Introduction
Equipment I need:
- Speaker x 4
- One monitor
The sound I need:
- Water drops
- Pure music (violin or piano)
- Sounds of hungry stomachs
- Ambient restaurant sounds
- Sound of ocean waves
- The sound of a fishtail swinging
- Sounds of speech (many people/different languages)
Description of the work: Enjoy this work from two perspectives and the sounds you hear are different. For the fish, the sound of the water you hear is the motivation to live, for the people it is just the drooling of the fish because it is so delicious.
The Process
This is one of my more mature ideas. But I think the meaning of its work itself is somewhat greater than the expression of sound art.
1 2 2 3 ·Final
This is how it evolved, this is how it started. Above is a bottle that is showing a drop of water falling below a bottle. This was the inspiration that came to my mind at first, I thought it was interesting but they were too monotonous. So on the basis of that, I thought that maybe I could replace the bottle with a fish that is inseparable from the water.
This is the second version, with a fish tank full of water in front and a monitor behind it with a fish swimming around. But I don’t think it would matter if there was no sound in this presentation. The fish and the water don’t fit together very well in this version, they seem to be two separate entities. So I thought that I could make the fish look like a projection as if they were swimming in the water. But when I looked at my sketches again I realized that I had gone a little bit off my original theme.
So it was time for the third version, where I replaced the first version, which belonged to the bottle, with a fish. This gave me instant inspiration, a drop of water that only has a sound but never falls and a fish that is stranded trying to find water. A hope that inspires or a trap for others. These ideas took shape in my mind and I got the best idea I’ve had so far. Replace the monitor that only drips with the person who is about to enjoy the delicacy, and the drops of water falling become drooling.
We can see this work from two perspectives. The first is from the point of view of the fish, which hears the sound of water dripping and thinks of a place where there is water and desperately moves its tail to get closer to the sound of water dripping. It is motivated and hopeful, even if it is wounded, there is nothing to stop it from moving there. But from a human point of view, I wanted to taste this fish that was alive and well, and the more it moved, the firmer and tastier the flesh became. The saliva is just a means of getting the fish to move, and the loss of that is far less valuable to humans than the taste of delicious fish.
I would like to name this work Hope.
About the sound
I wrote about what sounds I needed in the very first outline. Because I was looking at the issue from two perspectives, the sounds were divided into two groups. The first is the sound in the red box, which should be larger than the sound in the blue box. The sound of water drops is the sound that should stand out, while the other sounds can be blurred to make them less clear. The sound in the blue box must be heard clearly only if you get close to the fish. The sound of the fish’s tail swinging is bigger than the sound of the waves and bigger than the human voice (shouting), and hopefully, the sound is layered.
Technique
I would prefer the fish to be moving than to be drawn into the display. This is a type of Chinese lantern called a fish lantern. Its skeleton is made of bamboo and it moves when one holds it in the hand. I think it might work well if there were some moving parts on the tail of the fish.