Future Aspirations shaped by course
Throughout my time at UAL I have been exposed to many different disciplines within sound arts, this has not only shown me what I want to do but also shown me what I don’t want to do.
Although I see the value of each discipline, there are some that I just don’t identify with, namely ethical discussions within sonic ethnography. I feel that there was a large focus on ethics within our degree. I believe that within this area of study there are important conversations to be had, such as the place of the documentarian in ethnographic works. However, I did not identify with this line of study, I am interested in sound for film, composition and sound design. I found the constant ethical enquiries tiring and most of the time the links were quite a stretch. Although I will consider that ethics implications of my works when appropriate, the focus of my work will not be ethical analysis of sound arts practices.
I think that an important element of my degree that informed my future aspirations greatly was the classes I had with Tim Harrison. Firstly, it was reassuring to be taught by someone currently working within my practice, having previously enjoyed his work made my investment into the class a lot greater than others. Secondly I found the structure of his lectures to be easy to understand. Although the assignment was short I feel I gained a lot of insight into sound design for film within that time. Particularly one lesson in which Harrison showed us a film he had played the role of sound editor on, he then broke down the project into its individual sections, and explained the processes behind forming a cohesive sound for a feature film. The specific techniques Harrison discussed were perfectly suited to my research at the time into diegesis and scoring. Harrison described finding environmental sounds that normally go unnoticed by the audience (eg. air conditioning), and tuning them to dissonant chords to create a sense of unease with an unidentifiable source. This subtle manipulation of environmental sound is the crux of my practice, and emotionally influencing audiences with an unidentifiable source is a practice that I have since spent a lot of time trying to refine.
Harrison’s breakdown of the post production sound process made it clear to me that I wanted to work in ambience and composition, these two elements of sound design combined seemed appeared to me to be the most apt tools to achieve subtle emotional manipulation.