Audio Paper PRE-Reflection

Ive been finding this project to be quite challenging. I wanted to make the most of the medium of an audio paper, and also the complex academic yet more accessible nature of it.

Although I knew what topic I wanted to cover I wasn’t sure how to approach it, or articulate my points.

One approach could have been a more clear cut auto-ethnographical direction – My personal experience of growing up in rural villages; half my time spent between my Dads, a bungalow on a small holding 4 acre farm/cl site (interesting dynamic of home/garden as a public business) , and a terraced house at my mums.

Going back and forth between the two households shaped my upbringing quite a bit, with often opposite experiences in either households (socially, economically, general lifestyle). I found it quite socially disruptive, and it did ingrain certain personality traits. I still have a resistance to play music from speakers when at home with family in a similar way that I won’t swear at home, even though I’m the only one who doesn’t in either case.

I worked for my Dad for a little bit, helping him work by putting up fences and find that it’s a really interesting topic on the ‘boundary’ of many things, ownership and privacy, a big topic in sound. You get these pockets of no-mans land between peoples fences that can become a but of a Cold War scenario, especially when fences need replacing.

Even though its not the overt theme and topic of my audio paper I did include rural industrial sounds as a counter to the often thought peaceful sounds of rural field recordings – My stepdad is a tree surgeon and so Ive grown up very well accustom to the noise-y sound of the countryside: of chainsaws, tractors, mowers and hedge-trimmers. Could even argue to put the sound of geese in that list – we had some as guard geese when I was younger.

I could have focused on all this in the audio paper, and might have been able to did it successfully, however I have been wanting to make something about plunderphonics in relation to soundscape for a while now (I debated writing my essay on it last year) but I felt, and still feel, that it would be better represented through sound itself, than reducing it to words.

I also wanted to blur the line of what an audio paper is, as something more impressionistic or illustrative but found it a stressful task in creating something that still retains the dense and critical questions and reflections of the more traditional format.

Such an illustrative method would focus less on language and words, focusing more on sound. It feels a bit of a pity reduce the notion of an audio paper to a language based form. I was reading about Wittgenstein last year and the philosophy of language.

Someone who doesn’t know English hears me say on certain occasions: “What marvelous light! [Welch herrliche Beleuchtung!]” He guesses the sense and now uses the exclamation himself, as I use it, but without understanding the three individual words. Does he understand the exclamation?