In the Creative Sound Projects course we’ve been doing two very interesting practices that don’t deal directly to sound making or composition. The first one is a listening exercise consisting of listing down every single noise heard from your local environment. Then the list of sound are categorized by different factors like: pleasant, unpleasant, loud and soft. This creates a table that makes it easier to compare and analyze those sounds (Picture below).

I felt that the table was great tool when planning a field recording because I could list the sounds I want to record and then see which ones to prioritize based on its loudness. With the same list of sound we also did a circle of panning, putting in the center your listening position and then mapping all the sound were heard (See picture below).

It’s really interesting how the acoustic environment can be mapped with this exercise. This diagram displays a basic map of my room that is where the exercise took place. In the front left of the circle, it can be noted that there is no sounds, this because there was a big wall there that filtered most frequencies. I thought this practice made me more aware of the acoustic response of my room, I would like to try this in another environment to see how the answers change.

The second practice was automatic writing. Our lecturer gave us 20 minutes at the start of every class to write a story or a description of the first thing that came into our minds. This practice is totally automatic because no planning time was given or any topic to base the story on. At the end we finished with very random outcomes, pure descriptions and narratives of the unconsciousness. Later on with the pieces of writing, we attempted to compose sound that would fit with the description. My composition of sound was very original because I based the structure of the piece to the narrative of the story, making the piece less predictable and interesting. I thought that this practice was a great source of inspiration when coming up with ideas for composition. I also thought this practice would be very useful when designing sound for another medium like film.