Milo’s class this week was clarifying more to do with the hand-in regarding what we are expected to have done as well as what an audio paper can take form as, and some of us showed off the work we were prompted to make last week as a “Reading Aloud” practice, as well as discussed the Audio Papers that we went off and heard on our own.
Recommended to hear by classmates were “THE SECOND SOUND OF INTEGRITY”, which was mentioned by Tal. I have now just listened to it and was very much left quite dissapointed, from just listening to it I got out of it basically nothing more than thoughts about the etymology of the word Integrity, and connections with this idea of Integrity as Wholeness to Black communities/charities. Only after reading the writeup I started to get it being intentionally vague as per the belief that “Formlessness is an anticolonial strategy, a method of solidarity.” I appreciate the sentiment and diversion from the typical format of an audio paper but I found that it just flat out didn’t work, the synth music that was playing was incredibly annoying as well and the audio effects sounded quite ridiculous, doesn’t say anything on it’s own and needs the writeup to tell you anything at all, I’d say that’s a failure. There were a couple ideas I liked though “Is integrity enough?” , “What has integrity done for you?”. Both questions are not answered clearly (intentionally I’d assume), and after listening a second time I didn’t get much more out of it.
Jez recommended “TO WHOM IT MAY SPEAK”, which I found to have a much better use of the medium and to be a much more impactful experience. The idea is to use the audio paper as a way to unify Ukrainian voices, some moments before death and others closer to the narrator, friends and family speaking and recording the space. A large part of it is the phrase “Slava Ukraini” being an assurance of Ukraine’s being, and with Russian soldiers seeking to remove the phrase from being by killing anyone who speaks it, using clips of real deaths with the phrase spoken. It also gets into how their language and music is being targetted, the danger of speaking, and the unifying properties of sound, how when sound is spoken it puts a person into a state of appearance, and the sound becomes a part of the whole. I got most out of it that sound can be rebellion, and it doesn’t have to be in any kind of drastic way, the narrator multiplies the Ukrainian voices and dulpicates her own voice to get across the unity sound has as a plea for help. I found it very beautiful and eloquent, and is something that I don’t think could be articulated in any other medium as the topic is particular to sound itself, and descriptions will not do justice what she is getting across.
Something Kit mentioned as a key factor of an audio paper is having a premise that starts vague and gradually unwravells, which I have found the examples that I have heard so far all do well or attempt to do, and I don’t think this is so much a hard set rule moreso a structure that works to engage the listener the most, and is something to take on board when creating my own. Vic showed off something she’d made which I found very beautiful, refracting her own voice “like you’d refract a prism” using ableton effects and stacking the layers until it was a colourful mess, quite beautiful.
As for my own work, I still haven’t really formulated a solid idea, I have ideas about writing something focused on genres I already like, Harsh Noise Wall, Drone Ambient and the like, but it might be more fun to engage with something new, or maybe abstract one of my interests down into something more interesting to engage with than a kind of “history of” kind of essay…