My sound project is called “Profanity”. It is about the great number of cursing words on media, including songs, cartoons, and movies. Cursing words are hard to listen, but easy to speak out for people. As an international students, I found out that American medias use a lot of cursing words in different works, especially films. As a film major student, American films are sexual-oriented and very violent compared with films from other cultures.

This observation inspired me to do a project about profanity on medias. I did researches about famous American films that contains many cursing words. I reviewed several of them, and chose some pieces that I found interesting to put into my project. I used Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dog, Scarface, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Full Metal Jacket. They are all great films done by great American filmmakers. They are good films, but each of them has many cursing words. Some of them are even famous for the big number of cursing words, such as Pulp Fiction.

So I want to illustrate the large use of profanity words in American films and other medias. I collected those audios together. It went well, the rhythm and the quality, but after asking the Professor and other people, I realized that I didn’t have a clear private exploitation/theme of the project. Somehow, I had the theme, which was to show the American films’ addiction to profanity words, but it was not enough.

Then, I tried to reorganized my works. After thinking and revising the project, I realized that I wanted to show two themes in this project. First, I want to emphasize the public’s addiction to those profanity words in media, although people don’t use them as much as in real life. I found out that my friends sometimes laugh a lot at those profanity words on TV, so I add laughters to the project. This makes the audio sounds like someone is watching the movie and laughing at the scene. Second, I want to illustrate that those profanity words are essential to those films and works. Films would be dull and bad without those words. I used a lot of “censor beep” to create an annoying and disruptive feeling of watching those films without profanity words.

After doing this project, I feel that sometimes, it is even harder to appropriate other works than create original pieces. It could be easy to lose direction while appropriating many other works.

I posted the work on social media. Many of my friends thinks that it is entertaining at first. They know that there are a lot of profanity words on media, but they barely put them into one piece of work. They said that those words are everywhere, but emphasized much more on media, especially films and pop songs. Some people think that it is bad to use this big number of cursing words, but many people agree that cursing words are somehow necessary for films and other media works.