Sonic Postcard Assignment

Each student will create a 10 second audio work or ‘sonic postcard’. These postcards will eventually be heard on WALF radio and allow a glimpse into our lives here in Alfred, New York. Your recording is due next Thursday at the beginning of class. Please bring it on a thumb drive or CD and label it as follows: LASTNAMEfirstname. We will be loading them onto one computer and talking about them in class. You will also need to bring one digital image to class that can help represent your audio postcard.

1. How to begin?

Start by listening to what is around you. What did you hear on your blindfolded walk? Keep a sound diary. Write down sounds that you normally hear or sounds that are unusual, textural, part of the ambient, or that arise from a natural or manmade process.

2. Recording

Try recording in the same location on different days or hours. What do you want to share about Alfred? Develop your idea or just get started by playing with recording sounds. You may do in-recorder editing by turning on and off the recorder and making new files that will be heard together or you may make many sound recordings and take them in to a program to edit them into a 10 second piece. Many of you have Garage Band, but you may also download for free Audacity or another program. (Download Audacity here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) If you are having trouble with an editing program, you may also just import very short sounds into iTunes and order them as your audio postcard. Keep in mind, it must be mp3 format and exactly 10 seconds.

3. Image

Create an artwork or image to go with your sound. Put it on your thumb drive or CD with your mp3 file.

4. Anything ‘off-limits’?

Record any sound, with the exception of sound made with conventional musical instruments, like guitars, pianos, trumpets, etc. These are off-limits, and should be avoided. Your composition can be musical though, but the musical qualities must present in the recordings as they exist or in the way you structure a select group of sounds as you edit. Your composition can also simply be a collection of interesting sounds, edited together in an engaging way, with little or nothing to do with conventional music.

For further thought:
Are your sounds in the high, middle, or low range? How do sounds in the same range of the sound spectrum react with each other when blended? How do sounds in different ranges of the sound spectrum react when blended? How can you determine the "right" length for a sound element in relation to the duration of the overall composition? What should the transitions for adjacent but different sounds be like? How do abrupt transitions differ from gradual transitions? Do your sounds seem distant or close? How does a composition that includes sounds from varying distances differ from one that includes only sounds that occur at the same distance? Where are you positioning the listener in relation to the sounds, in front, in back or in the middle? Are the sounds still or do they move from one speaker to the other? What is the effect on the listener if the sounds move? If you had to describe a sound as texture can you visualize what that texture may be like? Can you find a way to put sound textures together so that they are no longer static but begin to influence each other in the composition? What is the effect of repeating a sound element in a composition? What is the effect of using a recognizable sound in a composition? Can you make a common sound seem "new"? What is the effect of using part of a common sound when its source is not recognizable in the composition? Are the incidental sounds that occur in a room where your composition is played to be considered as part of the work or something outside it?