Sounds collected on a walk around Eagle Rock Neighborhood, in Los Angeles, CA

Soundscape Project Final

Assignment #2 by Sean Embrey-Stine and Jorge Azanza


Library Soundscape

Sampling project

An audio essay about the blog Fuck Yeah Pop Punk. Includes music by New Found Glory (Something I Call Personality, Sonny), Angels and Airwaves (Everything's Magic), Self Against City (Ready and Willing), Sugarcult (Do It Alone), and All Time Low (Poppin' Champagne). 

Audio Essay- FYPP

Chip Tune, Assignment #7

This is a short track, which features samples from Where We Belong by Brighten, among others. 

Sampling Remix Project Final

Everything In Its Wrong Place
The majority of the audio clips that Jocelyn recorded for me were from a chef’s visit to their classroom at Annandale. At first, I was unsure of how I was going to be able to make anything creative out of it, especially because the context of the clips was not always immediately identifiable from the chef’s recorded words. Once I began to listen more deeply, however, I discovered that perhaps context was not important. I began to hear something sonically interesting in the tone, inflection, and timbre of the chef’s voice within certain small sections of the clips, sometimes as short as a fraction of a second and sometimes as long as 5 or 6 seconds. Once I decided not to worry about context, and to focus purely on these sonic elements, I felt creatively liberated. 
I derived the title of the piece from one particular clip, in which the chef explains the French term “Mise En Place” to the students and asks them to repeat it. He defines the meaning of the phrase as “Everything in its right place.” I superimposed the clip of him saying this over a rhythmic sonic landscape I composed using bits and pieces of the sound clips at my disposal. Almost nothing in my piece is “in its right place,” or in its original context, which highlights the ironic nature of my sonic layering. 
I learned a lot about the intersections of the Annandale students’ social and educational spheres. Often in elementary school, boundaries are blurred; students learn things in their free time and socialize during class time. Despite the efforts of educators to preserve order in the classroom, often things are not always in their right place. Mixed in with the recordings of the chef’s voice were a clip from a recess period, which featured numerous pop culture references to the band One Direction, and a clip recorded from the radio that captured a short portion of a Katy Perry song. 
In order to highlight the theme of re-contextualizing sounds, I recorded myself playing renditions of Perry’s “Teenage Dream” and One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful” and placed them underneath sounds from the school. Not only was I removing the tune of these songs from the context of their mass produced versions, I also placed these sounds in a new context. The underlying recordings of me playing keyboard are the only sounds I added to the piece. They represent my position, as a cultural outsider, quietly observing Jocelyn’s world. 
The sound clips Jocelyn gave me revealed a lot to me about the social, aesthetic, sonic, and educational environments at Annandale Elementary School. The sounds of the playground, shouting, Spongebob, putting on fake British accents and references to One Direction’s Harry Styles reminded me of the playfulness of learning, as well as gave me a clue as to the aesthetic tastes of the sixth graders. My observations at the listening party confirmed that the sixth graders do indeed love One Direction, Katy Perry, and Spongebob. I also learned that the tone that adults use when speaking to sixth graders is very different from the tone they use when speaking to college students, which obviously means that sixth graders live in a very different sonic world than I do. 


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