Sound Essay

September 26, 2008 at 5:34 pm · Filed under Exercises

Joyce and I decided to portray the sensibilities and qualities of the noun: Time, and pair it with two verbs: Reveal and Escape. All sounds are from freesound.org.

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EX3 // Everyday Sounds

September 19, 2008 at 1:43 pm · Filed under Exercises

Describe your setting, time, and any important particulars.

Indoor location: my bedroom with a closed door on the 11th floor. The building is situated very close to a four lane road. The time was 7:45 AM on a working day. I was sitting in the middle of my bed, near a closed set of windows.

What sounds did you notice?

Clock Ticking – constant beat. Every second I heard the hand ticking. It is not as simple as saying that the clock was ticking, because even this sound had variations depending on the direction in which the hand was rotating. While my eyes were closed, I could visually imagine the direction of the movement and its position on the clock based on the sound, for instance if the sound was higher or lower determined whether it was moving upward or downward on the dial.

Faint movement of cars on the road. As each vehicle came closer, its sound increased exponentially, and then decreased in the same manner as the vehicle moved farther. As well, there was a difference in sound, as some sounds were heavier than others, perhaps it depended on the weight of the vehicle.

Household sounds – such as ruffling of plastic bags, clicks in the wooden floors, perhaps when someone walked upstairs. Interestingly, the sources for sounds such as the ‘clicks’ were more unrecognizable, thus I mentally categorized them as “noises”. There were these low hum’s at some points, as if someone were to blow air out of their mouths.

Did you become aware of previously missed sounds?

I did not discover any ‘never heard before’ sounds. I think that all of these sounds I heard were known to me at some point or the other. The interesting bit was that I paid full attention to each of these sounds individually to asses their qualities, whether they were bulky or serene, constant or random, close or far.

Were some sounds more prominent than others? Why do you think so?

I think that the word prominent can mean a number of things, it can mean ‘most present’ or ‘more outstanding’ but in different manners. A sound can be more prominent due to a pattern even if its volume is not very high. The mere beat, and its repetitiveness makes it prominent to a point where your ear senses the next interval at which the sound will strike, and is simply waiting to be satisfied. The clock was therefore the most prominent sound in my indoor space. Coming in second would be the movements of cars travelling, also because of their ongoing movement up and down the road.

What did you notice about the quality of sounds?

Sounds which I mentioned above, such as the clock ticking and the car movements were sharper, and less ambiguous perhaps due to the fact that their source was definite. However sounds which were less constant were generally low, softer, somewhat unidentifiable, vague and faint – possibly due to the distance they may have traveled to reach me.

Reflect on your overall experience and understanding of everyday sounds.

The most interesting part for me was to try and draw out the sounds I could barely hear. It was very tempting to identify their source, how far the sound must be travelling from, etc. I found that the tiniest of sounds make up what we call “silence”. Silence is not a complete void of sound. I believe that I understood this when I realized that snippets of sounds and noises still existed in a place I often felt peaceful in. Knowning this now, I can say that silence is more a resting of the mind, a harmony found in oneself being motionless, rather than everything around you being still.

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EX2// The Making of “The Witness”

September 19, 2008 at 12:09 am · Filed under Exercises

Hello! This is my first ‘reflective’ blog on a small experiment I conducted as part of my Time Based Communication class. Through this process I had one thing in mind, post-production work is more difficult when the raw source is not well extracted, so my aim was to exert enough control and direction over my raw images (when shooting film).

The Process

Starting out with a regular maxell CD-R disk, an retractable/adjustable lamp shade, and ofcourse my Sony CyberShot camera. This was the bare minimum I needed to produce some interesting images, until I realized that the shine caused by the lamp shade was overbearing. Turning down the lights in my environment helped to achieve a very objective and focused composition, as the lamp shade was positioned over the disk at a fair distance. I found that as the light moved farther from my disk, not only did the darkness increase, but extremely beautiful and soft shades of color began to cup the rims of the disk. However, I was in search for results that had variation, which came about depending on the amounts of light that hit to disk. The closer the light source came to the disk, the more flourescent and shiny the disk became. Unhappy with this harsh color quality, I knew I needed to implement some diffusion to achieve a softer look. I discovered through mere accident that using three opaque pieces of plastic cards (8.5 x 11 size)(colors: red, silver-blue, and dark sky blue), not only was there more softer reflection on the disk, but also that there was more variation in color.

The Concept

I was very pleased with the experimental, spontaneous and yet a staged aspect of this exercise, from which the concept of a ‘witness’ developed. The way the light hit the disk resembled the eye throughout the series of photographs. All the “funny-business” taking place on the surface of this “eye” helped to tell a story about a witness who sees a series of mysterious happenings. The transitions that I found most useful to advance this concept were for the majority: Channel Map and Luminance Map. These had subtle effects, yet very valuable because they did not overpower the content, rather support it. In places where these transitions came into play had a smooth, slow and mysterious transition from frame to frame.

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