Sound Experiment

“When you’re beating a drum, you can hear when the boom comes the teeniest bit too late or the teeniest bit too early, because your whole attention is focused on the razor edge between silence and noise…

when you beat a drum you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you are breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and thunder.”

Ruth Ozeki in A Tale for the Time Bein

• For this project you will find and create sounds to use in a sound collage.
• They don’t have to be drum like but developed toward sound and time as an element for your work.
• You will use a digital audio recorder or your cell phone to gather these sounds and then create a sound collage
  • Make a list of topics (facts, idioms, myths, Adjectives, emotions, etc) you are interested in from personal sources, classes, the wider world.
  • List colors, rhythms, texture they remind you of. Use chance methods (like the card game) to extend those topics.

Finding Sounds: Carry the recorder or your cell phone ready to record sounds you come upon and explore the world around you.

• Try to think of sounds that could relate directly and obliquely to your topic.
• Capture sounds that have variation in tone, tempo, texture and rhythm.
• Be able to identify the shape of time in your piece when you are finished having a clear beginning, middle and end. (you don’t have to pre-plan this, but respond to the sounds you find.)

Building your Composition in Premier Pro

• Think of the sound as having a texture, a color, an emotion.
• You can use transitions, jump cuts, simple filters (don’t overdo this).
• You can use visual wave forms to cut the clips precisely.
• Consider contrasting rhythms: whole notes in bass, quarter notes in alto.