sadly i wasn’t able to attend the class this week due to migraine most likely caused by stress of assignments. being dyslexic makes art history modules very stressful once the assignments start, something that made me extremely unmotivated when i had to start my literature review on 1980s painting. interesting topic, but my writing skills will never be to the level i would like for them to be.
Personal project:
due to me being so unmotivated and the nature of my project being so aggressive in its language it was draining me to work much more on it this week. i have been looking at new editing softwares as i still want to do more on the recordings themselves other then just composing the piece. i have also been thinking more about what Miranda had told me during one of the previous tutorials, that everything personal can be political and that this topic of work is so universal that it might have an unintentional, intentional political message behind it.
i started making some graphs which should control the tempo, composing the audio files as one, rather than having a constant high tempo. i wanted to have parts of the audio to have parts where all speakers were silent for a moment and parts with high tempo/medium tempo. i have also been writing down some things i can say during the audio and just general thoughts i have around work to spark new sentences to say during the audio.
i will be borrowing iPods next week to play around with how they work and look at battery life. i will also ask people in the class for editing softwares as i know some of them are musicians.
artist research:
Steve Reich:
Born in New York City, October 1936, the American composer is known for his contribution for developing minimal music in the mid 1960. His work is known for using repetition, slow harmonic rhythms and canons. He uses phase shifting in a lot of his work. This shows a clear gradual shift between two tape similar tape recordings that eventually fall-back inn to synch.
One of the works that shows this, is his piece “Its Gonna Rain”.
Its Gonna Rain:
the audio consists entirely of a a tape-recording from 1964 recorded at San Francisco Union Square. The piece uses the voice of a preacher talking about the end of the word, with sounds of pigeons taking flight.
The piece starts with the story of Noah, and then repeats “Its gonna rain” for most of the piece on loop, almost distorting the words with how the tape has been edited. This is a two-part piece, with the first part repeating “its gonna rain” whilst the second part looks at a different part of the speech, with an even bigger delay. The second part also splices different parts of the audio together before starting to use phase shifting.
althoug hi had been introduced to this piece in week 2 it wasnt before this week i really understood how it could help my own project. i started looking at how he edited his work, and how the effects were made. although this piece is made using tape recordings and i am using digital recordings, i can achieve a similar distortion by copying and pasting the same audio on two diferent tracks and changing the spacing between the audio.
Hang in there…good effort.