opening to skin/sometimes sing/skies sound soft

a blog for noise, affect, archive: a podcastig workshop eng180c mills college spring 2016

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Final Project for Noise Affect Archive. 

Listen Here: Unearth synthesia---hear color as noise. 

This project takes the alphabet and numbers, of which I have synthesia to, and assigns a noise to every letter or number, and it’s corresponding color. I am trying to capture the essence of both the shape, sound, and color of the letter I see. The code works on different levels, the noise makes sense in terms of the letter, but more importantly the noise makes sense in terms of the color. This project is about transformation, and it is also about the reverse process of removing meaning from a poem I had previously written. The noisescape sounds long, monotonous, and almost absurd in the context of a poem about depression, anxiety, helplessness, loneliness, and desperation.

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reading listening notes (9) 4/15

1. Soundcloud,. "STARRY NIGHT". STARRY NIGHT. N.p., 2016. Web. 15 Apr. 2016.

2. Mismar. PDF. 

“Kerbaj’s gesture fails as an interception, but only as a means of practically stopping the attack. It succeeds in offering a glimpse into the ongoing effort to deal with, overcome, and reconstruct the terms of what it means to be a political subject navigating the context of war. The work’s failure is purposeful in that it suspends instrumental politics and forges a new political relationship to the situation. To say it is paradoxical is to open up the customary spaces where we traditionally fathom politics into a space of thinkability and transformation of the subject, of ourselves. Instead of escaping from an inevitable polarity that fixes the possibilities of aesthetics and politics, paradox starts within this polarity and creates a space beyond it” (8). 

3. the last bomb didn’t sound like a bomb. like by the third time i had already become desensitized to the sound. i want to tell the truth, so, when there were pauses in the bombings and Kerbaj was playing my mind wandered and i thought about the mundane things in my life that make me anxious: cleaning up, what i’m going to bring with me tomorrow. my wandering mind is the whole point for me—not having anything to do with the “effectiveness” of the piece, i think that in the moments when i wanted to escape being present is when the piece is most “effective.” Mismar writes of a moment like this, “Between 0:55 and 1:09, a buzzing sound heightens as it leads up to the first bombing. Was that Kerbaj’s trumpet or the Israeli aircraft? Such ambiguity makes us realize that as much as Kerbaj intercepts and works against the soundscape, he also works with and within it” (9).  i didn’t want to be there in the anticipation of more, and that is the point for me. reshaping how i conceive of art is always important, even if it’s something i feel i already know, there’s so much about “effectiveness” and “impact” placed upon art in a society where people/labor is only useful if it can produce: “The second suggests that poetics can achieve a sense of power only in terms of how that power serves the needs of the political order, embracing means- end logic and relegating the poetic gesture to a didactic act” (7 Mismar). what does this produce for me? if i cannot stop the wars the bombs the deaths made forcibly political then Kerbaj places me in the same frame that he is constantly in, and i “experienced” [it/the bombings/the fear?]. i want to be really careful about saying how much this piece moved me/changed me, i do not want to take space that is not my own, that is miles and oceans and continents away from my bedroom where i sit under the covers. i really appreciated Mismar’s writing for this reason it engages without necessarily holding Starry Night for too long, he picks it up and places it back down where he found it: “The fact that it is beautiful does not mean it must succumb to the aesthetic pole in the aesthetics/politics binary” (13). it is beautiful as it fails as an interception. when this is over i will turn my music back on and take a shower. 

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reading listening notes (8) 4/10

This American Life,. "Same Bed, Different Dreams". This American Life. N.p., 2016. Web. 10 Apr. 2016. “Shin always spoke of North Korea as the place he associated film freedom with and creative freedom with, because he could ask for anything and get it. In one episode, he asked for a model train to blow up for a scene, and he was given a real train packed with explosives on rails to blow up if he wanted to. And if he asked for a wind machine, he was sent helicopters. And if he wanted fake snow, everybody was flown to a mountain.”

Bergeron, Elena. "Watching Beyoncé From New Orleans". NPR.org. N.p., 2016. Web. 10 Apr. 2016. “Beyoncé synthesizes visual cues and themes from all over the place (and history) to create for a medium that has to both promote and embody her music.”

Even though my project isn’t a narrative story, I really enjoy narrative stories, and it encourages my growth as a writer, even if I am not primarily doing that for this class. I listened to a This American Life, this time called, “Same Bed, Different Dreams.” The first act was produced by Nancy Updike and was very surreal to me. It’s the story of a film star, a South Korean actress, named Choi Eun-Hee, who was kidnapped by Kim Jong-il. He was a huge fan of her movies, and he had her live in a guarded villa for five years. Kim Jong-il brings her out for these dinner parties, and then she is at one, and she sees her ex-husband Shin Sang-Ok, who had directed or produced almost all of her films. Shin had been kidnapped as well, however he had tried to escape a couple of times so he had been put in a prison camp for two or so years. Kim Jong-il wanted them to be back together as a couple, and basically kidnapped them both to do so. So Kim Jong-il arranges for them to live in a different villa together, and it’s here that they make a short term plan to record Kim Jong-il, with a tape recorder in hopes of catching him admit that he kidnapped them. This is somewhat effective, he says something like he brought over Shin to entice Choi, which is a joke and they all laugh. Their long term plan is to escape, which they do in 1968, in Vienna, when they are left alone, they are able to get in a cab and go to the American embassy where they explain everything. What I found crazy about this story, other than the obvious, is when they’re describing the films that they made, and the reaction in North Korea: “So the first film Shin and Choi shot had sequences that they shot in Eastern Europe, standing in for the Hague. And they showed Kim Jong-il the film. He said, this is fantastic. It's like a European film. It's the best thing we've ever made, allowed them to start showing it. And it never crossed his mind that they had done exactly what he'd forbidden his own filmmakers to do forever for a reason. They'd been forbidden to show the world outside North Korea. … All they could talk about was the first 10, 15 minutes shot on the streets of Prague where, OK, wait, the buildings look amazing. People are walking into businesses. They're all dressed differently. There's cars. What? That's what really had an impact, because up until then they had been told, you are the luckiest people in the world. The Worker's Paradise is the only place in the world where people have peace and freedom. … There would have been people in their late 30s who'd never seen anything of the outside world that hadn't been filtered.”

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reading listening notes (7) 4/1

1. King, Emily. "Scripting Podcasts: Three Tips For Writing Podcast Episodes". Radix. N.p., 2014. Web. 31 Mar. 2016. “I’ve previously asked him about how he puts together his episodes, and he told me that he spends a few hours carefully writing a script of what he is going to say, and finds that he uses approximately 3000 words per script for each 30 minute episode. This length also takes into account the speed at which he speaks and allows for necessary pauses.”

This American Life,. "583: It'll Make Sense When You're Older". This American Life. N.p., 2016. Web. 31 Mar. 2016. “You have three different elevations that you have to get together to get the information.”

Snap Judgment,. "426: Gratitude 2013 Special". Snap Judgement. N.p., 2013. Web. 31 Mar. 2016. “We’re still full but we just said this is for the guys inside.”

2. Do you think it’s important for listeners to be familiar with your voice? How would you make your voice more omnipotent/heard? Would you ever consider changing your voice to make it more ubiquitous?  

3. This article was helpful to read, to further conceptualize how someone would put together a podcast episode. One really obvious thing that slipped my mind was that you would have to add in breaks for your audience to think about what was happening. I also liked the part where they explained that it makes sense to write a script out big with lots of spacing and also that it makes sense to write out hard to pronounce words. Although I’m not putting together a script for my final project I’d most likely choose to script out the entire episode, I think if I didn’t plan out every word that I wanted to say I’d likely spend a lot of time trying to choose the right word and kind of trail off. It would make sense if I was a professional and working for many years in the business that I’d only write most of the outline to the script, and then ad-lib the rest. If I was doing my final project to be an interview or even just a narrative kind of piece then I would have to try it both ways. Maybe it sounds stiff and scripted if you do write it all out, but maybe I’d just fumble around if I ad-libbed, I don’t know. I’d make sure to plan ahead and have time to try both of them two different ways. I listened to a podcast by Snap-Judgement about Gratitude. Th e podcast was structured the way most narrative structures are, three different acts, where different people reveal their stories. It made me wonder how people are chosen for their stories, and if they are given scripts of their stories, or instructed to write scripts of their stories. Although I’m sure for these people they’re important stories, so they’ve been told a lot and rehearsed and edited, and then edited more in the process. I also listened to a story by NPR’s This American Life, which was edited in the same way an overall theme and then three acts. There’s a host or an overall narrator, but this person doesn’t really speak during the acts when the person is telling the story. The narrator instead works to weave and structure the stories together. I think it may seem small, but I listen to This American Life on a regular basis because I think that I have gotten used to Ira Glass’s voice and I have grown to find it comforting. This seems small, but it makes sense why podcasts have a hard time getting off of the ground, unknown voices disconnected from faces, can be unfamiliar and disorienting.

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reading listening notes (6) 3/4

1. This American Life. “Tribes: Rest by Andrea Seigel.” Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, Mar. 31, 2013. Web. 4 Mar. 2016. “Her voice sounds like she always has a hard candy in her mouth, but she doesn’t.”

2. Leigh, Emma. “Mediate Sexuality in ASMR Videos.” Sounding Out! Dec. 14, 2015. Web. 4 Mar. 2016. 

“ASMR is triggered not only by sound, but also by touch, and many ASMRtists strive to create perfect illusions of tactile sensation through the expert manipulation of visual and aural components.”

3. I really like ASMR videos, and I feel like they’re totally ruining my ability to naturally come across ASMR in real life, I wonder what other people who experience this have to say.

4. This was totally the ASMR article I was waiting for, in some senses. I think it’s important to talk about reframing sexuality to be about pleasure, and of a much wider scope. At the same time I struggle with ASMR being inherently sexual, as Leigh argues, because I think that I do not seek ASMR for sexual pleasure, I seek it for ASMR pleasure and I still feel like I want to draw a distinction between the two, if only because they are different sensations for me. I also feel like ASMR because of it’s personal contact has a lot to do with taking care or nurturing and I would also place that as (possibly) different from sexual experiences. The things that I feel like I want to read about in regards to ASMR is having to do with politics of identity and politics of the body, and a larger discussion about what it means to make money off of providing ASMR experiences. The majority of ASMR content creators who are very successful and make large amounts of money off of making these videos are blonde, white, female, feminine, with big titties too. What does it mean that people find pleasure, calmness, comfort, nurturing, and develop some kind of relationship with people who look like barbie? Within the context of Leigh’s article, what I’m going to suggest is kind of sick, but ASMR is more like a parent-child relationship to me than a sexual/intimate partner relationship.

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proposals for final project

1. Create a noisesound installation. This idea is to create some kind of “exhibit” where people could enter a room and people could interact with different objects that have been manipulated to make sounds. Like a telephone would purr or you’d open up a water bottle and it would start making the sound a typewriter does. I like this idea, and I feel it necessary to point out all of the way that this idea becomes difficult. I don’t know how to manipulate the sound of objects, I don’t have a space readily available to me, and I don’t have a lot of free time to do/find these things. There can be another approach to this idea which is that people would enter into a room alone and then a soundscape would begin to play. I think that for this idea I would have to find a space and then spend a lot of time in that space trying to create a soundscape that felt like that room. The latter approach is maybe easier, and I feel very nervous about the idea of creating sounds from scratch, because I do not know “how” to do that, and I fear I will just end up being derivative.

2. Use my synthesisia to inform the creation of a song/poem.   The idea is basically to create a code that assigns every letter and alphabetical character to some kind of sound, and then to use those sounds to “type out(?)” a poem (or series of poems) that I’ve already written. So this project is about transformation, and it’s about trying to create meaning through a set of auditory codes. I really actually like this project, however I think that I may have a hard time making the sounds to a satisfaction, and then I could foresee the sounds that I make being very different and therefore the poem would sound “weird” or “ugly,” which would bother me. On the other hand if the noises were close to each other to try and avoid this problem, there probably wouldn’t be much distinction and it would sound muddy. I think this appeals to me as a project, because if I can get the sounds right, then I can translate many poems, and this could become a long term project.  

3. Make an asmr soundscape. So I “have” asmr, or whatever. I like asmr, and I also think that since the creation of asmr videos, my asmr has drastically decreased, because once you start experiencing asmr a lot you become numb to it. I think that this is an okay idea, I think that this idea appeals to me because within the idea there’s some guidance. And I like that this idea is about trusting myself to know what “sounds good.” I think the obvious drawback of this idea is that asmr is mostly functional as a video, because it’s the combination of noise/sight/touch that triggers people. It would probably be difficult to trigger people just through sounds, and I feel like because the length of asmr videos are between 20-40 minutes it would be hard to sustain a sound-only situation for that long. On the other hand this poses the least amount of pressure to me, and feels like a pretty achievable project.

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reading listening notes (5) 2/26

1. Black Girls Talking. “Imposter Syndrome.” Online audio. February 17 2016. Soundcloud. “There’s a false idea that there’s a certain amount of room to do a certain thing.” 2. This is a really good episode of Black Girl’s Talking, they have really grown in the short amount of time that they have been podcasting and this episode demonstrates that. This episode in particular was great, it starts off with recaps of pop-culture and then moves into the topic of imposter Syndrome. They discuss Imposter Syndrome mainly within the context of work, specifically creative work. Black Girl’s Talking is always so much fun to listen to, it’s one of the few things that I know will make me happy. 3. I think the main reason that I really like listening to Black Girl’s Talking is because I always know what they’re talking about. It’s a different feeling than listening to NPR or an academic or scholarly podcast because when they were talking about Katie Weeber’s Justin Beiber interview I immediately knew who the writer was when they referenced an article where Weeber sat in a Guy Fierre restaurant to try all his unlimited appetizers in some kind of a bet. I am trying to describe that I feel some kind of closeness to these girls and that it is known to me though cultural capital/knowledge. In this episode they briefly touch on the Formation video, mostly to explain that the SNL sketch that seemed like it was going to be problem-making was actually one of the better things that SNL has put out in awhile. When they started talking about Imposter Syndrome of course one of the concepts that came up was deserving, which I was really happy about because the concept of deserving is such a weird thing to me. i liked that they pointed out that white people generally do think that they deserve to have the world go there way, so that when it does, everything seems right. At the end they started talking about the internet and how much they hated being on the internet, a very relatable topic, and then it shifted into this idea that they didn’t want to just repeat what other people thought, in their own words, and I agree. I wish I did less of that in this blog.

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reading listening notes (4) 2/18

1. Shraya, Vivek. "We Want the Airwaves - Vivek Shraya." Interview by Nia King. Audio blog post. Nia King. Tumblr, 28 June 2015. Web. 18 Feb. 2016. 2. How do you cope with the emotional trauma of doing social activism on a daily/professional basis? Do you feel that because your social activism is making art that this is different from other kinds of social activism? Was there an option for you to not do this work? There are so many different queer POC people who do/are interesting things/people, how do you choose your interview subjects? 3. The interview with Vivek Shraya was incredibly fascinating and informative to me, there were a lot of really important points made that I really related to as a queer artist. One of the first things that they talked about was how POC queer artists are very rarely well documented, which I thought was a crucial idea, as some traditions do not include written history, rather oral histories that are passed down generationally. What does it mean to attempt to write a history while also considering who has access to the internet, where the history is stored? (About 40% of the global world). It also made me think about how insular queer artist communities can be, and what it feels like it results for me is that I feel very removed from knowing about/being connected to my own peers. The rest of the interview shifts in topic to largely discuss the issue of success, which is something that most people struggle with in late capitalism globalization, especially artists. The conversation reminded me of the belief that many people hold today, which is that artists should give out their work for free. Art is one of the most undervalued commodities, and POC queer artist’s work is valued even less than that of white males. At the end of the interview Vivek is thinking about Toni Amos and Sheryl Crow, who were both successful at age 35, after having worked at their careers for ten years, and muses that she did not even consider that brown success would be much different than white success. For me this interview was also practically applicable because it discussed in depth the differences between self-publishing and working through a publishing house.

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reading listening notes (3) 2/12

1. Cvetkovich, Ann. “Introduction.” An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke U.P.: Durham, 2008. Print. “This book implicitly juxaposes cultural production and therapy, not in order to dismiss the latter but in order to expand the category of the therapeutic beyond the confines of the narrowly medicalized or privatized encounter between clinical professional and client” (10). 2. Jones, Josh. “See the Curious Score for John Cage’s ‘Silent’ Zen Composition 4’33”.” Open Culture: The Best cultural & educational media on the web. Open Culture, 2 Oct. 2013. Web. 12 Feb 2016. “In the interview below, for example, Cage does make an important distinction between ‘music’ and ‘sound.’ He favors the latter for its chance, impersonal qualities, but also, importantly, because it is neither analytical nor emotional.” 3. Is space noisesound? 4. While there were parts of Cvetkovich’s “Introduction,” that I found useful, I think that any conversation about trauma that doesn’t center colonization and racism is shortcoming. I also want to push back against the hegemonic representation of femmes as those who want to get fucked, and butches as unable to be emotionally vulnerable—and furthermore these two identities as a binary against themselves (12). I found the Cage piece to be interesting, and I think my final analysis of 4’33” is that Cage is creating space, which prompted my question is space noisesound? What I want to know, as well, is how Cage would’ve performed this piece, as I found the way William Marx performed the piece to be slightly embellished, specifically the way he flicked his wrist when he turned the timer on and off. I think the more casual that one performs this piece the easier the message is to be, and I found myself distracted by his coat tails. After seven or so minutes of silence, when the performance was done I was struck by how loud the audience sounded when applauding and the immediate disjoint between the two. Did Cage consider the audience, as well, to become part of the piece and bring in the only noisesound that we hear?

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reading listening notes (2) 2/5

1. Moten, Fred. “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream.” In the break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. U.P. Minnesota: Minneapolis, 2003. Print. “She allows us to ask: what have objectification and humanization, both of which we can think in relation to certain notions of subjection, to do with the essential historicity, the quintessential modernity, of black performance?” (2).

2. PRI Public Radio International. “Ira Glass on Storytelling, parts 1- 4.” Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, Aug. 18, 2009. Web. 5 Feb. 2016. 

“All of us who get into creative work, we get into it because we have good taste… And your taste is still good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of disappointing to you.”

3. This video podcast is a four part interview with Ira Glass, where he answers questions on storytelling, persistence, and the question of taste. Glass gives some insider tips, like while a great anecdote is a good hook if you don’t have the content to follow it’s useless, and that the largest amount of time any story producer will spend will be on finding many good stories and then discarding a third to a half of them. In this interview he is honest, humble, and although slightly jarring, it is nice to put a face to the ever-famous voice.

4. What really resonated with me this week was Ira Glass talking about the gap, which he articulates in terms of the work that creative people produce. I think that another way to articulate the gap, is to say that it is the space in between where our lives would be under the most ideal circumstances, and wherever we are now in our lives. I have never made auditory work, and I am now old enough to have a monumental amount of fear, that is at times paralyzing, about doing new things. I think of an idea a poetry/visual artist has shared with me, which is that the more a writer or artist comes into their own, they develop their own forms and patterns, until it becomes a rigid structure that they inhabit. For Glass this would, perhaps, be the moment where taste is realized. However, the point the professor made was that when the artist or writer works so rigorously within this structure they inevitably will break it, and that moment is a moment of true beauty. I go back to the idea of failure, once an artist has found their own structure, and have in some cases, risen to fame for it, there comes a point in that person’s life when their earlier failures are lauded as success of the artist trying out different techniques in the earlier years, before they fell into a defined structure. Play is an essential to this stage of failure and experimentation. In my fear, I have written on a post-it in my bathroom mirror, “failure means, ‘not that, I choose otherwise,’” a thought I find extremely comforting now, when the fear of presenting work to the class, instructors, and Nia King looms above me.  

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the noise of water boiling in a tea kettle 

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the sound when water hits ice and there is a cracking sound

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reading listening notes (1) 12/30

1. Serres, Michel. “Genesis.” Noise and Silence. 1982. Print. “[Talking of the seaside] That placid of vehement uproar seems established there for all eternity… Space is assailed, as a whole, by the murmur; we are utterly taken over by this same murmuring… The silence of the sea is mere appearance” (93).

2. Generation Anthropocene. “The Soundtracker.” Online audio. October 2015. Soundcloud. “Not once do we find in the fossil records of ear-lids.”

3. The podcast, “The Soundtracker,” brings up that there is no place in the world unaffected by sound pollution, how can we further understand the longterm effects of the pollution of advertisements?  

4. I am struggling now, with the difference between listening (hearing/comprehension) and reading (visual/comprehension/hearing). At the end of the podcast, “The Soundtracker,” Gordon Hempton is explaining the phenomenon of understanding and he says, “when I listen to this [sound that I love] I disappear.” Which immediately resonated with me, though, perhaps not with listening, rather with reading. When I am reading something and the verisimilitude of the sentence/phrase/page overtakes me I am no longer there, it is the closest I am to being egoless. I think this feeling is true divinity, the moment of comprehension. When I read, I hear the words speak themselves in my head. When I am listening sometimes I see the words, which is particularly delightful as I have synthesisia. The moment Hempton is speaking of is neither of these things it’s the moment of cognition which is all together outside of space-time. In “Gensis” Michel Serres writes about the noise of the sea, “stable, unstable cascades are endlessly trading. Space is assailed, as a whole,” (93) articulating what Hempton might refer to as “the poetics of space.” Serres is able to capture the sound of the sea by describing its movement, and I wonder if without replications are we left to resort to using the other senses to describe this sense? Because my senses are tied to each other I complicate this even further. The way that we translate meaning to each other through language is familiar to me, though the way that we translate meaning to each other through sound is incredibly unfamiliar. I cannot think of how to translate a non-sound thing that is beautiful to me into sound. This question, practice, doing will be what tethers me this semester.