Introducing the Sound Diaries Project.
Welcome to Sound Diaries.
This project is designed so that anyone working with sound and the idea of sound diaries can share their projects online, talk about their ideas with other people working in this territory and contribute to discussions around how sound diaries are made and shared.
To contribute your own sound diary, any text about yourself or any images pertaining to your work in this area, leave a comment here on the blog and either Paul or myself will contact you with details of how to get your work up on this site.
Our forthcoming plans for sound-diaries.com will be announced as the site develops; in the meantime, you can look forward to our forthcoming Sonic Advent Calendar, featuring a sound-based countdown to Christmas.
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Hi,
I’m Sarah(Princesspurling)’s boyfriend Rob.
Really liking the Sonic Advent Calender
I’m quite into field recording, but more so into editing the sounds into music afterwards.
I’d really like to get involved with the Sound Diaries project if possible.
Maybe editing some of your field recordings to make tracks?
Let me know if you’d be up for this.
you can check out some of my stuff at http://www.mrminimax.wordpress.com
Cheers,
Rob
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:13 am
Hi Rob,
It’s great that you want to get involved with the sound diaries project but I would really prefer you not to remix my recordings into music as you propose.
If my sounds are taken by you and then remixed to form tracks, I think there is a danger of the sounds becoming completely decontextualised. The purpose of keeping a sound diary or creating one is to document life in sound, recording and using sounds as themselves. The resulting diary/document/composition is developed as a whole idea rather than as a set of interesting sounds for integration into musical remixes. I also think that collecting and recording your own sounds is an essential element of creating a sound diary. If the project was about written diaries, there would be no sense in you taking my written pages and then recompiling them into something of your own making. However interesting the results of such an experiment may be, the final output could hardly meaningfully constitute a diary project.
So I think recording your own sounds is almost the most important aspect of developing a sound diary project. The act of listening to the ever-unfolding soundscape around us and considering how to filter it into a manageable project (just imagine all the sounds that are happening in the world right now as I type this!!!) is an essential element within the process of creating a sound diary. Having said that, within the creative boundaries I seem to have imposed around the idea of creating a sound diary (develop a system for collecting and recording sounds, record and collect sounds, organise said collection) there are a million different variants for creative activity. For instance one could record the first second of every minute for 10 minutes, or make the decision to record only the sound in the empty rooms that you enter during a week. The sounds may be recorded - as in my SOUNDBANK project - by text only.
I think there are a lot of artists who are working with sounds as a cool or interesting addition to music, but this use of sound is arguably limited by the conventions surrounding what we traditionally think of as music, and this use of sound is very familiar to us now through artists like Aphex Twin and Matthew Herbert. I think it’s perfectly valid to use sounds as sonic elements within music, but I think it is a different project altogether. Sound Diaries is much more about using sounds as themselves and keeping their origins and contexts apparent.
I very much enjoyed listening to your music on myspace (excellent stuff! Let me know when you are playing near Reading…) but I think the creative agenda in remixing sounds into music in the way you seem to be doing is almost adversely different to the agenda behind the idea of making sound diaries.
One of the reasons for setting up the sound diaries website is to generate a conversation/debate around sound-recording projects and to focus around the idea of documenting life via sound so by all means feel free to disagree with me!
I would still love you to think about getting involved with sound diaries, but it would be great (and maybe more interesting for you) if you could think about doing this in a way that involves you collecting your own sounds systematically and developing your own unique, sonic representation of life beyond musical remixes.
I hope that makes sense and isn’t too off-putting as a response; I am always into enthusiasm for sound diaries and suchlike, but I think it would be good if we can keep the focus of this website on ordinary sounds and how we record and document our lives in sound rather than on music and sounds subsidiary position within it.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:01 pm
[...] like this comment, because it explains the motivations behind the idea of a “Sound Diary”: …If my [...]
December 4th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Hi,
Came across this via the Sonic Arts Network mail out and am really intrigued by the project. For a while now I’ve been writing these short pieces of prose called ‘Sounds Heard’ where I write up particularly ‘musical’ experiences with found sounds. For example:
“In a part of the forest dominated by firs, pines and other evergreens, the sound of the wind through the trees is a note: a deep, haunting moan.”
I not sure if its as systematic or organised as the diary process you’ve talked about in your previous comment rather if I hear something interesting I make a note of it and then write it up. I like the process of trying to document why and how the sound was a musical experience that stood out from the everyday background noise of life. I try to be as brief and haiku like as possible.
There’s also some recordings on my website that I make on my super lo-fi mobile phone voice recorder function.
I look forward to reading the blog as it progresses. I remember googling around looking for this sort of thing when I first started the ’sounds heard’ writing and not coming up with a lot. It would be interesting to hear from other people who are reacting in this way to the sounds around us.
Ian Baxter
December 5th, 2008 at 8:14 am
Hi there Ian,
Thanks very much for your comment on Sound Diaries. I’m very interested in your ‘Sounds Heard’ process… I am working on a project called Soundbank where I note a sound every day. It isn’t massively organised or conceptual, but so far I’ve found that knowing I have to write about a sound at some point in the day makes me pay more attention to the soundscape around me.
I like your note about the wind in the forest and the whole premise for your ‘Sounds Heard’ project is very interesting. How is a sound ‘musical’ or ‘non-musical?’ I’m fascinated by how people make those distinctions. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer… it’s just a genuinely interesting question to me. Another thing about ‘Sounds Heard;’ do you find we have a lack of vocabulary, collectively, for describing sounds? I have been finding this while working on Soundbank; but it may be that I am so unused to describing sounds that I need to grow new language muscles to be able to do it dextrously.
In the previous comment I was trying to articulate why, for me, remixing found sounds into ‘tracks’ (as in Musical tracks) isn’t really a sound diary project! I think a sound diary project can be as loosely or as tightly organised as the recordist chooses. I guess a diary is like a collection of recorded experiences and the nature and form of such a collection is up to its curator.
I think ‘Sounds Heard’ does involve a certain level of systemic thinking; it seems you have decided to record sounds that are specifically ‘musical’ to your ears, and then you’ve also made this decision to be ‘haiku-like and brief’ in your description of the sounds you choose to note.
I love those kinds of personal decisions people make, about how they are going to segment and document the soundscape.
I think the different ways that people choose to record and document the soundscape of the world is one of the things that I hope will get explored a lot here on sound diaries.
December 10th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Hi there,
This sound diaries idea really sound interesting. I’d love to get involved.
I’m currently studying Sonic Arts at Middlesex University, and for the last few months I’ve been maintaining an online blog, full of all my field recordings, sound design, sound art and synthesis experimentations.
I try to keep a healthy mixture of all of these styles, but lately I’ve been working with a lot of synthesis and field recordings.
I don’t post every day, but normally at least once a week, depending on what I’m working on during that week.
The link to my blog is: http://plundr.tumblr.com
I hope I’ve understood the theory behind this project fully, and haven’t wasted your time.
Kind Regards,
Simon James French
December 10th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
hi simon,
am listening to your rain recording while writing this - it’s a great sound. would be great to have some of your sounds on the site here via the artists pages. what we are particularly interested in - as you will probably gather from the sonic advent calendar recordings - is the role of sound as documentary evidence of our everyday lives. in the same way that we tend to take spectacular numbers of photographs often of the most mundane situations so we are looking to provide a hub for recordings that record our daily encounters with sound… looking forward to hearing more.
all the best
paul
December 12th, 2008 at 10:57 am
Greetings all,
Been having a good scout about sound diaries and would like to put forward some initial impressions from the point of view of someone who’s never considered this sort of thing in any depth.
For me the presentation/context of the sounds is crucial - the art of it, if you like. Let me illustrate with a couple of examples. For the Sonic Advent Calendar if found the presence of the prosaic tags reduced my listening capacity - I start the recording, look at the tags and think I know what I’m going to hear from then on - my attention is diminished. By contrast, on Felicity’s page, the combination of more poetics in the titles of sound clips are more inviting. I’m intrigued but don’t know what I’m going to hear.
Also I think the spoken introductions and commentaries work much better than the written ones. I’m much happier just reading or just listening, rather than both which my poor brain seems to reject. It’s like concert programme notes, one’s tempted to “find out what you’re listening to” eye rather than by ear because we have a cultural bias towards text as information.
Anyways - good work folks…
December 12th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Hi Dan,
Thanks very much for your comments; they are really useful in terms of helping me to think about the Internet as an interface for presenting everyday sounds.
I agree that the presentation/context surrounding our encounter with sounds is crucial in terms of determining our experience of those sounds. For myself the issue of knowing the source of a sound actually adds to my imaginative/associative experience of listening to that sound, if you see what I mean. For me, the idea of not knowing the source of a sound is somewhat abstract. I prefer to know where a sound comes from rather than not but I think this is a matter of personal taste and approach and also the different ways in which people process information. I cannot listen and read at the same time, but I do enjoy reading what a sound is and then sitting back to listen in more detail to the sound. I am always surprised by the descrepancy between what I anticipate from a sound, and how it actually acts when I listen to it in a focussed way. I nearly always discover that when I really listen, there are details that my memory or idea about the sound has missed, and this has the effect of reinvesting sounds I have heard all my life and ignored, with a new value and perhaps even a sense of wonderment.
The tags issue is interesting because tags are so much a part of how the Internet finds things and directs information. They are the means by which search engines discover pages etc. so how we choose to tag the sounds (in the context of a blog) is as much about how we draw listeners to the project as about accurately labelling what is on the page. Up until now, since my whole premise for research concerns the value of everyday things, we have employed a very straightforward tagging system which names and labels the objects/events contained in the recordings. Your interesting point about this has made me think that perhaps there are other ways to label posts which do not name the sounds, but which direct a certain kind of listening experience. So the tags could be suggestive of certain listening states etc. instead of just directly stating and pointing to the source of the sounds. I will think on this, as there are pros and cons to both approaches in tagging. I do like to name the sources of the sounds in many ways because I think that using sound as a found material - a substance if you will - from and of the world, kind of necessitates this kind of approach.
Interesting that you prefer the spoken introductions and commentaries.
I am very interested in the links between text and sound… I think it is quite possible to meld the two in various ways.
I hope you stay tuned and keep chipping in with your views,
good work! Felicity