September 2017 – Media Arts I

For this project, the quietest place I know is my backyard on Parsons Street. I like to go to my backyard to do my work, or to just relax by myself. There are three standing trees, and many bushes around my yard. There is a big wooden fence framing the backyard. I heard and experienced many different sounds I never would have payed attention to. I stood/sat outside for thirty minutes and captured many different sounds/natural elements. Some I made more exaggerated than others, however they were all sounds from my backyard. Doing this activity after reading the Russolo article I had a lot of fun capturing the “noise-sounds” of nature/outside. It was fun to break the restrictive circle of pure sounds in order to conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.

Air: I held my phone in the air to capture all the noise/sounds around me.

Cars: Cars were passing by in the distance and I tried to capture their fading sounds.

Birds: There were a few birds in the distance that were chirping.

Breathing: I was focusing on my breathing and trying to relax. However, when I tried to capture my breathing I might have put the microphone a little too close because the sound is very loud.

Chewing gum: WARNING – very unpleasant sounding, but after only 5 minutes of standing outside I realized that I was chewing very loudly.

Leaves crinkling: After walking around a bit I picked up some leaves and recorded myself crunching them in my hands. The more I listen to it, the more I hate the sound of forced leaves crinkling. I prefer the natural sound of leaves crinkling under your feet.

Breaking twigs: I noticed breaking twigs while walking is a sort of peaceful sound so I wanted to hear what the individual sound was like, and it’s not very pleasant either.

Machine: This is the sound of the air conditioning unit that is in the back corner of my yard. It is very distilling and looks extremely unattractive. Russolo talks about the revolution of music being paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery, which I found very interesting and important to be aware of in this day and age.

Chair moving: I went to go sit down and pulled the chair over the brick patio, and this was the sound it made.

Wind: It is very faint, but if you listen closely you can hear the wind passing by the microphone.

Scratching head: My hair was a little itchy so I scratched my head and this was an interesting, noisy sound.

Fire truck: I waited until the fire truck got as close as possible before it rounded the street, and then started recording. It was interesting to hear the siren fade away.

Squirrels attacking: I went to go sit back down by the fence, and two squirrels ran right by my head on top of the fence. The first seconds you can hear me scream and regroup myself. As one ran right by me, the other one stopped and we had an ultimate stare down. Then it hissed at me (00:09) and then you hear me hissing two times back. It was so crazy I got this on tape, it was a total accident, I clicked the button when I screamed initially.