Day 0.5 • 8am Session

This week I did a big push and got quite a bit done. I built a whole section with Tibetan bowl recordings I did with Ana, a film artist here doing a documentary of 4DSOUND. The past two days I’ve done two mini showings for other artists in the building. I was at a place again where I was feeling not so sure about what I was creating, but getting a lot of positive feedback from people has been really helpful to reassuring me I’m on the right track. I’ve never been so insecure about anything I’ve created, it’s weird. What’s actually the most encouraging is that people take a solid 5 minutes to say anything or stand up after the piece finishes (or what is currently my ending). They need a second to come back to earth which tells me they’ve actually achieved a meditative state. Which is super cool. The piece is currently 23 minutes, I think I still have 20 more minutes of content to build-but it could be less. Actually it could be more. I really don’t know at this point. 

Today Vlad set up the iPad as a controller for me to trigger my scenes remotely as I walk around or see how it sounds in different areas of the studio. So now I don’t have to keep running back to my computer to trigger each scene. This is very useful for listening in creation, and I have been considering using it for the performance. But that scares me a little. Like if something’s going wrong I can’t see the details of the issue. I’ll think on it a bit more. But I’m happy for the iPad right now, and how quickly and simply it was set up. Crazy. Technology. 

As I move onto this next section of ‘third eye’, the imagery gets less concrete and tied to earthly sound I can recreate like fire or water. But I like this challenge of giving sound to a feeling or idea. On a separate note, I initially built this one section that has the sound of a forrest fire and built a sound object that starts small and grows to encompass the whole room. After listening to it for a few days, I knew there was something not quite right about it. Then as I was waking up one morning to head into the studio, an idea popped into my mind that I should make the object smaller and rely more on a spatial delay to spread the sound around the room. I also made it so the spacial delay grows with the object, instead of starting at it’s biggest point. These small tweaks add this extra element of movement and texture that just brings the sound to life. In both showings it was a highlight that people brought up afterwards. Yeah, I think I’m on a good track. Now I’m working on a starscape. What do stars sound like?