Wednesday, October 30, 2013

whEn RoSalInd mAde heR sTory intO a hOuSe...

I met Rosalind at a songwriting workshop I held at the Paekākāriki Railway Station. 







She was one of those people who professed to not being particularly musical, but like the other students on the course, she was open to a new experience. Together we supported one another, told stories, laughed, played and created songs. 

Rosalind had a flair for rhythm and tone in her writing and ended up with a journeying spoken word piece that incorporated the rhythm of the rail with the musings of a wombat. We gathered together with the others and recorded her song Full Steam Ahead. The instruments included the side of a train, gravel, a plastic bucket, and the metal side of a building. The players are Rosalind, Te Ahu, Drew, Chris and Nic. Here is an excerpt of that recording from the day...



Rosalind was keen to continue exploring the telling of story through song and sound, and I was keen to continue working with her as I have long had an interest in working with people to create stories and song using sound (particularly of objects and buildings). 

We met regularly and did various writing and sound exercises. One exercise was to write about a specific childhood memory about a sister. Mine was about a visit to a farm I did with my two sisters Kim and Bron, and how Bronny and I wanted to test a hole in the side of a hill for bees, so we gave a stick to Kim and asked her to have a prod...suffice to say there were no bees or injury but I'm sure Kim has a bit to say about that now!

Rosalind's writing centered around a memory of her sister playing the piano. I love the visual detail Rosalind brings to her writing (she is a visual artist and architect).

This small poem transformed into a sound piece in an interesting way - but first here is the initial reading...



Once we had the recording, we chopped the wave into pieces and Rosalind chose a colour for each one, so now they looked like this...

 
At this point I admit, I reached the usual impasse as to what to do next. Enter that uncomfortable moment when you feel blocked, tired, unimaginative, and unsure what to do next - and that's the facilitator! But I have learned to trust in these instances, and once again to return to whatever is happening in the present.

What was happening in the present for me was that I had recently become fascinated by, and an avid reader of architecture. This began with discovering Louis Kahn through watching the documentary My Architect: A Son's Journey...






the New York by Gehry...






 It moved onto Falling Water by Frank Lloyd Wright,





It continued with Dancing House by Gehry....



And the first female architect to catch my eye - Zaha Hadid...





Rosalind is an architect and all I really wanted to talk about was architecture. Go where the heart is racing towards I say...

So I said to Rosalind "let's create a house from your sound files". I asked her to look at the coloured 'bricks' and to construct a house using them. Here's what she came up with...

As Rosalind is visually oriented, it provided a way that the poem sound excerpts could be arranged without us knowing what they were. The house, I remember, has over-hanging eves, and the bottom level is colour co-ordinated so will provide an aural repetitive loop of some sort.

We then decided to cut to an internal view of the house, and Rosalind created sky-light frames (volume) and a staircase (panning).


To finish, we returned to the exterior view and added a keyboard accompaniment - a synth pad sound already in the software called Floating Embers. Rosalind chose the keys and played throughout the piece. This she coloured in a beige colour to create the ground for the house.


To separate the voices, we added an effect to one of the house levels. The effect was a delay that also acted as a pitch shifted - interesting because the poem talks about Celia as a small girl. Rosalind chose the effect merely by sight.

With the words rearranged and the volume and panning automated, and with added keyboard - here was the result.




What was amazing to us was that without knowing it, we had referenced content of the poem through constructing skylights and stairs - as both of these are mentioned in the poem - the automation brings out those specifics too.

Rosalind also found the poem and resulting sound work refreshing and full of light - much like a well designed house. 

No comments: