Sunday, February 15, 2015

allatonceness




My sound piece is titled "allatonceness" because it is quite literally a bunch of noises happening all at once. However, all of the noises come from the same source: my acoustic guitar. I recorded myself (with the Mac) playing 5 different songs that I know on the guitar and then layered them all over each other. I did not mess with the recordings besides cutting and layering. The bad quality of the computer microphone made it sound weird and unnatural enough by itself.



Working with sound was a new experience for me. Definitely quite different from the other creative things I do. I am very interested in music; I listen and/or play nearly every day. However, my interest in experimental sound is rather limited. Most of it is a bit too much for me (which is part of the reason why I took a rather minimal approach to this assignment).


McLuhan said, "The ear favors no particular 'point of view.' We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us. We say, 'Music shall fill the air.' We never say, 'Music shall fill a particular segment of the air'" (111). The songs in this piece form a web around each other as well as the listeners. There are 5 distinct tunes being played, but they are extremely hard to pick out (until the very end with only 1 tune left standing). It is a rather uncomfortable feeling.

4 comments:

  1. This piece constantly makes me think that you're about to start playing a melody, which never really comes true. I feel like I'm straining to make sense of the jumbled-notes, like I might find some familiar pattern in the already familiar notes that are arranged in such an un-melodic way.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I second what Noah says at first, that there is the sense that is a tune somewhat lost in a purgatory that is our mind when we try to make sense of what kind of song we're trying to create knowing that there is something special about it. There is something hidden but beautiful in this piece that we may never know or hear completely because it is so wrapped in a subconscious fender bender of memory.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Did that end with a few seconds of a Tallest Man on Earth song? I appreciated that tiny thread at the end with the chaos of the piece. I think you captured the McLuhan quote of "enveloping sound" very well.

    ReplyDelete
  4. As someone who also plays guitar, I found myself trying to pick apart the songs (pick apart, haha) and figure out whether you were strumming or playing fingerstyle. So for me the track kept alternating between chaos and melody until it resolved into a simple melody at the end, which I thought created a nice resolution.

    ReplyDelete

What?