Sound Process

*Sha-Shing!*

A Sound Piece by  Rae Finlinson and Myself. 

Artist Statement:

In case it isn’t completely clear from our piece, our process piece was a recording of an ice skating rink. After brainstorming for some time, we determined that we wanted to select a process that was clear and auditorily engaging. Ice skating is a fun process that produces a variety of sounds. We wanted to take a fairly naturalistic approach to our piece in order to most closely represent the experience as we understood it; thus, we decided not to narrate, but to have the sounds tell the tale, hoping the unique sounds would help the listener identify the process.

We started with entering the venue and ended after exiting the venue to have the process come full circle. When we arrived to the rink and began recording, we hadn’t anticipated how loud the background noises would be. It did drown out some of the hushed detailed noises, and we fantasized about how nice it would have been if we could were able to better isolate and single out certain sounds. On the other hand, the process and experience wouldn’t be authentic without the background noises. We were hoping to get some sounds that didn’t work out (Zamboni, for example), but we also were delighted to discover sounds that we hadn’t anticipated. At the rink, kids scream, people chat, music plays from above, and if you listen closely you can hear the soft hum of the fans.

During the editing process, we decided to stay true to this environment of the rink, and we even included some dialogue we picked up. By presenting the setting of our process as realistically as possible, the listeners can be better transported to the rink. An important part to telling stories (and specifically processes) is condensing, as most processes take longer than a minute or two. This meant we had to condense the process and highlight the most thematically important and auditorily interesting pieces to the story. This also meant that there were a lot of things we had to leave out.

As Aubrey was editing our project and Rae was sitting around playing with the recording equipment, Rae ended up recording the process of our editing the recording of the process of ice skating. We were tempted to revamp our piece as a piece of creating a piece. Regretfully, however, we didn’t feel as if we had the time to re-edit another process; in addition, it may have been too meta to easily comprehend in a simple audio format.

This side rambling does have a point. It got us thinking.

What is process?

Everything is. Process is everything. There is nothing that just happens in one moment. It was always a process that took you to that moment, and a process leading you back out of it. We found a quote by C.S. Lewis to be enlightening:

“I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

While this thought concerns a very specific process, it’s clear that this idea can be applied universally. Happiness is a process. Charity is a process. Love is a process. Creating a process piece is a process. Perhaps these processes are worth examining in greater detail. Perhaps the realization that they are processes can help us understand them, can help us better achieve the things we set out to achieve, like happiness.

That’s our hope, anyway.