As I type this blog post, my ear drums are hammered by the punching of my fingertips against the keyboard, and I curse myself for not including this essential percussion of my daily life as a sound bite in my composition. I am soothed, however, by the fact that I could list a thousand more noises I hadn’t included: my sniffly nose, the rustling leaves outside my open window, a running shower with men’s-room-reverb, the late-night busy clamor of my Chinese neighbors, the list goes on…
My composition is not arranged linearly; I layered my field recordings because I wanted to best represent how the echoing memories of my sonic daily life congregate in my mind, running into each other, creating entirely new soundscapes altogether. This, to me, is quite profound, for there is a constant stream of vibrations entering my ears and they are stored in my memory as electrical impulses which I can hear inside my head – via reminiscence – at any moment of my choosing, and sometimes not of my choosing. I then compile those electrical impulses through a hard drive external to my brain, and arrange them by viewing a visual interface and replaying them as vibrations out of a stereo, feeding this energy-transferring perpetuation of vibration to organic memory to artificial memory and back again until I have composed a project for a class in which other students are cycling through the same process, feeding the relationship between man and machine – a relationship fueled by vibrations. Lawrence English, in his article, “The sounds around us: an introduction to field recording,” articulates that “the microphone and the recording device are non-cognitive,” which emphasizes this near-symbiosis because, although our technologies do not “need,” it is necessary for humans to manipulate recordings (amplifying certain sounds, removing extraneous noise, etc.) in order for the successful transmission of “listening.”
The individual recordings of my daily life work together as layers and take on a musical quality. None of the recordings were altered other than clipping and minor volume adjustment (volume adjustment was crucial). I included samples of a documentary I watched in my sociology class called The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, which I recorded in class. Three of the layers are instrumental (improvised by yours truly). I spend a lot of free time playing guitar, banjo, and keyboard synthesizer, so, naturally, I included these sounds in my composition. Playing music is an invaluable stress-reliever. I also use it for relaxation and stimulation; by playing certain families of vibrations, I am psychologically affected accordingly. In listening to the collection of sounds I have put together, one can hear the mundane noises of society: slamming doors, groaning buses, talking crowds of people, and tumbling dryers to name a few. I appreciate such sounds because when I hear them in my memory, I am musically inspired. This inspiration may have led me to compose my audiography in an unorthodox manner. I am justified by my certainty that this means of composition most strongly represents my take on the sounds of daily life. What I feel is most important to get across is that the sounds of my daily life do not only occur as I hear them, but also when I remember them, which is a definitive factor of my overall sound experience. I feel that my audiography has “grain”, as Roland Barthes calls the “signifier of the level of which […] the temptation of ethos can be liquidated” (Barthes 181). In other words, when I listen to my audiography, I do not feel it appropriate to label it with adjectives and force inaccurate characteristics upon it. Instead, I feel that only the compilation can describe itself, as both a listening and reflecting experience.
Works Cited:
English, Lawrence. “The Sounds around Us: An Introduction to Field Recording.”
The Conversation. N.p., 8 Feb. 2015. Web. 11 Oct. 2015.
The Life and times of Rosie the Riveter. Dir. Connie Field. Perf. Wanita Allen, Gladys Belcher,
Lyn Childs, Lola Weixel, Margaret Wright. Clarity Productions, 1980.
Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath. “The Grain of the Voice.” Image, Music, Text. Noonday Press ed. 1977. N. pag. Print.
In response to your comment, Asher, I decided to layer the sounds because when I reflect on the noises of my daily life, I do not hear just one sound; I hear the harmonized wall of society’s song. As for your question regarding which sounds I chose to layer on top or on bottom, I do not quite understand: do you mean the volume of each layer or the order in which they are heard?
This is awesome! I loved the way you described how one heres through ideas sound waves and vibrations, and especially how you explain how one hears these things sometimes by choice and sometimes not. I think your podcast really reflected this idea and was able to let the listener really understand the points you were making. On top of that, the podcast also really helped emphasize another point you made which was about how we must manipulate the recordings in order to successfully listen to sound. The layers of sound within the podcast’s different layers of all 10 sounds playing around the same time aloud the listener to experience the idea of manipulation and amplification greatly. Each time I listened to the podcast I heard new noises that I hadn’t quite heard the time before. This was an ingenious way to support your points made in your essay. What gave you this idea to layer them together? Also, how did you chose which ones to layer on top or on bottom? This was an extremely cool idea, and i though it was extremely innovative!
Thanks for your comment, Abra. The instrumental layers were all played by myself, save for the short, old-timey clip in the beginning, which is from the documentary I cited. I simply turned on the recorder a few times while I was making music and threw the recordings into the audiography. No special attention to the other layers was being paid while recording these layers.
So. Cool. (That’s what I said when I first hit play on your podcast). I loved the way that the sounds from your daily life were layered, and that the format of your podcast reflected the way you perceive sounds. Additionally, the variation of manmade and machine made sounds was intriguing, as they all mixed together into one wash of noise. While listening to this wall of noise, I was curious about the music you chose. Are the three layers of music all from things that you listen to frequently, or did they just speak to you for this exercise? How did you originally find them?