Sonic Design Evening

So last night's event was a success and it was really fun to see people enjoying my work. I'm really happy with the way that everything turned out.

Christian was a huge help setting everything up with me, and he found this shopping cart somewhere downstairs in Loeb, so that we were able to get everything upstairs in one trip!
This is what it looked like once we got it all set up.

Three 13" TV's, 3 mixers, 3 dvd players, 3 sets of headphones, 2 VCR's, 1 converter, lots of cables.






Final product.

Documentation for Final Portfolio

Nature Photography

Memory

This work holds quite a lot of personal significance as it exists for me as a kind of memory box of images from a summer spent in British Columbia. That summer was a very important one for me and when I decided to devote myself to a year-long project, I wanted to make sure that it be something that was going to retain its personal significance over this extended period. This project certainly has done that for me and every image, whether broken down or completely distorted, triggers my storehouse of memories and puts me right back in the frame of mind that I was in at the time that I shot each image.

I have made this piece as much for myself as for an audience and I hope also that it reflects on memory itself as a concept and considers the digital image as a flexible memento that functions simultaneously as a personal artistic expression and document of internal emotions.

Documentary Film and Self-Reflexivity

Much of the inspiration for this work comes from my new understandings of documentary film and the differences of approach between the realist tradition, the direct cinema and cinema verité approaches and self-reflexive documentary practice. I relate the production of informational documentary films with the practice of documenting nature through photography, and I have made attempts to dispose of the notion that a photographer like a filmmaker can ever be unbiased, neutral or objective.

Under the influence of filmmakers such as Agnes Varda and Jean Rouch I have attempted to insert myself into the piece by bringing attention to method and exposing digital images as representations rather than objective records. Through the use of inter-titles and the distortion of images I have chosen voice rather verisimilitude and tried to bring awareness to the construction of this piece.

Sound/Image Relationship

For a long time I have been interested in pairing image with sound and it is something that I originally began investigating in MUSI 3604 when I sewed together a number of short video clips taken through an O-Train window. I have chosen for this project however to include still images and to deal with photography as an artistic medium and I am drawn particularly to the way that music, especially mellow or soothing music has a way of subtly enhancing the experience of photographed images.

I hope that what I have achieved through these three short slideshows is an experience of nature and its representation through digital art within a sonic environment that mixes well with the colours and light and shadow on-screen.

Simultaneity

This collection of three slideshows is meant to be played on three television screens with three separate sets of headphones. The reason that I feel it will be interesting to display them this way is that it allows for a dual experience of these works of art. On the one hand the three slideshows can exist simultaneously for the viewer who is standing at a distance and watching the images play out in a loop. On the other hand each slideshow can be a personal and individual experience for the viewer who has encountered the exterior view and made the choice to come in for a closer look and listen.

By placing the headphones on her/his head the viewer becomes attached to the image and is able to experience the work within a small personal bubble, which produces a link that did not exist at a distance between the audience and the work of art.

Execution

Trees: This is the first video that I completed for the collection. The music was written and recorded in Cubase SX and I began by playing with my piano plug-in called “The Grand,” and a midi insert called “Density” which adds random clusters of notes to the keys that you press. I liked the layered piano sound, but abandoned the “Density” insert for some regular delay and reverb once I had exported the track as audio. I also included a soft organ sound from Tassman that I had adjusted and used in my initial portfolio idea about an airplane flight. The drums were put together in Reason with some hip hop loop samples that I took apart so that I could create my own patterns. The forest ambience included in the song are all sounds that I either recorded myself or borrowed from The Freesound Project (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/) for my work on the Jinsaburo Oikawa exhibit entitled Sea, Stealth, and Suzuko: The Suian Maru Centennial Exhibition at the Japanese Canadian National Museum in Burnaby B.C.

Sky: This piece does not include any ambient sound effects, but I have manipulated a backwards piano track to sound somewhat reminiscent of an airplane engine. Throughout these three soundtracks I have chosen to include piano as a dominant feature in order to tie them together aesthetically. I utilized the same technique of building my drum tracks in Reason here, and I have also included a manipulated Tassman sound as a melody feature.

Water: I took a different approach to writing this piece, but tried to tie it in with the other tracks through the piano. This piece was executed almost entirely in Reason with various sounds loaded into different tracks of the NNXT Advanced Sampler where I also loaded several effects such as EQ, reverb, delay, and distortion. Once satisfied with the musical track in Reason, I exported it and then loaded the entire song as a .wav into Cubase where I added additional manipulated water sound effects from the Jinsaburo Oikawa project.

Editing: The digital images were all edited using either Photoshop or Picasa 2 image editor and loaded into Windows Movie Maker where the soundtrack was also added. Changes of light and colour were achieved gradually by creating a variety of iterations of the same image and cross-fading them with the movie editor.

-Kristie Taylor, April 2007.