My Short Sound Collage

Our first week assignment was to make a sound collage that tells a story of a space. I downloaded some sound clips from freesound.org and mixed them together on Adobe Audition.

My response to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Ted Talk titled “The Danger of a Single Story”

Stories are powerful, they determine what we believe, what we perceive and our response to certain situations. Stories are a big form of influence. My interpretation of this talk is that we all have our different perspectives and those perspectives come from information we’ve been exposed to or lack thereof. 

There is always a going to be a danger of a single story. We all tell stories from our perspectives and as human beings; our opinions and perspectives differ. The main thing is to be ready to adjust our thinking and perspectives when we realize we’ve been wrong.

I was brought into awareness that the way I tell a story matter. Stories have the power to determine what people believe based on how strong it is told.

She stated, ‘Show a people as one thing, as only one thing over and over again and that is what they become.’

I think from the concept of crafting stories whether non-fiction or fiction, I can conclusively say from this statement and the whole talk that the power of focusing on one thing or an idea in a story will make the narrative believable to the audience or listener.

For example, in film-making, we are told stories from the perspective of the director. We are not actually seeing what is happening behind the scenes, we are only seeing what the director wants us to see, and from there we  individually determine our perspective and interpretation of the story.

History of Sound Art

I liked the first piece that I heard, I think it started from 0:00secs to 3:25secs. When I first heard the sound, my first impression was space, vacuum, something empty. It reminded me of sounds from sci-fi movies like an aircraft in space or a person floating in space; a movie like Interstellar.

The sound felt like it was moving, coming from a distance, humming, and then it moves closer, humming loudly. At a point, it’s almost as if it was vibrating (like a combination of wind and vibration), then it became flat (low), like it faded in to the atmosphere, then it picked up again, louder. And I heard birds whistling in the background.

The voices that eventually started to speak feels static over the ‘moving space’. At the beginning, the voices are loud and clear, it feels like they are in a hollow environment, like a vacuum. Sometimes the sounds were higher than the voices. It’s like high, then low, then high and low again.

At 2:06secs to 3:22secs, there is a female voice whose voice sounds like it’s echoing and I get a sense that she is speaking to another individual in a low tone, sort of like, the person is close to her.