Blog #6: In Summary...

I do feel like I learnt a lot in this course, but what I appreciate the most is the same thing that I appreciate when I listen to 99% Invisible – that is, the learning of something that I already was familiar with, but had never been properly introduced to, as it were. As someone interested in (or more aptly, low-key obsessed with) podcasting, I spend a lot of time thinking about sound design; I just didn’t know how to categorize what exactly I was thinking about. I also was surprised to discover how much I'm still thinking about some of the heavier theoretical concepts we discussed in class, like R. Murray Schafer’s crochety concerns about the long-term implications of “sound congestion” (71) or the whimsical beauty of Pierre Schaeffer’s “sound objects” that seem almost to become their own living beings outside not only the origin of the sound, but even beyond the listening audience (Kane 21).

I’m glad for the toolkit this course was able to provide for me – not just the texts, which I know I’ll refer back to in the future, but also the videos and even just the conceptualizations of how to think about sounds in the world (like from material.io) as well as in the works I hope to create. Having a terminology and theoretical framework to help me articulate the finer points of what makes things sound good is something I know I’ll be able to use in future.

This course wound up having a lot of similarities (without really overlapping, which was interesting) with the Production Lab II course I took this semester – most of the theory I learned in this course that ended up in my final project was similarly put to work in the audio projects I undertook in that lab, too. This course also helped me concretize some of the concepts I had been circling around in my MRP project, especially in thinking about how I produce, record, edit, and disseminate my audio-based work effectively and at a high level that does justice to the subjects I’m representing. You don't necessarily have be thinking theoretically to be making good creative work, but I think any time you’re willing to go down that path to figure out how best to inform your practice it can only serve you in the long term.

I think a lot of my preoccupation of making intimate audio experiences, which is one of the focuses of my MRP, stemmed from my belief that making a recording environment that fostered that intimate feeling (like from inside a tent, for example) was the best (or maybe just easiest) way to achieve that desired effect. I think now though that physical proximity is only one way of achieving that result; as we learnt in “The Beautiful Lies of Sound Design” video, there’s many ways to create a soundscape that supports the goal of the audio, and sometimes magical trickery is the best way to create something that’s more than the sum of its parts. Though we learnt about Michel Chion’s concept of “synchresis” in the context of disparate audio and visual being overlaid to create a new meaning (Beckstead 2020), I think that this concept can still be useful in considering the sound on it’s own – after all, the act of listening means it’s up to the receiving end of the audio to imagine for themselves what they may be listening to, so in that way most all standalone audio works are inherently acts of synchresis to some degree.

Some of the key takeaways I’m completing this course with are the lessons we went over right at the beginning of the semester: that there are “at least three” ways to listen to the various sounds of the world (Chion 25); that as cantankerous as R. Murray Schafer sounds in his writings, it’s his love and fierce protection of the precious sounds the world has to offer that motivates him to try and make people “Listen” (NFB 2017); that the connection between the technology we use to listen and listen back to and reconfigure sound with plays a vital role in allowing sound to transform beyond its origin, but as Pierre Schaeffer points out the impulse to separate the sound from the source is as old at least Pythagoras (Kane 24). Most of all, the thing that I’m taking away is that listening, more than just mere hearing, is an active engagement the listener can utilize to interact with the world and which has been culturally underprivileged compared to the other senses; we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what it means to listen from an academic standpoint, and I can’t wait to see what comes next (and maybe even be a part of it.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOlxuXHWfHw

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“About Sound.” Material Design, material.io/design/sound/about-sound.html.

“About the Show.” 99% Invisible, 99percentinvisible.org/about/the-show/.

Beckstead, Lori 2020. “Week 9 (online): update, Film Sound continued.” Online lecture video, Sound Media RTA 907, Ryerson University, Toronto, accessed 6 April 2020.

Chion, Michel, Claudia Gorbman, and Walter Murch. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Columbia University Press, 1994.

Kane, Brian. "Pierre Schaeffer, the Sound Object, and the Acousmatic Reduction." Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. Oxford University Press, 2014. pp. 15-41.

NFB. “R. Murray Schafer: Listen.” Youtube, 4 Apr 2019. youtube.com/watch?v=rOlxuXHWfHw.

Schafer, R. M. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Alfred Knopf/Random House, New York, 1977/1994, pp. 71-99.

TEDx Talks. “The Beautiful Lies of Sound Design | Tasos Fratzolas | TEDxAthens.” Youtube, 21 Mar 2016. youtube.com/watch?v=jDy5j0c6TrU&feature=youtu.be.