Process Piece

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This project was initially very challenging. Being so used to working with visual mediums, it seemed hard to get any sort of meaning across with only sound. However, both the viewings and some outside inspiration helped us create something worthwhile, as we noticed the importance of daily sound and realized how important composition and juxtaposition are.

            One of the things that struck us most about the viewings was how fascinating  normal sounds were once we paid close attention to them. Sawing, hammering, chopping, boiling water—all of these things were simply fascinating once we bothered to notice them. Because these daily, normal processes were so interesting, we decided to incorporate a daily process into our audio documentary. Similarly, we were inspired by NPR’s podcasts This American Life and Radio Lab. During the stories of these podcasts, the producers catch a huge amount of ambient noise. They turn on their recording equipment far before they even get to their subject. This noise adds a lot, and carries the listener through the entire process. We tried a similar technique in our short audio by including the beeping noises of the treadmill, etc. Overall, the emphasis on ordinary sounds became a key player in our audio documentary.

            Another inspiration for our piece came from one of the viewings—“The Smokehouse.” We noticed that while the sounds and images of making the smokehouse were interesting, what really set that piece apart was hearing what the philosophy of building the smokehouse was. The smokehouse was really just a smaller piece of a much larger process for Rohan—living a self-sufficient life from the land. This led us to ask questions of our own collected audio for the process of running. What was the bigger process? What would lead someone to do this task every day, when it is so physically demanding and often so unpleasant? We answered those questions through the form of an overlaid narration.

            Taking advice from some of the suggestions sent out to the class, this narration as a conscious choice. While we did decide to make it narrated, we decided not to directly comment on the process at hand. Rather, we depended on the composition and juxtaposition of the sound to get across a meaning. We also decided to juxtapose style. While we made an emphasis on capturing the hard breathing and mundane process of running on a treadmill, the narration was academic, formal, and voiced with little motion.

Our end goal was to have the focus be on what the world spends so much time doing, and to contrast that with the maybe scary implications of why we do it. By hearing the cold definitions of the severe mental obsessions contrasted with the basic humanity of breathing so hard and the inhumanity of the sounds of the machine, we wanted our audience to question why we would run a treadmill to begin with.