Initially, my project was different. I had recorded my voice as a train of thought, where I would physically voice my inner consciousness bringing my inside voice out into the real world. I then manipulated that audio to create some distortion and put different tracks together. Although in the end, I was not happy with the result that surfaced. I did some more research and came across an amazing composer by the name of Steve Reich.

Steve Reich is a composer who has innovated different patterns and has proven the power of sound through various techniques such as tape loops and phasing in his audio tracks. His work was and is very successful and has gained fame due to its musical content and especially the fact that his compositions take on a slow harmonic rhythm that becomes almost hypnotic. The sound measures and the times where he would choose to stop or start each loop all added something at a larger scale to his work. His audio compositions are where I drew my inspiration for this project from. Here is one of his tracks:

Clockwork Orange is an incredible book, and beautifully structured film directed by Stanley Kubrick. The protagonist, main character, and narrator is Alex DeLarge. At the beginning of the film, he is completely independent and a leader/ruler of his entourage. He represents rebellious youth and the angst of a teenager, and is incredibly successful at his acts. As the film progresses, he finds himself in a situation where he is suppressed by higher powers and takes on a robot-like quality. I created a loop of his voice when he talks about walking into the Korova Milk Bar, after vandalizing a couples home, raping the wife, and beating the husband. There is power and strength in Alex’s voice, but as I layered the loops and distorted the sounds, he loses that strength, and he conforms into societies norms- this metaphorical conversion is analogous to the progression of A Clockwork Orange.

Enjoy.

For this piece, I used audio I had collected last year for my studio arts senior thesis which explored the effects 9/11 had on the children who lived in lower Manhattan and witnessed the devastation through young, impressionable eyes. I interviewed kids I had grown up with, and three who I had been at preschool with that morning. I asked them all to share with me the memories they had from that morning, and to explain what, if any aspects of their lives they see some influence from 9/11.

I also discovered declassified CIA files about 9/11 on a database found through the Lafayette Library’s research tools. The documents I chose to use are dated from late 1998 to early 2001, all acknowledging and warning of an imminent threat to Americans.

I created a dialogue between what the kids shared with me and the recordings of the CIA documents. I hope the piece provokes listeners to consider how 9/11 affected those who are often thought to have been too young to remember, through hearing their own accounts of losing innocence contrasted with the government’s unemotional, rigid approach.

I wasn’t really sure where to go with my project and spent a lot of time thinking of different ways I could use sound. Because the weather has been pretty erratic these last two weeks, I decided I wanted to use the sounds of the changing seasons into a condensed time period to make it relate to the weather that we have been having. I find it crazy that it can go from 80 degrees one day to 55 degrees and rainy the next. I wanted to depict these weather changes and show how different the weather is throughout the year and even throughout two weeks. I also wanted to use a text that went along with it. I first recorded myself reading a piece and put it on the soundtrack but I didn’t think it matched up correctly and I didn’t like how it made the piece sound. I instead decided that I wanted to put the piece of writing underneath the project. I find that you can read the work before, during, or after listening to the soundtrack. Overall, I really enjoyed this project and I think it relates to the very unpredictable weather that we have been having.

Descriptions of the New Netherlands

Although these countries differ much in their situations in south latitude, still they do not differ much in the temperature of cold and heat. The winters usually terminate with the month of February. Then the spring or Lent-like weather begins… Some persons calculate from the 21st of March, after which it seldom freezes, nor before this does it seldom summer.

At this season, a change evidently begins…The fishes then leave the bottom ground, the buds begin to swell; the grass sprouts… And in some places the cattle are put to grass in March; in other situations, they wait later, as the situations and soils vary. The horses and working cattle are not turned out to grass until May when the grass is plenty everywhere.

April is the proper month for gardening… Later, the farmers should not sow summer grain, unless they are not ready.

Easterly winds and stormy weather are common in the spring, which then cause high tides; but they cannot produce high floods. The grass and herbage at this season cause no inconvenience in the woods, and still there is grass enough for horses. The cold has not overcome the heat produced by the wood burnings, and the ground which has been burnt over is yet bare enough for inspection. The flowers are then in bloom, and the woods are fragrant with their perfume.

When the warm weather sets in, then vegetation springs rapidly. It is so rapid as to change the fields from nakedness to green in eight or ten days. There are no frosts, in May, or they are very uncommon, as then it is summer. The summer may be said to begin in May, but it really is calculated from the first of June, and then the weather is frequently very warm, and there is seldom much rain.

Now when the summer progresses finely, the land rewards the labor of the husbandman; the flowers smile on his countenance; the fishes sport in their element and the herds play in the fields as if no reverses were to return. There is plenty here for man and the animal creation. The days are not so long in summer, nor so short in winter. The winters pass by without becoming tedious.

The autumns are very fine, lovely, and agreeable; more delightful cannot be found on the earth. The winter weather is dry and cold and the land is intersected and studded by high mountains, that snow remains lying on them and in the valleys, and seldom thaws away entirely; and when the wind blows from and over those cold regions, it brings cold with it.

For this project I wanted to creative a narrative without using any text. I knew for this project to be successful I would have to be a very clear and thoughtful piece. I thought of sounds that are very well know and can impact an audience. My first idea was the sound of water. Water impacts individuals all over the world in many different ways. Water is a necessity; however, some still view it as a luxury. The main message I wanted to get across in this piece is how the world uses water, some overuse and some underuse. It is important to remember how important water is on this earth, and if its overuse continues later generations will be left nothing.

Personally, I feel I was able to get across the many different uses of water in this piece. I was very difficult to be sure the message was being conveyed. I wanted to variety of use to be understood. But, I also wanted there to be an awareness of the anticipation the piece has in the end that leads to ultimately no sound of water. This ending means more than just and ending to a piece it represents the ending of the water supply. As the author, of this piece, I have been made aware of how I use water and this importance of doing little actions like turning off the water while brushing my teeth. The water supply of the earth diminishing is a true concern. My hope as the author is for people to understand what this piece was meant to do, raise awareness.

From posting this piece on social media, I hope this public has a realization while listening. This piece may be hard to understand at first, but I want the audience to realize this piece is not supposed to be calm water sounds for relaxation. This piece is truly about the experience of listening. I listed this piece as ambient genre to hopefully get more feedback in the future. So far I have received little feedback on Soundcloud, with 1 like and 2 plays.  On Soundcloud I do not have followers, it is more a public forum, so the likes are coming from listing the piece in a genre. I hope to continue to get more feedback on this piece, and i wish for the audience to understand the message conveyed by “How the World Uses Water”.

Before posting the artwork to social media, I had friends listen to the audio in order to see what was the immediate reaction of people without having to wait for responses on social media. Many people started questioning how the story was created. Was it an adoption of a nonfiction piece? If not, where was the inspiration rooted from? When I asked why they questioned the idea of the story, they highlighted the fact that this artwork embraces a controversial topic. To create something surrounding a topic such as sexuality one has to be sensitive to this identity, especially if we do not represent ourselves with it. I acknowledge that this aspect made the project much more complicated, but at the same time intricate because I had to weigh the power of the words I was using in addition to the power of the message all together that I was portraying. As a heterosexual women of color, I possess a certain power in society that probably those pertaining to the LGBTQ community do not have, and vise-versa.

I purposely chose to address a sensitive topic, like sexuaity, because I feel strongly about advocating for conversations surrounding topics society has silenced. Art is becoming a segway for me to push forward those conversations. Consequently, to leave this type of artwork in my private files is to not do justice to its purpose. It is necessary to put this out to the general public.

Right before posting this sound art, I felt very anxious because I was aware of the risks that talking about these topics includes. I did not know if I was giving the wrong message, if my words were clear enough or too ambiguous that it could be interpreted as offensive, or even if because of not sharing that identity I had no right to talk about it. I almost decided to post it anonymously in a different forum that had less of an audience. However, I decided to post it finally on Facebook with a caption emphasizing that it was a project. In addition, I realized that I was not putting specifically my views about the topic in the assignment. Ultimately, my assignment was a mesh of the stories and experiences I have heard from people close to me that are form the LGBTQ community, combined with the “macho” culture that surges from my Dominican culture, specifically in baseball. I chose baseball because in my culture there is a big pride in this sport and I wanted to voice out what some people have told me they have experienced and felt, but contextualizing it in a setting I have yet to hear stories from.

Finally, I posted it on Facebook. I did not get that much of a response; however, probably as more and more people hear it, the responses may increase. I remain anxious because I do not know if this artwork can be seen as offensive; nonetheless, I am interested in seeing if this would actually do some type of justice to that community. I still await for the responses of the public- responses that go beyond “likes” and transforms into “comments” and hopefully, if I am lucky enough, into conversations.

Time and again the media re-portray historic events, perhaps World War II more than any other. In the years following the end of the Second World War an enormous amount of movies and television series have been focused on the war. Their content was vastly varied covering all aspects of the battles fought on the land, air and sea. However, as the stories of the war are retold or created, we lose or obscure part of the truth of the war, which is what I wanted to explore by contrasting media representations of WWII and a primary source from the war. For the primary source I selected the recording of President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressing a joint session of Congress the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. This extraordinarily powerful speech perfectly addressed the mourning nation and quieted their fears while simultaneously encouraging the nation to find their strength to bring the fight to the Japanese.

Contrasting this I have sound clips appropriated from a varied landscape of World War 2 media portrayals. This included musical elements such as the theme from the Steve McQueen movie “The Great Escape” and the defiant whistling of British P.O.W.s from “The Bridge at River Kwai.” Piercing these layers are the dramatized explosions and gunshots from shows and movies such as “Saving Private Ryan,””Tora! Tora! Tora!” “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.”

While these movies represent the battlefronts of World War 2 I also wanted to utilize other movies that contained plots that were related to, but not directly representing in entirety, the war. To do this I took snippets from a movie about women playing baseball, “A League of Their Own,” and the musical “The Sound of Music.” I wanted to include these to represent the range of media inspired by the war and how playing them at the same time would sound a bit absurd. On the matter of absurd, I wanted to include the Quentin Tarantino film “Inglourious Basterds” to illustrate how historical fiction is very much a part of the media surrounding every major conflict, in some way or another.

As for creating the piece, I utilized my DJ software and equipment in order create a live recording of all of these elements. Parts of the recording were planned but for the most part the piece was improvised and could never be performed the exact same way. In addition to giving the recording a sense of chaos it allowed me loop sections of individual tracks and apply effects to various tracks and the same or different times. This often has surprising and unexpected results as in the instance where the phrase “dastardly attack” begins to sound like “bastardly attack” when looped

For this project I knew I wanted to record one of my field hockey practices in the indoor court, because I am always surprised at how loud we get and all the different sounds coming from the sticks tapping on the ball and the ball smashing into the metal goal cage. I decided I was only going to pick my idea of what it most sounded like through the recording after listening to the track multiple times. After hearing it I automatically thought of a loud storm at night while you’re lying in bed listening to it hit the shingles on your roof. The sounds were quite loud so I thought it represented a hailstorm, where large chunks of frozen rain were hitting your rooftop or the ground. There were also sounds that came from the goalie saving the ball which represented thunder, as well as the background sounds of the soccer team practicing in the court next to us.

One thing I struggled with was the amount of voices and talking that was picked up with Iphone recorder. I recorded this before we had the demo of the library recorders in class, but those may have helped with the background noises and the voices. (I really found out how much my coaches talked during practice!) Another issue was clipping a 2 hour practice into a 5 minute video, where I had to try and clip out the best sounds and try and make it into a nice flow of a storm. While also making parts choppy where necessary which was the way I heard the storm and thought went well together. If I had more time with the project I would be able to cut out most of the voices which would make the idea much more believable and realistic.

I uploaded this track to my Soundcloud where I used relevant hashtags, but I have no followers on there. So, I posted the link to my Facebook wall to see what feedback I would get. I am still waiting on any comments or feedback but I will give it time!

#hail #thunder #storm #lightning #roofshingles #hailthesizeofgolfballs

When brainstorming for ideas on what to do for this project, I looked at the different methods that we experimented with and listened to as a class. I chose to combine two of them. I wanted to make my own narrative by recording periods of time where there would normally be music, without it. I did this on three separate occasions and in three completely different settings. I also chose to find a primary source, and reappropriate it into the message that I wanted to convey through this piece. The track has a very awkward and off-putting feel to it, and that was on purpose. I want the listener to reminisce on things they usually end up thinking of when they find themselves doing tasks while listening to no music. I wanted the text of the piece to make the listener think about the psychological effects of music, and how if can negatively and positively effect their thinking. Does listening to music help you to complete a task? Or does it actually hinder your abilities? Is listening to music good for you? Can it have harmful effects?

My idea for this project was to record phone calls that I recieved from my friends that were walking home alone at night. Usually when girls walk home at night they feel unsafe, so they will phone a friend to keep them company. I asked my friends to describe to me everything that they see. This will give us a sense of scenery and let us experience the location without being there physically.I origianlly wanted to have 3 different conversations with 3 different people, but the app that I was using to record phone conversations malfunctioned. I was only able to salvage one complete phone call.