Surround Story-Sister/Wooden/Alike-“Dolls”
In my surround story piece, I interpreted a story I wrote. The key themes of the story are identity and multiplicity, which I wrote about through a surreal and absurdist style. I translated these themes into an abstracted sound piece by using techniques of non-linearity, repetition, warping, and selecting only certain frequencies of the sounds I recorded.
“There is a girl who looks into a mirror and suddenly her identity is changed. She repeatedly looks into the mirror and every time carves a wooden doll of how she sees herself with this new identity. She throws the dolls into a fire. After the fire burns down, every different version of her crawls out of the ashes.”
My goal for this project was to push the boundaries of how I think about identity and time. The main concept and story didn’t change throughout the process of making this piece, but I did end up cutting out certain elements and details because I felt they didn’t serve a conceptual purpose and weren’t adding to the piece overall. Over the course of creating this piece I grew stronger connections to non-linear storytelling and explored meditative repetition. Technically, I grew much more comfortable with audition and 5.1 formatting. I also grew especially fond of creating pseudo-collages with noise by selecting shapes out of the spectral frequencies which gave me pieces of each sound and thus created something new that sounded vaguely familiar and incomplete until layered with other snippets of noise from other sources. Specially, I really enjoyed employing the subwoofer because it gave a strong eerie feeling to the work. I also loved having sounds alternate between different places in the room because it tripped up the repetition and added to the surreal feeling. The most challenging part was getting a hold on working digitally because in most of my other work I do sculpture thats all very tactile and uses a much more hands-on approach to making. In the future I want to employ sound in an installation space paired with other pieces of mine.
