Month: February 2021

‘The Beckoning’ is my 3:29 contribution to group A’s 14 minute sound piece, as well as being a piece of sound work in it’s own right.

The collaborative project that this is a part of happened to coincide with an outside of school project that I had the pleasure of being part of. Simultaneously, I was asked to contribute to a 14 minute sound piece, as well as create a sound-scape for my close friends’ foundation project.

At the start of the process of making this piece, I toyed with the idea of making one piece for two very similar briefs. Both gave me ultimate freedom, whilst still needing a certain sound within. I feel that the piece fits the video above well, as well as being a solid entry within the group sound piece.

Most radio features voice or music, and communicates this to people wherever they are. Acoustic ecologists such as Bruce Davis have reimagined radio in a different way: as an observational tool for ‘listening in’ or invading remote, singular environments, giving an ear to things other than talk and sound organised by humans. Artist Anna Friz suggests that instead of understanding radio as a ‘container for content’ it can be used as a means to explore communications and relationships between people and (their) things. It can facilitate ‘many-to-many’ exchanges and layered ecologies of transmission.

This session, we shared live sounds of our local environments using the ‘Locus Cast’ app. I found this experience extremely thought provoking; at first, having a class listen in to the sounds that surround you, almost sitting on your shoulder, observing the environment, made me feel a sense of invasion and ultimately made me a tad uncomfortable. However, after about 2-3 minutes, the discomfort I was experiencing faded away and left me almost inviting others to put themselves in my surroundings as much as possible.

During this session with Dawn & Ed, we explored the elements and ingredients that go into the making/creation of a live piece of work for radio, dividing these into clearly differentiated elements, including: 

• (the grain of) the human voice;
• music as bed/foundation;
• the use of song and/or poetry as colour and illustration;
• speech;
• SFX;
• environmental/atmospheric sounds;
• noise;
• jump/fast cuts, editing, repetition, emphasis/meaning;
• comprehending radio itself as an environment
• and critically, the nature of listening in radio.

As well as this, we discussed what the listener expects from this sort of work, and analysed how audio elements stand and work in contrast to each other whilst also thinking about the particular mode of listening which applies in radio.

We discussed how to create sound effects, using live ‘Foley’ techniques/methods as well as certain software. Working individually, each of us created and shared a re-working of a script, adding sound effects and atmosphere of our own choice/preference e.g. an explosion; dramatic weather; a prison or forest environment; a hammer blow to the head. Once shared with the class, we each explained in detail, how we achieved the finished product, and the steps taken to create the atmosphere of our choice. We, as a class, wanted to practice inserting live SFX (analogue and digital) into the re-work so we can use them in our final broadcast work.