Soundcloud link to project 1: https://on.soundcloud.com/WY8Cy, by Athena and Anna
When Athena and I began the sound project, we were both completely new to recording and audio editing, and so the first day we recorded during class we just went around the 3rd and 4th floors recording whatever noises from objects we could find.
Based on the sounds we were, and influenced by the TED talk by Pauline Oliveros on deep listening we had just watched, we thought maybe we could make a sound piece combining the sounds we don’t usually pay attention to in our daily routines—like the sound of chatter, or footsteps that we tune out, to give examples. That didn’t seem like enough to tell a story, and we wanted to have the listener feel like they’re temporarily being teleported into a journey just from sounds alone. Honing in on the footsteps idea, I thought it would be interesting to literally put the listener into the footsteps of someone. And since moving to NYC I’ve become more wary and aware of walking on dark streets alone at night more often than I used to, and as that is the perspective I feel Athena and I can both personally relate to, we decided to put the listener into a journey of a person walking alone the street at night.
The sound piece tells a story of someone leaving a busy building and walking out at night. Upon realizing that they might be followed by a stranger, they start hurrying until eventually they reach the safety of a crowded area again. We wanted there to be a peak to the story, which ultimately ends with a somewhat resolved ending.
We borrowed the equipment we needed from the ER and brought out our different shoes for the 2 characters, and recorded around the ITP area. We recorded friendly chatter, heels walking at different paces, boots walking at different paces, and the noise of a bustling street.
The audio equipment we borrowed.
Recording the different shoes walking on the concrete floor on the somewhat quiet ITP herb patio.
The day we recorded there was a fire alarm so we had to pause recording, but luckily because of it, we were able to record the noise of the NYU students huddling outside the building while waiting for it was OK to go back into the building again.
Athena handling the zoom recording.
After we recorded all our sounds, all that was left to do was compiling them into our sound piece track in Adobe Audition. The most difficult part of editing our track was trying to manipulating the boots soundtrack to sound as heavy and formidable as we’d like it to be. We played around with different track effects until we could make it a bit lower-pitched, as the original was higher-pitched and lighter-sounding than we’d like, possibly because of the combination of the boots sole and the floor when we were recording.
Once we fine-tuned the individual components of the track, I also added in a recording of cicadas chirping I recorded while actually walking home one night to really sell the fact that the heels were walking home alone at night-time, adding it together was more enjoyable and straightforward. Overall, this was a fun creative challenge outside both of our comfort zones, and I’m excited to see what sound journeys everyone else has created as well.
This article includes the perspective of both Joy Garnett, the artist accused of pirating an original artwork, and Susan Meiselas, the photographer who took the original photograph. Meiselas makes an interesting point in her statement, by comparing her philosophy of creating art that contextualizes to that of Garnett’s creating art by de-contextualizing.
It brings up an interesting discussion about what is art and who gets a voice and who gets to control over how a story is told. It reminds me of the iconic depression-era photograph Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange and the story of the woman behind the photo. The woman revealed herself to be Florence Owens Thompson after the image of her received a lot of publicity, and she wanted to make sure Lange and the public got her story right—that her and her family was not as distressed as the photo had made them out to be.
Similarly, the man in the photo, Pablo Arauz, doesn’t get much of a voice even in this article. Instead, we hear only the perspectives of both artists who took this image of Arauz and told the story they wished to tell. Who gets the right over the ownership of this image that’s been reproduced over and over again? Is it the subject, Arauz, or the photographer Meiselas, or the artists that re-contextualized the image as an abstract symbol for rioting like Garnett? I think it’s not an easy question that can be answered, and it’s for the individual consumer to decide and do their own research. After a creation is publicized, it’s not in anyone’s hands in particular how it gets interpreted and spread.