As with most of the projects so far, I tried starting out with something that really meant something to me and I could relate too. When the prompt of choosing a historical text was introduced to the class I immediately though of my favorite book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I have found Motorcycling to be one of the things I really enjoy the most and this book captures the philosophy I have towards both cycling and life in general. Another source I immediately thought of, especially for the element of sound, was a self narrated reading of Alan Watts speech entitled “The Real You”. This speech is something I usually listen too when stressed out or depressed, just like how I would ride my motorcycle if I felt the same way during the summer.

Originally, my plan was to overplay Alan Watts reading of The Real You with my own narration of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle to draw the parallels and also provided some sort of imagery. Instead I scrapped my own narration and replaced it with motorcycle sounds from YouTube to create the final product: Zen and the Art of Real Sound.

I tried to use the motorcycle sounds as allusion to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to match how his speech made me felt and personally I found the result very powerful.

I chose to work with the option of “creating a narrative of sound without using any text”. I found this option to be the most interesting and I felt like I had more options to of things to use for it. Some of the sounds I used came from my home life and the rest came from the internet. I wanted to make this a personal experience for the audience. I love going home and playing the game Zelda WindWaker for my sister Ashley, she always asks me to play for her and then whenever I play, my dad is always asleep on the couch. I wanted to combine these two sounds to create a narrative of a dream because whenever I play the game a lot, I end up having dreams about the game.

I first posted the audio to a SoundCloud account that I created. This did not create a big response due to the fact that I do not have any followers. I tried to hash-tag things that were relevant to what my sound so that others would be able to find it. I realize now that to find a bigger response, I could have hash-tagged things that were currently trending now so that even if people weren’t looking for it, they would stumble upon it. I then uploaded the SoundCloud file to my twitter, where I have a decent amount of followers, but again, I did not have any response.

I had trouble thinking of an idea for this project, and started several different drafts. When my last attempt failed miserably, I was sitting in my room with Kirby thinking what I could do when I saw an empty wine bottle. I then got the idea to create an audio recording with different sounds I could make with wine bottles.

Guys the trick to posting big GIFs is to select “full size” when inserting the uploaded image into the post. It allowed me to post this pretty big GIF. Btw this video distortion was created by datamoshing. Here’s an introduction to how it works: https://youtu.be/tYytVzbPky8 -Adam