Anna John adad1002

WEEK 10 Studio Exercise - Static, Noise, Interference, Glitch

The ‘whiteboard artwork’ was created as a result of a class experiment where the whiteboard was dragged across several markers held out, unmoving, by students. The artwork is now interfering with the class sides Anna is trying to present.

https://studio-dwyer.tumblr.com/post/178276509932/assessment-2-final-work-purple

https://studio-dwyer.tumblr.com/post/178276508972/assessment-2-final-work-boilersuit-note-i-have

And statement here:

FINAL WORK

The video is split into 2 halves. The first half is quite fast and silly; the main character, along with most of society, is obsessed with “rebelling”, although what they are rebelling against seems unclear even to the people themselves. I tried to convey this through the lack of emotion in the facial expressions, and the timing of the animation (pauses in motion representing hesitation etc). The rebellious acts also seem quite silly, the key example being the main character eating the breakfast food raw, causing them to throw up every morning.

The second half begins when the main character receives a gift from a stranger: Anti-Rebellion Headphones. With the constant oversaturation of rebellious messages shut out, the main character’s life becomes calm and pleasant. They even go to work! The Anti-Rebellion Headphones are a play on the true meaning and value of rebellion, and connects back to the core idea of my earlier work, the idea of individual struggle and rebellion. Although they are labelled “anti-rebellion”, what the headphones really do is spark an individual rebellion and gives the person the opportunity to look at their life and decide for themselves what they want to change. In this case, it is represented through the quality of life improvement and increased happiness.

The sounds and music were mostly done by me. I used the alarm beeping and the glass breaking sound from: [alarm] https://freesound.org/people/zanox/sounds/233645/ [glass] https://freesound.org/people/RoganDerrick/sounds/260434/

Assessment 2 Final Work + Concept Statement

My final work is based on the constructed binary of Sound versus Music (which is slightly altered from my last assessments focus which was Sound versus Silence. Through the process of creating this work, I wanted to explore whether ‘random’, ‘everyday’ sounds are inherently musical or not and also to find the delineation between sound and song. I did this through recording a multitude of everyday sounds, manipulating them in different ways (explored below) and remixing them together to create a track of music. Alongside this, I videoed myself creating and recording the sounds and created a video collage as a kind of music video to examine this idea more.

The manipulation of the recorded samples was an interesting and learning process as I have not really done a lot of it before (In my sound works, I mainly work with MIDI rather than audio samples). It involved first taking the recorded stems out of Cubase, into Ableton Live, then cutting it to the point in each sample I was going to use. I then laid these out in a row (kind of like a sound bank) so I could figure out which sounds to use where and have them quickly accessible, visible and playable. 

(The recording setup)

(Recorded Stems in Cubase) 

(Samples laid out in Ableton Live)

Next, I started off with the squeaky sound - which was me rubbing a vinyl case against the table - as I pretty much already heard a rhythm out of the sound. After this, I warped the transients of the sample (the high amplitude, short-duration sounds at the beginning of a waveform) to get it in time and launched the rest of the song off that. 

(Warping the waveforms of the vinyl squeak)

I altered each sample differently. For the more percussion based sounds (this ended up being the majority of the samples) I put filters on them and increased the resonance of a certain frequency within them. For example, for the sample which involved me flicking a tin was put into a drum rack and turned it into both a hi-hat and snare by using different filters and transposing two of the same sample in different ways. 

(Drum rack and both a Midi arrangement and audio sample in Ableton Live)

For the more melodic-sounding samples, I pulled a singular hit from the recorded rhythm and pulled that sample into a sampler. What a sampler allows me to do is basically record midi data and play the sample in different keys and lengths, depending on what values I enter. However, within this process, I am still editing the frequencies and envelope as well; it just adds an extra element to the mix.

(The advanced sampler in Ableton Live with changes to frequency, resonance, and envelope along with the Midi Arrangement for the melodic lid drop)

The video element was a little bit tricky as I am not as versed in video editing as I am in sound editing. The process for each individual video was: first finding the corresponding sample in Ableton Live, finding which part of the sample I used, and then cutting the video down to a little bit before the hit (So you can see me create the sound/impact in the video rather than just the impact itself) and a little bit after. I then marked out where in the video the sound was created and then pressed the ‘m’ key in time with that particular sample to create markers to mark out where it would go within the timeline. In addition to this, for some clips I lined up the audio that was captured on my camera (as the audio I used in the music track was captured by a different mic), to the audio from my track to make the process a little bit easier. After this, I cropped at positioned all the recordings to create the collage. 

(Markers and edits in Adobe Premiere Pro)

This process took a lot longer than I first anticipated purely due to the number of layers I ended up using. Even after finishing this task, I didn’t end up getting to include every recording I used in the video element as I just ran out of space and by the end of the video it was already a bit too cluttered.

(Editing in the DB07 Video Suite)

So after going through the process of researching what defines a sound and what defines music as well as creating a piece of music and video from said sounds, I have come to the conclusion that an everyday sound is not usually inherently musical. However, by changing the context of these noises and combining them in a rhythmic and melodic way, they can easily be considered music.

References

“3.1.3 Music vs. Noise - Digital Sound & Music”. in , , 2014, <http://digitalsoundandmusic.com/3-1-3-music-vs-noise/> [accessed 15 September 2018].

“ANDREW HUANG”. in , <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdcemy56JtVTrsFIOoqvV8g> [accessed 14 September 2018].

Anna, P, Silence in the forest. in , , 2017, <https://freesound.org/people/13F_Panska_Petruzelova_Anna/sounds/379210/> [accessed 8 September 2018].

Ball, P, “Why dissonant music strikes the wrong chord in the brain.”. in nature, , 2012, <https://www.nature.com/news/why-dissonant-music-strikes-the-wrong-chord-in-the-brain-1.11791> [accessed 15 September 2018].

“Consonance and Dissonance”. in , <http://www.avatar.com.au/courses/PPofM/consonance/con1.html> [accessed 16 September 2018].

Darman, N, “Noise vs. Music: It’s All in the Physics! | Fiat Physica Blog.”. in Fiatphysica, , 2015, <https://www.fiatphysica.com/blog/everyday-physics/physics-of-music-vs-noise/> [accessed 14 September 2018].

Elert, G, “Music & Noise – The Physics Hypertextbook.”. in Physics.info, <https://physics.info/music/> [accessed 16 September 2018].

M., E, “Difference Between Noise and Music | Difference Between.”. in Differencebetween.net, , 2011, <http://www.differencebetween.net/science/nature/difference-between-noise-and-music/> [accessed 15 September 2018].

Metcalfe-Davies, S, “The Reality and Truth of Existence – by Stephen Metcalfe-Davies | The Magic Happens (TMH).”. in Themagichappensnow.com, , 2016, <http://themagichappensnow.com/the-reality-and-truth-of-existence/> [accessed 16 September 2018].

“Sound and Music : Overview : How Music Works”. in , <http://www.howmusicworks.org/100/Sound-and-Music> [accessed 13 September 2018].

Stanford, N, “Cymatics.”. in Nigelstanford.com, , 2014, <http://nigelstanford.com/Cymatics/Behind_the_Scenes.aspx> [accessed 16 September 2018].

Stanford, N, Cymatics: Chladni Plate - Sound, Vibration and Sand. in , , 2014, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFAcYruShow> [accessed 16 September 2018].

In pairs - discuss your research so far and what it is you are taking from assessment 1 to assessment 2.

1. Assess your project from a variety of different time scales and design an experiment to test a different temporality… turning an image we understand as historical and of a still, painting practice into a moving image

OR

2. Re-stage/re-enact a creative work that you have researched for your assessment. Document the piece in its new temporal and spatial context. What has changed? What has stayed the same?

We chose to look at the activity concerning ‘temporality’. ‘Temporality’ is defined as “the state of existing within or having some relationship with time.” - https://www.google.com.au/search?q=temporality+definition&oq=temporality+&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l5.3852j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

statement can be found here:

Restaging Marina Abramovic’s- a minute of silence

In my series of experiments, I want to explore binary through the 3 notions of to have and not to have/to access and not to access. In this first experiment, I’ll be focusing on the notion of to have and not to have. In order to start experimenting, I have to firstly understand the meaning of to have and not to have. Due to the society’s inequality and heavily classified society, there are many things, values or thoughts that people can and cannot have. It can be rights that people can or cannot have, it can be wealth that people can or cannot have, It can be thoughts that people can or cannot have, it can also be resources that people can or cannot have. But more eventually, it is the happiness that people cannot have due to this phenomenon. Those who tend to ‘have’ are more happier that those who cannot and doesn't ‘have’, therefore my experiment is to target this issue, and conduct a work that provoke a sense of thinking and respond from the audience. 

Therefore, the action I’ve taken to convey the idea of to have and not to have, is through the usage of photography. I’ve transform the idea of ‘having’ by symbolizing it with an object, and that object is lock. The reason why I chose lock as the symbol to manifest the idea is because there are two things with a lock. One is the key, and one is the lock itself. Once the lock is being locked onto certain object, then it requires the key in order to unlock and have the object. Therefore, I think it represents the idea of to have and not to have. Where not to have refers to it is being locked, and to have means it is being opened. I’ve then incorporate this idea on things that I think are relevant to this binary. Taken photos on objects like water faucet, car key and doors. Each represents one different idea, where the faucet represents resources that people can or cannot have. The car means materialistic things in our life, like car, houses, money etc. Lastly the door means freedom, the choice of being free or not being free. 

This week in class we looked at value. As part of an exercise we had to create something in 15mins worth $5, and I made a waterproof wax dollar by melting a candle I found into a dollar sign.

This gave me a cool idea to do with one of my concepts, with a solution to underwater housing. In this way, what we value is held safely underwater even though we would not normally put things we value in this situation.

Also, I got 11 monies which I thought was pretty good.

WEEK 7 Experiment 

3 How does collaboration create communities in art and design? What challenges do collaborative approaches face and what are some of the solutions?