Group Members
- Meghna Mahadevan
- Timothy Wang
- Ryan Rotella
The Prompt
Our group selected Option A: Sounds for a sound vacation.
From our class’s Brightspace:
“In teams, collect sounds for a sound vacation. This could be informational, fictional, sensual, spoken-word, musical. It could be about infrastructure, architecture, people, or something completely different. Be specific, and transport us to another location through a 1-2 minute journey crafted through sound. No longer than 2 minutes please!“
Our group chose this option because we felt the most creative freedom with this path. We wanted to collect sounds in the field (a la Musique Concrète and Halim El Dabh) and explore how we could craft a sonic journey for an audience.
The Piece: untitled
The Theme (please only read after listening)
What is our sound piece about? It definitely leans into the “something completely different” portion of the prompt. In our group’s first meeting, we settled on a theme of “Technology vs Human Connection.” We wanted to explore the tensions of technological interaction in our day-to-day lives with how humans connect in the midst of so many sounds. Can we “marry” technology with nature and humanity in a caring way? Are they always diametrically opposed? How so in the landscape?
The Process
During our initial meeting and after brainstorming our theme, we delegated roles to one another. Our group did this because we quickly realized that our schedules did not sync well together. We planned a group editing session a week out and divided tasks to complete before then.
Ryan was the main sound collector/recorder (I had the most time free) and clip editor. Last weekend, I travelled around Manhattan (where my dorm is) and Brooklyn, bringing a Zoom recorder and my phone to various spots where people gather together. This included Tompkins Square Park, sidewalks in the East Village/Astor Place area, a CVS, various bars, the R train, Grace Church in Manhattan on Broadway and 10th, and a basketball court near an elementary school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
The Process (continued)
After collecting sounds, I (Ryan) chopped up the sounds into a library of useful clips. That way, during our group editing session, we could maximize our time and play around with mixing in different things, which we did. I also created Google Drive folders to organize us and checked in with everybody in the group chat regularly.
Meghna also collected and clipped sounds that ended up being critical to our project. They attended a wedding last weekend on some farmland outside Toronto, Canada (I believe?). They recorded the lines heard in the piece of people offering intimate words during a marriage reception.
Meghna also contributed a lot during the group editing session, where they plug and played some of the sound layering that we implemented as well as editing side-by-side with Timothy. Their ideas shaped a lot of what the piece became.
Timothy was our lead editor. He had the most experience with Adobe Premiere out of all of us. He kicked off our group editing session by playing with the sounds and finding juxtapositions of how certain sounds interacted with one another. He was open to all our ideas during the editing session while continuously experimenting with different sounds/concepts in Premiere. He is primarily responsible for the structure of our piece, which involves overlapping and layered sounds flow in and out of each other.
Overall, we worked well together as a group. We communicated clearly with one another, set out expectations and roles, and we all followed through. Most importantly, we all felt comfortable enough to experiment with play and trust that we could make something intriguing.
Ryan Rotella 
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