Rebirth

Overview

We are born into this world completely bare and devoid of any experience. We start out as completely helpless beings of flesh and bone and go through life attempting to establish who we are. Throughout this process we may lose people that are important to us and we will fall apart at times. Eventually we find ourselves and find others that are compatable with our individuality before returning to Nothing to start the cycle once more.

Artist Statement

Description

Rebirth is a roughly 3 minute long sound work representing a person's birth from Nothingness to their return to Nothingness. It starts with white noise and gradually the sounds of crowd chatter fades in. The crowd then fades lower than the white noise and eventually stops at which point a song starts. The crowd chatter comes back and eventually everything fades out and it ends with the white noise. The white noise and crowd chatter files both come from a free sound archive. Song is "Changing Reality" by Kai Engel.

Background

The idea behind Rebirth is to represent a person's journey from birth to death. We start from nothing and go through life learning from everything that is going on around us. At times we will become overwhelmed by the things going on in our lives and will fall apart and feel like we are drowning. Eventually we will pull ourselves out of that and be even more alive than before. It is my goal with this sound work to capture this.

Purpose

My purpose in creating this sound work was to give insight into the life of an individual. We go through life in an almost monotonous way which can sometimes overwhelm us and we don't seem to stop until we are dying. I love the idea of portraying a life though different forms of art because I feel that art allows us to step back and observe a small portion of what is always happening around us.

Influences

As always I am influened by the desire to create art in any form. The idea of portraying birth and death in a single piece of work has always been appealing to me. There is no one person or thing that heavily influences me I just love being creative.

Fit Within Larger Notion of Aesthetics

There is an abundance of art paintings and sculptures that deal with the concept of birth and death. I have yet to come across a sound piece that is an attempt at representing this cycle. I created this piece with the intention of making a sound piece that is an indirect representation of birth to death.

Methodologies

For this sound work I pulled the white noise sound and ambient crowd chatter from a free sound archive. The song is by a classical and instrumental composer that I like named Kai Engel, who's work I found on freemusicarchive.org. Using Audacity to edit the file I put them together and messed with where each file faded in and out and was placed within the project. I knew at the beginning that I wanted to start with white noise and bring in crowd chatter and a song, I just had to work out exactly how.

Outcomes

The results that I got after finishing this sound work is very close to what I imagined. The only difference was that I couldn't find the right white noise sound to match what I heard in my head but it's as close as I could find. I was suprised with the fact that I was able to get it to sound almost exactly like what I imagined. I hoped to achieve an overarching representation of a life from birth to death and I think I have done that.

Self Reflection

I have definately achieved a better understanding of how sounds can be made to work together to create a piece of work. I think that putting together more ambient sounds along with a song and making it cohesive definitely helped with the learning process in audio editing and overall creativity. I managed achieve what I hoped to achieve with this project and I am proud of that.