Sound Investigations
Ideas
The upper limit of the human ear’s perceivable range decreases with age. In Hong Kong, there is a popular high-pitched ringtone students often use to text each other in class, because though their older teachers could hear vibrating alerts, they could not hear this high sound. A girl in my French class showed me this. Our teacher couldn’t hear it at all, even when she set the volume at its loudest. The rest of the class could, though, and complained very loudly when the tone was played on maximum volume.
Most people react to pleasant sounds with relaxation and comfort, but with discomfort to unpleasant sounds even when they’re quiet. Even plants and animals respond to sounds; It is actually true that music can be used to stimulate the growth of certain crops. Also, buzzing sounds affect the pollination of tomato plants and mechanical buzzers are often used in greenhouses for this purpose.
Sound and voice: very good mediums of communication in writing. The meaning of the words actually do very little to get ideas across. It is hard to make a character sound evil when the sound of their “voice”, i.e. the tone you would imagine their words with, is sweet and naive. Hence we have sound poetry: getting rid of the meaning of the words all together, and only keeping the meaning of the sounds.
Artists
“Musical instruments produce sounds. Composers produce music. Musical instruments reproduce music. Tape recorders, radios, disc players, etc., reproduce sound. A device such as a wind-up music box produces sound and reproduces music. A phonograph in the hands of a hip hop/scratch artist who plays a record like an electronic washboard with a phonographic needle as a plectrum, produces sounds which are unique and not reproduced – the record player becomes a musical instrument. A sampler, in essence a recording, transforming instrument, is simultaneously a documenting device and a creative device, in effect reducing a distinction manifested by copyright.”
- John Oswald
Canadian sound artist born in Kitchener, ON. He is also a saxphonist, composer, media artist, and dancer. His most well-known piece is “Pluderphonics”, in which he made new recordings out of previously existing ones. This is called a “sound collage”. He played songs backwards, clipped them, played more than one together, etc etc.
Yoko Ono
Best known for her marriage to John Lennon. She was born in Tokyo, and moved to the US and back to Japan several times at a young age. She survived the fire-bombing of Tokyo. Her father died in a concentration camp in Vietnam; back at home, she was teased and excluded by other children. She was the first woman to be accepted into her university’s philosophy program, but she left after only two semesters. She was also part of Fluxus, a network of artists best known for blending media.
Michael Snow
Also Canadian. Born in Toronto. Well-known for film-making. Considered to be very influential. Also an improvising jazz musician. The Canadian geese hanging in the Eaton center are one of his pieces, called Flightstop. He is also responsible for the sculptures of fans over the northeastern and northwestern entrances of Skydome. This piece is called The Audience.
Flightstop
The Audience, over the northwestern entrance
