Experimental Gallery Piece

After the audio crits that we received, I was approached by Paul Brannan (also on our course) who after saying he liked the sound piece, asked if I would like to help make an experimental sound piece with Hannah Grencis for the art gallery on Chapel Walk (35 Chapel Walk), to which of course I said yes. The gallery is doing a whole exhibition based on the "nativity" but not necessarily taking a religious approach, the artists could do what they want.

We were given the subject of "star". Paul had already proposed the idea of emulating the sounds of the birth and death of a star. And with that, we all went and made our own separate recordings. I played around with various sounds, such as making a toilet flush sound as though it were part of the atmosphere in space, along with adding the sounds of an internet modem to make it sound as though it were a star communicating. I liked my experiments with the separate sounds, but when it came to putting it together, I could tell there was something missing:

After doing some research on what the sounds of a star would be, I found out that they would emit gas-like sounds and explosions in the atmosphere, so whilst I had the general "sounds" of space, I hadn't added any sounds like that, however, Paul and Hannah did. So we put all of our sounds together, focussing purely on the birth of a star as opposed to both the birth and the death; which means that towards the end, there is a crescendo of gas-like noises and explosions which I think work successfully and I hope people hear this too and enjoy the piece. I feel very privileged to already have a piece in a gallery.

This is our finished piece: