My topic is about Female Genital Cutting. For the first part of this project, I choose Aisha’s story, in which she shared her memories in an effort to encourage other women to come forward and join in the chorus of FGM survivors who are demanding an end to the brutal practice. She told the story in first-person narrative. I found five different people to read her stories ‘in her perspective’. An interesting part is that I found a male voice to read the beginning and ending part, which can lead the audience to pay more attention to hear the women’s voice. I include the audio file of a documentary about FGM after Aisha’s story. The Guardian does this interview of some survivors sharing the pain. Most of them are speaking their native language instead of English, which I think make it even stronger although some audience may not understand them. We can feel the pain when hearing them talking about the memories of FGM.

In this project, I choose people from different background and people who are not familiar with FGM to read this story. I also include interviews with language that most of the audience may not be able to understand without translation. My goal of doing this is to let the audience feel the pain of those women and raise societal awareness to pay attention to this brutal practice and its relationship to women’s rights and human rights.

Most of hose who did the recordings for this project said that they knew FGM but had never heard those women talking about this. Reading their own stories makes them feel the pain. My friends also pointed out that even they did not understand the interview part, but the power of the language and the emotions are very strong.

For my sound project, I decided to create a piece that captures the thoughts and feelings of someone who has been diagnosed with HIV in the mid 80s. I used multiple stories from different people to form the dialogue and incorporated different news reports and interviews about HIV during the 80s to emphasize the stigma of HIV during that time. I wanted to focus on how such life changing news can drive a person to think such dark thoughts. I also wanted to shed light on society’s response to those suffering with HIV/AIDS during the 80s and how certain terms were used back then that we wouldn’t use today.

I did my project on a very controversial law in North Carolina called HB2. This law states that you must go into the bathroom of your birth certificate regardless of what gender you identify with. There is no way to regulate the law and it is extremely useless. North Carolina has lost a lot of revenue from concerts and games that have pulled out due to the ruling.

I used my family to speak parts of the bill. Gender originates in your family, thus hearing my brother, mother, and father speak has a major impact. The governor that passed the bill is in the beginning and end speaking about why it is important. i think the use of my family voices really brings home just how important and crucial gender is and how ambiguous the bill really is.

I put it on social media but I did not get much response. A lot of my friends here don’t really understand what the bill is and who it affects. They are far removed from the situation so its completely understandable. Because it is a sound clip, not many of my friends took the time to listen to the whole thing. Instead, they listened to the first part that makes it seem that I am for the bill. There was some confusion as to which side I aligned with.

For my Sound Art Project, I sampled pieces of famous speeches made by US presidents, and edited words out to make absurd, funny and whimsical sayings.  But as the piece goes on, I replaced my own artificial humor with actual recordings of our presidents saying ridiculous things.

Going into this project I had the inspiration to use Sojourner Truth’s “ain’t i a woman speech” because I have recently read about how it was considered one of the first true acts of feminism in the 1800s. I decided to split this part into both a man and a women speaking because I felt that both voices were needed to truly value the message that Truth reveals in the speech. Questioning and asking if she’s a women.  I then came across a poem that I read in high school by Maya Angelou called “Phenomenal Women”, and felt that by layering this into the piece could in a way answer Truth’s question “ain’t I a women?”. I also decided to layer in another powerful poem by Maya Angelou called “still I rise” because I felt that it showed the potential and fight that all these women, including myself, have in this world and believed it truly brought all three pieces together very nicely.

Overall creating this project I did not intentionally think I would create so many layers in the piece that would fit together.  So often we come across people and things in this world that make us question whether or not we are women. Whatever definition that means to you it commonly is questioned and criticized. I believe that all women are phenomenal and that we all deserve to rise. No matter what or how you define being a women, you are. I have been so inspired over this past semester, and in my entire life, by strong, independent women and this is my ode to them and all those who fight for what it means to be a women!

After putting this on social media I got some response but not a lot, really. I feel that because it was solely an audio piece not many people wanted to just listen to it. I would really like to add graphics to the piece to show an even stronger statement and feel that it would grab more attention.

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.

The topic of my project is Chinese Exclusion Act. I did not even know this happened in our history before this project. Since the topic is sad and historical, I primarily focus on using other people’s voice, for example, the comments from scholar and historian, and the sound from government.

The project follows the timeline of the whole event. It starts from introduction. Lots of Chinese came to U.S. for the Gold and later stayed in U.S. and many of them were employed as a railroad worker. However, many people were afraid of these Chinese worker. Thus, at 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was approved. It prohibited the immigration of all Chinese. Even those who had already obtained a green card or even were born in U.S has to go through many troubles and process to re-enter the U.S. I initially decided to interview Prof. Woo in Chemical Engineering department. But it happens way before he even was born. So I turn to some online source. And I include the part of interview of Chinese historian Connie Young Yu about the experience of her grandmother and grandfather.

Later, U.S. Congress formally apologies for the Chinese Exclusion Act at 2012. Interestingly, we still observe some similar restriction of entering U.S. targeting to certain group of people. But we do see more protest from people while more than 100 years ago, almost no one will speak for Chinese. I believe this is a progress for the society. However, we still have a very long way to go.

After posting it to the social media, my Chinese friends were shocking. Because they didn’t know about the Act at all. I think there are two main reasons. Firstly, this happens more than 100 years ago. It is not even related to our parents. Secondly, the media in China does not say too much about it. Xinhua news agent did write a report about U.S. congress apologized for the Act. But I (and my friends) didn’t remember or read about it at all. Besides it, many people address this Act with the recent President Trump’s immigration ban.

I got the idea for this project while listening to an artist’s stream while he talked with some friends and guests. I found the dichotomy between the absurdity of their humor and the (from my perspective) level-headedness in political discussion quite interesting.

I added some more formal sources dealing with similar topics from a few comedians I like. I think the conversation from the livestream serves as an example of the lessons that can be taken away from the comedians being used in everyday discussions.

I used the first strategy to create my sound work. I thought through the motivation and meaning of this assignment before I began to look for historical texts. Trying to personalize this sound work, I thought of myself as an international student who study abroad in the United States, and English is my second language. Also, listening is an important part to learn a new language. So I decided to make a sound work about the process and progression of myself and people around me learning English.

Then, I found an interesting text about Chinese Pidgin English, which is a contact language widely used along the coast of China in the 18^th and 19^th century. It was formed in a very restricted contact situation to fulfill limited communication need between English-speaking traders and their Chinese-speaking servants. Many linguistic features of this pidgin can be considered as contribution from Cantonese. So I recorded a dialogue between a Chinese shoe seller and an English speaker who is trying to buy shoes.

Starting from the earliest English form in China, I traced back my own experience in learning English. Since there are great differences between English and Chinese language system, we use phonetics to study English pronunciation. So for myself, phonetics is my first step to English, and I recorded the sound of reading English phonetics, which is mixed with the sound of Chinese Pidgin English.

Inspired by Pidgin English and my own experience of connecting English pronunciation with Chinese words, even if they have totally different meanings. Then, I found several texts about translation and transcreation between English and Chinese, especially Chinese poetry. The book Yingelishi wanders freely between Chinese and English, leaping over the gap between sound and meaning. So the first poem in this sound work is reading a poem in both English and Chinese.  They may sound similar, but the meaning is totally different.

Another obvious difference between these two languages is in the translation. The second poem is the first sentence from an ancient Chinese poetry, however, when it is translated in English, it sounds much longer. At this moment, the female voice reveals the progression of English study from pronunciation, words to translation. The last sound is a speech by a Chinese political figure, Soong Mei-ling, who was First Lady of the Republic of China. She attended a private school in Summit, New Jersey, and she graduated from Wellesley College in 1917. She was the first Chinese and the second woman to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress. In 1942, she also conducted a speaking tour of the United States to gain support for China during the Second World War. So I mixed and added her English speech at the end.

My friends think that this sound work is funny, especially the first poem which made them laugh. And some of them said that they had the same experience.

The subject of my sound art project is the development of Chinese immigrants in America. It related to a dish called chop suey. The origin of chop suey could tracy back to the nineteenth century. Railway company thought Chinese could construct the railroad because they built the Great Wall. Then the company signed treaties with the Qing government, which allowed Chinese to get into US legally. 

During that period, they made food by themselves because they couldn’t adapt American diets. Then a famous American Chinese dish called chop suey was invented by one of Chinese immigrant. This dish was cooked for laborers on the Pacific Railroad in California in the mid-1800s. At that time, all the food they had to cook for dinner was an array of leftover odds and ends; they cooked it all together to prevent wasting and then called it chop suey. Here is a recipe of chop suey in early stage. In my sound project, the beginning part is the sound of the mining and constructing the railroad. Then it followed by the sound of making chop suey, including the sound of washing, cutting and cooking. The last part of this project is the sound of train, which symbolizes the success of constructing the Pacific Railroad.

I posted it on social media. Most people cannot recognize the first part sound. As for me, I also never know the sound of the mining and constructing railroad before making this project. They didn’t know the main idea behind this project as well because I posted the sound without any sentences. They were curious about why I posted this sound.