︎
Work                  Events                 About

RIVEN RATANAVANH



Sound Art

Week 2

Within the reading material, I found myself particularly focused As Queer Listening: An Interview with Sergei Tcherepnin.
- Lots of concepts
- Asked me lots of questions, not necessarily answers
- But also is an instabilizing thing, a becoming as opposed to something that needs to be fully articulated and discernible (there is always something to say in allowing the audience to be confused, to not know)
- But also ask who are you making your sounds for? If the queer community, you can make it for them, for what resonates with them, for what is legible ot them (and for others you can allow it to be illegible)
- Lots of work to be done in this space (not yet super developed?) Sound art has not yet been fully colonized like other mediums like visual art(?)

And fascinated by Maryanne Amacher’s Living Sound, Patent Pending. How was it made...

I certainly don’t think I’m ‘purely’ a sound artist (whatever that means). I came to this class because I wanted to be able to better think about the sonic element to the performances and installations that I want to make. It’s  too much for me to expect myself to be a sound designer for my own performances, but good to have a basic vocabulary. I do think I would be the sound designer for my own installations, though.



Assignment
Take a listen to a site around you and try to document any cultural features you can identify by sound. Think about how your own relation to the world and its inhabitants informs what you can listen to and what you can listen for. Try to use this as an opportunity to listen to sounds that culturally identify a place, and your relationship to it. This can take the form of a 1 minute sound piece that we will listen to together next week.

This is the sound piece I made.

  • I was asking: what is Queer Sound
  • Thinking about techno
  • Wanted to experiment with Ableton Live - get to know it
  • Took white cishet (gymbro) sound and modified it
  • Reclaiming gym space 
  • Once was female presenting, lots of anxiety about entering (like ‘do I belong here?’ Am I doing it wrong? A little bit of that remains)
  • Warped / hypermasculinity (contrast to hyper femininity)
  • Sound of dropping weights - turning metal into water


Feedback from Temar France + class:

  • Feeling hypervisible but also invisible in gym spaces
  • Sounds like metal
  • See potential to inntegrate with visualizations
  • Temar def sees a visual element to it
  • Could incorporate dance too - temar heard movement
  • My approach seems much like sound design for choreography
  • Temar: the gym as a library of music