This is the final video in my Soundwalk project. After initially struggling to find sounds in my environment that resonated with me, and influenced by the work of Janet Cardiff’s ’40 part Motet’ to use the human voice in artistic expression I used my own voice as my art.
I began creating a sound map of my everyday experiences and used onomatopoeia to express these as I was isolating at the time and could not go out to record noises. I read the onomatopoeia out several times, each time progressively getting more and more hectic and exhausted/ill. Towards the end of the audio I start to cough a lot as well (firstly to exploit the fact I had a cold at the time!) to emphasise the nature of this pandemic and the fact that overworking myself often led to me getting ill.
I then with each replay of the sound map overlapped it with the exact same audio, to create a ‘build-up’. My intention with this is that while working on the Drawn from the City course, I have came to realise that my dislike of where I live is due to the circumstances I am in -financial difficulty, overworking, isolation – as opposed to there being anything wrong with the town itself. I wanted to display these feelings in the soundwalk project by mapping out what most of my days consist of – waking up exhausted, travelling for over an hour to work, working and then coming back home again. This lifestyle does not allow me to engage properly with my environment and, especially during this pandemic, has become quite hectic and tiring, as the repetition and build up of the audio displays.
Note – this piece is intended to be an audio piece, however struggles with technology led to me uploading it to YouTube hence it is only available in the form of video.
