alice on strings: artist statement

alice on strings takes Disney's 1951 animated classic Alice and Wonderland, and replaces its sound with the sound of a sole violin. Every thud, firework, tea kettle, and lyrical passage originate from my violin. The visuals and sound work together to produce a "version" of reality that is similar to the realm we experience, but with an unexpected twist of fantasy.  While Alice is a believable child character, the animals sing, she grows and shrinks based on what she consumes, and the landscapes become "curioser and curioser.”  The sound shares a similar function, because the viewer will identify with the sounds in the scenes, only to discover the multitude of sounds came from a single source. Alice in Wonderland is a highly imaginative literary and artistic work, so it seemed the appropriate visual backdrop for a sound experiment, where I don’t try to trick or suspend the viewer, but recreate Alice’s original soundtrack.  The visual landscapes and auditory soundscapes are fantastical, allowing the viewer to question whether this dimension is tangible with one’s reality, and more specifically, the validity and believability of sounds’ sources.  Since the violin is being used in a non-traditional way to imitate everyday sounds, the goal is to surprise the viewer that thinks a firecracker is the only thing that can make a firecracker sound, or a clock’s gears are the only things that cause it to tick.  Some of the sounds in alice on strings are realistic imitations while others are abstracted, such as the bird call, due to the medium and my ability (or inability) to produce an accurate sound.  This mix of narrative versus lyrical representation of sound showcases the tonal and textural range of the violin, and adding interest to the work.  I found my video not only mimicked recognizable sounds, but also the history of music.  In the beginning, the breeze is a calming harmonic chord, which represents music’s earliest interest in creating melody and a transcendent experience using sounds unlike those heard in everyday settings.  As the video progressed, the length of the sound files got progressively shorter.  Arguably, towards the end, the video sounds emptier.  However, the middle and ending were the hardest and most time consuming to create because the video clips required sounds that were more percussive, more relatable to our everyday lives.  This represents modern and contemporary music, which often sounds odd because it is breaking away from “pretty” and “sensible” to create something different for a new generation.  For the latter portion of the video, though it sounds emptier, I had up to five or six layers of sound accompanying the action.