This was the last class of this Studio and I was full of emotions. And this was the last chance for me to hear different opinions on my last project. I revised the combination of the elements in my three audios and I recorded another one making it four audios together. Each one lasted one minute. And I took the suggestions Hannah gave me last week of sending the four revised audios to my friend and inviting them to listen to the sound effect of each one. What was interesting was that they could only hear the easily distinguishable sound effect like the sound of water, keyboard and page-turning. They could hardly tell what objects made those sound effects, and even almost failed to distinguish what sound effects did they combined with. The first time they heard the audios, they did not have special feelings. Yet when they tried again, they had different thoughts.
Just like what Hannah said before, the whole sound effect was different from that of solo sound. So when I was editing I gave 15 seconds for each of the three elements in the one-minute audio, and then I put them together. I was not sure whether Hannah and others have noticed this. Maybe it was because I did not express it clearly. Hannah told another student that she did not know what I wanted to express with the audio if listening in this way. To tell the truth, this also faintly appeared in my friend’s comments. What I wanted to show in this project was to see whether the combination of the sounds in normal daily life could produce different feelings. However, it seemed that the four audios could not bring such feelings at the first time. In simple terms, perhaps they were to distractive. This should be a very serious problem. Because I listened to the audios too many time I did not think they were not good. On the contrary, I thought they could express different scenes and emotions. This kind of audios was not suitable for listening once and then expecting to have feelings. It only could make people notice that there were so many different sounds in it. If listened individually, these sounds all lacked diversity. They only made people curious about the original sources of the sounds. If asked about your feeling, I thought most people would have no feelings at all.
In my opinion, the second point of my BIGGEST THINGS: whether listening to audios without images makes us notice the things we don’t notice normally, not only notice the configuration of the audios but also to notice what kind of feelings the combined audios could take along. The feelings differ from the “meanings” we discussed before. We discussed the following two questions before:
1、Does what you’re doing for task four allow you to look around rather than ahead? (Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World)
2、Will your task four allow you notice neglected things? What do you think they might be? (Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World)
For me, doing the project this time, the image is the so-called “direction”, audio is the “surroundings”. The “surroundings” are the things we easily neglected. Perhaps when listening for the first time, we do not have so many resonances. The only thing we pay attention to is the “surroundings”. This is curiosity. When we close our eyes to carefully listen to the sounds of “surroundings” or to listen to the compound sounds of “surroundings”, it will induce different associations. It makes you associate with some of your familiar scenes or disturbing or anxious scenes. This is the part that I want people to notice as I think noticing these feelings deserves more consideration than the direct feelings and meanings the image produces.
In conclusion, I decided to save the four audios and try my best to make a new edition. I will edit again all the elements inside the four audios and compose a complete 4-mins audio just like the audio example of sound collage in the PPT of week 9, making it a long audio directly to see the differences from the original one.
