Soundscape: Office Sounds

The goal of our soundscape attempt was to capture common sounds that take place in the Colson Hall offices. Layla recorded the sounds with her iPhone, and Amelia and I made sounds such as walking down hall, fiddling with keys, opening the door, unzipping a jacket, pouring water into a cup, typing a paper, messing up a sentence and saying, “oh crap”, deleting some text, talking to friends passing by in the hall, complaining about work, opening and closing desk drawers and the overhead compartment, turning on the radio, and getting back to work.

These sounds truly represent life in Colson. Sometimes it’s quiet until friends come by to say hi and we use the time to discuss or complain about work, then the visitors leave and the office environment once again becomes quiet after the friendly voices and footsteps fade away. Just because I liked the sound, I bounced a ping pong ball toward the end, and it really seems to take over the end of the recording, even sounding over the radio. Ironically, this sound is the one we don’t hear too much in Colson.

The iPhone Layla used to record, and the program on the it, added extra layers of sound – manipulating the sounds we made throughout the recording – from shoes clip-clopping down the hallway, to the voices, to the ping pong ball at the end. It is interesting how the program kind of accentuated the moods the we were trying to project (anger with “oh crap” (frantic typing, then banging overhead cupboard – frustrated)….empathy with “that sucks”....long, drawn out, low)
It’s like the remixing that DJ Spooky talks about. In this case, though, the iPhone program is the DJ. Therefore, the final outcome of the soundscape is the result of multiple authorship – a collaboration between Layla, Amelia, and me, and the manipulation of the iPhone. Our recording would sound much different without the program. Once we made the sounds, we lost all control over how they ended up on the recording. The iPhone would make some sounds louder than others and give them different tones and tempos. We really had no control over the outcome because we did not know exactly what the iPhone program would do with our sounds.

Considering the larger questions from the beginning of the semester, I wonder if we produced music or art or poetry…or if our recording is a noisy racket. I think John Cage would be pretty accepting of what we’ve done, and even though we haven’t recorded a bathtub performance, we did do a similar rendition since we used common, everyday, office props. We also planned out our performance (though not as detailed as Cage) by having a rough outline of the sounds we would make and in what order we would make them. I’d say we modernized Cage’s performance with the iPhone application adding extra layers of sound to our performance. It’s hard for me to interpret our soundscape as an outsider because I was so involved in the preparation and recording, so I’m curious to see what others have to say about our work.