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Critical Reflection (Week 10)

Through my work and experimentation, I initially intended to investigate how space and perception can be manipulated through sound. I was interested in amplifying the underlying sounds which usually go unnoticed - flatline drones, air ventilation, bodily processes and movements. I have had this idea of creating a work that utilises a space which is occupied by numerous people, however, my experiments at the time were quite limited to an intimate scale which included one or two people.

On the day of project presentations it was helpful to set up a small demonstration with the soundscape playing and microphones on in a larger space such as the audiovisual suite. It allowed me the opportunity to observe how the work would operate with a larger group of people who are allowed to move around and interact. Since this set up was quite different to ones I have done in my apartment or bedroom, there were sounds occurring in which I have not heard of in the past from my experiments. This reinforced my intention for the work to take on a life of it’s own where it changes with its environment and autonomous creates events. When Michael cupped his hands over the microphones, even more interesting sounds were created by the alteration of the sound feedback. I would be interested in further exploring this interaction and how covering the microphone with different objects or materials may change the soundscape. During the demonstration, I suggested to some people that they were free to play with the equipment and experiment with talking directly into the microphone. One person started getting anxious and said that they did not like the sound of their own voice. This situation is a major contribution to the ideas of my work. I am attempting to harness and manipulate the mundane corporeal sounds of of audiences which they may be uncomfortable with or dismiss in their daily lives. I want to allow participants to recognise these sounds and their potential to affect change into the sonic environment.

In the discussion, there were suggestions of moving the work and placing it in different environments - public, private, opened, closed, etc. I would be interested in how this work will change sonically depending on the different variables of its environment. In addition, it would be interesting to examine people’s interaction with the work, especially when it is in an unexpected playful place. When hearing the sounds of their movements and bodies be replayed and echoed back at them, will they choose to be more quiet or be playful and make more noise?

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General findings

Intimate Space

Playful

Audiences were more engaged

Public Space

Fewer people cared to think twice about the sounds

More likely to find people who were agitated from the project

Performed

Did not effectively communicate the work’s experiential aims when I performed it myself

When using the street performer, people were likely to turn their heads and watch the singer because of the curious sounds.

This was also more effective because it was a change in the already present soundscape.

However, audience members are always the ‘performers’

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Degraves Street Subway - Experimentation

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Z4PHJ7V3M

This experiment offered a very different experience compared to my past project set ups. The project was opened up in the Degraves Street Subway, a public space and underpass which people use to walk to Flinders Street Station.

There also happened to be a street performer there at the time. I utilised him further exploration with my project as to whether or not a ‘performer’ in the work would have any different affects on the audience. It seemed more appropriate to have the busker be the performance rather than myself because he is not an introduced object but something that was already in the environment and is now being changed.

Several different observations could be made from this experiment. The first being the street performer and the people passing by. When I set up the project during of the performer’s song, their voice began to be replayed in a stutter manner due to this “artificial echo” I have produced. There was a moment where they became aware of this change and their voice’s potential to alter the soundscape. They progressively began to sing slightly louder to play with the echoes and feedback. The video also captures some people who noticed this strange soundscape and they took double takes to look back at both the performer.

What I found very interesting was for the fact that the sound work was not that engaged with by the public audience. Regardless of the few people who were curious about the sound source, many disregarded it and kept walking on their way. It was also fascinating to observe people’s voices and body movement sounds being picked up and echoes back at them, yet, they did not respond to it as I thought they would have. The reason behind this could be for the fact they they are preoccupied with a task and not paying as much attention to their surrounding environments or for the fact that it was the end of the working day and people wanted to get from points A to B as soon as possible without any distractions.

This project experiment demonstrated to me that the context in which the work is situated highly influences its reception. There was definitely levels curiosity within the audience but people did not take the time to further investigate it.

I questioned whether or not an explanation should have been set up for the work, however, I believed that that would have taken away from the project itself. Like a ‘sonic rupture,’ the work is meant to subtly intervene the every day and mundane. It is meant to be discovered by the audience’s own means and self-explanatory when discovered. This is then understandable when the work is dismissed, but it only makes it more meaningful when it is received.

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Degraves Street Subway

There was a suggestion made for me to set up my project in the Degraves Street Subway.

I wanted to further explore this project in a more “public” space. It would also be interesting to investigate a space in which people are constantly moving from A to B, without the intention to stop and examine an intervention.

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Kusum Normoyle

Link: https://vimeo.com/119204270

A heavy influence of the little scream performance I did is Kusum Normoyle’s work where she works with the voice, feedback and noise.

I was quite interested in her ability to transform the female voice into something harsh and aggressive with the use of ‘analog’ technology - the microphone and the amp.

Likewise, with the class performance, I was interested in playing with the voice, feedback and artificial echoes I was making.

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Project as active performance - does it work?

Link: https://vimeo.com/165742498

For another class I decided to do a little sound/performance work that involved screaming as well as a very similar Max MSP patch to the one I have been using for this project which echoes and stutters sound input.

The small work investigated ways in which I could affect change in the sound and feedback with aggressive screaming. This makes me think about whether or not I should experiment with this project as a ‘performance’ piece. The work in itself is already a performance project where the audience members are the performers, but what happens when I place myself on the pedestal and perform the project? What kind of alterations in behaviours can I catalyse if I walked around with the work and performed it by speaking into it or actively directing it at people?

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Further investigation - student spaces and courtyard

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-slsom8hyOk

For a further investigation, I set up my project and ‘performed’ it in more open spaces which more unknowing people occupied. I first set it up in a student lounge and it did not take long before people started to become disgruntled. Two different people gave mean looks while they were trying to talk on the phone. As annoying as I was for these people, it was interesting to investigate the fact that these sounds were being produced by themselves. Do they continue with what they were doing and create all these sounds that they find irritating or do they just stop everything they were doing?

One friend felt quite embarrassed and tried to not make as much noise as they could in order to avoid the amount of echoes and stutters produced. Another friend suggested we take the work outside into the courtyard. In that instance, the friend who avoided making any sounds then made as much noise as they could by whistling and speaking into the microphone. Regardless of the fact that we were only 3 metres outside of the student lounge and the people could still hear us, it was then this idea of ‘anonymity’ which allowed him to engage with the project as much as they could. He also said that he liked to annoy people and make them angry. This whole new layer of morality and body politics then came into play. With this project or tool, how far and loud can you push yourself to make others uncomfortable? How do the differences in spaces change the operation of this project?

During this experiment, there were also moments in which my bluetooth speaker was running low on battery and kept cutting off. These pauses and breaks stopped the project from running fluidly, and it was in these moments of stillness which I found humourous because my friends and I would be caught in these moments of awkwardness in the middle of playing with the work. This extended the ideas of body awareness whenever we were given those split seconds to realise how weird we were being with the work.

Eventually, one person decided to ask us to turn the work off.

The context and space in which the project is set up indeed has strong influences upon the reception from audience members.

#VART3508 #spatial practice