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Bus Photo 

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Final

"Middle School"
40 seconds

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Interview With a Middle Schooler

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2 minutes 53 seconds

-Interview Questions-

Could you please introduce yourself? (IE: Name, age, year in school…)

Where do you go to school? What’s your particular school like?

What has the middle school experience been like for you?

What has been the hardest part?

What is your favorite memory of middle school?

Can you describe to me the events that happened to you in 6^th grade?

How do you think that affected you?

Can you tell me what it was like to be diagnosed with anxiety and depression (When)?

How do you think that affected your middle school experience?

Can you tell me more about your recent struggles with depression and anxiety?

What was that like?

How have these experiences shaped you as a person?

What are you most excited for in your future?

Essay #3

            According to Barry Blesser's and Linda-Ruth Salter's Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Aural architecture refers to the properties of a space that can be experienced by listening (Blesser and Salter, 5). In other words aural architecture is anything is a space that changes the way a listener will perceive sound. In the way that cathedrals are built to help the sounds of music reverberate off the walls or how towns have an aural architecture that arises from its natural topography and buildings. Apparently aural architecture is not always planned out and is sometimes just a coincidence. Aural architecture isn’t really a profession or practice, but rather a tool that can be used for different purposes.

            “A related kind of social grouping is the professional subculture whose members study, design, or manipulate special attributes for the purpose of creating aural experiences for others. Often these professionals do not realize they are functioning as aural architects,” (Blesser and Salter, 8). One of these subgroups is obviously cinema. Sound is important to film. Knowing how to use space to create sound is important to film.

            An aural architect, who is both an artist and a social engineer, is someone who selects specific aural attributes of a space based on what is desirable in a particular cultural framework (Blesser and Salter, 5).  An aural architect is not always a person and even when it is a person, they are not always concerned with what sounds best, but rather what looks best (ie: city planners).

            I hope to be able to use the idea of aural architecture in my future work. Both with this class and future classes. 

The Waitress Rant

running time: 1:30

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Essay 2: Lost Cosmonaut

            In his book, Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist, Daniel Kalder defines an anti-tourist as “[someone who] embraces hunger and hallucinations. The anti-tourist seeks locked doors and demolished buildings. The anti-tourist travels at the wrong time of year, prefers dead things to living ones. The anti-tourist is humble and seeks invisibility. The anti-tourist values disorientation over enlightenment and lastly the anti-tourist loves truth, but is also partial to lies, especially his own.”

Kalder is from a small town in Scotland. Growing up he found a lot of over touristy places to be boring. He talked about how those places have been seen and written about so many times that it’s hard to see them for yourself. Tourists wind up following an automatic path and the job of the anti-tourist is to reject that common path. Kalder says that anti-tourism is to “step into the wastelands and forgotten zones that are usually neglected in the more standard form of tourism.”

I believe I have embraced some aspects of anti-tourism. Last summer my best friend and I went backpacking through Europe for six weeks. We planned our entire itinerary and paid for the trip ourselves. We chose to stay in cheap hostels and go couchsurfing rather than stay in nice hotels and we ate dinner in with locals instead of going to fancy restaurants. In the end I think we learned way more about the culture than we would have on some pre-planned typical tourist trip.

I can definitely see how anti-tourism relates to our recordings and drifts. We need to be an anti-tourist in a sense and explore forgotten places that are different and unique. At the same time, we need to be an invisible observer and only record what is in the environment naturally.

Drift

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For my drift strategy I began walking towards the lake because I have yet to walk around that area this year. Every few minutes I would flip a coin to decide wether or not to record. Heads for yes, tails for no. After recording at the lake I doubled back, but took a new route via a wooded trail because I got heads when I flipped the coin to see if I should take the new trail.

This particular clip was taken Friday, October 24th around 5pm on the bank of Lake Michigan. Close to N Lincoln Memorial Dr. I was sitting on the rocks by the water with on mic pointed towards the water and the other pointed towards the sidewalk.

The current running time is 1 minute and 10 seconds.

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Field Recording 1: Smoke Break

Smoke Break: Recorded Tuesday, October 14th at noon on one of the wooden picnic tables near Sandburg. It's along the sidewalk that leads towards the library. One minute and forty seconds.

Found Sound

Within a DreamThis is my Found Sound project. It runs at a minute and 21 seconds. I titled it Within a Dream because that's the idea I was going for. Sort of like a surrealist dream where things change randomly and abruptly and don't quite make sense. The beginning is someone typing at if they are relaying the dream to someone. They begin the dream in the woods, as they walk different things happen and the meet different characters, like the German. It begins to rain. Then a loud car sound of the highway. Then they turn around and they're on the beach. I drew a lot of inspiration from surrealist films.