Sound scape and Narration

I have started to look more deeply at Chris Watson's work, http://www.chriswatson.net/, he records unusual and reactive sounds from different environments.


These audience responses to Watson’s work suggest that there are significant parallels between the visual music work of Len Lye and environmental sound art. Much like the visual imagery of mark making, environmental sounds that are familiar or even unfamiliar (but affectively tangible) can tap into our individual or shared memory repositories. With the potential to function as synaesthetic memory triggers, these sounds and images can also be spatially and temporally locating. While their referential qualities refer us to what is outside of the work, they ultimately refer us to our own bodies.(Lisa Perrott, Visual Music meets Sound Art: Exploring the Relation Between the Haptic Body, Referential Memory Triggers and the Locating Sounds of Aotearoa.)


I want my sounds to be unnaturally human, as only unnatural a human can be. Sounds of scratching, screaming, foreign mutterings, chains, pummelling bodies and blood splating, vommitting, heavy vehicles, the sounds of soft bodies being shaken around in hard environments. Punishing and discomforting to the ear, without rhythm, harmony or melody, unexpected, the audience blind and startled to what sound comes next.


http://www.harvestfilms.ie/silence

 

When presented as auditory close-up, and without the accompaniment of visual imagery (or the mediation of symbolic representation), Watson’s sound compositions bring the audience into a close and direct sensory engagement with the material and timbral qualities of the sounds. My experience was an almost levitated sensation of my body being completely enveloped by the soundscape. The sounds appeared to be moving past and through my body, which was situated within the spatial parameters set by the movement, closeness or distance of the sounds. (Lisa Perrott, Visual Music meets Sound Art: Exploring the Relation Between the Haptic Body, Referential Memory Triggers and the Locating Sounds of Aotearoa.)