BA Sound art – Page 7

Idea 1 （Dimensional）

Introduction

WORKTYPE:

TECH SPECS: Headphones

The sound I need: a secondary processed ambient sound (similar to that heard in a hearing aid)
The ability to connect these elements and make an experimental piece of music

WORK DESCRIPTION: I felt that the hearing aid was very much a tool to connect two worlds, so I wanted to use the sound it brings to connect the world in the painting. And not all of the painted worlds are realistic, they can be mechanically related, similar to Cyborgs. I chose headphones because they are more immersive and the act of putting them on makes people feel like they are putting on some kind of equipment to go to another dimension.

APPROX DIMENSIONS:

GALLERY LOCATION: Gallery 3, West Wall

The Process

A Musée Vous

This was my initial inspiration （A Musée Vous）. Famous paintings that can be moved around, which I thought was very interesting. But what I was thinking of wasn’t quite the same as this. What I wanted was not dialogue but ambient sound. Like Esquisse d’ensemble. The ambient sounds in this painting are a dog barking, the sound of waves, communication, and walking. Or the “Des glaneuses”, where there could be the sound of the wind, the sound of people stepping on dead grass, the sound of clothes rubbing together.

Perhaps I could put an electronic screen inside the frame to make the picture move to make.

Refinement of the idea:

Put the painting in the eyes.
I got this idea because I have a doll. These dolls can change their eyes, as in the picture below.

Similar to these eyes are prosthetic eyes for people. This eye can be enlarged in soft ceramic to equal proportions and the painting placed in the eye. A sound can be placed behind the painting.

Because of this I came up with something related to people with disabilities, and the one related to sound is hearing aids. I saw a video a long time ago about the sound in a hearing aid. The sound in it was a little bit electronic, a little bit electrical. I looked up some of the principles of hearing aids .

Hearing aids are small amplifiers that amplify sounds that would otherwise be inaudible and use the residual hearing of the hearing impaired to send the sound to the auditory centre of the brain where it can be felt.

Feeling:

There was a whistling sound when I put my hearing aids in, I couldn’t answer the phone because of the strong electrical currents, and when I watched TV I couldn’t actually hear the lines very well and had to read the subtitles. But for the first time, I could hear birds, cicadas, falling rain and thunder, and the whole sound world opened up to me. It was a very loud and very happy feeling, the world was lit up.
The sound is hollow and floating when you put it on, a bit like singing with a microphone.

This is an interview I did with a friend who has a hearing impairment about how she feels about using hearing aids. She is a very cheerful person and is grateful to hear again. She hears a lot of interesting sounds that I don’t get to hear and she says that the sound world she’s in is rich. I thought that was cool. We live in this realm, but the distorted sounds that come from the hearing aids are like another world. It’s like the hearing aid is a tool to connect to another dimension.

If I go with this option I will then get as much of the hearing aid user’s experience as possible. It’s important to me to find out as much as I can about their feelings.

By the way, when I was writing it I thought this was similar to the Cyborg setting and maybe I could use that element in it. For example, the people inside the painting are in a cyborg state.

Here are some sketches I made of how the Cyborg and Esquisse d’ensemble would look together.

Black Hole Horizon

Thom Kubli is a Swiss-German composer and artist known for installations and sculptures that often use digital technology and material configurations to incorporate sound as a key element, thereby increasing the viewer’s sense of space.

This installation transforms sound into a three-dimensional object and ensures its stability. The installation consists of three sculptures of different sizes made of polyurethane, resembling the horn of a boat. These horns are capable of producing sound using compressed air. For each tone, huge soap bubbles appear on the mouth of the horn. They grow larger with the duration of the sound and eventually detach from the horn and float around the room until they float randomly around the room to the point of hitting something and eventually exploding. Sometimes the larger soap bubbles can float more than 20 metres away from the device, the distance being dependent on the temperature. Visitors can walk freely throughout the room, where they may randomly encounter floating bubbles.

“It is important to me that the sound has a substantial correspondence rather than a virtual one. (e.g. conversion to biomass, liquid or particle) This type of conversion touches me in a very specific way. It creates a very direct aesthetic connection.”

He was not satisfied with creating a pure sound also wants the audience to see the sound touch the sound feel the sound.

FLIGHT

FLIGHT is a unique sound installation experience created by the British artist team DARKFIELD, using ‘sound’ as a core element, fusing art and technology. It is a new sound art installation experience set in an all-black container, 1:1: the seats, luggage racks, and small tables are the same as any other flight you have ever taken. It makes you forget the border between reality and virtual.

With the headphones on, the cabin then goes into complete darkness for the flight – and from that moment on, you enter an amazing sound journey constructed from ultra-fidelity sound. The constant vibrations under your feet, the roar in your ears and the ambience are enough to convince you that the plane is ready to take off. Once the plane is “in the air”, the silence in the cabin lingers for just a moment, replaced by the sound of the food trolley going back and forth, the rapid footsteps of the stewardesses and the anxious cries of the baby. …… Following the elaborate sound design, a whole new parallel A new parallel world unfolds around your ears.

Surrounded by 360 degree sound and ultra-realistic sound design it is immersive and felt from the dimension of sound. Perhaps in another latitude this sound is happening. The plane is also crashing and the headphones connect the two worlds.

From Here to Ear

In this sound installation by the artist Celeste Boucher-Mujn, the birds spread their wings and land lightly on the strings of a guitar, playing a beautiful and unplanned piece of music. The curtain separates the different areas of the exhibition, creating a garden where the birds can roam freely. From the moment they pass through the curtain, the visitors become guests. They are guided by the gritty floor and follow a set route.

“I have always believed that we are here not just to watch the birds fly around the grounds. Rather, we can feel that this is a place where they belong and that people are invited here as guests.”

Through his work, Celeste offers the viewer a chance to ‘be a guest’. He constructs an ecological world that allows people to imagine a ‘world after humans’. But he does not simply want to discuss the existence of non-human beings, but to bring humans back into the midst of all things, to understand the concept of nature, and to consider how to co-exist with the artificiality of nature.

Breaking the Space

The first line is that I had no idea what I was doing; I just saw a magazine, cut out the material, and pasted it on the paper. I felt that the image was a bit empty, and maybe I could draw something to make it richer.

I started to find my form in the second and third lines. There are more elements in the picture than just one element in the first line. But there is still white space in the whole picture. I think this certain amount of white space looks good. The combination of reality and fiction breaks the sense of subtext.

This is one of my favorites out of all the collages. It gives me a feeling of escape. More and more novels and films these days have a plot : The protagonist finds out that she is a character in a book and wants to break her established fate to change the future. In this collage, you can see the second person on the left escaping from where she should be and leaving the text behind her. I thought about my research into experimental vocals in experimental music in SSSA. I seem to like the theme of ‘disruption,’ something that doesn’t follow the established trajectory.
idea1:
Maybe this work will be like the previous ones, trying new concepts or perhaps trying something not so new.
Idea2:
Escape from fate (like random music?)

Carbon Scape

Chinese artist Chris Cheung has produced a sound installation, Carbon Scape, which simulates the sounds of jet engines, ship horns, steam, chimneys, and other carbon emissions and mixes them together to create an immersive sound exhibition.

The kinetic soundscape installation, which includes 18 magnetically synthesised sound samples, was created using data obtained from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to help visualise the effect. According to their findings, CO2 concentrations soared in 2017 to the highest level in the last three million years. The data shows that much of this increase can be attributed to industrialisation and the use of fossil fuels.Chris Cheung collected these noises from sound sources that leave a carbon footprint, such as: the sound from jet engines, steam from factories or the stern of a ship. These tracks are fused into a unified soundscape, with the black sphere rising and falling as the sound is made to represent changes in the carbon of a particular part of the planet.

He satirizes the current phenomenon of random emissions and calls for attention to be paid to the issue. I think it is a good idea to combine the work with some social issues. It’s a good idea to show the social issues that exist and to present them in an artistic way. People will appreciate the art and think about social issues at the same time.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

This is one of my favorite paintings, and it always gives me a wonderful feeling when I view it. When I first look at it, I feel that the whole painting is carefree, as if the sunlight in the picture penetrates the paper and makes you feel lazy and drowsy on a lazy afternoon. Whether it is the colors or the person lying comfortably on the grass is very restful. But when I stare at the painting for a long time, this relaxation becomes still. It feels as if nothing has ever happened in this world and nothing will ever happen again, as if time and space have remained here and all the people and things, even the sunlight, the breeze, and the dust in the air, are frozen on the canvas. It is a very strange feeling, and it is difficult for me to describe what I feel in words. How this painting is painted is also very unique. It is called pointillism, which is colloquially known as ‘pixel painting.’ The painting is 3 metres long and 2 metres high, with millions of coloured dots all over a canvas of about 7 square metres, all manually painted by the artist. Even the borders around the painting are painted with dots. I am impressed and find it incredible that it took a lot of time and effort to complete this painting.

I have a few ideas

Idea 1: Give the viewer two senses (?). For example, the visual and auditory senses are completely at odds, or the auditory senses are the visuals…

Idea 2: pointillism, pixel painting. The first thing that comes to my mind with pixels is pixel games. So I could add some game sound effects to it or something? Or maybe combine it with technology… Robotics or something like that.

Sound Studies and Aural Culture

I started out with the idea of doing experimental music. I thought it would be easier to introduce experimental music as it is a recent genre that has only been around for about 60-70 years. But after doing some research, I realized that it would be difficult to introduce experimental music in 10 minutes. The most difficult part for me is the classification of experimental music, such as experimental electronic music, experimental rock, etc. …. If I were to find all the examples, I would not be able to cover the history in 10 minutes. So I started to think about whether I could introduce only one of the many categories of experimental music. (My last blog about this project had a list of the music I wanted to choose.)
When I was looking for types of experimental music on the internet, I saw that some people put noise music and experimental music together. So I subconsciously thought that noise music was a kind of experimental music, so I looked up noise music. But the more extreme it got, the more it didn’t seem to fit with the definition of experimental music. It wasn’t until I came across this book ‘The art of noises’ Luigiolo that noise music is not experimental music. He was around much earlier than experimental music, and although Pierre Schaeffer’s series of musical studies brought the art of music to the point where Russolo conceived of it as a way to better open the sense of hearing to conceptualize sounds… that doesn’t mean that experimental music is a continuation of the art of noise. So I focused on the human voice and learned that there is a name for experimental music that is the experiment with the human voice. Perhaps due to the form of expression, the history and works of this category of experimental music are relatively small. And the music I chose fit well.

Experimental vocals:

originated in the 1960s. Yoko Ono, Japanese artist and musician who was an influential practitioner of conceptual and performance art. In 1968 the two began collaborating on experimental films and recordings—the cover of their musique-concrète-based album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (1968) controversially featured a photograph of them naked—and they wed the following year.

Encyclopedia Britannica. n.d. Yoko Ono | Biography, Art, & Facts. [online] Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yoko-Ono> [Accessed 6 December 2021].

Instant Patience

JFDR made Instant Patience. On my first listen, I fell in love with the lead singer’s voice due to its ethereal quality. The live version is more enjoyable than the recorded version. Live vocals reverberate better. I like that feeling. And the li Live version sounds better than the recorded version.

In this project, I will introduce the concept of experimental vocals, their origins, and recent easy-to-write works. And some of my own reflections.

12.7

I received some suggestions for changes following the presentation of my project.

In order to give my sound a little more thickness, I added these two effects.

I kept some of the breath sounds and those when the mouth was closed. The reason I keep it is that a lot of experimental vocals incorporate some of these sounds. This seemed more natural and brought the listener closer.

I also learned a lot of new things in the process of making it. I think the most enjoyable part of the project was deciding on the theme. There is a lot to experimental music that I cannot cover in ten minutes. I was really anxious at that point and wanted to change the theme. Then it occurred to me that I had heard of the concept of experimental vocals before. So I looked it up and found out that there really was such a category. I also found out that it was a niche of experimental music that could be introduced in 10 minutes and still have time to talk about my feelings. It was a very special moment!

That’s probably the point of the project, to tell what I’ve learned in my own way. I’ve learned a lot of what during the research process. It was really good for my thinking skills.

Project

Here is the screenshot of my project in progress. I used different tracks to separate the different sounds and named each track. The first reason for doing this is that I can easily find the sound I want to modify if I want to. The second reason is that I can easily do 5.1 channel, but even then the whole thing is a bit messy. To mark the footsteps, door openers, and window openers, I use markers. This makes it easier when I add these detailed sounds. Because when I was dubbing Foley Studio, I found it really difficult to match the footsteps to the picture, and sometimes I missed some of them. So I recorded one set of footsteps and pasted the rest through that set, and then I watched the picture frame by frame. It’s a lot of work, but it’s very accurate to the picture. The sound I really like is the mechanical sound of the castle moving. I used the barrel on the shelf opposite Foley Studio, and I created the sound by tapping on the barrel and the handle of the barrel.

After I finished the first version, I sent it to my friends in China, and they said that the music in the middle part was very attractive. They said that the music in the middle was very appealing, but they also gave me some suggestions for changes. Firstly, the sound of the water dripping down in the first scene was not quite right, and secondly, the sound in the back was a bit empty, so I could try to add some music to it. I made a second version based on their suggestions, and the result was much better than the first version, but there were still a lot of problems. So I made a few more changes myself and came up with the final version. After I sent it to them, they thought it was good, but I could add some more ambient sounds. That’s how I got the final version. I really appreciate their suggestions because I often get aesthetic fatigue when I keep revising a piece. It was hard for me to find the problem myself, but with the help of other people’s perspectives, I was able to find the feeling.

Through this project, I found that I was better at making soundtracks than I was at dubbing films. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s anime, but there’s a lot of room to play with the dub itself, and there’s a lot of detachment from reality. I try a lot of voices when I’m dubbing, and I’ll sit in front of the computer for half a day before I can pick the right one from the recordings. But I don’t have that problem when I’m arranging, maybe because I’ve studied music theory before or maybe I’m just more interested in arranging. All in all, it was an interesting experience, and I enjoyed myself while working on this project. I also noticed several flaws in this project, so perhaps I can learn how to design sounds from game or anime dubs.

week 10

I show my work to the tutor, and he said that I need more atmosphere sound. It will make the sound more realistic. It occurred to me that during the group activity we need to talk about Kevin, we were asked to use zoomH3 to record some voices. At that time we recorded some ground noise and I thought it would be good for use as a room tone.

Final

I hand in with the 5.1 Channel one, and here is the stereo version.

UP

This is a practice video for sound for screen. I am responsible for the soundtrack in this clip. At the beginning, the wedding scene jingya said to me that she wanted it to be like a wedding march, so I changed the score a little bit based on the wedding march. I changed the rhythm and some of the melody. It doesn’t sound much like the original song

For the soundtrack of the latter part of the clip, to be honest, I was a bit of a headache at first. It was a lot of parts, and it took longer than my final project. But I listened to the original music and found that there was a lot of repetition, so I made the soundtrack about 1 minute and 30 seconds and then I could loop it. In the rhythm I chose a round dance beat, this beat is very easy to create and less likely to make mistakes. The last part of the music and the previous part of the music is a common melody, but is a variation of the previous melody.

Overall the soundtrack can be said to be very rushed, many places are not produced well. For example, similar melodies, there are too many repetitive. Because this time I also found that my problem is too slow when making things, the root cause is the unskilled nature of the arrangement. Many times I rely on a melody that comes from inspiration, but if I refine it, I struggle more. And a lot of things are put off until the end. The ability to plan for time is too poor. The Christmas holidays are coming up and I need to take some arranging classes during the holidays to improve my skills. I also want to have some planning for the future, so that I can do better next time and not be overwhelmed.