Category: Sonic Doing & Thinking

“

Oh, a dream. Well, this is one I’ve had multiple times throughout my adult years. it’s not anything fantastical or wondrous in a normal sense. there isn’t any flying, mystical lands, great adventures or nonsensical madness. I always like to dream about mundane things for the things that are most like reality are the most dreamlike. the dream I am talking about is quite simple, after an event of sorts myself and someone I love would be on a walk and at one point I would confess to them and like most dreams, it would end abruptly before the climax of the story.

It would be after an event we both chose to go together too with a bunch of our friends. everyone would start saying their goodbyes but at one point we would leave together. it was always a long journey home and it always ended on a walk a long walk in which we would split off near the end to go our separate ways. every time we had walked together my heart would slowly fill with the anticipation and adrenaline finally proposing, which was always stifled by the fear that would freeze my lips as I tried to speak. this night was no different to any other yet I knew that time was running out I never knew what happened in next day and if I didn’t act now I may regret it for the rest of my life. So as we reached the crosswords and said our goodbyes I stopped her, for one last time and it left my lips for the first time. I didn’t know whether anything was mutual if anything I felt was also felt by her and the shock in her face did not help ease my concerns Both her shyness and the stuttering in her voice eased my heart. I knew I wouldn’t get an answer on the spot nor would I want one, one thing I’ve always thought about proposing is that if someone cared properly about it they give time to think about it, and I hope that was the case here. after I said what I said and awkwardness hung in the air I broke the silence with see you sometime hopefully and left. I know how much she doesn’t like awkwardness so I thought it was best to leave her to her own devices, so that might have been the anxiety creeping back in again. hello arrive home finally thinking about Quote if it all goes wrong with everything crumbles in a new day, I knew that when I woke up my life ether crumble before my eyes or finally start again. But that was something that the me tomorrow would have to worry about and then, then I woke up.

After all, has been said and done, I’ve had a good think about how my piece actually went.

Things I did well?
I used more audio techniques that I hadn’t in the previous project; I leaned into the fact that we’re doing an audio work for radio and made the voice the centre of my piece; I got a lot more personally out of this task than I thought what’s possible.

The assessment this time around with tricky because it was a lot harder to make something meaningful especially with the topic of dreams, but I do think I made a piece that has some nuance, is meaningful to me, and maybe to other people too especially when it is about an innocent, youthful experience that everyone goes through. I also feel like I have improved from my last assessment as I am slowly becoming more used to using different audio techniques.

Things I wish I did better or did in the first place.
One thing was the topic itself, looking back I do wish I leaned more into the idea of dreams, specifically the dreams you dream of when you’re asleep. This is mostly because I do think on some level, I “cheesed” the assignment, which allowed me to dodge restrictions that were set upon us. This is an awkward point because I also really like the topic I did so it’s up for debate whether this point is a good thing or not.

Another thing was the simplicity of the execution of the idea. Again, I went for something simpler than most people on our course would do, and it’s putting me in quite a weird spot because my work is quite different to the next persons’, making it hard to gauge the good qualities of my work against theirs. Also, I worry if I’m doing the same thing again and again or if it’s actually my style of sound art, which is rooted mainly in music and fine art, to be honest.

Personally, I think a good way to switch up the style of sound art I’m using would be to use analogue processes and live performance to allow for randomness and experimentation in numerous different directions instead of setting a course to a certain goal straight away.

It has also come to my attention that’s another problem with my work is that I’m not utilising my strengths. If I had more time to put into my script and the recording of my voice, I feel like this piece would have gone a lot better than it has. One thing I am more certain about, let’s say, is my voice. Another thing I’m almost certain of is music, so I do think it would be wise for me to weave an aspect of musicality into my work.

While I’ve done a lot more and quite a few things well in this piece in my personal opinion, I’m still stuck with quite a few of the same reflection outcomes in terms of making my work being exciting but also more unique to me. I do believe it’s just because sound for radio had my mind in a completely different place so I didn’t think to incorporate a lot of the last reflection outcomes I had before.

In the new sound project coming I’ll be sure to make my piece more musical so I can take another step to develop my practice.

My piece is two distinct acts that are separated in terms of tone instead of content. The first is a casual interview and the second is an introspective recount. On top of that, the comments I got from my last sound piece were mostly to use more processes that one would use when creating sound pieces like reverb, distortion, delay, et cetera, so I have to find good ways of improving on those things that I was lacking in my last assessment.

While the dictation of my voice plays a big role in setting that tone, the sound design, in this case, helps inform that, especially in the second act. The piece has a certain level of nuance and I also want to reflect that in the sound design, well at least I want to be subtle with it.

This blog post is mostly focusing on sound and noise, and how I want to use these two things to inform the atmosphere I’m trying to create.

For act one, I want the sound design to be quite crisp, I want the scene to sound like an exhibition space in UAL. So in terms of sound design, this means, reverb and echo on the voice, the shuffling of feet, the creaking of chairs, and also points where you can tell that the main character isn’t necessarily facing the microphone. All of this is to sell the fact that it is based in the reality we live in so it is something that is being recorded, something I touched upon in the last assessment as well. This section won’t have noise in it, the only way I can think of using it is to connect the first section with the 2nd.

Act 2 will be quite different. It’s meant to be set in the place that the protagonist speaking about, so outside, at night, on a walk. All I’m trying to do is sell that the protagonist is where he is so there isn’t much in terms of sound design here, at least nothing apart from the obvious. The noise aspect; however, will be more apparent, slowly rising in volume through the piece as the lines start to blur between reality and dreams, the mental dissonance starts to set in and the protagonist slowly descends into his fantasy.

There are parts in the script where I pause and in those moments I want the noise to also stop, as instead of a noise overload where is almost like the main character is going crazy, I’d rather pause in insanity something that hints to the listener that the main character knows this isn’t real but also to add emotion, to let the listener stop listening and instead empathising or feeling.

At the very last line, I want the sound design of the voice to basically morph between him being outside to him being in that exhibition space being interviewed.

The way I want to achieve this is by hiring out a recorder from uni and getting my own samples, but fortunately, I have a lot of samples from the previous project I can use so that is a nice thing to fall back on but I hope that I won’t have to.

My scripts went through many different phases. The main basis of my script was it try not to be about dreams in terms of sleeping but dreams in terms of goals or hopes for something more. This technicality was the only way I felt that I could tell a story that wasn’t honestly horrendous and idiotic. Also, I wanted to make the task meaningful for myself and more based on the things I have been exposed to in my life, so even if I couldn’t get what I wanted out of the task in terms of experience working in a group, I could get something more personal out of it through self-expression.

Despite me saying that the main premise of my story became a common trope that you would find in Japanese romance comics, which was an account of someone confessing to their friend, but in a specific way. I’m a young lad so I relate to it on some level.

When making the script, I wasn’t sure what direction I want to take the tone in. Did I want a jovial tone where it sounds like just one person telling their dream to another, or was it meant to be something most serious than just small talk? At first, I thought it would be better to use the jovial tone as a veil to hide the meaning behind the story with the pauses at certain moments and diegetic sounds to sell the fact that there was more going on, which could be easily understood because these are feelings that everyone has.

What changed my mind was the idea that the script was based on in the first place, taking dreams as more like an unachievable future or goal than REM sleep. So, I leaned into that more.

The story of the script starts with someone talking to someone else about their dream in a jovial tone, being quite brief in the way they describe it and also being quite muddled in the details. Then at one point, the tone changes and it becomes the main character recounting this dream as if it was a lived experience. As if it was something they had been through before. I did this because that’s what made sense, I wanted to make the main character seem as though they had actually lived that dream to sell the fact that they want to lose themselves in a fantasy.

At the end of the piece, there is also the troupe of “it was all a dream” or “then I woke up”, one I wanted to avoid; however, instead of completely destroying any narrative importance that was said previous to the statement, it instead adds to it as the whole point of the piece is that the main character is blurring the lines because the world that he wants to live in is so far out of reach that the only way to live that reality is to dream.

Honestly, I was quite excited about the group shenanigans as I thought it would be a nice way to lean into the fact that I have a passion for acting and playwriting. On top of that, a group task would be an interesting way to mimic the process of creating a radio production through the different roles we would undertake. As someone who’s listened to the radio a lot when they were younger and someone who’s quite interested in the whole dynamic of the radio as it is the mainstream way of digesting audio-only media, the revised task had a completely different angle than the one previous and lost the unique aspect that a group task has. Firstly, now each person in our class has to be their own voice actor, sound engineer and director, completely removing the group part of the task. This also makes it harder is fully explore a certain role in radio production, and this is all before we actually get onto the content of the task itself. Instead of making a radio piece with an unrestricted topic that included voice, sound and noise, instead, we now have two create a five minute part of an exquisite corpse about dreams.

Dreams as a topic, for myself, isn’t really a restriction but also is a quality that, for me, doesn’t breed creativity. If one made a piece about normal dreams they have, who would care? It’s almost like a weird application of empathy, who would listen to a story about a dream when their own dreams are more exciting and detailed than the ones they listen to from other people? It begs the question of why someone would listen to something so fantastical when it isn’t a story they want or need to hear? There are also many pitfalls with making a sound piece about dreams because it is very easy to make a piece that is, again, uninteresting. I feel as well the best angle with making a script for this piece would be to make a story that has a meaning or message to tell; however, even then, telling a serious message is almost nonsensical to do in the framework of a dream, mostly based on the fact that dreams are silly so why would anyone take you seriously?

My main takeaway with the dream topic of this task is that it is hard to make something interesting or meaningful in the framework of a dream and a lot of the things we want to talk about are better said through a different story and not one that primarily is based around a dream.