Saturday, May 5, 2012

My Sound Piece....




For the past two days I have been focusing on my sound piece. It has been a very difficult process,  as I have had to sculpt a space through another one, and  trying to figure out the best way to translate my experiences of resonance into the show. For this, I have had to go back and listen to all my recordings, and think of which ones would work to represent the experience of resonance that I want to create in my space.
The thing is, is that a lot of my recordings were done as tests are are more like field recordings, rather than finished pieces, and they all have different vocal and tonal ranges depending on the spaces I am in. My major problem was that none of the recordings really related to one another and they were not made to merge together. They are all recordings of my own interactions and exchanges with site, so for me it felt strange to bring them together.
Last week I had a tutorial with Holger, who listened to a piece I was working on. The sound piece only included my recordings from Hamilton Mausoleum, and he told me that he wasn't sure it made sense to do this. So I took his advice and started playing around with recordings from all the different sites I had visited.
Listening to them all was manic, and very unnerving, the tones were completely different and the quality of the recordings varied, making the final piece sound unfinished and diverging from any sense of self or identity. It was because of this lack of identity, that I so wanted to create, that i decided to not go down this route. I have added the test to my supporting material to show my progress working up to the final piece. I also wanted to show that at least I tried to bring them all together, but for the sort of immersive experience I want to create in my space, the sounds needs to harmonize and work with one another to create the notion of 'site'.
What I started to realise through doing this, was that this had to a piece in its own right, and I had to sculpt an experience and make it into a new one. For this I decided to go back to the Hamilton Mausoleum recording as for me it feels like the only one that brought the space with it. In the piece, my voice carries the echo of the space and because it has such tremendous reverberance, you immediately get a sense of the site.  I thought there could be no better sound piece to work with than this one. It is also the site in which I had my strongest experience of resonance, and for me is the only recoding that sounds like a finished piece, and like a performance in itself.
So by working with this I have tried to select the very best of my journey and to work with it for degree show.
Over the passed few days I have played with the recording, and have played with how the sound moves around the space, choreographing its movement through the pipes. The idea behind the piece is to carry a space through the human voice. For the final piece I have tried to encompass my experience, but sculpt it for the space, to create a new site, and one that will exist in a new body and environment. The final piece is 6:01 minutes, done to fit into my space, which is room 601.

This is the final track:

1 comment:

  1. This is such a good blog. I enjoy the sound pieces because they inhabit the space of the listener as well as indexing, and allowing us to enter, the humanity of the voice. We're not just feeling the space of a disembodied call, a wave, but we're inhabiting the spatial body of the voice in all its tones, registers and being. Thanks for sharing your work!

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