Intro to Storytelling / Sound & Space
After watching Pauline Oliveros's talk on hearing vs. listening, I was thinking about how not only is there a difference between hearing and listening, but that the act of listening is situationally dependent. Listening, as opposed to hearing, requires the effort to understand. However, that understanding looks different depending on the sound. Spatial noise, like the sound of ventilation in a room, doesn't require the same 'listening' as sound that is purposefully intended to communicate. Maybe you sit in silence for a few minutes, listening to the spatial noise around you. This kind of listening could bring an understanding of how you are situated in space, focusing on your body / the physical world. But, I wouldn't say that ventilation or a creaking house are trying to communicate some sort of message. It can make you feel an emotion or invoke an idea, but that relationship is between you and the sound itself. For sound that is created with intention (language, music, a knock on the door), I think there is now a different layer. The relationship is between you, the sound, and the entity creating it. Your understanding is no longer just about how the sound makes you feel or what it makes you think of, you also have to seek out the intention behind it.
Conveniently, as I'm starting the Sound Design article with Haley Shaw, I've noticed that they're opening with intended feeling. Already, this perfectly goes along with what I was saying above, because now I'm getting an idea of how a sound-creator is thinking. I like the idea of working left of center, doing something that isn't on the nose but still belongs. That can go for any creative project, if desired.
Project One: Collecting Sounds
In the next two weeks, Justin, Vedang, and I will be working on this first project. We've talked about doing the option where we imagine a sound installation. Vedang brought up focusing on environments that are supposed to be quiet, like museums, galleries, libraries, or the quiet car of a train. I've been brainstorming, and I think it would be cool to create a version of one of those places. Instead of the audience using the space to look at paintings or read a book, they need to think about how these aren't actually silent spaces. They may be quiet, but there is still some sort of spatial noise that is affecting the experience. How does the spatial noise change the way you inhabit a space? Maybe we could compare a gallery when it is empty vs. highly trafficked. Or we could create two separate rooms with a different kind of 'silent space' in each, and then switch the spatial noise. Now the library sounds like the quiet car of a train, and vice versa. Does that change the way the audience inhabits the space? I'll bring this up when I talk to them next!