Sound Art Midterm Reflection, 3/2/09

I completed my first project in audio art, which is titled Carrots. This is a stop-motion video made from a series of cropped photographs recording carrots being chopped up and arranged to spell look, cook, and closer as a play on domesticity and gender roles. I decided to work with visual noise (static) on the surface of a very desaturated and high contrast image to abstract the actions as much as possible.


In working towards the audio portion of this project, I recorded myself whistling arbitrarily slong with other household noises building up a library of sounds to use in this video and others with similar content and format (folding laundry, cooking chicken, drinking wine, etc.). I imported the whistling into Audacity, pulled down large peaks in the wave, and then manipulated the speed, pitch, tempo, equalization, and amplitude. These simple additions changed the ambiance of the piece significantly. I continued to layer in domestic noises, specifically rattling dishes that I had recorded, and manipulate the same elements to make its sound origin almost unrecognizable. I played the track with the imagery and found it to be of two separate entities, so I needed a tying element to link the audio and visual imagery.

In exploring the program I found that the command of creating white noise and silence to be a very helpful component to my piece. I added in some white noise sporadically across the track, which came across as too unintentional, so I then tried placing it every few seconds to sound more calculated. This repeated noise was immediately associated to waves crashing, a valuable lesson learned in the use of repetition. In the end I decided to spread white noise across the entire track to align with the visual static on the screen. The sound and video became more unified with this change, but needed one last addition to link the two, so I put I short tone at the switch of each picture in the stop motion sequence. I also worked with fading in and out to sync the tracks, officially completing my first project with sound.