Act of We | Soundscape | Multiple Perspectives

This project was completed in groups (mine consisting of myself, Anna Ka Wai Kwan, Brian Oh, and Hunter Amos) and focused on using connotative meaning to help navigate between personal and social meaning and space. For Seminar, each group chose a song, divided it up into parts for each group member to focus on and wrote a collaborative lyric essay that intertwined lyric analysis, social commentary, and personal experience using the essays On Seatbelts and Sunsets by Hanif Abdurraqib and This Was 1993 by Kiese Laymon as models. For Studio, based on the same song, the task was to convert it into a soundscape that shares a similar connotation / conceptual meaning by using sounds generated in our homes / workspaces.

Ideation + Process

The process of working on this Bridge Project began with us sharing our interpretations of the song itself, through which we collectively concluded that the underlying message of this song is one of a love that has been deprived and under-nurtured. This led us to contemplate the implications of the question of “what is love?” and consequently use this question as a refrain for our Seminar essay and as a guiding theme in collecting sounds for Studio, despite having divided the song into stanzas for each of us to work on individually. After listening to the song together and dissecting its lyrics from this perspective, we divided the song into stanzas and allocated each group member, which we individually focused on interpreting the meaning of, and applying to the perspective we wanted to share in our lyric essay for Seminar.

Personally, I chose to work on Stanza 5, which describes the breaking down of a relationship, and how that can affect the identity of an individual, thus, in response my Seminar piece explores this idea in the context of a friendship, and how the dismantling of a long-standing friendship can impact one’s identity but also how the redemption of said friendship can be liberating and empowering. 

After having completed the Seminar assignment, we held a brainstorming session to focus on how to proceed for Studio. During this time, we discussed what constituted a ‘soundscape’ and shared sounds / songs that we believed could serve as inspiration for our final soundscape.  In contributing to this discussion I shared this list of songs and instrumentals. Further to this, we discussed how our theme may be represented in the soundscape, while simultaneously achieving a sense of consistency and correlation with the essay. This led us to identifying distinct stages in the song – i.e. confusion and ambiguity, love, hyperactivity, and melancholy – for which specific sounds may be collected.

After this, we went off on our individual journeys to collect songs that related to the stanzas that we had been assigned. In reflecting the duality explored in my Seminar piece in the soundscape as well, I cultivated a collection of sounds that are both cacophonous as well as euphonious in order to show the balance between destruction and rejuvenation. Moreover, I wanted to explore this in terms of the materials I used to create sounds as well, therefore I derived sounds from from both natural and manufactured objects / sources. For example I collected sounds of pebbles, leaves, rain, and wind, but also the sound of a fountain, ice from my fridge, scissors, and writing.

Finally, after collating all our sounds into respective folders, Hunter gathered and edited the clips together to create a soundscape accompanied by a video that also demonstrates how the sounds were generated,  that would reflect the different stages we had discussed, and establish an atmosphere that would communicate the different feelings they represent.

Final Work

Here is a link to our lyric essay for Seminar.

Below is the video we produced for Studio:

Skinny Love
October 2020
Digital video
4:21 s

The visual overlays in the video accompanying the soundscape are intended to highlight the layers of emotion that create ambiguity surrounding a relationship, whereas the intentional silences and blank screens between each stage represent the quiet moments of contemplation in a relationship as well as allow for the viewer to assimilate and draw connections to the audio from their own experiences. Together, the different audio and visual effects serve to deepen the viewer’s focus on the soundscape and further connect their mindset with the ideas explored in Skinny Love, whereas the circular shot structure of the video represents the overarching strength of relationships.

Challenges and Surprises

In terms of Seminar, I think one of the most significant challenges was finding a narrative or memory to write about that felt true to the song we had chosen as a group. Even though I felt that I would be more comfortable with this form of writing as it is closer to traditional prose, and the song itself has such profound meaning, it was a bit of a challenge for me to get into interpreting the music as intimately as Abdurraqib and Laymon had done in their lyric essays. In hindsight, this was probably because their experience with and connection to the respective songs they had chosen came more organically whereas in our case the song had been chosen collectively and I had to actively look for a personal meaning to attach to it. On the other hand,  I think in this project, the Studio task fell into place in a more natural way, since any questions we had about what exactly constituted a soundscape and how we wanted to construct ours had been rationalised prior to beginning our work on the task through our regular discussions. Overall, just like in Bridge Project 2 one thing that surprised me was how well our group worked with each other and the ways in which our stories merged. In focusing on the question of “what is love?” I believe our writing (even though we didn’t coordinate the things we were going to talk about) and sounds came together well to really explore different types of relationships and how love manifests in them in different ways.

Reflection

I am confronted with very ambiguous feelings when reflecting on this Bridge Project. On one hand, I learned a lot about how sound can be used as material to supplement the audiences understanding of a work of art, whereas on the other I am not entirely satisfied with the outcome we produced.

When I initially began researching what “soundscape” meant, I went back and listened to quite a few songs that reminded me of the word, and what I noticed was that there was an element of natural, everyday sounds or “audio landscape” in many of them. This was very intriguing to me as the very fact that this form of using sound as a material to convey meaning is so common and prevalent is a strong testament to their true communicative power that for the most part goes unnoticed in daily life. Additionally, in reading the lyric essays of Hanif Abdurraqib and Kiese Laymon in Seminar, I better understood the high degree of music’s evocative capability as the different songs discussed in either essay evoked such profound and poignant reflections from both authors. Consequently, I realised how the universality of certain personal and cultural experiences can be communicated through sound in a way that possibly cannot be accomplished through “fine art” or visual media, in which allusions may not be as explicit and may rely on the artist contextualising them, or simply may not be as publicly accessible to people as music.

However, with regards to what we produced as our final work, I think this project was one that I really didn’t develop enough conceptually. As a group I believe we could have pushed ourselves more in terms of the theme we chose to base our writing and soundscape on, and I think doing so would have resulted in us exploring Skinny Love in a more authentic and interesting way, especially since I feel like the essay that we produced for this project explored themes in the song very superficially when in fact it has several layers of meaning that can be extrapolated to a variety of contexts outside what is directly communicated to the audience.

Connection to Creative Practice

I have never worked with sound as a medium before, however conceptually this piece relates quite closely to the theme of human experience, and the notion of searching for a sense of belonging, which I have explored heavily in the past as mentioned in Bridge Project 1. This work reminds me specifically of a work I created in March of this year titled Inter_sections.

This work draws inspiration from Wassily Kandinsky’s conception of the circle to epitomise a balance between the concentric and excentric. In employing this ideology, my intention is to portray the universality of conflicts about identity. Thus, as humanity is represented by the organic line-work in the foreground, the background of intersecting primary-coloured circles represents the unity of people at the most fundamental level, in finding a sense of belonging in an increasingly divisive world.

Although this doesn’t explicitly explore the notion of love, I believe the link to the soundscape is still evident as both works aim to explore conflicts of individual identity in relation to a larger experience of disconnect or tumult.

Questions to Explore Further

The journey of putting together this project raised quite a few questions for me. Here are some of the questions that I cam up with that I would like to further contemplate:

• Are there any sounds that objectively / intersubjectively convey specific meanings?
• In what cases is sound a more powerful tool to convey meaning than visual media? Is the former a more universally comprehensible medium compared to the latter?
• How do natural and unnatural (e.g. digitally altered, electronic) sounds convey different meanings? How do the connotations of each influence the overarching meaning of a soundscape? Does one evoke certain ideas / emotions better than the other?

Work from:
Integrative Studio 1 with Professor Matthew Villarreal
Integrative Seminar 1 with Professor Marina Blitshteyn