I wasn't sure where I wanted to go with this project, So I started taking audio recordings of my commute (I spend about 3 hours on the train a day). As I was taking recordings, I found an old recording I had of my mom talking to a psychic after my grandma passed away. The psychic's voice is captivating, and I couldn't stop listening. I had forgotten that my mom had used my phone to record this. Over break I was chatting with someone else who turned to a psychic after their brother had passed. I started to think of how I could create a recording that expresses that comfort that we look for for after loosing a loved one, in either a psychic or therapists, loved ones, religious spaces, etc. I wanted to build a lulling and soothing drone sound by the end of the recording. I used the recordings of the subway to create ambient sounds to help build up to that effect. I also can create multi phonics with my voice, so I used recordings of my voice slowed down at different rates to change the pitch and layered them to build up to the otherworldly sounds at the end of the recording.
My grandmother was a huge fan of hard candies, so I also recorded myself crinkling hard candy wrappers and layered that into the recording as well.
Lately I've been wondering why I have been making art about my grandparents recently. I was not very close to them and they were difficult people to get to know. I think in making art about them, I am learning more about them and getting to know them better even after they've passed.
(I have permission from both my mother and the psychic to use their voices and upload the recording to soundcloud).
You did such an amazing job with this piece! The lulling music and sounds in the background go so well with the psychic's voice, and it has a meditative but mysterious quality all at the same time. I also love the significance of the piece to you and how making art about your grandparents is becoming a reflective process for you. If you were to go further with this, I think it would be really interesting to see how you might translate this sound piece into a visual piece with different materials. Similar to how we worked with our city soundscape in Mary's class, you could listen to the piece while you work with materials to further explore your relationship with your grandparents.
ReplyDeleteEva,
ReplyDeleteI love this piece. It is so mesmerizing, and has an almost hypnotic effect as you're listening to it. I agree with Becca- it is indeed both meditative and mysterious. I got goose bumps listening to it! I think that the fact that you have been focusing on your grandparents through so many different mediums over the course of the past semester is really powerful, and something that you could definitely incorporate into your classroom. Encouraging students to explore the same theme in different ways allows for them to think of things differently, and articulate different aspects of the same idea.
This piece also evokes such a distinct mood, which I feel like could also be brought into the classroom. You could definitely ask students, especially older students, to create a sound piece that elicits a certain mood or feeling, and see where they take it!