Sound.
How would one describe sound?
Scientifically it is the vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person’s or animal’s ear.
It is also the main stimulation for one of our major senses namely hearing.
But is that all what it is important for? Why is it important?
We may not realize it but we observe things and preserve memories by how they look, how they sound, how they feel how they smell and in certain cases how they taste. We usually hear things before we see them. Sound reinforces the images we see. We are surrounded by sounds.
As an experiment try watching a movie or video with sound on mute. And see how much you understand. It is true that visuals send a strong message but some things can only be conveyed through sound. Another example is text messaging. A conversation on text messaging loses a lot of meaning due to tone loss, which relays the real meaning behind the words written.
In movies or documentaries the sound or the music sets the tone for the scene. Simply by listening to the sound of the scene you can tell if it is scary, romantic or sad. Same goes for the theme music for a character, you can tell whether a character is evil, good, friendly or inconsequential etc by the background score accompanying the images.
In the above clip the music (even though it has lyrics) is very cheerful whereas the images are very dull and drab. If you watch this clip with out the sound on, you will think you are looking at a post apocalyptic scenes (let’s be honest that is what they are showing) or may be a scene from a horror movie but the music tells you to be optimistic about what is to come. And that actually is the entire message of the movie. So in short sound works to send a subliminal message in a movie or a documentary or any set of images.
Even the tourism industry uses sound to promote any particular city. It usually says ‘Sights and Sounds of XYZ place’. This particular phrase made me think that anything can have sights and sounds. Like sights and sounds of a school, kitchen, gym, textiles. Absolutely anything under the sun can be described in the form of sights and sounds.
Well if sounds can be used to promote tourism why not textiles of a certain place. I initially thought why not create an audio piece that records sounds of fabric. But lack of expertise in this area made me rethink this. And I thought why not make sound bites promoting our local textiles in 30 seconds. Just to spark students’ interest in textiles.
MY EXPERIENCE WITH SOUND RECORDING:
Initially I decided to record a sound clip describing the famous textiles of all the provinces of Pakistan. Once I started researching it I came to the realisation that each province has a lot of specific textiles that cannot be covered in 30seconds or in one clip for that matter. So I altered my idea and converted it into a series of 30 seconds’ episodes, each covering a separate province and its textiles. I started off with Sind since that is my home province and local textiles are close to my heart. I collected very cursory information which was very difficult to do given the richness of the Sindhi textiles and started recording it.
I had already downloaded quite a few apps on my phone. First off I recorded using my phone’s voice memos. I discovered it was picking up surrounding sounds as well and I could only trim the beginning or end of the sound clip and not the middle portions. Then I decided to work with WavePad. This was more high tech for me. I recorded a few different options on it. Honestly I still do not know what most of the editing options do or how to use them. But one thing Wavepad was letting me do easily was trim out the silences in the middle along with other variations for sound trimmings. Since I was using the Wavepad on my phone, getting used to it on the phone was difficult. Saving the clip and transporting it turned out to be a task and a half, but I achieved it in the end. I uploaded it on my Google drive and researched how to embed the link to my drive on the blogpost.
The Story doesn’t end here. It turns out It was not so simple to embed the sound clip from the drive, even though it was appearing on the blogpost it was not an active link. I thought maybe it was a wav. file that is why link to the sound clip was inactive. So I again looked up how to convert wav. into an mp3. In the process I discovered Zamzar.com, I used that to convert my clip into an mp3 file and tried to upload again. Both directly from my computer and through the link to my Google drive. Again both the methods failed. It was back to researching the reasons and and finding the next step. Found out that I probably had to upload it on some audio platform and embed from there. For this purpose I used Soundcloud uploaded my sound clip there and then embedded the link in my blogpost. In this whole struggle I learned to use technology and how to convert things. Though frustrating I felt I learned quite a few things by the end of this whole ordeal.
Here is the final result for your hearing pleasure (fingers crossed). And it turns out Pakistani textiles cannot be summed up in 30 seconds they need at least 2 minutes or 120 seconds per province! So below is episode 1.
Recording this short clip made me realize I can may be take this up for my final project. whether I end up doing that or not remains to be seen. I will update this blog post accordingly.
Update: I unfortunately did not continue with this Idea for the final project.
However I did try my hand at another sound piece. This time I collected sounds from my surroundings and mixed them on Audio Editor a different app from last time. I found this app easier to work with and I was also able to play with rate, pitch and other elements of the sound. And created the below piece.
DISCLAIMER: I did not make my account on the SoundCloud instead I used my husband’s existing account hence the appearance of his name on my sound pieces.
Tools & Technology in Art Education 