Sound: Project 1

During the first project we were asked to create a sound piece that involved the idea of metamorphoses. During this project was listened to some sound pieces by John Cage and Morton Subotnick. Before this I hadn’t heard much sound work before, as I hadn’t never been that interested in sound before or heard a piece that really interested me, however I found the pieces that we listened to very interesting and quite striking. I particularly enjoyed the Morton Subotnick pieces, especially his piece entitled “Butterfly #1 (From "4 Butterflies", 1974)”, and this piece is highly distorted and sounds very unnatural and electronic. I find the piece very dramatic and varied and simultaneously weirdly unsettling but yet calming and even a little bit relaxing. This piece maybe something that doesn’t only have to be viewed as an art piece but could be listened to and enjoyed as a piece of music on its own.

During this project I worked in a group to create the sound piece and we decided that we were going to look at the metamorphoses/ changing of sounds throughout the day and the sounds of daily tasks.

Ideas including:

·         Rain

·         Traffic

·         Children

·         Crowds

·         Music

·         Trains, etc.

We decided that we would each recorded some of the sounds that we heard during the day and then we would used audacity to fit them all together to create a single morphed day.

On reflection I feel that this project went well, since it was my first times (and all of the people in my groups first time) creating sound art and I think that we handled it pretty well as we had no previous experience creating or really listening to this type of work.

I found using the audacity programme relatively easy as everything was rather straight forward and simple to use, once I had played around with it a little, I found it very quick and clear to create sounds and put them together. I think that working in a group during this project really helped as it made the thought of doing something completely new less daunting /intimidating, and there were more ideas to play around with and research.

On the other hand I do feel that this piece could be improved and developed further, as working in a group did mean there was a lot of varying ideas, and I think that we just tried to include too many things, meaning that the sounds we created were very crowded and dense and many of the individual and interesting sounds got lost or distorted It would have sound better and clearer if we had stripped it back a little and used less sounds, so that more of the sound could have been heard better.