the project 1 piece ‘what the end sound like {in all directions}’ is developing, after creating 3 tracks on each end of the spectrum of intensity and peaceful ambience, and cutting them together I have created a 15 minute bases of the project, however upon doing this I’ve realised its a bit too binary in only exploring one axis of the imagined field of my taste, therefore I have decided that I will not limit the amount of axis’ that I will move between in this project, and I will move between various points in all directions, trying to find the furthest out points in all different directions, to try outline this field of my taste, and give a representation of the furthest out points in the field of my taste, and try to do this somehow cohesively without limiting the directions possible to go in.
To ideate this I’ve been listing various opposing musical adjectives such as dissonant vs consonant, minimal vs maximal, loud vs quiet, on-beat vs off-beat, soft vs heavy. I illustrated this in the diagram below, however these axis’ are impossible to illustrate in a way that shows any correlation between the axis’ because music can be both loud and minimal or loud and complex, and also all these terms are relative terms based on perspective, however this is okay because it leaves more up to interpretation of the listener in how they perceive the project and which aspect they think I’m exploring the end of.
one concern I have with this project after speaking with my block 1 tutor Ingrid, is that what gets us grades on this course is largely how our project relates to key ideas and concepts in sound arts theory, and I don’t know which concepts or theories this really relates to and this project isn’t really inspired by any of them that I know about.
This has posed a question to me about this course and its faux-freedom, that we’re told we can do whatever we want and are free to explore any ideas we have or that we want to explore, however we’re also told our projects basically need to be inspired by readings from sound arts theories, and need to communicate an idea clearly but what if part of the project is its openness to interpretation and intentional lack of a direct clear communicated idea, and what if our work is just inspired by a mass amalgamation of experiences and thoughts rather than just some theory we read that gave us an idea to do something.
This is a frustrating realisation about the form of this course and putting sound arts in an academic context, and is something I’ve realised that I think affected me not getting good grades because my work isn’t directly inspired by keys sound art theory, even though I feel I demonstrate experimentation and exploration, and a thorough process, and realisation, I seem not to get good grades and I believe its the lack of academic conventionality in my approach, however when reading feedback or asking teachers I often get ambiguous responses with no direct answers of what I’m doing wrong or what I should be doing instead, and also we haven’t actually been taught hardly any sound arts key theories or concepts to even be inspiring or using in our work.