In-Progress Sound Report

    I had the fortune of meeting the musician Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) in middle school.  He specializes in improv, and I remember being inspired by his workshop.  Long story short, I stumbled across this video and realized he has a subconscious influence on my project, because he gave a similar speech to my youth orchestra:  http://www.pbs.org/wnet/musicinstinct/video/performance/the-many-sounds-of-the-violin/36/

    During in-progress critique, I loved the idea of adding a narrative to the violin "soundtrack."  I made a rough list of possible sounds/techniques: mosquitos, door creaking, cry, wind, traffic/motor, tuning, below bridge, harmonics, sliding sound (wood/string), laugh, percussive, tremelo, col legno, bell, medical, glissando, siren, bird, fingers on fingerboard, pizzicato, rain/thunder, radio/static, coffee maker, footsteps, voices (themes for different characters?)
    A possible (oddly specific) storyline that includes many of these sounds is a character walking home (outdoor noises-bird,traffic, etc) from school (a location with bells), somehow getting involved in a medical emergency, and ending up at the hospital (medical sounds).
    If I can't create/find visuals that make the story cohesive, another possibility is pull scenes from movies and replace the sounds, to avoid jarring changes in aesthetic and inconsistent characters.

Sound Project Update

My project isn't going as well as I would like. I have lots of sounds recorded on my phone and lots of matching videos on my camera. My biggest issue is that the sounds are not as good quality as I would like and also I'm not sure if I will have enough time to edit things how I would like. It was hard to record my family. Recording crazy drunks is a very hard task. I'm also try to make my concept easier to understand. It is merging the idea different idea. First it is that the sounds people hear everyday but never notice. This is why the blank screen will be up initially so the viewer got get there own understanding of the sound and then I will show them what was making the sound. It is showing each of the sound and how they sound on their own. And then with the split screens it will combine the sound into one complete sound, this is the next idea. Kind of like how the movie "Drumline" says "One band, one sound." It's made up of singular sounds that come and flow together into a whole.

Movie Response - Three Colors: Blue

The movie “Three Colors: Blue” was quite different than what I expected to be. During multiple points in the movie I thought I understood what was going to happen but then there would always be some kind of twist. Kind of like the movie Psycho, what you expected turned into something complexly different. With the movie being in a different language we were all forced to pay very close attention when reading the subtitles. I think this was good because it can be easy for us to fall asleep during a movie, even if it is a good movie. The concept of the movie is still a little unclear for me. I felt like there was no real ending to the movie. Every intense situation that happened in the movie was left for the viewer to make up his or her own conclusion about it. I think the strong sounds in the movie that happened after an intense situation worked very well. I also like the blank screens, but a few times I got confused and thought the blank screen meant that the movie was about to end. Overall I think the duration and intensity of the sounds can make of break your work. This was a great movie to help us understand how sound works in time-based media. For me personally I liked how the blank screens also gave you time to digest what you just saw. It gives you a minute for it all to just sink in.  I want to use this method within my project. Even though the movie was something that I did expect I really enjoyed it. It gets really boring when you can predict a whole movie and this movie did the opposite of that.

A Sound Proposal

  For Project 3, I am interested in experimenting by stripping soundscapes of their natural sounds as we recognize them, and replacing them with replicas I produce through my violin.  The visual elements can be anything from a door opening, rain, footsteps- perhaps even global scenes like Times Square or a rainforest.  After reading The Art of Noises and hearing the speaker's view of orchestral pieces as "boring," I interpreted the reading as a challenge to prove that traditional string instruments can make untraditional and unpredictable noises.  The old can be used in exciting, new ways.  I will be able to explore the tonal quality of the instrument, where even the violin's body can be used to re-imagine sounds and noises.  Using the violin as the only source of sound will create a riff off of reality, because the viewer will internalize the sound as soon as they recognize an image, but the sound isn't entirely predictable in that, for example, if glass breaks, it will be the violin's interpretation of the break, instead of the glass'.  The violin will mimic the sound as closely as possible, I do not want the violin to portray an opposite or irrelevant sound, there must be a connection between the image, expectation and the violin.  This way, I hope to create a different world and dynamic relationships between the eye and ear.