Take 5: Sound One

To begin with I thought I was really going to enjoy working with this brief. I thought it would be hard to describe a sound visually with static images, but I was looking forward to experimenting with materials and producing some abstract work. I picked out my five sound clips and began working, and never have I been so wrong. The looped sounds soon gave me a headache, and I was finding it very hard to come up with different ideas once I had drawn the odd couple. However, it was fun to use a range of different media and it made a nice change from trying to draw the perfect character or scene. I really made a mess with the first half of this brief.

I started out by describing the sound, and then basing my drawings on what I heard as well as what I wrote. The clip sounded like it pulsed and it seemed to break into two separate sounds the more I listened to it. The first was a repetitive "whur" and the second sounded more jumpy and seemed to "change direction" a lot. I represented this by using a combination of two different shapes. 

After my quick responses I was finding it really hard to come up with new ways of expressing the sound, so I turned to producing some blind responses to see if I could come up with anything new. I really liked this idea as I was purely focusing on the sound. I was trying to let the noise control the movement of my hands as I held/used different media. I started working with the colour red as the clip was starting to sound like a laser of some sort, and red is just how I pictured it.

To say this was my first attempt I don't think I have done too bad, especially as I was struggling to think of new ideas. I found it hard to visualize anything else once I had a solid picture in my mind of what the sound "looked like". I think the blind responses were a nice way of trying to overcome this problem, but I'm unsure of whether I will continue with this method. I didn't like how I didn't have full control over the work I was producing, and where this did make the final piece more abstract, I feel as though I wasn't able to capture the sound well enough.