All sounds were recorded using an Iphone in-built microphone and mixed on ProTools.  I chose to do the feeling of anxiety, the kind you get when you are waiting around for something to happen. In this case, I chose the situation of waiting for someone to arrive. I'm not quite sure that this properly captured the feeling but I tried to encompass sounds that I tend to hear when I'm waiting. You tend to hear sounds you wouldn't normally focus on like a loud clock tick or a dripping tap. This seems to build up until the event you are waiting for finally happens - in this case someone arriving at my house.

PDE 1 - Anxiety

Ever wonder what happens when you take two people, aged 20 & 22 to a playground at night after explaining that they must simply play around on the provided playground equipment so that you can record it? Well… They think its a cool idea - they're clearly bored & what else is there to do in Campbelltown after all. Inspired by the idea of Jon Rose & Hollie Taylor's "Great Fences of Australia" the original aim of this was to try and record the playground equipment as if it were an instrument. Using the usual suspects of the swings, and the seesaw plus some weird thing that span around this was the end result. I attempted to morph it with another concept discussed in class about tracks that seem to built up to some sort of event which would end the track yet they continue on afterwards. Obviously I'm bad at explaining what I mean by that, since google even failed to understand what I was looking for when I tried to find out what art/music movement it was a part of. Anyways; here is the track that resulted from that bit of experimentation where two people ran around a park at night and tried to find the most noisy playground equipment they could… All sounds recorded using an Iphone in-built microphone and mixed within ProTools. 

PDE 2 - Playground Equipment Experiment

When leaving the station on foot at night to walk to work I decided to record the journey to see what kind of soundscape I would get since I could hear lots of manmade noises (cars, traffic lights, trains,etc) yet there was still natural sounds coming from the trees around me which looking around I discovered to be a colony of bats. This PDE is a soundscape that shows that while humans try to take over everything with their fancy machines, deep underneath it all nature still survives. You may have to listen carefully to hear the bat screeches, I've got to say walking next to a fairly busy road trying to record them using an iPhone while also trying to not look like a complete weirdo on the streets of Campbelltown is not the easiest thing to accomplish. All sounds recorded using an Iphone in-built microphone and mixed within ProTools. 

PDE 3 - Human/Nature Soundscape

I knew I wanted to incorporate this into a PDE somehow, I just didn't foresee this kind of madness occurring. So lets look bad to around week 6 where we looked at William Shatner's version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKo4FMzt_hM) which was let's be honest here, a little creepy. Moving forward in response to Mr. Shatner's creepy masterpiece and Daniel Kilp decided to follow in his footsteps and cover "Hit Me Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears (http://snd.sc/PBpsKk). After this somewhat life changing experience of these tracks I decided to try my hand at this idea of a spoken word cover of a popular song. It doesn't get more popular than Rick Astley "Never Gonna Give You Up" now does it? Obviously I'm no voice actor and these guys totally kicked my arse at this concept but it was all in the name of experimentation and giving things a go. 

I grabbed a karaoke version of the song from YouTube and using Garageband along with the in-built mac microphone I gave this a shot. It took 3 takes for me to actually get all the lyrics down and the timing right. It is then I realise my voice sounds terrible recorded and this was the worst idea ever but its too late to back out now. Just a quick edit in ProTools to add a fade in & a fade out to complete this track and we are done, never to return down this path again. I'll leave the William Shatner spoken word style to the man himself and Daniel Kilp of course.

PDE 4 - Never Gonna Shatner You Up

Hmmm, where to start explaining this one?! In week 1 the challenge was issued: "Just fulfill the criteria, maybe try and creep me out" and week 2 provided the perfect medium for my attempt at this - Dada(ism). After sitting on this idea for a while it wasn't until I decided to be a little creepy myself and enter into a bit of Internet "stalking" did the final concept hit me - Dada poetry is where its at! 

Stumbling across an album of spoken poetry from none other than Tom Hogan himself I decided to use this as the basis for my PDE. Searching on the Internet allowed me to find a video of one particular poem without the music element behind it. In quick succession it was downloaded, imported into ProTools, cut up into phrases and labeled 1-89. From here these numbers were written on paper, cut up and thrown into a hat to embrace the randomness that is all things Dada. All of the numbers were one by one drawn out of a hat and this became the order for the corresponding cut up regions of the performance piece. It was purely random; there was nothing planned about the order the numbers came out. 

The order the numbers came out is as follows if you are interested:
12, 63, 64, 58, 30, 36, 1, 17, 42, 34, 55, 37, 46, 61, 79, 52, 70, 86, 65, 27, 10, 33, 78, 26, 21, 69, 45, 22, 2, 24, 28, 62, 18, 39, 53, 29, 66, 83, 73, 25, 32, 87, 35, 23, 89, 6, 3, 85, 56, 50, 31, 60, 7, 54, 4, 19, 71, 82, 68, 74, 14, 77, 57, 76, 88, 67, 11, 75, 51, 13, 41, 38, 84, 43, 81, 5, 16, 49, 20, 44, 72, 15, 9, 47, 40, 80, 48, 8 and 59.

PDE 5 - Attack! Pre-Counter Emptive

This piece is my take on the art installation we looked at in class with the guy who got bowls to float in water and let them drift about to create sound when they clinked together. I tried to recreate this piece in the laundry sink using a collection of the contents of my dishwasher at the time. I filled the sink with some water, placed 3 bowls in it and then placed a fork inside each one of them so that the ends would hang out of the bowls and increase the chance that the bowls would interact.

When I first placed them all into the water they clinked together a lot creating a somewhat interesting piece but as time went on they either settled into place or drifted slowly away from each other so less sound was produced. As the bowls made less and less noise, more of the background sounds from around my house got into the recording. This piece was also recorded using the in-built iPhone microphone, which in itself adds a certain level of noise to the recording. I decided to not try to filter this hiss out as it masked some of the background noise making most of it hard to pick out from the hiss.


PDE 6 - Sound As An Art Form

Welcome to my SoundCloud. Here I will be posting various examples of projects that I have recorded, mixed or both. Enjoy.

Michelle Glover