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).