Month: December 2022

Sound is the media that different from other arts form which is not based of the visual (films, fine art, etc). Through music and sound, audiences can be in the places of their imagination and this more ambiguous way to present our own idea. I am not good at present myself thpouhgt language, therefore I started to write music and Folk, Blues and rock music seems to talk to me most when I started to learn music. For music, Syd Barrett, Nick Drake and John Lennon inspired me a lot. By listen to their work, the idea of minimalism is interested me most where it gives more space for the audience to wander around the pieces. My works always reflecting the things around me and the alternative lifestyle seems to the topic that at the top of my mind in recent years. Think the alternative way to live rather just stick in the city and forget the fundamental element of living where in the urban lifestyle, those element are being transfer to money. By doing that, field recording is the tools that I found can be present this idea where it can capture the soundscape of city and the nature. Therefore, field recording is the area that I start to dive in and hopefully there will be more field recording related composition in my future works.

The first sound that I recorded is the train approaching the platform in the tube station. It have the low pitch drone sounds with high pitch sound from the rail and when stop, it have the really high pitch squeezing sound. It can be cut and stretch the sound and become a drone or cut the high pitch breaking sound.

The sound sound I recorded is the sound of the cooking stove. It has the texture of wind like sound which technically is. It is the while noise and have more low frequency. It can be use as the back ground noise and with modulation, it can be the sound effect in sic-fi movie flying ship.

The last sound I got is the bowling water. The sound of water are satisfying, therefore, I recorded some sound of the wave when we were doing the field recording trip. But this time with the bowling water, it has more bubbling sound. It also have the burning sound when the water are vapoured by the hot edges of the pot.

Hearing is the practice that we all doing every single moment. Unlike other senses, our ears can not be closed and we don’t have ears lid. Even we cover up our ears or even we have the headphones on which blocked most of the sound around us, we still can hearing thing or we will hear the high pitch drone. Therefore, hearing is our ability to receive vibration of the air and we may react to the sound that we heard. For example, when we walk across the road and we can hear the horn or the engine sounds of cars approaching us, and we may stop when we hearing it.

The difference between listening and hearing is that when we listen, we put more effort to analyse what we heard. We listen others conversation or listen to the music, and thought listen, we will think about the information that the sound contain. And for more sound art related area, we can trace and force on the sound that we want to listen because most of the time, there have more than one sound sources. Therefore, the difference between listening and hearing is that listening require more focus while hearing is just the default mode of how our ears receive sound.