Drift
Drift is a piece about a world oversaturated with mechanical noise. It is a walk through metaphorical clouds where an incessant anthropocentric-age din floats across them.
Sounds that guided us and gave meaning to the world around us for millennia have been replaced. Instead, from a distance the whirl of highway traffic sounds remarkably like the sound of waves crashing on the beach. Air conditioning units generate enough noise to block out the sound of the wind rustling the leaves on the trees. More dire perhaps, is that we are using sounds from the natural world in new ways. Human ways. Melodic bird “calls” that once asked only of us that we listen can now be reminders of meetings or birthdays.
Drift explores the idea of harnessing sounds emitted or captured from my rose colored iphone SE. Over the course of several months I recorded a daily journal of sounds using my Voice Memo App. A soundscape of these layered noises drift discordantly across stylized clouds in a soft ceaseless auditory bombardment. Thousands of classic earbuds symbolize our increasingly mediated experience.
The one non-human or human-made noise is the “tweet” of the classic iphone text messaging sound. A sound that is so ubiquitous that it may be more recognizable to some than the birds in their backyards. It turns heads in meetings, auditoriums, and classrooms, causing countless hands to reach out, grab their phones and check, “was that mine?” This ever-present and insistent call epitomizes distraction and a lack of presence. In Drift, I deliberately take that mechanical tweet and turn it back into a “real bird” by stretching, flipping and twisting the sound. Convincingly authentic the rendered becomes the new normal.
Three different collages of sound drift across the clouds. To hear a 2-minute segment of the 30-
minute piece: https://youtu.be/fziy9Xaofr8