Saturday, April 2nd will mark a first at Northwestern University: An artistic adaptation festival centered around Ernest Hemingway's famous short story, "Hills Like White Elephants" (yes, the one about abortion.) If you are unfamiliar with the story, it can be found and read here.
Collaborators on this project include actors, dancers, musicians and artists of many varieties and adaptations have few constraints (barring time and assigned spaces throughout a designated building). The curators of this festival, two good friends of mine, have done a fantastic job in encouraging us to be creative and explorative. Thus, for my project, I decided to do a sound collage.
As I type this, I am listening to bits and pieces on an open Logic tab that combine spoken word, MIDI instrumentation, and various sounds to create overarching feelings and a specific point of view. The soundscape this is shaping up to be is not a traditional song, nor is it an audiobook spoken as pure story. (To digress: I've actually worked at an audiobooks company for two summers, but more on that later.) The soundscape is, instead, an all-encompassing piece that can include music and can include words or other sound but is, I believe, meant to be listened to and appreciated as sound apart from other aesthetics and elements that appeal to the senses. Some sound pieces can be appreciated apart from elements of sight in particular, allowing them to stand alone rather than recede into the background.
In experimenting with sound, I have been trying to draw a bit from the phasing traditions of Steve Reich and the minimalism of Philip Glass. I have also begun to notice how important this tradition of incorporating spoken words has become, such that it has actually been absorbed by popular culture.
A prime example is Radiohead's "Fitter Happier" off of the 1997 album OK Computer, which consists of hauntingly stoic, spoken words throughout. In particular, as of late I have been exploring music by The Books, a guitar and cello duo that explores the use of spoken words and sampled sounds within their music while maintaining a sense of tone throughout.
Thus, the music is both accessible and engaging in its innovation. Take a listen to this sound piece called "The Story of Hip Hop" off of The Book's latest album, The Way Out as a more story-oriented example.
The idea of borrowing bits of audio to construct a whole piece is also not one that is entirely foreign to us, as we hear sampling being used by everyone from The Pussycat Dolls (eg: "Beep" samples ELO's "Evil Woman") to rapper and champion of mash-up culture, Girl Talk. With the use of samples of audio to make a new piece, the question of copyright comes up. As artists, should we put our art into the public domain and "share the wealth", assuming that nothing is original anymore and everything has already "been done"? Creative commons licenses are becoming increasingly more frequent, allowing artists to "borrow" from one another for better or for worse. Is this diminishing or increasing the creative capacity of today's sound and music artists?
To put this back in context with my piece, I did not borrow any sounds, except for the few that I found as spot effects off of freesound.org, a website specifically devoted to sharing sounds. On Saturday, my piece will be listened to and experienced in a pitch dark room, dulling the sense of sight. I will also be playing along with an acoustic guitar, adding a live element to the interpretation. I hope it will excite the audience and make them think about the story in a different way, engaging the text from the inside out. However, with all of these indications of mash-up culture and borrowed sounds, can it really be said that this piece will be an original idea?
An audio posting to follow!
Peace.Love.Music
Kara Ali
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