We brainstormed a bit about our idea for the composition today and went out to get more recordings. So far we're exploring the sounds of nature existing in the mechanical city with all its sounds of machinery and cars. Also a sonic timeline of nature by itself evolving into a city with human inhabitation as the population of humans grow.
We went on the sound walk today as well. It got boring after a while though because we went to similar places with similar sound. There wasn't much variety. So in the composition it would probably be more interesting to have a variety of sounds and to have some contrast between sounds as well.
This is the video our lecturer showed us about Loren Chasse. He interacts with things in his environment, turning the environment in to his musical instrument. I think my group is leaning more towards a Loren Chasse kind of approach to the composition and selection of sounds. This is because we found that a lot of our favourite sounds recorded from yesterday were mainly made from human interaction with nature such as walking in the park, the movement of twigs in response to human contact, and so on.
This is John Cage's silent performance, also shown to us by our lecturer. I think before this I didn't really think about silence in the composition, thinking that the entire length of time should be filled with sound. This made me appreciate the existence of silence and how it can work in compositions instead of having constant sound happening. I think the silence makes the audience listen more carefully, waiting for the next sound to happen. It also makes the music piece have room to breathe; like the use of whitespace in graphic design.
At the beginning of the video there's a voiceover where John Cage says "The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing." This sums up what I'm saying quite nicely about the importance of silence in composing. I think what a lot of us forgot was that compositions don't have to be made entirely out of sound, they can have areas of silence as well as long as they are used with reason like every other component of the composition.
Near the end John Cage says something that German philosopher Immanuel Kant once said, "There are two things that don't have to mean anything. One is music and the other is laughter." This helped me understand what our project is about a little more. The aim of the brief is to create a "sound moment". An experience or sensation. Thus, it doesn't necessarily have to have some deep, philosophical meaning. So for now I think since our ideas are still developing, we don't need to nail down a meaning yet. For now we should just experiment, go with the flow, and see where that takes us.
This is Futurist music by Luigi Russolo, which centres around the "art of noise". Here he combines ambient noise, dissonant sounds, and musical instruments. It's quite an interesting piece in my opinion. It gets annoying at some points though because there's no break in the sound. The sound itself though is something that we can play with. I like how in this piece there's the ambient noise as the background and the layering of each sound is lovely too. It's also interesting how there doesn't seem to be a set beat or time signature for it as well.
I think this is something that we can think about when we do our composition. Consider the layering and where all the sounds are in the composition. Be careful not to create a looped beat as well because we're not after traditional composition here as we are creating a moment in sound rather than a sound track for the purpose of entertainment like orchestral music. I think it's more about making the listener more aware of sounds commonly encountered in every day life, thus encouraging people to pay more attention to their hearing. I'm hoping that in our composition we can make it feel like listening to a changing landscape; going from a lovely forest to a concrete city.
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