technologically produced sounds are capable of producing a similar nostalgia that analog vocoders do for older generations.

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Week 3 Reading Response

In the Chion reading, Michael Chion divides the act of listening into three “modes”. There is casual listening that consists of listening in order to determine the source of the sound. Casual listening is what we use to construct a realistic world inside our heads. At a dinner party, the sounds of clinking glass and chatter orient us in our surroundings, despite not actively paying close attention to any individual sound source. Semantic listening refers to the interpretation of messages through sound. When we speak to one another, we may speak in different tones and styles, but the meaning of the words remains more or less intact and in line with the rules of the language we are conversing in. Reduced listening occurs when we listen to the actual properties of a sound. There is no semantic meaning and no obvious source of the sound. Of Chion’s three modes, reduced is by far the most understood mode. 

In the Journal of Sonic Sound: 7 Metaphors piece, Mailman divides listening into more categories that Chion. He describes each one as a metaphor for listening. Listening as Digestion, Recording, Adaptation, Meditation, Transport, Improvisation, or Computation. I honestly struggled to parse out what each of Mailman’s metaphors really meant, but I was able to break down the seven metaphors and place them within Chion’s three modes. Digestion, Recording, and Adaptation can roughly be described as Casual listening. Computation and Recording can be described as Semantic listening and Meditation, Transport, and Improvisation as Reduced listening.

What interested me about both readings is the idea of studying sound as a multifaceted medium. In order to effectively begin to understand the nature of sound, you must understand that it is perceived in a myriad of different ways. When looking ahead to my future work in sound, I am going to keep this in the forefront of my thought process. How can I manipulate the different modes of listening to create interesting compositions? I’m wondering if it is possible to actively transport a listener between modes of listening. Can I create a composition that initiates casual listening in the listener but then subverts their expectations and causes them to engage in a reduced listening state? What emotional effect does an individual feel when they think they are just hearing ambient noise when all of the sudden they find themselves paying attention to incredibly specific facets of the sound around them?

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Week 2 Reading Response

In Attali’s piece Noise: The Political Economy of Music, the central theme revolves around the concept of music as power. He describes the use of music as a way to, “Make them forget, make them believe, and silence them.” Perhaps he is correct, and music has really created sheep out of us humans. His statement infers that central powers are the creators of music, and this is where I find trouble. Music is, in many ways, one of the most egalitarian forms of expression in existence. Perhaps in a dictatorship, yes, music can be used as a tool of societal coercion, but I will not be convinced of this outside these parameters.

I also disagreed with Attali’s prophecy theory. Claiming that Music preludes societal change is a chicken and egg scenario. Music and societal change is a correlational relationship. Drawing hard and fast conclusions about this is nonsensical.

Kahn’s piece, Noises of the Avant Garde was more challenging for me to read. The complex historical nature of Italian futurism and the Dadaists is something I knew little about. Kahn describes how La Bruit, which is essentially sound music, was intended by Marinette to be a “rather violent reminder of the colorfulness of life.” This is echoed later on in the discussion about the Russolo’s sounds of war when he describes the expressiveness of sound to be “infinite” compared to sight which is almost zero. 

One connection I found between the two readings was a theme of sound as a territorial occupation of space. Attali describes sound as a “panoply of power” and uses a bird’s call to establish territory as an example. Sound as a tool of power when it comes to the articulation of space is an idea I can get behind. This is also brought up in Kahn’s piece when he speaks about how sound is what makes war real. In All Quiet on the Western Front as referenced in Kahn’s piece, it is the sounds of the dying man inhabiting the space of the protagonist that makes the war real to him. He cannot shut off the noise because he is in the auditory territory of war, and therefore at the mercy of its power in space.

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Horizontal Arrangement Exercise.

Waveform

Volume

Panning

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Sound Library

Here are my 10 favorite sounds that I have recorded so far. I have uploaded them to Soundcloud. 

https://soundcloud.com/asherbrown1/sets/10-favorite-sounds

Here is how I organize my sound files. I first categorize whether the sound is interior or exterior. Then I categorize it broadly before I categorize it with more detail. Additionally, I attach a variety of tags to each file so that common characteristics can be searched for across categories.

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Eric Benoit’s Elegy

As I listened to Elegy, a story emerged. In the description, Eric writes that the piece is about mental illness and depression at college. Personally, I think this description detracts from the piece. Elegy has multiple climatic tensions that rise and fall with intensity, culminating with a climax at the end of the six minutes. When I listen, I hear the low pitched reverberations mixed with higher pitched tones and I can imagine how Benoit is trying to recreate the fundamentally feeling of existing in a state of mental chaos. However, I think this sound piece could tell a lot of different stories.

A good story needs arc, suspense, and some well timed release. There are mellow sections and there are intense sections in Elegy. When attaching mental illness to the sound. The contrast between mellow and intense mimics the swinging of an unstable mind. I also really enjoyed how Benoit handled the ending. In the last crescendo. The lower pitched sound is textured and feels heavy. When the crescendo is released, it feels as if the whole sound has truly just jumped off a cliff.