March 23 and Soundscape

“There is no difference in dimension and reality between the original sound and the recorded and reproduced sound as there is between real objects and photographic images” said Balasz (Silverman 42). So is this the case? I don’t think that it is. I believe that the prerecorded sound within cinema takes up fake space. Apparently, film theorists say that there’s no difference between recorded and prerecorded sounds (Silverman 42). To answer one of my previous questions from a blog post, this is incorrect. Of course there’s a difference—that’s why one can often tell if they’re listening to a recording or the real thing. Similarly, the real image that was photographed also has depth in a way that a photographic image can never have since when you move to look around the object in an image, you can’t see the other side. Also, a nonrecorded sound may be less scripted, especially in a movie, because it is not meant to be played in exactly that same way again. A recorded sound, however, can be played over and over again at the whim of the “author”, so to speak, of the recording.

Silverman implies that “’she’ here refers not to ‘natural’ but to ‘artificial’—or what I would prefer to call ‘constructed’—femininity (193); my question from this is isn’t all femininity socially constructed, whether dealing with feminine voice or the feminine persona?



Soundscape posting:

“The Office: Sound Only”

Layla, Mary, and I collaborated on a soundscape that focused on sounds of the office (specifically, Colson Hall room 332) on any given day. There were multiple versions, but you the one available is the final (and best) version. We recorded this with Layla’s iPhone application, where, to my understanding, you can set it and listen to the sounds going on around you while wearing headphones in an interesting way: it remixes (a bit) and adds to as well as echoes the sounds actually being made. You can probably guess which ones we made and which ones were made by the iPhone application since human made sounds are generally louder and clearer.

The pair of heels heard in the beginning and the key opening the door and the unzipping zipper all indicate someone walking to the office and entering, as do the noises of the coffee being poured and the satisfied “ah” after drinking it. The “oh crap” (my favorite part) begins one of the most interesting sections where we hear human voices for the first time; the human voice embedded in the office clatter may have startled some because it was unexpected, while it echoes the frustrations we sometimes (to put it mildly) feel in our offices as does the loud bang of the overhead drawer closing and the crumpling of paper. The second batch of voices reflects the real office—you never know when someone will pop their head into the office to say “hello” unannounced and ask you how you’re doing. The radio and bouncing ping pong ball indicate the boredom that may come during office hours, and the fade away of the noises implies dozing off to sleep (sounds like that coffee did not work).

The technology of the iPhone played a large roll in our soundscape since it added the layers of sound. Each sound’s echo fades into the next and into each other just like the real world—it’s not always one sound on its own but multiple sounds going on at once (even if at first you don’t hear much, if anything). The iPhone application may have complicated the question as to who is the author of this piece—the three of us who made the sounds happen, the device that altered their natural state, or even the process of recording the iPhone soundscape onto a computer using a free download of a program.