Blog Post Expansion 1- Blog Post #3

I wanted to take my analysis on Whose Line is it Anyway? skit, using Shipka's theories, and apply it to my own work. Without further ado, here is my audio project from before (if you don't wanna find it again):

1. What is the piece trying to accomplish?

This piece represents someone (myself) trying to organize her thoughts through meditation but ultimately failing against all of the noises. This serves to demonstrate the immense clutter we let our minds take in without consciousness, and how easily we let our minds gets distracted.

2. What specific choices were made to service this goal?

To represent the random sounds that appear inside consciousness, I decided to add little jingles and random sound bytes that would play behind my inner voice. This served to tell the listener what are inside thoughts or outside sounds.

To represent sounds, I kept the layout of the room in mind in an effort to center the listener (as if they're in my mind). Therefore, all distracting sounds of friends laughing or playing games were all positioned in the right ear (since that scene is right to my room).

In order to truly represent the ever-distracting stream of consciousness, I overlapped plenty of sounds to express the chaos of the mind. In order to effectively elicit this to the listener, though, I also added plenty of moments of brief silence in order to contrast it. This is representative of our minds- as if not focusing can get us brief moments of peace, but they are almost always short-lived (as mine would get distracted by either myself or friends playing Dance Dance Revolution.

3. Why did they pursue this plan instead of others?

I mentioned this in an earlier post, but my first idea was simply too out of my league. I wanted to work with data sonification, but I wasn't experienced enough working with data to give the benefits of sonifcation any justice. Basically, I couldn't sonify data and also have it mean anything other than random sounds.

The reason I'm glad I chose this idea is because it comments on much of what our audio readings were about in the first place: the quick attention our minds can give to sound in an instant. What my project aims to do, however, is to focus on how blindly (or deafly) we allow these sounds and distractions to seem through our minds.

4. Who/ what helped accomplish this goal?

As far as who, my friends helped accomplish this goal by serving as quite literal distractions (thus my muse, and source of content). Also, Sam Harris for getting me into meditation and giving his voice for me to record over.

What helped me was some experience using Audacity and the plenty of readings which gave me my theories and strategies to pull of this recording.