The idea was to capture street sounds by creating a frame animation. I decided to write down the name of each of the sounds I could hear on a sheet of paper. For each of the words, I would first select a spot on the sheet whose spatial coordinates reflected the position of the source of the sound. A noise coming from the right, for instance, had to be identified by name and that name had to be entered on the right side of the sheet, where it would reflect more or less the location of the source. The size of the words would reflect the volume of the sounds. In some cases, the fonts would differ to distinguish between types of sounds.
In order to create an animation, I had to develop rules for capturing my progress. I decided that I was going to take a photograph of my work every 2 minutes. This way no two consecutive frames differed from each other drastically, but the intensity of the words spreading across the paper was maintained. My plan was to continue writing down the sounds I heard until the whole page from my sketchbook became black.
For my spot I chose a roundabout near the center of Edinburgh. An hour into this piece, I noticed a few changes in the sounds that I heard. I started hearing more distinct and unique sounds–for example, keys dangling or the rustling of leaves. Then all of the sounds started to blend into one another and became one amalgam of unpleasing noises. The project as a whole took approximately two hours to complete. After assembling my frame animation using Photoshop, I got the impression that it lacked one crucial aspect–namely, sound itself. The next day I went back to the same roundabout and recorded different sounds. After collecting my sound material, I used simple Photoshop sound editing software to make all of the sounds overlap. I made sure that the volume of these sounds varied. This helped me achieve the sense of clamour or cacophony.
