Audio Journey

My audio piece will take the listener on a journey to a party, starting from the car ride to the party and ending with the car door slam after the party. There will be noises found at a party from the ecstatic greeting to the loud chatting to the goodbye. Then there will be walking to the car as the noise of the party drifts away. The audio piece will contrast the silence and calm of being alone to the energy and noise of being at a party.

John Lennon's "Radio Play"

The approximately 8-minute piece made my John Lennon has two tracks playing at the same time. One track sounds almost like a constant tapping sound made from taking tiny clips of a radio program. The other track only plays sometimes during the piece, and it is John Lennon speaking at a much lower volume so that his voice is only in the background and you cannot actually make out what he is saying.

The piece is hard to tolerate or comprehend because it is so choppy and the sound of broken static almost hurts the ears. The only tolerable parts are those with Lennon's soothing British voice in the background. I was expecting the tapping to evolve into a steady, rhythmic beat eventually, but it turned out to continue at a random pace with random pitches. It must have been interesting to experiment with the sound clips and multiple tracks, but the finished piece was not pleasant to listen to and did not flow together as well as it could have.

"The Use of Forms"

The article, "The Use of Forms" presents an interesting view of post-modern art that emerged in the 1980's with the availability of computers and sampling. The article describes this new trend as a "reprocessing of form" (35). Rather than circulating original pieces of art, a group of artists known as the Situationist International argued that art should only be used to combine and create new forms of art. This art movement created the shift from High culture, defining art by is context on pedestals or hanging on gallery walls, to Low culture, breaking the traditional form of presentation of art.

This new "use of forms" is known as "detournement". This term applies not only to fine art, but also to other forms of art including music such as techno and hip-hop, and film. People today do not generally practice detournement as an attack against the modern culture as the Situationists did, but they practice it instead as a personalized form of expression. For example, DJ'ing combines different genres of music so that the types of music get more and more specific and therefore more and more personalized. One DJ states, "I'm sure that new music will be born from now on, unceasingly" (38). In film, detournemnet has been applied by breaking down the traditional genres so as not to be limited or restricted.

With today's technology available to the public and the sharing of forms that has become popular in the post-modern world, there has become less of a distinction between the "creator" and the "consumer." Because of this new trend, there is controversy of whether "remixing" original music pieces is ethical or not. More and more artists are encouraging others to edit and share their work, suggesting that detournemnent is not stealing, but rather a "reprocessing of form" (35).