#skiessoundsoft

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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 (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.