聲音課心得

        First thing to say ,I had a lot of fun during the week I was working for the project.

       Actually, I was quite worry about the demo that day at 寶藏巖, because I haven't seen the whole piece yet before the demonstration. Fortunately, the surprises(mistakes) were not that bad, someone was even touched by them.

       The original of this project is those old folk songs which my parents often played during my childhood, my father even whistled when he was showering, those are vivid images in my memory. I don't get rid of these images until now even they don't play much in recent years. Sometimes, I would find some old folk songs to listen, I like them, they bring me back into some old stories. They are part of me. Then, recently there were two songs remind me of the varieties of quality of sound from different recording and playback devices, they are 林生祥's "菊花夜行軍" and 純純's "月夜愁". I realized that the noise in the recordings and the "bad quality"(most people would say it bad) of the recordings really make differences, they are tactile, and I see them as textures of a particular period. I'm lucky, because I'm able to access to almost any kind sound devices, from vinyl to mp3. And Yannick has said that if I ask people to show how they play music would be interesting, so the idea about "play a song for you" suddenly comes out. That's it, the story of the birth of the project. Next I'm going to talk about what I've learned from the entire project.

        I found something interesting about music in a sound project. At first, I couldn't imagine that there will be a whole song in my project, because people tend to focus on the melody of the music whatever the type of it when it comes out , and then define the sound as "music", this action is quite dangerous for listening a sound project, so trying not to let music appear in my project is my first thought. The group which recorded chess sound has similar concern so they decided to shorten the part of there recording that include music. The group recorded the sound of cafe and the group showed the commercial-like video faced some problem with this, too. So dealing with music in a sound project is really a big deal. However, the problem seems not so serious in my project, though the whole song goes through the entire video. I think it is because the environment and the qualities of the songs coming from each sources were really different. The gaps between each sections are great, so audiences may have a strong conflict at the transitions, then try to feel the differences and have fun in it.

         The second thing I learned is about communicating with strangers when I'm wearing a camera. Even I show respect and try to be really humble and harmless, they still fear to face the camera, and don't  care about what my purpose is. In this situation, try to talk about some old folk songs seems working great, at least they know I tend to do something with the songs they are also interested to. Find some common interest to talk about is never a bad start.

         And I have two surprises(forget the mistake in the video, ha), one is the the quality of Yannick's  equipment, the quality of the sound is super good. Actually, I would have been stunned by the gorgeous sound if I didn't have to hold the camera. I haven't realized that the effect of a equipment could be that huge. Unfortunately, I couldn't bring all the audiences to Yannick's room (and other places in the video) :P This remind me of the fact that no matter how good is the recording device, once the sound (the situation) is recorded, it is distorted. But I still can give the audiences a clue, they may listen carefully next time when they find some interesting listening situations, that's all I can do with the limitation of the form of demonstration.

          Another surprise is that almost everyone had fun while they were watching and listening to the video. I think one of the reasons is that everyone are familiar with the content, so can be easily touched. It's just that the technology is developing and spreading so fast that people soon take it for granted , so they don't pay much attention on the differences that everyone should have already noticed. Anyway, I'm glad to see surprises and joy of audiences.

          I'm not going to do the similar work recently, or at most one piece more, because the form is  almost developed, the rest things to do are just find some new place, new people, new devices, also funny but not that much; discovering a way to put things and ideas together and realize it is much fun, that's my favorite word - tinkering. Yannick has talked about this notion in the class, try to do more instead of letting the process to be like this: an idea come out --> realize it --> done. I was surprised at the moment when he said that, and one day I suddenly figured out , Oh! It's tinkering!

          Thank for this class, give me a new way to discover a place with sound now(like this), I think dealing with "soundscape" is mainly about this process. And that is the next step.

                                                                                                                             
                                                                                                                                        Loooffy



the two songs I have metioned about in the essay:

• 純純's "月夜愁"
• 林生祥's "菊花夜行軍"