My thoughts from the Seminar session and sound editing with Audacity- Laura Cooke

From the Friday session last week, when looking at performance in terms of framing and threshold,  I felt, was a different and interesting way of looking at the performance as a whole. The repetitive actions such as opening the door and saying ‘Hello’ over and over again, showed that in ordinary day situations, a greeting in which we say so naturally, can be turned into something that almost becomes robotic, as it was the same word being said at us, the meaning of the word felt like it was being lost in the process and we couldn’t do anything about it, we had to wait. During the exercise at first we as an audience, didn’t know whether we should interact and say ‘Hello’ back to make it stop, however we tried saying ‘Hello’ back and it kept going, although us saying Hello back didn’t make it stop, I feel it was good that we all decided to try something as a group. For example my group need to try things out a few times to see if they work. We are going to record our actions soon.

When thinking of our performance in terms of framing, I feel that we want a linear structure to it, but to also make it seem interesting for the audience. We have thought about the idea of using music from the war period, for our transitions, (from monologue to monologue) for example. For our performance, we would like it all to make sense for the audience members. We also said that the use of headphones, is like a threshold for the audience, because its their way of entering the performance but in a different way.  It was also discussed that The City of Lincoln could be an example of framing for our piece.

When researching what the words ‘Ethnographer’ and ‘Phenomenologist’, I found that an Ethnographer is when someone ‘deals with the description of specific human cultures, using methods such as close observation and interviews’. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ethnographer [accessed 18/2/15]. ‘Phenomenologist’ comes from the term ‘Phenomenology’ which means: ‘the study of structures of consciousness, as experienced from the first person point of view’. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ [accessed 18/2/15].

After the Audacity session this week, I felt that I have gained a better understanding of the software and I enjoyed looking for sound effects to go with our performance too. We are going to do more recordings as a group soon.

 

One thought on “My thoughts from the Seminar session and sound editing with Audacity- Laura Cooke

  1. Laura, it is good that you are thinking about the practical exercises from the sessions in your own work, however you can go further with this and apply some of the reading too. I am trying to get you to think about the practical and theoretical journey alongside each other, so you will need to read and practice regularly. You simply reference ‘ethnographer’ and ‘phenomenologist’ in your comment but I think you should demonstrate an understanding of these terms. How might you use phenomenology in your own work? I mentioned Bachelard in the class, perhaps you could use some of this work to support your own thoughts? Be careful to check your writing for grammatical mistakes – you switch tense in your writing. Keep reading, writing and practising and your work will develop.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *