Originally, I wanted to write about the fixation of youth within popular music. This is a topic that has interested me for some time, and it can be linked to many different cultural theories and phenomena. It’s really strange how anyone who seems to gain popularity from their music after the age of 30 seems to be portrayed as someone who has worked extremely hard, fighting their corner for years and fought through so many failures to get where they are, and that it’s a real testament to their work ethic they’ve managed to become popular at such an ‘old’ age. (see Jarvis Cocker’s prologue to Pulp’s performance of Common People at Glastonbury 1995). Obviously this is true, they will probably have worked very hard at their craft, and taken rejection after rejection to get where they are today. Why is this seen as an anomaly though? In any other industry, to be in one’s mid 30’s is to be considered relatively young, but still with a good amount of experience. There seems to be a particular fixation on youth, on one’s 20’s and even teens, within popular music that I find to be quite damaging. As a session musician, I have worked with people in their late 20’s who seem to be of the mindset that time is running out, they must act quickly or else they won’t succeed in their careers – they look up to these figures who have ‘made it’ past the age of 30 as is there is some sort of sliver of hope along the horizon – they constantly compare their age to other people and wonder whether they are doing the right things. I find this mindset to be very damaging, and it must be fed by some greater cultural issues – youth and attractiveness are marketable, which is most likely why this phenomena occurs. However, within other industries this really doesn’t exist so much. Film directors or actors may not have to worry about this so much, and there is definitely not the same fixation on youth that I have seen in the music industry.
I am interested in this topic, however I don’t feel it relates to the unit brief of ‘Contemporary Issues in Sound Art’ enough for me to write about it now. It would be good to potentially find a topic that relates more to the world of sound arts, as I feel like the link is a bit tenuous at the moment.
During the break between terms, I visited a private view for the Juliette Sturlèse and Marjan Moghaddam joint exhibition at the Anna Kultys Gallery in Cambridge Heath, East London. I was invited to this last minute, but it became very relevant to what I am studying at the moment as it is a mixed reality exhibition – i.e. part real world, part virtual world.
This was an interesting experiment in terms of gallery design. The actual space itself is quite small, so the gallery has opted to make use of a VR headset to expand the amount of works they can show. There is definitely a stark difference between the physical and digital space, both in terms of what they can show but also the impact they both leave on the viewer. Personally, I still preferred the physical gallery space. The works shown physically were that of Sturlèse – her work is about sense of space, and was mostly made with astroturf among other materials, depicting abstract scenes and making use of lots of greens and blues. Although I found it somewhat difficult to find what specific message Sturlèse was trying to convey with her pieces, they were large, and they certainly gave me a sense of perspective, that I felt was missing from Moghaddam’s virtual works.
Getting the VR headset ready
Moghaddam’s art was displayed in a giant virtual gallery, full of digital sculptures and art hanging on the ‘walls’ – this was interspersed with old Iranian revolution songs that were linked to each piece. Personally, although the idea may have been a strong one, I found the presentation rather lacklustre. The walls and floor in the virtual space were very plain, and overall it just had a very unfinished feel to it. Maybe if more effort had been put into the presentation of the world around the art, I would have been more convinced by this digital exhibition space, however it felt like this way of showing the art was more of a novelty than it was something that genuinely added to the emotions and ideas behind Moghaddam’s work. I didn’t really get a sense of scale that I had experienced with Sturlèse’s work, and ultimately I felt unimpressed by the digital space, as I have been before when I’ve previously encountered these kinds of spaces (albeit on my laptop, not on a VR headset).
Maybe as technology develops, these sorts of ideas will become more impressive in practice, however at the moment I am still much more in favour of physical exhibition spaces.
Our first group crits for our project so far also provided me with the chance to look at the first visual draft of the VR experience so far. Before we went up and presented what we have at the moment, Ana gave us all the opportunity to walk through the space on a VR headset. At the moment, it’s still quite basic but I’m very impressed with how Ana has managed to model the building so far.
Ana’s model of the outside of the building at the moment
So far the walkthrough allows the player to walk through the entrance of the building up to the lift in the tower block, and then to be transported to a different level of the building (this will eventually become 3 levels). At the moment the level that is available is just an idea of a surrealist landscape, but this will probably change at some point.
Annoyingly, although I had worked on a sonic idea for the experience in preparation for the crit, I didn’t have access to my laptop over the weekend before the session so I couldn’t upload it to the Google Drive for ideas to be presented, due to me moving over the weekend and accidentally leaving my laptop at my old home. The idea I wanted to present was based on a sequenced loop I had worked on at the synth desk in LCC a few weeks ago. I did try to come in early before the crit on the day to recreate what I had made but I wasn’t happy with the result so I decided not to upload it.
Overall, we had mostly good feedback on the sound assets and visual elements of the experience. One thing that was mentioned was that we might want to work more collaboratively on each aspect of the sound design, instead of dividing up roles and only focussing on one element each. This would mean that we all get to learn something about each aspect of the sound design of the experience, whilst also preventing certain aspects of the sound being left to the last minute if the person who is responsible for it doesn’t put enough work in. This is something we have taken on board, and we will try to work more collaboratively with each other when it comes to the foley, music, background ambience etc.
It was also useful to see how the other groups are getting along as we can compare their progress to ours and also take inspiration from the way they are working together.
We recently had a meeting with one of the students from the VR course, Ana. We were supposed to meet with another collaborator, but unfortunately they couldn’t make it to this session.
In this meeting we (the sound artists) brought our ideas to Ana to see what she thought of them and to think about how we could get the project moving. We’ve decided to move ahead with the satirical walkthrough of LCC that I explained in the previous blog post, and in this meeting we divided responsibilities and looked at possible points of reference for inspiration. I put myself forward for making soundtrack music and reoccurring motifs for the experience. These were the other collaborator’s roles:
Sound Art Roles
Virtual Reality Roles
I’ve chosen to mainly focus on the music, as I come from a popular music production background – when dividing roles we all decided we should play to our strengths. We did mention having small teams to do everything on each individual floor i.e. group 1 does all the sounds for level 1, group 2 does all the sounds for level 2 etc, but we thought that this would lead to a disjointed experience for the viewer – The whole experience should be cohesive.
Below is a moodboard of aesthetic routes the VR designers might want go down:
There is a lot of surrealist imagery in here – this is different to how I thought we might want it to look, however I’m sure we can still explore the same concepts with these aesthetics.
Ana also came up with a preliminary timeline for when we will want to get certain tasks done, which we will try to stick to as much as possible, although from experience in the past I know that this can be difficult with group work:
Having been put together in our groups for the the collaboration unit, the sound artists from our group had a discussion at the end of one of our lectures about our preliminary ideas for the virtual reality experience that is being made in collaboration with the BA2 VR students at LCC.
The idea we had the resonated the most with all of us who are at the discussion was a satirical walkthrough of the tower block at LCC where the experience explores a lot of the stresses/problems a student might have with their time at the University i.e. overwhelm from workload, a lot of our fees going towards the new campus we will never study in, homesickness, etc. This is a topic we were all able to get behind as we all have our own unique experiences within the university that we feel we would be able to get across through the project.
We could use a lift to transport the viewer between all of these experiences on different floors – this would allow for us to allow different sonic and aesthetic concepts on each level, and ensures that every member of the group will have something to do.
We were also thinking of potentially adding some aspects of horror/surreal imagery to the experience, but we will refine these ideas once we talk to our collaborators from the VR course.
In producing this audio paper, I set out to answer two questions:
1 – What is the purpose of academic reading and writing within the context of UK art studies and does it benefit us as artists in terms of improving our practice?
2 – From the perspective of a student with undiagnosed ADHD, does this reading and writing create barriers to achievement?
To be completely honest, I think this was a subject matter born more out of instinctive frustration than anything else, and if I had the opportunity again (which I will) I would write about something else. I chose the subject matter when I was going through a bit of a frustrating time in life (money problems, too busy with outside work to focus properly on university work etc.), and because I was struggling to come up with ideas based around my fields of interest, I wrote about a subject that was based on my lack of ideas at the time and an area that I personally struggle with in my studies – that is, writing. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad idea, and it’s a topic that genuinely interests me that I don’t feel has really been talked much, however the latter point also became an issue for me. Because it’s not been talked about much I couldn’t find much material to reference and critique – this is why I decided to go out and conduct interviews as a way of obtaining some primary research. I also don’t feel that it was the most helpful topic in terms of improving my practice, as it doesn’t really go hand-in-hand with any of the practical work I’ve made so far. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but in future I’d like to write more around my fields of interest.
That being said, I do still feel as if I’ve learnt some points to take away, and I think I’ve learnt more about my process and how I study. I’ve learnt more about the value of academic reading and writing within art studies, even though in some ways I have critiqued it from the perspective of someone with an undiagnosed learning disability. The process of making an audio paper is also something that’s been new to me, and I find it a far more expressive and practical way of getting my thoughts down, even if it is a little more work and a little more technically demanding. I have found the process difficult, however it feels much more rewarding to have produced an audio paper over a black and white slab of writing. I’d like to make an audio paper for next year’s dissertation, however it could be beneficial to add more abstract elements which I didn’t include this time.
So, did I answer those two questions successfully? I’m not sure – if I were to do this again I would write less about the history of universities and technical colleges as I don’t feel it’s too relevant to the point I’m trying to get across (or at least I didn’t explore it deeply enough within the time I had). I would have liked to explore more writing around the subject, and I still find it frustrating that the best answer I had from my student interviews kept deleting itself when I tried to place it in the paper. I really feel as though this would’ve added something. However, I still made an effort to gather opinions of students and academics which is a good thing to have done. If I had more time I would’ve maybe interviewed more students with specific learning disabilities to ask their opinions, as I feel this paper was written too much from my own perspective. A lot of the problems with time come from my own time management, which I will hopefully be getting support with by the end of the academic year.
The mixing of the paper was adequate, and I didn’t feel like much needed to be done to the tracks. However, I didn’t get the chance to hear it in one of the studios at LCC, which I will make the time to do next time.
Having said all this, I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom and I’m still happy with myself for finishing this audio paper which initially felt very daunting. There are aspects that I’m proud of, like the sound effect of the continuous scribbling on the page that helped create a soundscape that was supposed to add a background level of noise that hopefully can give the listener an idea of all the sounds that occurred and often distracted me whilst I was writing the script for the paper. This also added a slight performative (albeit non-vocal) aspect as I recorded it in one 10 minute take, which I think was successful.
Overall, I think the paper could have been better. Next time I make an audio paper I will take more time to carefully consider what topic I choose instead of just getting carried away with one subject before I carefully evaluate what else I could cover. I learnt a lot about my own processes and that is a positive, however in future I would like to research more perspectives and choose a topic I can do more reading around. I’m considering doing my dissertation on the humour within art and how it can sometimes be perceived to have lower validity, as there is a lot of writing around this and it’s more relevant to my practice as an artist who likes to make pieces with a sense of humour. However, for now I am somewhat happy with my paper, and looking forward to carrying on with future projects.
In order to continue building the soundscape of my surroundings, I tried to make a mental list of all the sounds that I would usually hear on a day-to-day basis. These include:
Fire from a woodburner:
Traffic on the main road:
Ambulance going past:
The large fountain that seems to run all day in the nearby luxury apartments:
The DLR running past:
And the planes from London City Airport that I previously posted a clip of on the BBC Sound Effects Review. Likewise, all of these clips are from the BBC Sound Effects website, which I have found very useful in helping me build the soundscape of all the noise I will usually hear in the space of 10 minutes of my day.
When putting the clips together I mostly left them as they were as I didn’t feel as though they needed effects or much EQ on them, they seemed to slot pretty easily together. However, I did add a convolution reverb to the fountain to make it sound further away, as it does in reality:
I ran into some challenges when trying to insert the the voice clips from the interviews I had conducted. One of the clips worked completely fine – it was sent over Whatsapp and I just downloaded it onto my computer. and dropped into the recording However, the interview that I felt was most beneficial to the point my paper is trying to make was sent over Instagram and I had some real challenges with it. The interviewee (a student from my course) was talking about how the writing in courses benefits some students whereas others find it difficult, and that students that find it difficult shouldn’t take it as a reflection on themselves if they don’t feel like they succeed in it. They also said that they felt it would be better if students could have more of a choice between written work and practical work, and I thought this was a really insightful comment that would benefit the paper. Unfortunately because this was over Instagram I couldn’t download the voice note, so I had to take a screen recording to get the audio. However, when I tried to take this recording the voice note wouldn’t play back, and even when I wasn’t recording it wouldn’t play back either. It was as if it had deleted itself, which I’ve never know to happen before on the app. I asked the interviewee and they said they had the same problem as well, so a few days later they sent me another voice note with a similar response to my question. Unfortunately I encountered the same problem again. I would’ve asked the interviewee to send the second voice note over Whatsapp so there would be no problems, however they actually sent the second one before I’d asked them to – which was very nice of them! However when it turned out I couldn’t play it back to record it a day later, I didn’t want to ask them to record another response again as I felt like it would be asking too much of interviewees to get them to send the same answer to a question three times over because of my technical problems. I’ve realised that in the future it would be better to conduct these interviews in person. This situation is a shame, as I do think the content paper is going to suffer from the lack of this clip. This also meant I had to re-record a few lines and change the script due to my response to the interviews having to change.
However, a positive note is that Dr Vasseur finally got back to me! Had the paper been handed in on time, I wouldn’t have been able to include his response as he only got back to me a day after the deadline. Although I’d rather have handed the paper in on time, I’m still happy to have this response as I feel as though what he has said is very balanced and contributes as good primary research towards my paper.
I haven’t added too much processing to the vocal track I previously recorded, only a noise gate to drown out the building works that were happening nearby when recording the track:
There’s also a few seconds in the paper where I ‘play’ the part of an English teacher I used to have being a bit snobbish about ex-polytechnics. I thought it’d make the paper a bit more interesting if I gave this character a different tone of voice, so I put my speech through Logic’s Vocal Transformer plugin, changing the pitch by +1 and formant by -3:
This is the result:
It’s a bit strange but I think it’s quite a playful aspect to add to the paper.
I’ve put most of the BBC Sound Effects tracks as a constantly running background throughout the piece, with the exception of the ambulance, plane and DLR effects. I’ve faded them all out at the end, in time with the end of my writing clip where I drop the pencil on the page I’ve been writing on.
I don’t really feel as though there’s much mixing to be done on this. I adjusted a lot of the levels and a couple of EQs as I was recording the paper, and even then I felt as though some of the work I did with the EQ sounded worse than when I left it alone. I’ve panned a few of the soundscape tracks a little bit to create a sense of space, although I’ve tried to keep it as natural as possible. I’d say the paper is pretty much finished now, and in my next blog I will be reviewing the final outcome.
When finishing the first draft of my audio paper, I’ve tried to link my thoughts and research into academia within art studies to my own experiences with ADHD and reading/writing. I’ve also made an attempt at coming up with a proposal for what I think could be a way forward for art studies within higher education, although I’m not sure how realistic it is. The basic conclusion I’ve come to so far is that whilst a contextual understanding of the debates and conversations surrounding contemporary sound art is definitely useful to a degree, it would perhaps be beneficial for students to be able to choose the ratio of practical to written work in their course – to an extent.
Obviously, I’m not saying to scrap written work and reading entirely for students that this doesn’t appeal to – it’s very important to be able to describe one’s process to justify and explain work that has been produced, and reading also plays a large part in the development of contextual awareness that is important to developing one’s own practice. I also don’t want it to seem as though I am whining or complaining about having to do written work – my thoughts and opinions on this subject have definitely evolved as I have worked my way through the script. I’ve found that producing an audio paper has been a useful way of combining practical and written elements to create a body of work that questions the state of contemporary arts education. However, I also see, and have felt personally, that the world of academic writing and reading can often be intimidating to students who join art courses primarily to create practical work and learn practical skills. Maybe lectures could be given to make this world of academic writing seem less impenetrable? I understand the argument that academic writing surrounding sound art is often only made by academics for other academics to read, which would be the same as, for example, papers written by scientists studying for their PHDs which are only ever meant to be read by other scientists. However, a demystification process of sorts, a few lessons to help students who struggle with the language used in these papers, could be useful. It’s difficult to imagine a reality in which this exists, though, as funding is constantly being squeezed out of arts courses by the government. It is a difficult topic to find a conclusion for.
Before I began to record this paper, I had the idea of the pencil scribbles running underneath my voice. Having recorded both of these elements now, I think they work well together – the writing noise adds to a soundscape which I am hoping to fully develop of the surroundings in which I have written the script. I want to create a soundscape that can at times slightly distract the listener from what I am saying, maybe make their brain wander. My brain was constantly wandering off whilst writing the script, not on purpose, but just because I can’t concentrate for longer periods of time very well and it takes me quite a while to write usually. I want to create a mood of constantly being slightly distracted by one’s surroundings, especially in a busy cityscape.
Unfortunately when I first attempted to record my dialogue for the paper, my interface stopped working (it’s an old one and I think the phantom power stopped working). This was a bit frustrating as I was recording pretty close to the deadline (completely my fault and I should’ve done this earlier!) and I had to give back the microphone I was using to record my voice to LCC the next day, and it was not available for me to book out afterwards as we are approaching the winter break. I would make use of the studios at uni, however they’re not available at any of the times I’m free in the coming week. I did manage to borrow a microphone and interface from a friend for a few days, so that’s how I’ve started recording dialogue. This is annoying as because of my poor time management the project will unfortunately have to be handed in a bit late as I don’t have extra support in place at the moment (I’m on the waiting list for a screening), however hopefully it will give me more time to make the paper better quality.
To make the sounds of my voice and the writing congeal together, I’ve sent both tracks to a bus with a very small room reverb. It’s not meant to be heard necessarily, but just to create a sense that both are happening in the same space, simultaneously. Here’s the settings I’ve used:
I’ve also added 11.9db of gain onto the writing track using Logic’s gain plugin, as the recording I have is too quiet. I could’ve re-recorded it, but adding the gain sounds perfectly adequate and if I don’t need to record my scribbling for 10 minutes again, then why should I?!
The final vocal track is also a comp of a few different takes – when recording I’d usually get to around a minute or two of perfect speech until I’d fluff up a line, so in instances like this I have just started recording from the nearest possible break in my speech that I can.
To start building the soundscape I’ve found a couple of good recordings from the BBC Sound Effects website of a narrowboat engine and some lakeside nature sounds:
Narrowboat engineSounds of nature by water
This is a good start, although when I come to finishing this piece off I would like to add more cityscape sounds to truly recreate what I experience. Just for context, here is the view from where I’ve been writing:
What’s left to do now is to further build the soundscape and insert the recordings of the interviews I carried out with my coursemates. Unfortunately, Dr Vasseur hasn’t replied to me just yet, which is a shame as I think his words would count as a very valuable piece of primary research, however I still have some time so fingers crossed that he gets back to me!
Below is a short description that could be used to promote my audio paper to websites such as NOS magazine (http://nosmag.org/) which highlight and comment on issues that affect people with neurodiversities:
20 year old student and sound artist Henry Brewer has just released a new pilot podcast titled “Well, Why Am I Doing This Anyway?”. This first episode highlights Brewer’s struggles with ADHD in academic settings, calling into question the very nature in which arts universities function and become inaccessible to neurodivergent students, whilst also stepping back and looking at the history of how this came to be. Brewer’s aim is to call for change in a system which he sees as being “frustrating…, especially from the perspective of someone who with an undiagnosed learning disability who doesn’t necessarily have access to many treatments”. He hopes to continue this series into the future, further probing into inaccessible aspects of our westernised societywhose traditions can often stem from the archaic. We are here, and we deserve to be heard.
In the past couple of days I have started developing my script and I’m now at the point where I feel I’ve nearly finished writing. This has been a bit of a difficult process for me so far – I have written the entire script on the notes app on my phone whilst pacing up and down my living room. This probably sounds strange but it just helps me concentrate if I can remain in motion – sitting down and writing is much more difficult for me.
I’ve decided to focus in on the question of if academic writing and reading is necessary to develop a successful practice as a sound artist. I am also then planning to link this to my experiences with undiagnosed ADHD, and I will hopefully be able to come to a conclusion where I can make a suggestion as to where arts education could possibly change in the future, although I’m not quite there yet.
I’ve looked a little into the history of arts education within universities and polytechnics, as I’ve previously heard it mentioned that art courses within the framework of higher education used to be more practical than today, where one could argue a course like this is around 40% practical work and 60% written/academic work (taking blogs like this one into account too). I’m hoping this may give a little bit of historical context to what I’m talking about, although I’m concerned that this section of the paper so far is a little under-researched. I will try and rectify this.
I’ve asked a few of my fellow students to send me voice recordings responding to the question “What is your opinion of academia within art studies and do you believe it’s necessary for developing a successful practice?”. I’ve received around 4 replies and there are a couple I think that would be good to slot in. I’ve also emailed the same question to Dr Roman Vasseur, my family friend who lectures at Kingston School of Art. I don’t have a reply yet but hopefully one will come in time!
I now need to think of how I want to conclude my paper. I’m not quite sure what to suggest at the moment so I will take a break and come back to it soon when my brain has had time to ponder…
My bizarre ramblings on my phone… I wish I could still and type on a laptop like other people
