Friday, June 20, 2014

Acoustic Ecology

Stop. Close your eyes. Listen.

What do you hear?

Right now I hear a gentle hum coming from my refrigerator, as well as cars passing by outside, my fingers typing, and some other white noise I can't figure out where it comes from.

After Reading this article, I realized just how much I think in my head instead of absorbing a central aspect of the human experience--sound. Sometimes things become white noise for me, and that's great for concentrating and thinking and flowing through work periods, but it's terrible for my soundscaping comprehension.

Sometimes now I catch myself sitting and truly listening to what surrounds me, and making a mental note of what type of film I could use that in. Then I begin to think of people actually recording room acoustics for things of no plot importance, but all the realistic importance; the acoustics are important to the characters on screen's reality, and therefore are detrimental to transporting the audience into their world.

I've also never thought about a soundscape as being another type of screenwriting/character development process. Perhaps if I utilize that kind of thinking into my soundscaping process, I would keep getting better at it.

Before this class I've never really done any type of soundscape, and I still feel that I wasn't doing it totally right--many times I rely on music to progress the narrative along. I don't feel like that is a bad thing necessarily--the emotional power that music holds is quite powerful. But I'd still like to be able to adapt and learn that I can also do well with ambient sound.

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