Assignment 2: Sound

Assignment 2: Sound

We have learned that the sound artist John Cage believed that all sounds are musical and worth paying attention to. After completing the listening exercise and learning about John Cage’s work, I think that I really have become more aware of the beauty in everyday sounds. When I was gathering sound recordings for this project, I noticed that I very frequently hear the sounds of doors opening and closing. Every door makes a unique sound with it's own combination of metal clicks and bumps and vibrations. When you hear something in real life, there is no loss of quality from a recording or a speaker. There really is a musical quality to even the most mundane, everyday sounds.

I gathered sounds over the weekend by taking my phone out to record anything that stood out to me during the day, like birds calling and doors closing. I also specifically sought and created a lot of destructive sounds like popping and crunching, the sound of my hand saw cutting down a dead ash sapling, and paper ripping. I enjoyed listening to the isolation of each sound in the recordings. It was like taking photographs, except that the sound is less contextually expressive and more descriptive of time as it passes.

 When it came time to put all of the sounds together, I found that I had no plan for them. I distorted some sounds, although it’s very hard to hear in the finished composition, and I layered many of them on top of each other. Each one had a specific order and place in the composition, but what I came up with was a cacophony, and I was fairly displeased at first. I have taken some time to think about it, and I think what happened was that once again I approached making a piece without a plan, and what came through was how I felt at the time. Sometimes in a comic an artist will give a character a thought bubble with only an angry scribble in it to describe how the character feels. This sound composition might be somewhat of an auditory version of that scribble. Maybe the chaos will convey that mood, of being fatigued, and stressed about school and how many things are happening at once; doors opening, and doors closing.