April 16, 2011
April 10, 2011
Goodbye, Freud
Goodbye, Freud
2 minutes of listening and looking at Yourself to calm down in a busy city-life.
I modified a little bit to add three different sounds into my sound installation piece. First, sound of the city, second, sound of nature, and third, two sounds mixed together.
Living in the place where you have hard time enjoying nature unless you plan to go a park or somewhere, I personally began longing for the sound of nature. There are tons of tall buildings around my place and busy people walking around in my neighbor. I hardly hear the birds. During my trip to Pittsburgh, I woke up with the sound of birds chirping outside, and it reminded me of how nice it was to live near the nature. So it gave me an idea to incorporate pleasing sound. It would be nice to give people some time to hear the nature where they cannot usually.
I hear a lot of construction sound. And it really bothers me. Also to me, the sounds in city means construction, loud train, cars, buses, horn, and mostly man-made sound. So I added those sounds into the first part of the piece.
The name of the installation will be ‘Goodbye, Frued’. I have always been interested in psychology and what makes what people think. It led me to choose psychology as my undergraduate major and I studied Frued and his methods. In my sound installation, I borrowed his name to the title.
Freud the psychologist used conversation methods to study people’s psychology. But these days, we use technology such as fMR or PET scans to see the actual brain activities. In that ways, we know how our brains react to different emotions, thoughts, and stress. I think you can train yourself to have a better, healthier life by looking at you. Even when you feel angry, you should try looking at mirror and realize how much bad facial expression you are having. People do not look at the mirror when they are angry of course. But there is a scientific study that proved people’s brain sends the same positive hormonal reaction to our bodies according to your facial expression. In other words, if you smile even if you feel down, your brain thinks you are actually happy, sending serotonine to your body.
I realized I had a wry face when I hear the sound of the city I mentioned above. And when I woke up with the birds chirping sound, I was smiling. So, the name ‘Goodbye Freud’ implies that there is no need to have Freud to fix your personal problems. You can do it by yourself by listening and looking at you.
The icons of the city, nature, and combined are there just to aid people to understand better what they are listening to. The main is the sound experience.
The installation would include a headphone and a mirror with the title sign ‘Goodbye Freud’. People will stop and pick up the headphone and start listening. While they listen, they can look at the mirror and see the changes in the face expression. Here is the very first sound piece I gathered.
At the end of the sound piece, I mix city sound and nature sound together. Hopefully people would realize it would be nice to have some nature in their city life.
It would be ideal to collect all the sound pieces by myself but it might be physically impossible. I will site where the sound from if I end up using other’s.
February 8, 2011
Soundwalk
Manhattan to JFK by A train on Friday night
I recorded the sound of A train, Howard Beach air train, walking, and JFK International Airport. It became a really long sound, so I divided the whole sound into sections and gave them different names to sort out. (subway1,2,3…, people talking1,2,3… musician1,2,3… airtrain, my walking, jfk announcements, etc) Then using Garageband, I gathered the and modified it to make a soundwalk piece.
Soundwalk 2 by maruholic
My Song 2 by maruholic
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