Artist: Daniel Perlin: Creates sound, video, objects and installations. Today is Daniel’s birthday!
Workshop: Students will participate in a deep listening walk. Walks will first be led as a group, such that listening to one’s environment may be discussed, and then done privately. The private walk will allow students to explore the city through their own ears. We will the discuss the politics of noise and concepts of listening as strategies for artistic an social production. It will be fun, and a nice way to train urban ears.
Critical Frameworks: Students will learn to ‘listen,’ and start gearing up for next week’s exploration of the Highline – we will draw on discussions about observing the spaces we occupy with a keener eye, and a collectivist spirit. Urban research, public / private space, personal perspectives.
Resources: Ears, Audio Recorders, Notebooks. And a lecture on how we hear and why!
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Today we worked with Daniel Perlin “Redrill”, and learned all about deep listening. The day began with a discussion on the word “Aural”. It pretty much has to do with listening, as opposed to hearing. We then had a quick discussion on the differences between listening and hearing. We found that there is a difference, and hearing is more passive, while listening is more engaging.
We then talked all about the wonderful world of sound. We learned that there is a “shelf of urban sound”, that is 60 dbs. This means that wherever you go, you will always hear about 60 dbs of sound, in the city. We also talked about Cognitive Science, which is the science of the brain. We learned about visual input vs. aural input. With visual input, your brain has to do tons of work piecing everything together. With aural input, there’s instant impact. Your brain doesn’t have to change things around. We also had in interesting conversation on the difference between noise and sound. We figured that noise is all the crap you don’t want to hear, and once you start listening, it becomes sound.
We finally got into the world of deep listening, and talked about what exactly we were going to do. We figured that we can’t close our ears, but we can close our eyes. For our activity, we went on the highline…again…and sat somewhere to deep listen. To practice, we sat in the classroom for about two minutes and closed our eyes. We then sat still and listened to all the sounds around us. When we were done, we wrote down the sounds we heard, and then drew a picture of where were sitting and where we heard the sounds. Afterwords we shared our beautiful masterpieces.
When we were ready, we left Eyebeam and went to the Highline. In groups of about three, we found spots we liked and settled in. We then deep listened, and recorded our findings. However, this time was different. We actually had recording devices, and recorded what we were hearing, while drawing our surroundings. After we were done, because we were running out of time we gave our devices to Daniel, and he transferred them to his mac and led us through a demo of what to do with our collections. He showed us how we could edit small parts of each of ours and then layer them together to make music. For example, he cut a sneeze out, and my voice saying something crazy, and other sounds we collected. He then used QuickTime Pro to edit them and play them at the same time, at different frequencies, and the result was magic.
Soundbites coming soon…
Bloggers: Spencer and Luther
Digital Day Camp '09 