Excited to embark on the third and final part of this studio! I feel I am now ready to dive deep into all the interesting things I have learnt and discovered in the last seven weeks. Although, to be honest, I’m struggling to come up with that perfect idea or story I want to explore for my final assessment. Since the beginning I have had a particular area I’d like to explore but I’m unable to envisage how I can turn it into something I can create, present or even submit.

With everything we have learnt to do with sound whether its exploring ‘change’ in sound design, orchestration, the voices and instruments that comprise an ensemble, timbre, the tone colour of a sound and its unique sound print, sonic density, how thick or sparse a sound is, how tension is built, textures, polyphony (many voices all voices are equal), monophony (single naked voice), homophony and monody (voice and accompaniment is slave to the voice, secondary), counterpoint & trio (two or three equal voices bouncing off each other), the range of sound whether its wide range to make a place feel big or shifting range to give a sense of rising and falling, frequencies (giving each voice a place in the mix), articulation and decay, staccato (short sharp ‘pointy’ sounds), macato (clear, ‘marked’ hardish sounds), slurred (‘soft’ flowing, undulating sounds), rhythm and pace and sonic framework…I’m ready to use this blind, invisible, ephemeral and conversational medium to the best of my abilities.

ANYWAY…I have a bit of an architecture background – My dad was a draftsman, my brother has one year left of his Masters of Architecture and my housemate is also studying architecture. So with the new knowledge and skills I’ve obtained from this studio I am eager to create something to do with the spatial aspects of sound alongside an examination of the transformative and temporal dimensions of space. Within architecture, every built space can modify, position, reflect or reverberate the sounds that occur there. Sound embraces and transcends the spaces in which it occurs, opening up a consummate context for the listener: the acoustic source and its surroundings unite into a unique auditory experience. I’ve been reading a lot into the materiality of sound and recently discovered how extensively architects work with sound. For instance the new School of Music at the University of Iowa literally shapes sound using complex parametric modeling to create a high performance theatroacoustic system. You can find out more here –

http://architizer.com/projects/university-of-iowa-school-of-music-suspended-theatroacoustic-system/

I also recently watch a TED talk by sound expert Julian Treasure in which he advocated that its time “to start designing for our ear.” Check it out.

Julians talk make me entirely rethink what the architecture of sound is and what it can be.

“How many times have you gone to a beautifully designed restaurant but can’t hear the person you are sitting across from? Or how often do you have trouble understanding a flight attendant as they speak into a plane’s muffled overhead speaker?”

Like I said, at the moment I’m unsure where exactly to go with this interesting topic but there is lots to go into… maybe I could explore the various issues found in schools and hospitals due to poor sound environments, and the negative effects they have on our health and productivity?

Radio literacy is increasing and audiences are eager to hear more innovative sounds and stories. After last weeks talk with Miyuki Jokiranta and Catherine Gough-Brady I am committed to exploring the possibilities of radio… so whatever it is I choose to do, I need get a good grasp of radios distinct capabilities – especially its power to create an intimacy that is unparallelled by any other media…

I am not sure if I want to go back to studying film and television – this studio has steered me into the tip of the iceberg and now there’s just so much more explore!

Heres the link to my website where you can listen to all four works…

http://jack-connor.weebly.com/

This piece was inspired by an article I read in The Age by Heather Holst titled ‘Too many lack a place to call their own’. It brought about the idea of having a studio discussion about the facts and issues discussed in the article, but also with the addition of some of my own experiences being on the estate. This piece was also strongly influenced by Radiolabs Jad Abumrads audio conference Music: A Force For Good (And Sometimes Evil). Generally most Radiolab pieces I have listened to played a roll in shaping this piece, for instance my opening montage was intended to sound similar to theirs. The discussion of music as punctuation really resonated with me and I felt this piece was an opportunity to test my ability to utilise music correctly. I wanted to explore ways of using music to lift my monotonous voice and to connect listeners to the emotional life of the story. I made sure so as not to just put it over everything but instead use it as a comma. I tried to fade it in and out making the listener pay attention and also using it as a kind of full stop, dividing the narrative into chapters.

Chris Abrahams and Sherre DeLys’ Energy Grids really influenced they way I used sound to portray a place. I used similar eerie sounds of squawking crows and peculiar electric noises to enhance the spoken words. Although I enjoyed exploring sounds capacity to convey meaning, I found it extremely difficult to avoid words becoming the focus of the piece. Once voice is introduced is difficult to fade it out and use sound to communicate the rest of the story. I tried to just use the studio discussion and location narration as way of grouping material into meaningful chunks whilst letting sound be the tool for carving out time, establishing an emotional tone by either speeding it up or slowing it down.

I think this particular piece has taught me to listen in a deeper and more nuanced way. I have noticed that there are endless possibilities in terms of creating emotion when using material generated from the studio. I have found that it is often quite intuitive, after listening to a sentence over and over you start to hear the sounds you can add over the top. I am lucky enough to live in a house that contains a vast amount of musical equipment, hence why there is often faint keyboard and drum machine sounds heard.

This piece centred itself around a tiny section of interview I recorded. I asked Aleisha, a resident of the estate, what she didn’t like about the place and she replied with a short response, “the junkies and the alcoholics”. This response inspired me to record sounds that put you in the shoes of one of those junkies. The piece manifested itself in a very different way due to the way I constructed the piece using scenes I had in mind as appose to a written out structure. All I had to work from was my imagination and five words. Originally, I had the intention to kind of float in and out of different emotions, however the narrative/story/message wasn’t strong enough to inspire and push me to create something aurally engaging. Instead, I decided to stick with the one feeling, which to me was a feeling of isolation and distress.
After listening to the opening sequence of Hearing voices by John Wynne I decided to include the tram sounds at the beginning and end to signal the endless dreary repetition of life as a junkie. At times I went for a wide range to make a place feel big and played around with the frequencies so as to give each voice a place in the mix and to give a sense of clarity and at times muddiness to the sounds. Radiolabs Jad Abumrads audio conference, Music: A Force For Good (And Sometimes Evil), gave me lots of tips and things to remember in terms of the power that music has on a piece. I used the music as a collector and channeller of previously created emotion, rather than the device that creates the emotion, which I am often guilty of doing. With the scenes in mind I altered the music from Diegetic to non-diegetic allowing the music to switch to full frontal and create the effect of the junkie escaping to another place. I then allowed music to frame the picture and tell the listener where they are; framing the experience so it was as if the camera was panning into the other room where a family was preparing dinner.
I think a significant change in the way I think about Radio’s New Wave is that organization is key in terms of field production work. I have learnt that rather than going to the location without a story and just recording everything I hear is often a waste of time. It’s important to go to the location with a story so as to avoid returning again and again to gather more sounds. Looking forward to further push the boundaries of how I can use the sound of a location to tell a story.

A video I made for KMS/Oyster went live today. Check it out

This piece manifested itself in a very different way to anything I have worked on before. I would typically edit to an audio file, using the music to convey emotion and guide the listeners through the piece. Approaching the project in a different way allowed me to formulate a more engaging, participant driven story. I collated groups of audio files and established ‘scenes’ that would form the structure of my feature. I filtered through the content to find a ‘hook’ that would set the scene and allow me to understand how the piece might take shape.
A strong part of this piece I focused on is the preconceived ideas of what the people are like. “The more you know, the more you know you do not know” (Bolton 2009) The more I got to know Aleisha and how she came to be a resident of Atherton Gardens, the less I realised I knew about her. Any preconceived ideas of what people living here would be like and how they came to be living here soon faded. It was when she revealed to me that her mother had committed suicide on the estate, which must have been an extremely difficult and traumatic event, that I realized that the anonymity of radio provided each person I interviewed the opportunity to articulate their experiences, without the distraction of their visual representation.
In critiquing my piece, I feel I could have given more background on Atherton Gardens in the introduction and that the piece also lacked a climax. I didn’t want the piece to be heavily informational, as I wanted the listener to use their imagination to visualise the place from the voices and background sounds. I now see that this may have left the listener unclear in some areas. I also think that had I explored other recording devices, such as solid state recorders, radio microphones, hard-wire lapel microphones, boom poles, shotgun microphones and portable mixers, I may have ended up with a much richer sound production. I decided to work with the technology I knew.
Overall, I think the fact that I pushed myself out of my comfort zone made this project much more rewarding. It is easy to not explore sensitive issues and produce work that is an expression of what we feel comfortable with. I definitely I stayed away from this and will continue to do so in the future.

“Stories make sense of ourselves and ourworld. This world and our lives within it are complex and chaotic: seemingly governed by forces not only beyond our control, but beyond our understanding. We tell and retell episodes both minor and major to colleagues, loved ones, therapists and priests, strangers on the train, a wedding guest (Coleridge [1834] 1978). A dynamic way of grasping understanding, it prevents us being pawns in events seemingly beyond our control. The danger is that story making can merely be tucking ourselves securely under a quilt patchworked out of safe and self-affirming accounts: ourstories can only too easily be essentially uncritical. Or, even worse, they are censoring tools: ‘cover stories’ (Sharkey 2004). This self-protectiveness can ensure ourstories do not explore sensitive issues, but are expressions of what we feel comfortable with, or would like to be.” – Bolton

I found this in the drive and after reading it I am eager to produce work that isn’t just an expression of what I feel comfortable with. I need to push myself out of my comfort zone to create a piece that’s not just interesting for people to listen to but also rewarding for me.

I chose Atherton Gardens as the location for my assignment as it was a place that had stuck in my head since I’d arrived from Brisbane in March. Huge towers like the Yarra community housing estates don’t exist so close to the city in Brisbane, where I have been brought up. The architectural style reminded me of buildings I had seen in Russia, stark, cold and uninviting. I think this is why the location has had such an impact on me and has intrigued me. This project was an opportunity to investigate the space further and maybe understand the reason they exist and the types of people who live there.
I did a reconnaissance mission to the location to let me formulate ideas. I took photos and began observing and recording atmospheric sounds. As I walked around the area I took the opportunity to talk to some of the residents and recorded some interviews, but failed to get personal release forms. I didn’t think much of it at the time but it meant all those interesting conversations were unusable. However, the many rejections I experienced gave me some confidence to approach people on my second visit and also influenced the opening montage.
I recorded the location sounds using a Zoom H4n and the narration using a Behringer sm57. The narration recordings turned out to be poor quality so I re- recorded them using a Behringer sm7 with a windsock to avoid blowing out the levels. After replacing the new recordings I felt that the piece had lots its emotiveness, I think the second recordings sounds too scripted so I decided to leave the ones I had. I also had to deal with strong winds during my location recordings.
Everything I had listen to in terms of the different approaches to exploring sound and the various inflections and texures of ‘voice’ were bouncing around my head throughout post-production. I think ‘Poetry Texas’ by Falling Tree Productions had the most significant influence on this piece. I loved the way he narrated the piece and I imagined his experience walking around the small town was similar to mine in Atherton gardens. In addition to this I think this piece ended up with quite an American style, much like Serial hosted by Sarah Koenig.
Overall I think I had an advantage in terms of story potential but was disadvantaged by my access to people and I my lack of journalistic ability. It wasn’t as easy as rocking up somewhere and sticking a microphone in front of people. I often questioned the moral implications of documenting participants as I didn’t want my questions to make these often quite vulnerable people feel ashamed to live on the estate. I didn’t want to ask questions that seemed patronizing or remove any sense of pride they had in the area. I resorted to asking quite simple questions and I think this is the main thing that could be improved on in this piece.

Just returned from recording today. Really struggled to approach people for an interview. It wasn’t as easy as rocking up somewhere and sticking a microphone in front of people. I didn’t want my questions to make these sometimes quite vulnerable people feel ashamed to live on the estate. I asked rubbish questions like “so do you enjoy living here?” and just got bland responses like “yeah I guess I enjoy it”. I was putting words in there mouth. I didn’t want to ask questions that seemed patronising but at the same time I need to push people a little more to open up. Will try again tomorrow.

https://soundcloud.com/jack-connor-3/kate-kasby

The driving force behind my portrait of Kate Kasby is the conviction that someone’s surrounding environment can, conversely point to or even reveal what might otherwise be invisible in his or her personality. I feel that when entering a house of a person whom I know little about I really get a sense of who they are through what I see. So this is something I tried to focus on when interviewing Kate, I wanted to bring disparate images together to form a new and cohesive whole – an intersection of environment and identity. Kate coincidently had a great story about her sisters’ bar that is a ‘special’ place for her, this became central to the portrait.

Due to the projects length I knew I had to approach this task in a more artistic manner with a strong focus on vocal montage to create a rich audio vignette. I aimed to use voice over, archived sounds and music to characterise the person, this was inspired by the piece Just Another Fish Story by Molly Menschell. I really loved the way the voices ran over the top of each other whilst keeping a steady pace.

I recorded the interview using a Zoom H4n, unfortunately I didn’t quite have the levels right so there are a few minor blowouts in the final cut. Perhaps once my postproduction skills improve I’ll be able to overcome these kinds of issues. I also found it difficult to try and encourage the conversation without speaking too much so as to avoid being present in the edit.

I used some pre-recorded sounds to further the constructive engagement of interpretation and meaning. I wanted to re-contextualise the sounds to give them some creative appropriation. A swing-set can be faintly heard at the beginning as Kate talks about aspiring to be more like her sister. I thought of the swingset as a metaphor for this… to swish back your legs and kick them up ahead of you and keep your eyes on the skyline.

I didn’t want to continuously hammer information into the listener’s head so I used music composed by my brother to break the story. This allowed for emotional highs and lows, tension and release.

I think a key aspect that I will take away with me is that short projects like this one need to be textured, have a sense of randomness and the content should stripped apart to what stands out, even if it’s a simple happy story.