Project: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1VfIyzIFqipR3gokWn08cwCsnR3TpPw4r

A Timelapse in Sound is a project undertaken over several weeks, designed to reflect the most important sounds of the world over the last 2000 years. Our goal was to condense as many of the sounds of human civilisation and development as possible into a 3 minute soundscape, in a similar fashion to the typical visual time lapse. The key concepts this project was based around are soundscape and spatially. In regards to the former, we wanted to create a highly progressive experience with high quality unfiltered samples which are easily recognisable and perpetually subvert the listeners attention to them. Some strong inspiration for our soundscape came from the work of Pierre Schaeffer, the pioneer of the musical style musique concrète. According to Bates (2013), “What is integral to musique concrète is the reliance upon recorded sound, whether it be ‘found,’ ‘everyday,’ ‘natural’ or otherwise” (pp.21). Using this, we decided to primarily use samples that were recorded ourselves from outside sources (however in some facets of our project, use of non-recorded sound such as MIDI was mostly unavoidable).

A fundamental component of musique concrete is ‘reduced listening’, which is “the audible act of attending to the sound apart from its source” (Kane, pp.28), a component that relates allowed Schaeffer to compose pieces using “sound fragments that exist in reality” but that also “are considered as discrete and complete sound objects” (Schaeffer, 1948). Bates also refers to Schaeffer’s concept of ‘reduced listening’ as a key component of musique concrete, however, he argues that “it is inevitable that sounds have associations for the listener” (Bates, pp.24). While a soundscape based around reduced listening may have been effective in a different project, we decided to go the opposite way, and invite the listener to make their own associations with all the sounds displayed in our project. This is for two reasons: having more recognisable, distinct sounds will allow the listener to feel the progression we intended, as the advancement through the years becomes far more noticeable with certain sounds serving as ‘landmarks’ for them to focus on. The second reason is related to a core theme we decided to explore in our project; sensory overload. Our project has a strong focus on modern sounds, to involve a greater percentage of our target audience by providing them with relatable, relevant sounds. Living in a society in which technology is growing rapidly, and advertisements fight progressively harder to win the consumer’s attention, exploring this theme through sound was a way to allow us to intentionally pack modern sounds into our project for the audience, but with a far stronger thematic tie.

Another inspiration for implementing this theme is the discussions from prominent soundscape artist R.M Schafer, in which he applies the terms hi-fi and lo-fi to different facets of the soundscape; the hi-fi system is “one possessing a favourable signal to noise ratio”, allowing specific sounds to be heard and separated more readily due to the low ambient noise level, with the opposite being true for lo-fi sound, which are “obscured in an over dense population of sounds” (Schafer, 1977). We wanted to experiment with these ideas in a way that would fit thematically with our project; while the samples themselves would gradually increase in quality towards the higher end of fidelity, to indicate the improving technology of the time, the number of samples as well as the amount of ambient noise would increase too, pushing the soundscape towards the lower end of fidelity in Schafer’s ideology.

We also wanted to explore the concept of spatiality in our project. We did this by envisioning the listener in the centre of our time-lapse as the world and its sounds developed around them, using effects such as EQ shift, compression and pan to achieve this. While this was a more supplementary, less explored concept to our project than that of the soundscape, we wanted as much as possible to immerse the listener in the experience, taking inspiration from other sound projects such as Realscape Productions’ Seance, an interactive audio performance which played with spatiality to cause listeners to imagine and visualise things conveyed by the audio. As our project is strictly audio based with no visual component, we wanted to implement spatiality in a similar way, to encourage listeners to imagine the time-lapse in a visual sense.

 

 

References

Bates, N.J (2013). Sampling and the Sound Object in Contemporary Sonic Art. 

Kane, B (2014). “Pierre Schaeffer, the Sound Object, and the Acousmatic Reduction.” Sound Unseen, Oxford University Press.

Schaeffer, P (1948). In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. Christine North and John Dack. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Schafer, R.M (1977). The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Destiny Books, 1993