Process Piece

WRITING A PAPER

 

Artist's Statement:

Recording the sounds for this audio documentary was actually really fun. We both decided that we wanted to document a simple, everyday process rather than a fictional or large scale one. Most of the sounds we used are literal, as you would hear them naturally in real life, but some of them we enhanced by using different materials. For the writing/pencil-on-paper noises, we set the paper on top of a tin lunch box to get a richer sound and to get a louder, clearer recording. Also, to get the squeaks for the erasing we selected an old, dried-out eraser and erased on a wood surface instead of paper. We initially thought we were going to cut down the printing clip, but then we realized that we could really play up the emotions of having to wait for something to print. Hopefully, this comes across as comical and relatable, especially since we layered the mouth-popping and the sighing into the middle of the sequence. We wanted to emphasize the frustration of brainstorming and beginning a paper, the confidence and backspacing of typing it, the impatience of waiting for it to print, and the satisfaction of stapling it together.

For me, Mercadante’s “Routines” had a big influence on how I wanted to approach this project. I really enjoyed how intimate his recordings sounded and how simple they were. He takes a very up-close, stylized approach to representing actions through sound, which we tried to replicate. His videos also take a closer look at simple, often-repeated processes we do and expose them through intimate sound recordings. I also drew heavily upon my own experience as a writer and sitting in quiet places like the library, where the only thing you can hear is typing and the occasional eraser. Scenes from several different movies (for example A&E’s Pride and Prejudice or The Young Victoria) where the character goes through several drafts of a letter, crumpling up each rejected draft and tossing it, also influenced our recording style and the frustrated beginning to the story. Because composing an essay or writing a piece of fiction is almost an exclusively internal process, documenting it through only sound captures the spirit of the process better than a video would. Hearing the sounds but not being distracted by a picture brings emotions to mind rather than actions. It was fun and surprisingly satisfying to externalize such an internal process through the use of sound.