Environmental sound recording inside Meijer store, rec 08-20-2013

Meijer Sound Environment (test)

Environmental sound recording inside Meijer store, Lexington KY rec 08-20-2013

Lowe's Sound Environment (test)

Environmental sound recording inside Target store, Lexington KY rec 08-20-2013

Target Sound Environment (test)

Environmental sound recording inside Wallmart store, Lexington KY rec 08-20-2013

Wallmart Sound Environment (test)

first pass working with materials from big-box stores

OUTPUT

“Traveler’s Prayer” is a sound performance that took place in an abandoned synagogue in Varazdin, Croatia in early June, 2013. After the Holocaust, the building stopped functioning as a house of worship and, after briefly housing a cinema, fell into disrepair. After a consultation with the remaining Jewish population in the city, current plan for the building is to convert it into a Contemporary Art Center.

The performance is a sound textural work composed of over 30 voices reading Tefilat HaDerech (Traveler’s Prayer) in Hebrew. It lasted approximately 30 minutes. The prayer, uttered when traveling for significant distances, references both the final voyage of the Varazdin Jewish community members from their home and the metaphorical journey of the synagogue building.

The sound material used in the work is composed of individual readings of Tefilat HaDerech. The prayers are looped but never interrupted or rearranged (a concern expressed by one of the Rabbis I consulted on this project). I am using both unprocessed audio and heavily band-pass filtered passages that provide more abstract sound content. In addition, the band-passed elements were literally tuned to the resonant frequencies of the Varazdin Synagogue space in order to bring the building characteristics in as a one of the main components in production of the overall sound experience.

sample from Traveler's Prayer project

Test Run 4 Dance

Study 1

Recorded in Varazdin, Croatia at the Old Synagogue building. All of the sounds where generated by isolating specific frequencies within the recorded samples of the Tefilat HaDerech (Traveler's Prayer) and worked into ambience of the audience members'  conversations during this 30 minute sound event.   

Traveler's Prayer (excerpt)

Environmental recording of a Walmart in Lexington, Kentucky. Unlike other big box stores, Walmart does not play in-store music: sounds are limited to specific advertisements located at endcaps. 

Recorded with Android cellphone (November 20, 2012, 11:12 am)

dima_strakovsky

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