Memory Based Listening Exercise
In week three we were asked to bring in an object or sound that related us to a personal memory with which we could discuss about with the class. When moving into my second-year accommodation I accidently brought up with me a carrier bag full of objects found at my local hometown beach. This is a space I spend every moment I can at and for its somewhere completely isolated and shut off from the rest of the world. This bag, consisting of mostly driftwood, rocks and dried seaweed by chance made its way up with me in London so I thought choosing something from there would be easily recognisable and simple to talk about. The specific object I chose was a small section of washed up reed, fascinatingly light and filled with a sort of marrow of soft textured lining that could be moulded. This stick of sorts with a length of about ten centre mitres was covered in small ink droplet looking markings giving it a unique appearance. There was no particular reason I chose this specific one, just as a way to bring them all with me. In class we discussed how it related to a memory of mine, and I explained how the object ties me to that beach. Next, I described the sounds that appear in that place, detailing the movement of waves and how factors like weather and wind changed the sonic environment to a completely new degree. I also shared my favourite beach related tone which is the thought that upon each step you take when walking across pebbles or sand you start a chain reaction of bumping each grain into the other and with that a resulting sound that gets smaller and smaller. This to me highlights the ecological interaction we have with the environment and how everything we do affects the place we are in.
Related Sonic Sculpture Experiment
I composed a piece a few months ago called The Beach Has Ears which was an imagined sound environment created over a twelve minute field recording of the surf on that beach. I wanted to provide a sort of surrealist account of how I imagined this and used percussive elements and random objects to compose over top. This memory task and also my progress in the instruments and interactivity course elective inspired me to use these materials to create a sonic sculpture that would play the sound of that piece but also visually resemble the physical environment it was meant to be. I will save the technical details for that other class, but I used the rocks and driftwood to make a sculpture on which I placed an old guitar amp circuit with a speaker and also the Bela microcomputer platform. In Pure Data I made a patch from the irregular length stems of that composition and set them to loop indefinitely which created a way of constantly changing the composition over time. This in the end allowed me to play my composition through the low-fi speaker creating the effect of listening to that beach on a windy or rough day.
The Beach Has Ears. Beach Fodder, Orange Microamp Circuit, Bela Mini
Pure Data looped Patch
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