Week 9 Assignment: Sound

For my sound experiment I chose to record the different sounds that water makes in my apartment. I ended up with many different clips: water going down a drain, dripping water, opening a seltzer bottle, the sound of seltzer bubbling, the shower, the toilet flushing, pouring water out of a cup, water running from the sink, splashing water, and drizzling water.

The following is what I came up with after choosing a few to put together along with some subtle sound affects:

https://soundcloud.com/user293155979/watersounds

I had really been looking forward to working with audio as it is something I have never challenged myself to do before. However, it did not come very naturally to me. Looking back I feel the biggest difference between this project and the previous projects is that I didn't have much control over the final product since I was learning as I went along. The audio clip came together organically and now I find myself questioning if that is a good thing?

It is funny how this project relates back to my original project, the on/off experiment. In that project I recorded sounds I heard that I normally don't pay attention to, but instead of through audio, I recorded them visually. I think it would have been interested to have recorded the sounds as well. This way the viewer could listen to the sounds mashed together on a loop while looking at the piece.

Sound inspiring visual art is nothing new, but I like the idea of unexpected sounds, ones that we normally don't pay attention to, becoming the muse for a painting video.

An artist I found to be using sound creatively is Adam Brown. He is basically doing the opposite of what I've written about above. Instead of letting a sound inspire an image, he is letting images inspire sounds.

He does so by taking a digital photo, turning it into audio waves, etching them onto a vinyl record, and playing it back using a USB turntable and a projector. From what I can tell, this is as complicated as it sounds. But it is a fresh idea.

Most of his photos sound similar to white noise. By following the link above, you can listen to a sample.

Although I am intrigued by sound, as I look back on the semester the one project I particularly liked was stop motion. After exploring the iStopmotion software and creating my own finished animation, I have already learned so much and there are many things I would do differently given the chance. I would focus more on lighting, background, and opportunities for illusion. I'm wondering how I can use stop motion as a tool for one of my final projects. I would like to spend more time working on it.

I also really enjoyed the video project. The way I interpreted the video exploration is similar to the audio experiment, taking many clips to create one. This had more of an impact on me than the audio. It is something I've experimented with further on my own outside of class.