Author Archives: Daniel Bowden

10 Hours of Placement Somewhere Near Purgatory

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She woke up at 10am which would mean her next nap is at 12:30, she will need proper food before the next nap and a bottle when she wakes up. She has caught the sun… no, she is sunburnt! And we feel dreadful but she always pulls her daggy sun cap off. Who wouldn’t? We can’t pick her up from childcare until after 4pm so this will be a long day for her, we will need to be contacted if she is inconsolable but only I can be called as my partner as she is in an important interview. There is extra baby formula should she need it but we suspect that we’d have arrived by this stage.

She is now crying loudly but I have to walk away and make a beeline for the Docuverse Seminar to be a techie!

My food is packed for the shoot with lots of water, gluten free snacks, gluten free bread sans lettuce… I don ’t want to be bloated or contract Salmonella.

Which tech office do I meet the crew at? There are two!

I’m presuming the one in the Communications building however, I’ve been caught out by this before, waiting for Godot at the sterile desk only to put 2 and 2 together and realise that I need to be at the other side of campus.

The scene is absurd!

We are running around like headless chickens, it’s now 10 minutes until the conference is scheduled to begin and the audio isn’t syncing with the camera, it to me looks like an internal system issue as opposed to a hardware one. But having very little experience with this particular video cam, the misconnection is as obvious as Waldo at a nudest camp.

What to do??

Extract the Zoom F8 from the equation and run the audio directly into the camera, it’s working!

After delaying the talks by 10 minutes, academic John Hughes gets up and blows our minds with his thoughts on the Vertical Cinema experience, which is essentially a video played within the aspect ratio of a tall column. It was a model taken from the first depictions of human figures carved into a rock wall somewhere near he Top End of Australia, what I didn’t realise was that I had been involved in this highly imaginative subversion of the cinematic execution as an actor a year prior in a short film that was produced by Matt Richards of the VCA. I had surmised that the premise of this film was about purgatory but I could be wrong, it was all quite esoteric, disturbing and had sunk to the deepest depths of my 2015 memory.

But what a freak out!

Here I am, filming an event that explains what I was doing back in 2015 and, if I could have engaged more with John Hughes’ speech, I could have learnt so much more. But, I was the techie, and having worked as  techie in the past, I have come to understand that we are to avoid contact with the ‘talent’ and position our existence on the floor as a faceless Purot and the long chain of wheels and cogs.

…And that’s fine by me.

By Matt Richards 2015.

Purgot By Matt Richards 2015.

Death Has Wings – Brief Four

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DEATH HAS WINGS 

We, the living, have adapted to the thought of death and have evolved to better ourselves. This piece looks at the ways that people have dealt with the thought of their own mortality.

This radiophonic production focusses on mortality and the impact that facing death can have on people’s lives. As the topic is so broad, and the interviews conducted were so lengthy, this production takes the format of a taster or preview that could be used for a longer documentary about the participants’ stories.

The concept stemmed from my own experience of being informed that I may have a shortened life span due to a nerve condition. This piece conveys the denial that was the dominant coping mechanism that I experienced. Moreover, this piece highlights the phenomenon that facing our mortality can be the impetus for personal improvement; spiritual, physical or emotional (Ma-Kellams, C., Blascovich, J., Smith, E R., 2012).

The first participant is my 83 year old Grandmother Stella, an ex-WW2 service woman who after battling with a myriad of aliments had her last rights read which, in the Catholic faith, is sacrament for the terminally ill, signalling that she believed that she was nearing ‘the end’. As a way to circumvent the terror of death, she began knitting pullovers for pollution-affected penguins at Phillip Island. This activity has contributed to a remarkable improvement in her wellbeing and is a testament to her drive to serve nature and humanity.

The second participant is my uncle Greg, a painter and decorator who was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 37 despite being a fitness fanatic. After vehemently opposing alternative treatments, his wife Margaret convinced him to start meditation. As a last resort, Greg obliged and discovered a new sense of spiritual enlightenment that he would have otherwise never experienced had he not contracted the illness.

My fiancee Juliette was a key figure in helping me cope with the thought of my own mortality after a neurologist revealed that I may only live to 40 should my nerve disease accelerate. Juliette is the third voice present in the piece, and her reference to “counting your blessings” is symbolic of the positive attitude that I assumed in the face of this personal challenge. My outlook on life changed dramatically for the better and this is at the centre of my research and practical application for this project.

I have experimented with my own voiceover. The piece begins with a narration that is akin to the inanimate ‘voice of God’ which initially functions purely as a conveyer of action and story. However, this gradually morphs into my own personal story blurring the lines between the participant’s voice and the insensate narrator. In so doing, the standard narrative convention is subverted (Tim Key 2012).

The participants are people that I know well, however my relationship with them is only revealed gradually throughout the piece. Each participant is sonically woven into the piece, and different  sound fields have been applied in order to differentiate between them. For example, Stella’s voice is recorded in a cold, confined space that reflects her nursing home, and Juliette’s is close, warm and intimate. By means of exhibiting this piece as a radio feature, I am able to apply sounds that are representative of the participants’ situations as well as being able to splice, edit and manipulate timelines and timbres.

I have drawn my sounds from the FreeSounds website and produced foley recorded on location, the rhythm of the editing oscillates between fast and slow in relation to the poignancy of each speaker’s story. The recording of each participant was done in a Protools studio setting and on location using an H6 Zoom, which gives me both control over the sound quality and a comfortable environment for the participants to tell their story with fewer reservations. The musical pieces are my own compositions.

The style of this piece has been modelled on the ABC’s production of Russell Guys’, What’s Rangoon to You is Grafton to Me. Originally telecast on Double J in 1977, this piece was narrated by the news radio announcer James Dibble, whose professorial delivery and intonation served as a genre juxtaposition. The sounds were primarily organic recordings, meaning they were virtually untreated foley, which was accompanied by music to drive the rhythm of the editing and emotional tone. Similarly, I have incorporated these tropes in my piece with the addition of counterpoint editing, for example the layering of the doom sound with the Tuvan throat chanting at the beginning; one represents death and the other life.

Another influence has been Tim Key and Gogol’s Overcoat, which is a radio feature documentary produced by Steven Rajam and written by Tim Key in 2013. This piece played with ambiguity in narration and creatively explored Tim Key’s fascination with the work of Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. I have applied a similar reflexive narrative style to Death Has Wings. Exhibiting this as an audio piece has allowed me to orchestrate an equivocal hierarchy of knowledge artfully, disconnecting stereotypical conventions of radio narrative.

In my piece, the rawness of the off-mic questioning is a deliberate move to experiment with Werner Herzog’s style heard in much of his work, specifically in his 2005 documentary Grizzly Man. Herzog has an etherial off-mic presence that is raw and crude yet salient for the story’s advancement. He also challenges ethical rules by intervening and influencing the participant’s story. Herzog employs layers of implicit meaning to his work, and I have also aimed to do this in Death Has Wings. As I am loathed to explicitly announce my personal situation, I have simply implied it at the end of the piece (Bordwell, D & Thompson, K., 2012, pg.58).

Stella’s recording was compromised by sonic interference from a portable bar fridge in the room where we recorded her. All I could do was position the mic in a way that would pick up as little of the interference as possible. Aside from this, the main challenge that I faced during the production of Death Has Wings was the difficulty of having participants open up about the grim subject of mortality. It is a hard subject for people to revisit, let alone expand on, and consequently I feel that the information gathered in the interviews does not include the nuanced and highly personal range of emotions that each participant must have felt. Overall, the segments that I used for the final piece express the common thread that in the face of death it is possible to find a new lease of life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ————————————————————————————————

1) Bolton, G. (2005) Reflective practice writing and professional development, Sage, London, pg.7.

2) Bordwell, D & Thompson, K., (2012) Film Art: An Introduction, McGraw Hill, NewYork USA, pg.58

3) Hesthamar, K., (2014) Tim Key and Gogol’s Overcoat: Review 2, RadioDoc Review, 1(1), March 2014. Available at:http://ro.uow.edu.au/rdr/vol1/iss1/13

4) Ma-Kellams, C., Blascovich, J., Smith, E R., (2012) Enjoying life in the face of death: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, (2012), Vol.103(5), pp.773-786 [Peer Reviewed Journal] Available at: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/docview/1027832144?OpenUrlRefId=info:xri/sid:primo&accountid=13552

5) Rayner, M., (2014) Tim Key and Gogol’s Overcoat: Review 1, RadioDoc Review, 1(1), March 2014. Available at:http://ro.uow.edu.au/rdr/vol1/iss1/12

6) Rubin, H J., Rubin, I S., (2012) Qualitative Interviewing: The Art if Hearing Data (third edition), SAGE Publications, USA, pg.6-8.

7) Tim Key and Gogol’s Overcoat, (2012) radio program, Tim Key of BBC, UK, December 26th 2012.

8) What’s Rangoon to you is Grafton to me, (1977) radio program, Russell Guy of Double J, ABC, Australia.

Death Has Wings can also be found at: http://s3521907.wix.com/audioorganica#!death-has-wings/p4b8e

Flash-in-the-Pan FM

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Back in 1998, I was given permission to start an experimental radio show with 2 other year 12 compadres.

The program’s mission was to air new, alternative music with the occasional story about student life. I guess you could say it was a bit like Syn FM but with a localised range of the senior campus of our country school.

Wide eyed and bushy tailed we entered the studio (the school principal’s office) for our first lunchtime broadcast, we opened the show with Pantera’s Five Minutes Alone, Mr Bungle’s Squeeze Me Macaroni, and no doubt crowd favourites from Pearl Jam, Nirvana or, I dare say, Silverchair.

It was our first and last show, the wailing sounds of Dime Bag’s guitar and Mike Patton’s loud and immutable vocals were just too much for the poor sods in the halls of the tech faculty. Moments into the show, and narrowly avoiding a fist-fight, we reluctantly agreed to pull the plug on our radio dream.

Years later, it was still discussed as a ‘what could have been event’ for the  Secondary College, and as the school really didn’t boast to much other than cheating on the Naplan test, they were in need of a positive talisman. Our radio program could have been that talisman!

Though, it became the first and last form of empirical research into whether such a thing could ever work, there was debate over whether a show broadcast only to the people in our senior campus could be considered ‘radio’ at all, especially as we had only aired one episode! However, on reading Michelle Hilmes paper The New Materiality of Radio, I am going to return this flash-in-the-pan experiment back into the realms of radio as it was soundwork dammit— a creative, constructed aural text that employed the basic elements of speech, music and noise.

It was radio, people wanted to hear it… we just needed to turn down the volume somewhat and cater to the more easy-listening tastes of our rural brethren.

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Geolocational Podcasts – How Could I Ever Stay Mad at You!

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This was an idea that I recently fell out of love with.

In a nutshell, I wanted to contribute to a program that delivers podcasts to your smartphone via GPS, as to which podcast it delivers will depend on where you are in the world.

Even if the assignment constraints mean that the idea will never come to fruition, it would still be a good thing to research and exhibit.

 

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https://www.google.com/patents/US20110319098

 

Pilgrimage to American Land Art

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 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/soundproof/energy-grids/6463052

Presented by Miyuki Jokiranta, Energy Grids for Nadio National’s Soundproof explores Chris Abrahams and Sherre DeLys’ pilgrimage to American land art sculpture Walter De Maria.

The sculpture spans out across the New Mexico Desert consisting of 400 stainless steel poles installed in a grid pattern, each cell measuring one mile by one kilometre. The music score in this piece is intended to geometrically imitate Walter De Maria’s grid, the sonic interludes frame many of the visual explanations, like the colour of the sky, the light reflecting from the poles and the setting sun.

We enter the scene through a short car ride where much of the conversation is off mic, like we’re eavesdropping. As we stubble out of the vehicle, the pace slows as our narrator meditatively describes the landscape. For something so visual, it captures space nicely.

 

Stay Tuned!

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Now that I’ve had an in-depth one-on-one conversation with my tutor Kyla about my 4th Assignment, I am confident that I have solidified a plan, however, I’m pretty close to abandoning the lot!
My original idea is centred around ‘location’ using a geonavigation app that delivers videos, interviews, podcasts and audio tours that are about where ever it is you’re standing.  It is an app for your smartphone and it works by ascertaining where you are through GPS, so for example, if I was in St Kilda, I would click on St Kilda on a Google maps style map, and it would play a story about the area.
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As I’m sensing that this idea sucks, I am returning to the drawing board. I still want to include a strong emersive sense of location with an ‘art housey’ feel but instead of a tourist app, it will be more like a podcast about something that is quintessentially Melbourne.
Stay tuned!

Yidaki by The Yarra with Kent Morris (field)

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COMM2625 MEDIA 2 – Field Production 11th of September 2015
Daniel Bowden
s3521907

SITE LINK: http://s3521907.wix.com/audioorganica#!yidaki-by-the-yarra/vdi3u

‘Yidaki’ is the traditional name for the didgeridoo, it has a unique sound quality that becomes amplified when played in the ‘sweet-spot’ under the arch of the Morell Bridge.

Kent Morris, who is playing the yidaki in this production, is a Songwriter, Producer, Musician and CEO of The Torch in Victoria.

Kent is also a proud descendent of the Barkindji people of the Darling River in New South Wales and here in this piece, we are able to understand the Morell space, not only in an aural context but in a cultural and spiritual one too.

Yidaki by the Yarra with Kent Morris

This work consists of recordings made on a short trip to the Morell Bridge in South Yarra with Songwriter, Producer and The Torch CEO, Kent Morris. It features Kent’s yidaki (didgeridoo) playing performed and recorded at the location by the river.

The piece is introduced with a brief phone conversation inviting Kent to be apart of the project and eventually, an informal interview inside Kent’s kombi that uncovers the challenges of Kent’s work as a producer. This in-car conversation is included in order to provide the listener with Kent’s background which I’m hoping will enrich the experience of listening to his playing.

In the background can be heard a CD of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s album Rrakala. This reinforces Kent’s own indigenous heritage and the fact that the location, Birrarung, is important to Aboriginal people, hence my decision to record a traditional instrument such as the yidaki there.

Another important reason for recording the yidaki in this space, is that its sound quality highlights the echoes and the organic delay effect caused by the bridge’s parabolic underside of smooth curved bricks. The clap sticks served to further elaborate the effect of the bridge on the sound quality as well as heightening the piece’s cultural context.

The recording equipment that I used included an H6 Zoom recorder with a 120 degree axis X/Y mic plus two phantom powered Rode studio condenser upright microphones. To achieve the maximum left/right pan width, I had to separate the two condenser mics approximately 4 metres apart, and positioned to the edges of the balustrade above. The Zoom mic and recorder remained central to the span of the bridge, between the condenser mics and at speaking height to produce a symmetrical

sound split. The sounds that were closer to the space, like the yidaki and the voice, were primarily picked up by the Zoom and anything beyond the space, like the traffic and the pedestrians, were picked up by the condenser mics. Much of the session was spent readjusting the microphones’ positions, so that I could achieve the best possible example of the sound space.

The time of the recording session took place after 10pm due to Kent’s daytime commitments and it was serendipitous that we were confined to recording late because the freeway was quieter and so too was the normally busy bike path that runs through the space.

My interest in natural acoustics came from Trevor Cox’s article Past Echoes (2010) that was cited on Radio National’s Radiotonic edition entitled Volume Without Sparks by Timothy Nicastri (2015). Had I had more time, I may have produced further acoustic experiments where I explore how different curved surfaces affect the sound of different instruments. Having sadly not achieved all that I wanted to due to time restraints, I have again been made aware of the time management that must go into all Radio’s New Wave projects.

Kent and HughiePhoto by Andrew Englisch (2014).

_____

 

References;

  • Cox, T, (21 August, 2010), Pg. 44, Past Echoes: New Scientist, London UK , Reed Elsevier.
  • Gurrumul Yunupingu, G, (2011), [CD], Rrakala, NT Australia, Skinnyfish Music.
  • Nicastri, T, (17th of April, 2015), Volume Without Sparks – Radiotonic, Radio National, Australia.

Yidaki Symphony with Kent Morris

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COMM2625 MEDIA 2 – Studio Production 11th of September 2015
Daniel Bowden
s3521907

Have you ever wondered what would happen if the yidaki (didgeridoo) had a sonic duel with the soundscape of the city at 131 beats per minute in a 4/4 time signature? Hit PLAY to find out!!

Yidaki Symphony with Kent Morris – CEO of The Torch

This work incorporates the recording of Kent’s yidaki (the traditional name didgeridoo) and clap- sticks recorded on location with a host of other sound textures that were audible at the site of The Morell Bridge. The piece is a representation of how sounds have built up over time at this location, using a push-pull motion that has been influenced by Felix Blume’s oeuvre, most notably in his piece Les Gritos de Mexico (2014).

Yidaki Symphony is about the location of the Morell Bridge. In the field recording, Kent has commented that Birrarung, which is the traditional name of this area, has changed for the worst — yet ultimately, it still holds spiritual power. This piece is entitled Yidaki Symphony, which is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek name that reflects the fact that, in this day and age, the sounds of the city have become those of the traditional corroboree.

The piece represents a tug of war between cultures, new and old, and is structured according to a loose chronological timeline running in reverse from; the city’s overdevelopment, western invasion, people, wildlife and then the river.

It begins with an electrical buzz that pans from left to right which signals industrial development. Although it goes against the chronology of the story, after consulting with my peers, I needed to a) begin the piece less abruptly and b) have something that will grab the listeners intention so to engage them further.

The footsteps are an important feature as they symbolise aboriginal culture striving to readjust to find their place during the insurgence of western domination. The footsteps meander to one side and are then followed with sounds of industry until eventually, they are forced to run. However, as the yidaki pulls focus, as the piece draws to a close, it is to remind us of the continued Aboriginal presence throughout western development.

The bridge itself is the centre of the story of how that part of the river, Birrarung, has changed since colonisation, resonating both aurally and culturally.

The sounds of the clock, jet, birds, traffic, truck, sirens thunder, footsteps, wind, river, pick axe and electricity have been sourced from freesounds.org, Favourite Australian Bird Song CD and my own foley produced in the studio. Kent’s playing of the yidaki was recorded live at Morell Bridge with a Zoom H6 recorder and two Rode condenser microphones, they were treated in postproduction to extend their decay in certain phrases. To heighten the rhythmic element of the piece, I have placed all audio files on a 4/4 time signature grid set to a tempo of 131 BPM.

I’ve always sort honesty and conviction in art, Radio’s New Wave has extended from reporting to just that… art. In order to frame a text in Radio’s New Wave, according to Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad, sounds such as music, foley and the warping of the original are often called upon to sustain an emotive audience. However, a fine balance must be struck when producing nonfiction artefacts, because, such sonic affectations run the risk of being distracting and annoying. They may have an adverse affect to the truth if not used sparingly.

The figure above is the studio in preparation and below, is a look at the packed-to-the-gills Protools session.

 

_____________ References;

  • Adumrad, J R. Krulwich (2007) [PODCAST] Making Radio Lab, RadioLab, WNYC.
  • Blume, F. (2014), [PODCAST], Les Gritos de Mexico, France, ArteRadio.
  • Skeoch, A & Koschak, S (2001) Favourite Australian Bird Song – Castlemaine Victoria,Listening Earth.
  • ACM International Conference on Multimedia (2013), [DATABASE] Freesound TechnicalDemo, Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Multimedia, ACM.

Babylon?

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An intimate narrator’s voice sitting somewhere between diegetic and non-diegetic contrasts the wide and open calling over an exterior space. There were several repetitions of specific phrases however I wasn’t sure what sort of impact this was supposed to have on the overall affect of the piece.
Actors were used to carry the story, most notably, the male voice over, his warm, jovial and slightly jocucular performance accompanied by a crisp recording made for a superb coupling of elements.
This gave me some ideas for the delivery of my next project.
TITLE
HOW MANY MILES TO BABYLON? OR 13 EASY PIECESPRODUCEDKAYE MORTLEY
PRESENTED
THE LISTENING ROOM, ABC, AUSTRALIA, 2006COLLECTIONLIBRARY SPOTLIGHT TAGSINTERNATIONAL, NOSTALGIA, YOUTH

Los Gritos de Mexico

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Les Cris de Mexico – Prix Pierre-Schaeffer 2015 – Félix Blum

THE SCREAMS OF MEXICO

…Certainly caught my attention on the drop. Chaos to silence, then a controlled studio separation  of the each noise. Split, huge! So wide, left and right, then right became closer when the woman screamed as if walking up to me, however, the police sirens remained at a distance. My thunder sound is better, this did not translate the 80Hz rumble felt with thunder. Distance, distance, rain, yell, sing strike a  minor 2nd harmony. The condo, a natural abstraction of the pacific gull’s squeal.

Nice.

http://www.abc.net.au/…/soundp…/los-gritos-de-mexico/6743988