Sound theory

Hearing is the first sense in the womb and the last sense to go before death. But yet with a lot of animation or moving image sound is left to the last and not much attention is paid to it.

Each sound has 3 elements:

Vibration

Context (medium)

Changes in pressure

Each sound has 3 phases, which make up the sound envelope:

The attack

Sustain

Decay

Sound has the following qualities:

It’s immersive

It can’t be shut out

It contains depth

It has no directionality

It can’t be frozen

Sound and perspective

Figure – most important sound

Ground- the listeners’ social world

Field – the physical world around the listener

Dance music changes the perspective – makes it repetitive and hypnotic

Sound and distance

All sound has forms of distance – (as you go down the list it gets further in distance)

Intimate

Personal – conversation

Informal

Formal

Public – no interaction – hardest

Sound and memory

We use sounds/songs to conjure up associations of the past. A certain sound or song can bring us back to a memory. I've also found that sometimes I like a song better  if I have a memory to go along with it. 

Sound as event

Northern Ireland is one of the only places that give sectarian meaning to sound. For example there are specific catholic and protestant drums which are the boron and lam-beg drum.

There is also a difference in speech. Protestants speech is harsher – this comes from the Anglo sax-ans, the language is more guttural. All our swear words came from the Anglo sax-ans, which is why they sound so harsh. Catholics speech is softer because it comes from the Gaelic language which seems lyrical. It was interesting to hear about the spelling test to distinguish what religion a person is. You could clearly hear the difference in the letter “h” but you wouldn't pick up on it in everyday life.

I was in integrated education since I was four and I wouldn’t take much notice about religious differences. My mum says that in primary school (when you were in contact with the same teacher everyday) every year our speech would change slightly depending on what religion the teacher was.

In class the issue was discussed that, would your accent not make a difference to the way you pronounce it, rather than your religious background? I was thinking about this and most people live in an area that is either one way or the other, there aren’t many places that are integrated. Therefore you would be able to know where a person was from, because of their accent, and if you know the area you would probably know what religion the area is. Although obviously there is always exceptions.

Everything should be provocation

John cage 4.33 (created around 1947-48) Was a turning point and the birth of conceptual art. It made artists realize that it wasn't so much about the art itself, but the idea behind it.

Personally I can’t see how this piece was taken so seriously and how people actually spent hundreds of pounds on tickets to watch four and a half minutes of silence. I can understand that each silence is different and that the piece was meant to provoke a reaction from people, but how could they take it so seriously. It made me feel uncomfortable. Up until the clock came on I sat waiting for something to happen and then at that point I realised that it was going to be silent the whole way through.

“All sound is music, music is all sound" - John Cage

After hearing the John Cage piece, i started thinking about any pieces of music that i liked that didn't have vocals and i thought of a band called "The XX" and they have a song called "Intro" which has no lyrics, i watched the video on you tube and found out that Rihanna sampled it and added lyrics to it, for one of the songs on her new album. So i clicked on the link and listened to it. Its horrible. I think she ruined it (and I'm a Rihanna fan). It was such a nice piece of music that it doesn't need lyrics because you can almost imagine your own. Also I think that because I had heard it before and had sort of imagined the style of vocals that would work with the music. Now that she added vocals I don’t think they work, they just sound too different from the style of the original song. Sometimes less is more. And i think that this piece shouldn't have lyrics. I've put videos for both songs below: