Day: September 14, 2015

Full Circle

September 14, 2015 — Leave a comment

https://soundcloud.com/donandsherri/full-circle

Acting as an exposé of the importance of active role models in the lives of underprivileged children housed in Commission Estates in the Northern Suburbs; ‘Full Circle’ address the responsibility that coach Omar Coles has on the trajectory of his young kids lives.

Full circle draws on the recommendations that Kyla gave me in regards to repetition and variation, and the integral part that they play in the structure of a narrative and the engagement of an audience. To achieve a greater level of engagement, I cut a piece of Omar’s dialogue and insert it at the beginning of the piece, then immediately cut back to the feature itself. By doing this I hoped to shock the listener and take them from what they were expecting to happen next and make them listen more intently.

I treated the structure of ‘Full Circle’ as a piece comprised of 2 halves and 3 movements as a further attempt to employ the repetition and variation technique of audience engagement. The two halves act in a highly succinct manner, however they change from a observational piece, where Omar is the only subject of the narrative; into an interactive piece, where myself as a producer interrupts the observational nature. This change in focus from the subject to both Omar and myself further aims to aid in the flow of the narrative and draws the attention away from the thin texture of the background sounds.

Using only sounds derived from the field recordings proved to be a lot more difficult than I had imagined, as I thoroughly enjoy painting vast soundscapes comprised of sounds derived from a mixture of places. This difficulty may be due to the fact that I was only able to record a limited amount of audio over the course of the project. Having only about 50 different sounds and approximately 10 interviews to work with definitely made it a more challenging effort than I had first imagined. However, acting in complete contradiction to this, I found that having a scarcity of material to work with made me listen more intently to the stories being told and the kind of narrative that I aimed to portray.

The concept of the piece is designed to emulate the whole process of the Basketball program and the journey I went through to get there and record the sounds. By having the music I was listening to on the way there playing, in order to emulate the experience of listening to music through headphones and then dropping it out; the listener is drawn into the world. The dialogue of Omar furthers this immersing nature of the piece, as the basketball program itself often pulls out of the fun nature of training to offer poignant pieces of information to act as motivation to keep going (or keep listening).

C.R.E.A.M

September 14, 2015 — Leave a comment

https://soundcloud.com/donandsherri/cream-clouds-rule-everything-around-me

C.R.E.A.M (Clouds Rule Everything Around Me) acts to encapsulate the multifaceted approach that studio sounds have on an audio piece and their ability to augment an environment while still staying true to the story.

The literal locale of the piece acted as both inspiration and detriment for myself as the producer, for I found that the unwelcoming and downtrodden environment of the Atherton Gardens Commission Homes both scared me and intrigued me. Having the already well founded frameworks of the Helping Hoops Basketball program to work under, I felt comforted in the knowledge that I would not be hassled too much; however, when I went out to record all the background sounds, I felt highly vulnerable and out of my comfort zone.

The experience surrounding the act of recording the sounds for the ’24 Hour Folio’ was a wash of excitement and anticipation that unfortunately often culminated into a lackluster affair, where sounds blurred into one and became somewhat indistinguishable. However, this muddiness and non distinct nature that the sounds took, also acted to generate new and unique sounds that employed their blurred aspects.

By centering the conceptual piece around ‘the life of a Helping Hoops coach’, I aimed to take the listener on a journey through their weekly routine of arriving to work; and play on the idea that through this repetition, the coaches could almost find a beat and melody in the mundane banal sides of their session. The washed out children’s voices and the coupling of the Cello to the beat of their footsteps acts as testament to this beat in repetition. By adding a reverb emulator to the children’s voices, the piece was able to effectively create a sense of distance; however I feel that the distance felt by the listener was a literal one, rather than the mental one I had hoped to create.

After receiving feedback from my last pieces, I headed into the production of C.R.E.A.M with a more genuine approach to narrative and the cause & effect relationship that generates listener engagement and interaction. C.R.E.A.M as a conceptual piece, employs three different scenes or movements, and aims to transition through each scene with bridging Cello sounds. By softening the transition between scenes with the Cello, I attempted to draw less attention to the changes in locale, and further this sense of noises culminating inside the coach’s head to reach a washed out feeling.