Patrick Williams | kind of listened
listened
I assembled nearly 4 minutes of sound based on my previous work.
- Listen (3.5mb mp3)
The piece attempts to capture the vertical orientation of my collage. The sounds I included are intended to map to the curves and spaces within the collage and to represent objects falling through these spaces and striking the obstacles they present.
Process
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I recorded all of the sounds I used for the piece. I used the following recording devices:
- A model MZ-N707 Sony Mini Disc recorder
- A model ATR 35s Audio Technica lavalier microphone
Among the object I used to generate the sounds:
- The model I built
- My ceiling fan
- A bicycle bell
- Feedback generated from my microphone and headphones
- Wine glasses hanging from a rack
- A small metal tube
- An 18" metal ruler
- A Firewire Hard drive
I placed the mic inside and underneath my model. I thumped and picked different parts of my model, and ran the microphone across its surface. I wrapped the FI rewire drive and microphone in a towel and started up the drive and shut it down several time. When I placed the microphone next to my headphones, feedback was generated. I closed myself in the Laundry room and rang my wife's bicycle bell. I clanged classes together and placed the microphone against the motor on my ceiling fan.
I used a number of tools to record and alter these sounds, both during the recording process and once I imported them into my computer. Among them:
- A 1970s MXR Phaser guitar effect pedal
- A BOSS OC-2 Octave Doubling guitar effect pedal
- A BOSS DD-3 Digital Delay guitar effect pedal
An additional source of sound I recorded for this piece was my work, alone in my office and among others in the School of Information IT Lab. I noticed that the turntable on top of my desk picked up and amplified the incidental sounds I made while working: typing, moving my chair, and touching the desktop. I set my computer to record these sounds in the background and worked for a while, until I forgot that I was being recorded. I used a similar process recording in the IT Lab, it was interesting to compare the more isolated work sounds to the more social ones.