10.6 – 10.29 Summary
Project 1:
Project 2:
1. The conceptualisation phase （3 ideas）
What are the key areas of interest for your portfolio?
Composing, different forms and types of creative music, preferably visually related.
Process：
Project 1: Album
Topic：Male gaze.
Male gaze means to the act of depicting women and reality from a heterosexual male perspective in visual art and in literary composition, objectifying female sexuality to please a heterosexual male audience, i.e. representing or reproducing women as sexual objects from a masculine, heterosexual point of view, for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer.
This is a collaborative project between me and my friends who study GMD. We have had two rounds of discussions so far. In the first discussion we had a prototype of how the work would be presented and the idea was to make it into an album combining audio and visuals. It could be a reflection on the appearance of women, the workplace and even married life. I also have a preliminary idea for the sound section, I want to use Zoom H5 to record some ambient sounds. For example, the female appearance in Male gaze, under this theme I would record the sound of fabrics rubbing together, zips, heels, male criticism when the female appearance doesn’t match Male gaze, etc.
I saw these headphones before the second discussion and they gave me a lot of inspiration.
So I made some sketches of the headphone design, of which I like the spider the best. The spider is placed at the back of the head and looks like it is connected to the central nervous system. This is because I think that the spider represents in some way the current situation of women in society. Women need to have eight hands and eight eyes to have a chance of getting a break in the workplace, and need to work more than men to get the same or maybe a little less in return. The spider’s web is also a cage in which women are trapped in their own lives giving me the feeling of living in reality but being completely isolated. Finally, in the course of my research I have also investigated that female spiders eat male spiders after mating, and putting this in the context of females I think it could be a case of widowhood parenting (a significant absence of one parent in the family. For example, if one parent is away for a long time, or if both parents are present with the children, but there is a lack of emotional support from one of them (e.g. leaving early and returning late, children hardly see each other, no verbal communication, etc.). This form of parenting is very common in Asia and I have seen many examples of it. The most common example is when the child is with the father but the first thing they do is to blame the mother for not taking care of the child after the child has fallen and cried. Many fathers blame women for not taking care of their children by saying that they are too busy working outside the home, when in reality most women in a marriage also have to work outside the home and are not full time wives.
So I told my friend about this idea during the second discussion and she agreed, although she said she preferred to put the spider in front.
10.24
In week 5 we were asked to go to the library to find reference material and when we got back I read one of the books called ‘A Poetry of Reality Composing with Recorded Sound’. I read this article “Real-World Sounds and Simulacra in my Computer Music” by Jean-Claude RISSET, the content of it gave me a lot of new knowledge and it opened my mind to the work. It opened my mind to the work.
“This work was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture from a project initiated by GRM and was produced between about 1984 and 1985. The work uses mainly sounds recorded in the Massif des Calanques, south of Marseille, and sounds synthesised by computer (also in Marseille). These sounds were then processed at GRM through another computer. The natural and synthesised sounds are first presented separately. As a result, real birdsong, as well as synthetic bird-like or insect-like sounds, have been spatialised. In the third movement the filtering of bird calls appears first as coloured echoes and later as a real bird ‘raga’ using defective scales. The origin of many of the sounds inferred from the embryonic material can be attributed to a ‘family tree’, showing a diffusion of sounds , similar to a rhizome.”
This is one of the pieces that I saw in there and inspired me. Using computer production to create real sounds, I felt a lightbulb moment when I saw this. It made me realise that I was really confined to my own ideas before. I could replace the sound with a specific chord or melody, for example a zip sound I could replace with a melody that climbs upwards or an interval. Not all the sounds in the piece are real, and it might be more interesting to intersperse them with real sounds and scale confrontations.
It would have been too monotonous and uninteresting to just record, and I’ve tried that before. For this work I didn’t want to limit myself to what I had created before and I wanted to explore new directions.
10.25
When I was looking at the documentation I was drawn to this question “How do your proposed projects build on your previous work?”.
It reminded me of my previous audio paper on experimental vocals, in which I also mentioned gender issues. The human voice is, in my opinion, the best instrument to feel emotions from. It can be the sound of a woman breaking down in the face of Male gaze, or it can be the sound of defiance.
10.28
“A Poetry of Reality Composing with Recorded Sound”.
‘Our ordinary listening is itself In going about our everyday listening lives we take-I suggest In going about our everyday listening lives we take-I suggest-several different, but interdependent, stances, which amount to a dynamic construct. -Rather than deprive us of this activity, the realworld composer can treat it as a creative force, one which may be influenced by the way we listen. Rather than deprive us of this activity, the realworld composer can treat it as a creative force, one which may be influenced, changed or subtly directed to give us an enriched understanding of real-world sounds: listening is as much a ‘material’ for the composer as the sounds themselves.”
‘Real-World Music as Composed Listening’ by Katharine NORMAN
This got me thinking about everyday neglected sounds, such as the sound of jewellery clashing together, or the sound of the palm of the foot rubbing against the inside of a high heel when wearing high heels, etc. Katharine NORMAN gives an example,
“Work Trans makes judicious use of our propensity to give ‘presence’ to loud sounds. ‘ to loud sounds.engendered by a mundane object-a weaving shuttle-is transmuted by amplification into an enlarged and alarming entity, Here, the absence of visual stimulus aids the effectiveness of a sound whose role is to momentarily confound our understanding of temporal flow.”
The mundane sound is exaggerated/distorted and distorted, even when it appears as the main theme in the piece. This is when its place cannot be ignored.
Project two ：
Idea 1:
Collaborate with film and television or animation students. Composing
Idea 2:
Start with an element I like or am interested in: the Tarot
I know a lot about the occult because I have friends and family around me who have studied astrology or the five elements of gossip. I understand that there is a musical expression of the occult called inspired music.
I read a lot of comments from listeners and they all said there were variations and had comparison charts. This struck me as shocking. So I started to think about whether this was real or just a trick of the human body on itself. Can I make the same music and record the changes in myself or in the friends around me?
Similarly I thought of，the artist I was interested in at the online sound arts guest lecture a few years ago.
https://ideasinual.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2021/04/10/sung-tieu/
She has studied the human brain and sound and has documented the state of the brain.
Is it possible to make this project into an installation? For example, observing the reactions and changes in different areas of the human brain while listening to music. Or perhaps it could just be a display of pictures of changes in the brain.
Idea 3:
(A musical tarot?) Anxiety?
This idea is sort of a derivative of idea2, all based on the occult
The influence of people around me, and the Chinese tradition of feng shui fortune telling. I live in a world surrounded by the occult. So I would subconsciously seek answers from the Tarot or the Five Elements and Eight Trigrams, which would make me feel very secure. It’s more like soothing my anxiety than being superstitious. I want to see the outcome before it happens, I want to see my finality when everything is just getting started. Seeing the future through the guidance of the tarot cards, I would have a lot of fantasies in the process. The times when reality and illusion intermingle are also the times when I can escape reality and relieve my anxiety the most.
How the work is presented
Method 1:
Interaction design
A random tarot card appears when a person is sensed to appear in front of the screen.
78 Tarot cards
22 core cards : a continuous piece of music divided into 22 parts
56 smaller cards (divided into four groups) : each group has a different form of music
Method 2:
When the person appears in front of the screen is drawn idle, realistic and virtual sounds can be heard
Method 3:
Dreams? Hypnotic video ➕ soothing music