Janet Cardiff Response

The Janet Cardiff radio interview seemed to me to be more of an audio infomercial. The purpose was obviously to promote and advertise Janet Cardiff' walks. The interview allowed you to learn a little bit about Cardiff's intentions and how she acheives her goals. The things I learned from the interview that I thought were interesting were how she records the sounds so that they feel more intimate to the listener. I like how she described how she makes you feel like the sounds are actually surrounding you. She says she acheived this because her recordings allow her to magnify and enhance the sounds that may otherwise be ignored if you were walking on your own outside. I also thought it was interesting how she said that she researches the history of the areas she takes you through on her walks, because it allows her to give the location its own personal touch. The thing I do not like about her walks is her voice. Her "dead flat tone of her voice" to me is kind of spooky. To me, it seems like the voice of somebody who would be doing a reading of a sexy romance novel... These were my thoughts after listening to the interview.

In response to Janet Cardiff's project for Whitechapel Gallery in London, she definetly uses the three level spatial structure. Throughout the peice, her voice is always in the foreground, normally in conjunction with footsteps. Sometimes though, she brings other sounds into the foreground. I also like how she brings sounds that were once in the background to the middle ground as you seemingly get closer to that noise. When she first goes outside, she starts with distant waves and voices in the background, birds in the middle ground, and footsteps in the foreground. Then she has a random helicopter come to the foreground for a few seconds. She then continues to have footsteps in the foreground. Then random weird music makes its way to the foreground. Birds continue to be in the middle ground. Then new weird music begins in the foreground. Footsteps stop and the birds move into the background. Dogs bark in the middleground. Footsteps start again and move back to the foreground and the music stops. You then hear an airplane in the foreground and birds in the middle ground. A voice giving a lecture then becomes the foreground. Footsteps start walking away from the lecture and a childs voice becomes the foreground and then fades away. Waves that are in the background slowly get louder as footsteps continue. The waves then become the middle ground and then fades away to the background. Running water then becomes the foreground and then footsteps. Waves then make there way back to the foreground. Footsteps start up again as the foreground, waves become the middle ground. The footsteps, still foreground, sound different as if they are crunching leaves in a forest. There is an ambient background. Birds then begin to chirp in the background. Suddenly you are inside and you hear footsteps on wood. A machine recording becomes the foreground. Then you are back outside and waves and birds become the middle ground. Birds fade to the background. Music then starts and stop. Footsteps continue to be the foreground. Waves become louder and go to the middle ground and then the foreground. Birds are in the middle ground and waves eventually fall back to the background. As previously stated, Janet's voice is always part of the foreground. Sometimes she has a man whispering that becomes part of the foreground. I think that her use of three-level spatial structure allows the listener to gain a sense of distance. The louder the particular sounds, the closer they feel. When the sounds are in the background, you can tell that you are far away from them. Also, after listening to the whole walk, her voice actually kind of grows on you. Ha!

First Audio Exercise

My Exercise Here! Yay!

For my peice, I overlapped the sound of walking on a wet street during a thunderstorm, and ended with the opening of a door as if you are going inside, and when the door slams, the thunder and rain noises arent as loud.

Credits:

Samples used from Freesound

January 25, 2007
By artifact (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/usersViewSingle.php?id=229220)
lightning_strike.wav (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=29675)
By acclivity (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/usersViewSingle.php?id=37876)
Puddle1.wav (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=24206)
By FreqMan (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/usersViewSingle.php?id=92661)
011 Door opens and shuts.wav (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=23168)

Audio Journey Project

For my audio journey project, I want to do a journey from the airport to the beach. I want it so seem like you are flying to a tropical place and end up on the beach.
So far, the sounds I intend to use include:

Airport Sounds
Airplane sounds
Walking sounds
Car sounds
Beach sounds
Seagull sounds

These are just a few ideas. Im not exactly sure what sound I will create yet.. I have been thinking hard though. I think Im just going to take it peice my peice and see where I end up!

Milan Knizak - Broken Music Composition, 1979

I listened to Milan Knizak's Broken Music Composition. To be completely honest, I do not think the peice was very pleasing to listen to. In fact, I would compare it to nails on a chalk board. You could hear in the background there was soft, pleasant peices of music but it is broken up in many places by what sounds to me like rubber rubbing against itself (hence the nails on the chalkboard comparison). When it is not broken up by the rubbery sound, it is just a scratchy sound which is also pretty unpleasant. All in all, I think the peice is pretty awful sounding.

After looking up some information on the peice, the sound of it is more justified (although it still does not help the fact that it is painful to listen to). The peice was released in 1979 by Milan Knizak. The piece "consists of Knizak's modified LPs being... cut them up and glued unrelated pieces together, pasted pieces of paper on them, scratched them, painted them -- anything to destroy the medium and subvert its original contents to create new sounds. The needle hops, skips, falls into the holes of this Swiss cheese of a record, and eventually self-destructs. As if all that wasn't enough, Knizak also tampers with the playback speed. Nothing is sacred: classical music, religious music, jazz, rock, or pop -- any recorded work is susceptible to be submitted to the torture chamber. The sound quality is often terrible -- and not only because of the mutilated artifacts. The technique used to record the record players must have been primitive. Then again, Knizak was not making nice, comfortable music, so its gritty, lo-fi quality fits the sound terrorist aesthetic perfectly."

I think calling the creation of the peice a music "torture chamber" perfectly describes the peice. I could not have said it any better myself. Now that I know what he was trying to acheive, I am not as baffled as I was before because originally, I thought he was trying to make something that he thought sounded good. To know that the music was purposely mutilated and meant to sound horrible to make a statement, it makes more sense. It still doesnt change my opinion, although now I am curious to see what the record looked like!

Information found here!

Bertrand Lavier Walt Disney Productions

Artist: Bertrand Lavier
Artwork: Walk Disney Productions

Background: "Over the past few decades, Lavier has focused on his Walt Disney Productions. Based on a 1947 cartoon in which a skeptical Mickey and an enthusiastic Minnie Mouse disagree about modern art, Lavier has produced a series of abstract paintings and Jean Arp-like sculptures using the curves and colors that characterize the original cartoon. In a move that suggests Disney originally appropriated the visual language of high art arabesques, he often exhibits photographs of the double-dated sculptures (eg 1947-1990) alongside the sculptures themselves. These works continue Lavier's interest in the play between art, the public perception of art, and reality. They also mark him as one of the most inventive and influential European artists of his generation."

**EDIT** The reason I was attracted to this work is because while I was reading the article, I saw "Walt Disney" and I thought "FINALLY something I can relate to!!" considering I am 21 years old and still watch the Disney Channel... so this quickly caught my eye. When I looked up the artwork I thought it was really interesting because I could see how the artist was inspired by Disney, in a bizarre way.

Links:
http://www.eyestorm.com/works/Bertrand_Lavier_10327.aspx
http://www.artmag.com/museums/a_suisse/mamco/lavier.html

Interesting Thing: Birth and Decay

Artist: julian konczak

"Birth and Decay invites the audience to explore a time-sliced anatomy of landscape as it cycles through the inevitable rhythm of change. The visual field is composed of a scaled representation of a piece of land broken down into constituent details � the vista is hidden but the proximity and exploded imagery gives us an intimate relationship with the environment.
A simple immediacy draws attention to the inevitability of life processes � the birth-life-decay-death cycle is an inevitable performance that drives the movement of time on this planet. We need to do very little with our conscious minds to perform this path: breath, eat, shed a little skin - or in this instance drag a mouse blindly and watch the world change. The imagery itself plays with the idea of repetition; the images offer 25 instances of the same subject, the eye decoding multiplicity and diversity."

Link: http://www.hidrazone.com/artists/julian_konczak/birth_and_decay/display_birth_and_decay.html